Why We Write

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. – Albert Einstein

The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. – Dianne Di Prima

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination. – John Keats

What is madness, but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? – Theodore Roethke

What is now proved was once imagined. – William Blake

He not busy being born is busy dying. – Bob Dylan

Why not sink into despair or cynicism in these times of unrelentingly bad news? Caitlin Johnstone writes:

There’s not really any way to reframe all this horror and make it okay. All you can do is work on yourself to make sure you have enough inner spaciousness to accommodate the bad feelings and feel them all the way through until they’ve had their say. Let in the despair. The grief. The rage. The pain. Let it move all the way through your system without resisting and then get up and write the next thing.

That’s what writing is for me now…It’s just staring into the darkness and the blood and the gore and the anguished faces and writing out what I see, day after day. Nothing about it is pleasant or rewarding. It’s just what you do when there’s a live-streamed genocide happening right in front of you with the backing of your own society.

Many of us have been struggling with similar questions since long before the age of Trumpus (I continue to use this word to remind us all that the man enacts and embodies much of our own mythologies. Trump is us. We created him. We are not innocent.) I wrote this fifteen years ago in my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American innocence:

Now we are called to remember things we have never personally known, to remember what the land itself knows, that which has been concealed from us by our own mythologies. We have an opportunity to remember who we are, and how our ancestors remembered, through art and ritual. Their most profound myths arose in the inconceivably distant past, as the communal dreams of their cultures.

Our task is unique: inviting something new, yet familiar, to re-enter the soul of the world. We can do this invocation in two ways. The first is to restore memory and imagination. To Federico García Lorca, imagination “gives clear life to fragments of the invisible reality…” We can replicate the original process of mythmaking and dreaming by telling as many alternative stories, as often as possible, for as long as necessary, until they coalesce into the world’s story. “Hope is reborn each time someone awakens to the genuine imagination of their own heart,” says Michael Meade.

The second thing is to engage in the rituals – and do the arts – that bypass the predatory and paranoid imaginations. By convincing the spirits to aid us, imagination builds a bridge between fate and destiny. So we need to use sacred language, in the subjunctive mode: let’s pretend, perhaps, suppose, maybe, make believe, may it be so, what if – and play… where new life comes not from us but through us. Can we imagine a society like Bali – where people practice dance, music, painting or sculpture so universally that they have no word for “art?”

But we are also required to periodically collapse into the mournful realization of how much we have lost…Only from that position can new forms of art and language arise that might break the spell of our amnesia. Then it may be possible for us to speak and act without being throttled by belief systems riddled with unconscious forms of violence.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. – The Talmud

Mythology tells of art’s ancient connection to memory: it was Memory herself, Mnemosyne, who mated with Zeus and birthed the Muses…Artful reconnection to memory reverses the work of Kronos, countering Time’s linear progress with the cyclic imagination of Memory, who knows both past and future.

Carl Jung said that myth offers us two gifts: a story to live by, and the opportunity to disengage from an outmoded pattern and re-engage in a different way with the archetypal energies from which our stories arise. It is said that the Muses collected the scattered limbs of dismembered bodies; it was they – art – who reassemble what the madness of the world rips apart.

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But why are some of us called to write? I’ve condensed an essay by the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015), In Defense of the Word:

During long sleepless nights and days of depression, a fly buzzes and buzzes around the head: “Writing, is it worth it?” In the midst of the farewells and the crimes, will words survive? Does this profession, which one has chosen or which has been chosen for one, make any sense?

One writes out of a need for communication and communion with others, to denounce pain and share joy. One writes against one’s own solitude and that of others. One assumes that literature transmits knowledge and acts upon the language and conduct of those who receive it, that it helps us to know ourselves better and achieve a collective salvation. But “others” is too vague a term, and in time of crisis, the ambiguity can come too close to a lie. One writes in fact for the people whose situation one feels identified with, the under-nourished, those who cannot sleep, the rebels and the oppressed of this world.

…Can we make ourselves heard in the midst of a deaf-mute culture? The small freedom conceded to writers, is it not at times a proof of our failure? Let us be wary of applause. Sometimes congratulation comes from those who think us harmless.

We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are. In this respect a “revolutionary” literature written for the convinced is just as much an abandonment as is a conservative literature devoted to the contemplation of one’s own navel. Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.

One writes to put death off the scent and to strangle the ghosts that pursue one within; but what one writes can be historically useful only when it coincides in some way with a collective need for the conquest of identity…In saying “This is what I am” and offering himself, the writer can help other people become conscious of what they are. As a means of revealing collective identity, art should be considered a prime necessity and not a luxury. To arouse consciousness and reveal the true reality.

But what can a writer do, however much his own fire burns, against the ideological machinery of lies and conformism? If society tends to organize itself in such a way that no one ever meets anyone else, and reduces human relations to the sinister operation of competition and consumption…What process of change can urge forward a people which doesn’t know who it is nor where it comes from? If it doesn’t know who it is, how can it know what it deserves to be? Cannot literature directly or indirectly aid this revelation? In an incarcerated society, free literature can exist only as denunciation and hope.

If what he writes changes or stimulates the reader in some way, then the writer can lay claim to his part in the process of change…words have a meaning for those of us who want to celebrate and share the certainty that the human condition is not a sewer.

We look for people to communicate with, not admirers. We offer dialogue, not spectacle. We write from a striving for true meeting, so that the reader may be in communion with words that come to us from him and return to him as inspiration and prophecy.

…One may write in order to say, in a sense: “This is where we are, this is where we were; we are like this, this is what we were like.”…a literature which does not set out to bury our own dead, but to perpetuate them; which refuses to clear up the ashes and tries on the contrary to light the fire…If, as I believe, hope is better than nostalgia, perhaps this nascent literature may be worthy of the beauty of the social forces which will sooner or later, cost what it may, radically change the course of our history. And perhaps it may help to preserve for the youth to come, as the poet put it, “the true name of each thing”…It is not useless to sing the pain and beauty of having been born in America.

May it be so, whether we write or simply repeat what others have written:

Remember, and failing that, invent. – Monique Wittig

The Four-fold way: Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth without blame or judgement. Don’t be attached to the results. – Angeles Arrien

Be joyful even though you’ve considered all the facts. – Wendell Berry

I say to the bird: “As long as spring baptizes the grass, the scarlet blossoms will continue to sway over your head.” Even if the flood drowns everything, do not sink into sadness, because Noah is your captain. Do not sink into sadness, even though the mysteries of the other world slip past you entirely. There are plays within plays that we cannot see. – Hafiz

It’s a good idea to memorize poems. It gives you some culture when you’re in the slammer. – Gary Snider