For all of you who don’t want to write anymore

I really don't feel like writing anymore. This is a fairly common statement for writers. It’s a strange identity, this. To be a writer. Most creative types love the idea of having written but not the idea of writing. I think Dorothy Parker first said this, to which everyone else solemnly nodded and swore a pact to repeat forever.

I recently finished a book manuscript* and am tired to exhaustion at the sound of my own fingers clacking the keyboard. Tired of re-reading my own thoughts and endlessly parsing them. Tired of how tired the words now ring in my ears. I thought the words were important when I typed them. I'm not so sure anymore, not because I didn't try my best but it's just such a strange attitude writers must take, this compulsion to make ourselves known.

Anyways, the words exist now, so at some point you can read them if you want. Buy my new book, if you would be so kind, it’s out with Sophia Institute Press. I do hope you’ll like it. All I know is that, when I wrote it, I was quite pleased with it. In many ways I still am. I'm just tired of writing.

The problem, I think, is that those words contain a piece of me. They're now a permanent, blood-red, gaping wound that for some reason I voluntarily ripped open in my skull. Now, you all see me, the coursing synaptic electricity, the numinous light, a human soul from which a tiny corner of protective armor has been pried away. You're there with me in the smoke and ash, watching me heap it up in little piles like sand castles while the black smoot lodges under my nails and crusts into the prints of my fingers. Occasionally a volcanic spark singes my skin and raises a tender spot.* For some wild reason, I'm still typing. Right now. I'm actually typing about it. I must be suffering a compulsion. This must be how warlocks feel as they stir magic potion. Drop in another frog eye. Squeeze another drop of blood from your index finger and seal the vow.

The view of the Mississippi River from the library where I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing.

Jacques Maritain talks about creativity as superabundance, an image so powerful that it takes on form. It explodes onto the scene, at times completely unbidden, a numinous wonder never encountered before. Art has regularly staggered me in this way, as if I'd been privy to the sight of a brand-new, unnamed flower unfolding its velvet robes to the sun. I don't know how to explain it except to say that it's the experience of more.

It manifests itself as a vital communication, a thing made that, once made, you cannot puzzle out how it ever could not have been made. The idea, as it were, begins to sing, to hum and vibrate. It pulls rabbits out of hats and I jump up and down like a child. It’s the Prestige, believable and very much real but nevertheless unexplainable. If it’s good, don’t ask where it came from. Or do. But understand that in pursuing the question you’re poking your head through the doorway into a terrible mystery.

Artistic communication is odd. It isn't necessarily ventured for the sake of communicating to another person. Everyday prose works quite well enough for that purpose. In fact, the value of art is that, when it's done well, it exists as equivocation. Not that we doubt it stakes a belief or that it exists simply because it cannot be pinned down. No, the realness of its existence is precisely what's so stunning. The ambiguity is in the image itself. What does it mean? How is it that the image became metaphor? Who birthed it? What connection, precisely, has the metaphor made and what does it reveal about us, the cosmos, grace?

Ask and the artist shrugs. He's merely the midwife. He has some relation to the work but isn't quite sure what it is. In fact, if he's too much present in it, the words are lifeless. They're a lecture. I'm thick-headed so I tend to fall asleep at lectures, but when my teenage daughter chants the introit of the Mass my heart flutters. Just the other day, a friend handed me a book of William Stafford poems. Sparks shot from the page when I began reading. I sat up straight.

The value of writing isn't in what another person gets out of it, how an audience reacts, or if an audience materializes at all. To have an audience is, of course, a bonus. It's nice to feel heard. At least, this is what I thought when I started out as a writer. I felt as though I had a thousand burning ideas inside me, so much I wanted to share. I needed, I absolutely required validation. Lately, however, I'm wondering if the value in my work is really arising from me in any meaningful way at all. I'm proud to have written, don't get me wrong, and I work hard at my craft, but the meaning, as Stafford might say, slips in from some other place deep in the night, wholly other, in reaction to which the boundaries of the world flare and widen.

Or as Hopkins says - look long enough at a thing and it begins to buckle.

I was always an awkward child in the sense that I felt like my inner life and my outer life didn't match. I didn't know what to do about that, so I lay on my bed under a single lamplight and read Russian novels late into the night, falling asleep with the book splayed open on my chest, dreaming of tales of mad inquisitors. During the day, I had reveries during which I played the piano for hours. I played only for myself and startled like a rabbit in clover at the thought of another person hearing the song. I went on long distance runs alone and silence filled my ears as I beat out miles along suburban sidewalks. I had trouble expressing myself and was searching for an outlet, a way to be authentic.* I started scratching out naive little poems because I sensed they might be capable of saying what I was not capable of saying. At that time, there was quite a lot I wanted to say.

Now, though? Twenty years later? My archives are littered with hundreds of published articles. There's the big book release.* I look back over my work and feel ambiguity. Some is good. Some is bad.* That's not really the point. The point is, if art is a manifestation, an overflow of superabundance, maybe, at this point, I've manifested enough?

I've shared quite a lot. My cup hath runneth over. Eventually, there has to be some shame, some self-awareness, an inkling that maybe people are tired of hearing from me, exhausted by interacting with the manifestations of my most conflicted, suffering, inner self.

And yet, here I am, writing again. In fact, I still write two or three complete essays per week. I'm always happy I wrote them even though I never know at the outset how there could possibly be anything left to say. The point is, there's always more.

Superabundance, I've come to understand, is grace slipping up a rose-wreathed trellis like a hidden lover.

Maybe this is why writers are helpless to stop. When Wallace Stevens writes, “Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,/ The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,” I understand exactly what he means. The rage that is blessed, the artist's nostalgia, the sting of beauty. Underneath everything, or above everything, is a deeper order exhaled from timeless, fragrant portals, “dimly-starred,/ And of ourselves and of our origins/ In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”

If I stopped writing I'm at least half-convinced my heartbeat would stop as well. Life is a poem or it is nothing. This is my particular way of forming the word on my lips.

If art manifests the author and the work itself as a brand new thing made, if it's a communication of a more fundamental reality or a species of blessed rage, above all it manifests love. I am in love. So here I am, a ram caught in the bushes, tearing free from brambled thorns, pushing through the door, putting my shoulder to wood and splintering the threshold like a clumsy fool. I'll stumble through one way or another and if you manage a glimpse of blue sky over my shoulder, all the better.

* The Forgotten Language – How Recovering the Poetics of the Mass Will Change Our Lives from Sophia Institute Press.

* This imaginary scenario is obviously ridiculous grandiosely apocalyptic because I’ve been writing too much and have lost all sense of perspective. I mean, I’m even footnoting now, which is a sure sign of a writer who is out of control (with apologies to D.F. Wallace).

* At the risk of deploying such a loaded word in our society, which is so dripping in irony and post-modern embarrassment. All I mean by it is that I wanted to be myself and be known as myself but had no clue beyond shopping for stupid hipster clothes at the thriftstore and ranting to my friends about capitalism.

* Buy the book, you guys. It's really good. In order to write it, I basically ripped my heart out and described it like a scientist with no actual training.

* I’m not really all that motivated to load my old Dappled Things essays into the archives for the new website, for instance. They can drift kindly into the night.