why should i be a writer?
Here’s a pertinent question: why does anyone do this? Writing, I mean. You want to understand this question without that romanticism about tortured artists and their callings. Even if these romanticisms were once true, theirs was a truth of aspiration, not of fact (cf. the optimism of heroin’s etymology and how it has protected no one from the of realities of the substance it names.) Like anything worthwhile, asking a pertinent question tends to lead you away from the answer you want, tends to pull you down along the invisible contour of things, down to regions of ever greater silence and heat. This is because good questions are divine pickpockets.
Was there something about writing that drove Rimbaud from it, all the way to Ethiopia, into his inexplicable career as a middleman in the trade of coffee, guns and slaves? How many of the three nails driven neatly thru the notches in his belt were hammered there by Wallace’s fiction career? The belt that hung in a loop from a projecting beam on his house’s southern exposure. And then the thirsts. Rimbaud’s and Wallace’s are too dull to mention. There is Malcolm Lowry, whose left hand spilled more of himself in badly aimed bitters than his right ever did in ink. And Poe, who seemed almost ahead of his time in the deliberation with which he destroyed himself. By Raymond Carver alcoholism had become the moat protecting literary achievement. The moat that must be drunk. Even in my own life… not in the literal, by this point banal, sense of addiction, but in the way substances and the self-destructions they cause have become a lens for me. Become an essential cog in the mill of me. A magazine’s blow-in card taken for text. A story:
My father’s cancer was at last undeniable when he held a curling strip of glossy paper out to me. After I took it he lowered his head. When his head was down it seemed larger than ever. The strip of paper had three circular photographs printed on it and had bent into a loop in my hand. I straightened it out in the light of a lamp clamped to his desk. The lesion was shown in three angles. It was a pink crater that filled most of the round frames. A thin filament of blood trailed from the crater’s lip and became lost in the yellow wall of my father’s intestine.
I peered at the photographs with the useless intensity of a person caught in a lie. Then, a memory fell like a shutter. My father had just picked me up and put me on the counter of our kitchen. I was wearing mustard colored overalls. The Corian was cold and I could feel it through the denim. My father told me to pay very close attention to what was about to happen. There was a tall bottle of rye with a neck like a chimney on the counter beside me. He tossed his keys with one hand until the Swiss army knife he kept with them lay in his palm. He pulled out the blade and used it to slit the sleeve of shrink wrap keeping the cork in the bottle’s neck. He drew my attention to the way the plastic gave up its transparency to milky blue opacity where it had been folded or bent. “The chains are crooked here and scatter blue light. Blue is the narrowest light we can see. When you see it here you know that the molecules are nearly the same width.” This didn’t make much sense to me. I had barely been able to follow his definition of ‘molecule.’ (He’d taken a sugar cube and smashed it with the back of a spoon. He asked me what the mess was called. “Sugar.” I’d said. “That’s right,” he said as he continued to crush the little crystals into dust, “And a molecule is the smallest thing that’s still sugar.”)
He pointed to the surface of the liquor and told me to watch it very carefully. He held the bottle with one hand and, careful to keep it upright on the counter, twisted out its cork with the other. The cork shrieked and gave its pop. The bottle’s empty neck was suddenly filled by a white cloud. The cloud was so thick and had appeared so quickly that I thought it must be a trick, cotton wool maybe. He held the bottle up to my lips and told me to blow across its mouth. I smelled the wooden sweetness of the rye. I pursed my lips and blew through them. The bottle let out a high moan. And as I looked down my own nose I saw a thin white thread crest the bottle’s mouth and siphon away the cloud. My father said: “This was why they called it a spirit.”
This is a faithful transcription of the moment when my father’s cancer became undeniable. And even if I have told the truth I know that this truth is an interpolated one: The roundness of his tumor’s crater evoked the bottle’s mouth and the filament of blood, the cloud I blew away. Cancer for liquor. Were these associations naive? No. Who can doubt that when I was small enough to heft onto the kitchen counter and young enough to be taught about Tyndall’s effect and vapor pressure that the same three frames on slippery paper would, when shot into the prism of me, refract as emotion and not as memory? Experience has installed a mill in me. And the events that ought to illuminate my life are just the grist of evocation.
This story is how I understand Rimbaud’s exile. He landed in a place where his visionary eviscerations could be traded for the middleman’s uncomplicated keenness of mind (out of the red and into the black.) Where he could swap Verlaine’s guilty emissions for sunburn and domination (I can see Rimbaud’s eyes rolling as Verlaine drops the gun, blanches at the sight of blood and affectedly begs forgiveness.) Rimbaud was looking for a reality that could not be transgressed. A blind push through flab to touch the bone. Substance. (The sand and cancer he got instead probably seemed like a fair tax on the attempt.) Likewise, the gales of sentimentality that alcohol blows, and heroin’s flights of drooling ecstasy. These seem to be ways out of the mill, the mill whose mechanisms screen the writer from the world.
