So Much Depends Upon Such Small Things
I recently read a book by Stephen Marche called On Writing and Failure, a short essay seeking to puncture rather than entrench prevailing myths, about writing. His is a Grimm rather than a Disney fairy tale. Marche's book is a cold bath of writing reality: what it feels like, and how it usually goes. His basic thesis, his report from the personal writing front, is that writing is submission and rejection all the way down. Despite that sober report, he still does it. He just wants to be that the witness given is a truthful one.
The truth is, Marche says, the difficult realities of writing are never solved, even by "successful" writers. One might try to avoid them, but that would only mean participating in a deeper failure of not writing at all. (Indeed, that's one of the ways writers are "unmade.") A writer -- if she will take up the task of being a writer today -- must kneel to an acceptance of that hard reality. The kneeling does not mean "conquered humiliation," and it is the opposite of despair. Submission means consent, freely accepting disciplined labor, a long obedience in the same direction. To deploy the language of the desert fathers and mothers in their struggle for a holy life replete with necessary disciplines, a writing life is a battle to the end; you will go mad if you expect anything other than that.
For all the heroic battling that writers seem to endure ("I just bleed out on paper," etc.), there's an absolutely pleasurable mutuality that happens when writers and readers serve one another in faithfulness, something akin to the warm glow of a long marriage. Despite all the discipline, loneliness, and endurance necessary to the work, the pleasures of writing are immense. I do not love writing, but I love having written. Moreover, it is an exquisite honor to be read, to serve a reader's mind and heart with words, and to receive the conversations from readers that keep this artistry alive. There's a necessary relationship between writers and readers, and it is not fundamentally one of consumption. It is a conversation, one that improves with our participation.
Yes, writers need to eat. Readers do too. Writers, especially the poets, know that writing alone will not pay bills. Yet, to use Jesus's turn of phrase, writers know too that humans do not live by bread alone. We have spiritual, intellectual, and emotional needs for nourishment too. As William Carlos Williams put it in an oft-quoted snippet from a much longer poem:
"It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."
I have tasted that reality as a reader. I have read lines in essays, letters, poems, and books of fiction and nonfiction that have truly sustained me. They help me know myself, and at times suffer myself. Even the grim tales, books like Marche's, built word-by-word by means of a kneeling mind harnessed to typing or writing fingers, nourish me in ways that analogous to the work and nourishment of prayer. Praying and writing are often correlated and compared, even by "non-religious" writers.
The reality is that we either accept certain disciplines that are necessary to living a particular way of life, or we do not. Those disciplines may feel like losses as we live them. We trust them to be investments, even as they put us in touch with our failures and finitude. But in accepting that risk, by consenting to disciplined action, we receive enough for a day's need. Showing up, we discover that the accruals can compound into capacities. We really do write our lives, day by day, whether we are aware of that or not, and we read lives too.
My productive writing friends -- and I say "productive" in that they get words down onto pages, and some periodically get those words published -- regularly bemoan how hard it all is, how little they earn, how much they wonder about why they take up this task, and whether it matters at all. I don't write that to pity them, or to invite pity for me. Even "successful writers" will bear witness to this fact, as Stephen Marche does in his essay. William Carlos Williams knew that if he wanted to write poetry, he'd have to get a real job. So he became a doctor, and he wrote poems on the edges of that other good work. And because that dear poet also labored at words after he assisted laboring women giving birth, my young son now has inscribed in his mind, "So much depends upon... ." He knows that that line can be finished with "a red wheelbarrow," as the poet did, or with "a pair of binoculars," or "this little pencil," and so much more.
In the end, so much depends upon so little, such fragile little threads. Both living and dead writers help me see that I'm not alone in what I'm experiencing. They help me think and, at times, act better for having read and listened to them, certainly better than I can do alone, in my own head, and armed only with my predictable thoughts and behaviors. They put words to the ineffable, help me discern cosmos within chaos, to borrow Madeleine L'Engle's language for it. They have pointed to God's reality, to the possibility that love truly holds the world together even as we all seem determined to tear one another apart. They point me to the reality of my neighbors and that my life peacefully benefits and depends upon the labors of these and many other unknown others. Writers help me to see that my life, not only despite of but in the midst of its failures, is still being written (today!) and that I might cooperate with that writing. They help me hold on just a little bit longer. Sometimes the writers just get it wrong, and in their bungling and published misery and half-truths, they draw me out in different ways, to wrestle and contend. I think Marche gets his grim writing tale right up to a certain point, and then I think he luxuriates in the heroic despair that is also a real temptation for a writer. No writer is self-made, and an honest writer depends upon so much, including responsible, truth-seeking readers.
If you love a writer, if you love the words that their kneeling mind has put into the world, tell them, tell others! Find their website and fill in that little contact form. Sure, buy a handful of their books and give them away. (Yes, of course, I want you, invite you, to do that for me. Here's my own contact form.)
But I also want you to do that for others too -- for young poets and old ones alike, for all aspiring authors and writers, for all those learning to show up and to keep caring for and using words faithfully in a culture of false fairy tales and lies. Do it for the painters, the song-writers, and the sculptors. Point others to their work. Do it for the ones you know, maybe that live in your town, or who go to your place of worship, not just the distant, famous, successful ones you see on TV or social media. Do it as a creative expression of your own, a way of expressing your own participation in creative work. So much depends upon the smallest forms of patronage. I thank you for all the ways you show that to me by means of this point of connection, as a subscriber. It matters to me, the real person "back here," writing these words.
My point is that, however small we may feel, we readers make a real difference to these ecosystems. We really do cooperate with how the world is written, in how systems form, in what we make of each other, by how we participate. So much depends upon such small things, and that is nothing to be ashamed of nor deny. It is a graced reality that we are invited to embrace.
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I have a new essay coming out in Comment magazine, and I invite you to subscribe to enter more deeply into the conversation happening in that blessed space. More on that soon enough.