I Cannot Write

Writing has become more than writing to me - it has become some kind of medicine, sometimes a temporary catholicon, always an anodyne. This blog itself is testament to its continued efficacy, for I am certainly not writing in order to be read, keen though I am to impress the legions of Russian spam bots who take great care to imbibe my writing in the most sedulous fashion imaginable.

I was flicking through some essays by Sartre and naturally was interested by On Being a Writer, in which he makes the grand asseveration that writers write to create a world into which they fit; they write to alter the wicked reality. This, he claims, is what separates great writing from mere writing, and I am inclined to agree. I must quote it verbatim, because what he says is quite beautiful:

There is no storytelling gift: there is the need to virtually destroy the world because it seems impossible to live in it. There is no gift for words: there is the love for words, which is a need, an emptiness, a suffering, an uneasy attention one pays to them because they seem to hold the secret of life. Style is a cancer of language, a wound cultivated like the wounds of Spanish beggars.

This is all very negative - Sartre describes the need to write as some sort of void, a deficiency; not a gift, but almost the opposite - a virus, a corrosion. It is not even precisely what I suggested above - that writers must create a world more peaceable and conducive to their existence - it is that the real world must be destroyed. What can I say? I'm a sucker for sensible suggestions.

In states such as that in which I am suffocated at present, I cannot write anything of use at all, and become trapped in some grim panopticon of my own passive design. There is no escape from the savage reality of all things - the semblance of minutest sway in the world is swept up and replaced with a monolithic impotence. This, I can report, is not a pleasurable sensation, and yet it dogs my every movement. Even if I am writing, I am simultaneously lamenting the piece's stains of utter ineptitude. This is to say, that I am not destroying the world more comprehensively is itself a cause for lament. Yet even this is better than settling for the banality of an untempered world. All of this is not to say that I would declare myself a writer, for this would group me with the huge number of other deluded dabblers who believe their witterings make Shakespeare look like Christmas card platitudes. It is undeniable I have written, but so has everyone. What I do say is that I can sympathise with the need to destroy the world, to stash fleeting ideas away like stool samples, to collect words like stamps. The idea that I might not know the definition of a word is a real horror to me - it is as if my freedom of speech has been curtailed in some way. This is how the proletariat was silenced in 1984 - the dictionary was literally shortened. The idea is that that if you can't find the word to express a thought, you cannot support the thought for long, and certainly cannot share it. This is the ultimate in tyranny.

Moving on, part of the irony of art is that something so ostensibly productive can be so bluntly destructive. The solipsism and introspection incumbent on the artist requires an apathy to the world outside of the artistic conceit, which insouciance can only be interpreted as destructive. One necessarily destroys the parts of the world one does not assay. This kind of dedication reminds me of the interesting argument Slavoj Žižek briefly sets out to show the destructive nature of love:

Love, for me, is an extremely violent act. Love is not, “I love you all.” Love means I pick out something, and it’s, again, this structure of imbalance. Even if this something is just a small detail… a fragile individual person… I say, “I love you more than anything else.” In this quite formal sense, love is evil.

But back to writing. Of course anyone can sit and smash a keyboard for a bit, indeed I am doing it quite well at this very moment. This, to me, is not really the same as writing, however. There is no cathartic restitution, no real incentive but the avoidance of boredom, and the threat of boredom can justify even the most menial of activities. There is nothing greatly satisfying in depressing buttons (and indeed readers), though there is at least an occupative distraction, and a fleeting stupefaction at the consistency with which my fingers magically produce digital text. I will never understand technology, and this only adds to my sense of wonder at its operation. I do not subscribe to the Enlightenment, Dawkins-esque belief that everything must be fully understood in order to be enjoyed. My sentiments lie far more comfortably with the Romantic belief that not knowing, merely acknowledging the mute vastness of all things extrinsic, is far more salubrious to the human soul. If science did eventually explain all things, I cannot help but think that the human soul would experience, in that precise moment, its fatal blow. One gains far more enjoyment from not knowing how Derren Brown completes his tricks than we might if he were to reveal it all and we briefly admitted, 'Ah - that's clever,' and made our way about our lives. I do not reject the practical uses of science, but to say that all should be reduced to science, by all people, instinctively disgusts me in a way I cannot quite explain.

This all sounds absolutely histrionic and, frankly, bourgeois and megalomaniacal. I therefore thought it would make an excellent blog post. There's not a particular point to this odd heap of syntax, but why should there be? Is there a point in painting the walls in one's house? Is there a point in looking for points? Just a point.