But in fact they are not ways out. These exiles and self-destructions are only writing pursued by other means. ‘Writing’ is after all just another word, and hence simply names a shadow thrown by the one and universal Substance. (The things themselves, the things we name, are only shadows cast at a characteristic angle of illumination.) Writing pursued by other means. Rimbaud wanted to feel the bones holding appearance in its shape. Lowry, to freeze the whirling pieces of himself in aspic (and glimpse in the wobbly medium of his drunkenness, the contiguous man.) Poe wanted passage into sentimentality, that land where emotions become toothless and their gnawings idle. And Wallace, to be annealed in the bliss beyond introspection. The land where mirrors are always covered.
It goes without saying that there is a hierarchy of self-destruction just as there is a hierarchy of writing: Exile is superior to addiction, addiction superior to dissolution and this last, far superior to suicide. And equally, the Substance of writing cannot be fully sifted from that of self-destruction (they are, as above, different shadows of the same thing.) They are paired like kidneys, hands or hemispheres. The best we can do to tell them apart is to call one ‘right,’ and the other ‘left.’ Writing has a dual nature and cannot be performed without its sinister aspect. This is why my faithful transcription was hopelessly corrupt. (It is in the nature of inspection to cast shadows.) Diogenes had the right idea in trying to shine a light during the day.
And even though the Substance is one and universal, even it can die. Indeed, we may well be living in a world where this has already happened. And this is because we live in the world where the Holocaust took place. An analogy:
Suppose we represent the Substance with the human body. The soles of our boots grow thin but the soles of our feet grow thick: the body lives, adapts, repairs and strengthens. If I rub my arm I feel the rubbing, but my arm it stays the same. If I scratch my arm I feel it and then my arm grows pink. If I become obsessed and continue scratching past the point of pain and wear the skin away, my arm begins to bleed. If I continue, the injury to my arm becomes more grievous and I start to see the parts of my arm’s anatomy that I am not supposed to see. Fat, muscle, tendons and even bone. You can imagine a depravity that could sever one arm with the other in this way. My arm can be destroyed by the simple repetition of an action that is harmless in itself.
Now it goes without saying that I need my body to live. And likewise that there is also a body of the mind. This is an arrangement of self in the representational space of cognition that must exist for the mind to work. In every important way, this second body perfectly traces what we mean by ‘the soul.’ But immateriality is no defense. It can be destroyed as readily as the flesh it’s lodged in. In this analogy the Substance is to us, to all of us—everywhere and at all times, what the soul is to its body. It is the persistent order and arrangement of things such that human history and experience—its fabrications and developments—can be understood by those who perform them. It is that by which we know ourselves and that through which humanity condenses from the mere physical proximity of ours to other human bodies. And yet it can die.
History has often nothing more to report than the number of bodies crushed beneath its roller. Less attested, more tragic, but at least as numerous are the souls that have been killed while the corporeal body continues to live. And yet, through every disaster of the last ten thousand years, the Substance has persisted. The Substance was durable because it was our one, completely immaterial fact of human existence. And, until very recently, we had not discovered a method to extinguish a fact of this kind. But leave it to Europe.
What one scratch will pinken many million will redden, then tear, then saw and then sever. If a million deaths are a statistic then ten million are a result. Long story short, it was conclusively proven c. 1942 that if the darker aspects of the mind’s propensity were encouraged to breed, then these hybrids could indeed reach into the space between humans and do terrible injury to the Substance. And what can be harmed can also be killed.
Has it been killed? How do you know if your soul has been killed? What do we do if the International Kilogram becomes lighter? How would we know? When we can destroy a that-by-which, we are thrown into a circular world where history curls back to meet itself (they say a mass of fat weighing two hundred kilos once condensed and clogged the crematorium’s flue at Birkenau and that operations were disrupted for several hours by the efforts to dislodge it.) After the suicide of his mother—and in an effort to understand her—the cartoonist Art Spiegelman began seeing a psychiatrist who had survived Theresienstadt. Spiegelman reports that the therapist told him: “Primo Levi was right. The only thing a survivor can do is to kill himself: Everything is Auschwitz. Auschwitz is everywhere. People eat meat. Life feeds off life. After the optimism of liberation all the optimisms fail. All you can do is protest—but to whom?”
Has it been killed? Writing and self-destruction both come in cycles. The cycle of writing tends to reciprocate (like an engine) but the rotation can slow, can collapse, and then a loop of self-destruction tightens to a knot. Writing collapsed for Tadeusz Borowski (gas stove) and Jean Améry (Veronal) and for Primo Levi (stairwell). And then the half million others who did not write, who squeezed thru the needle’s eye, who escaped death at hands of omnipotent morons, only to die by their own. These deaths do not reassure. For them the Substance was killed and replaced with Auschwitz. Has it been killed for the rest of us? The question might be all we can cling to. The answer is not known, and ignorance is the grist of hope. The Kilogram could be unchanged. The Substance may even grow thick with abuse.
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