On the passing of a writer

You have to admit it is a depressing job, the self-imposed one (in Frost’s terms) of writing. Writers, not that they deserve any better necessarily from the rest of us, are treated barbarically. They will need some way of supporting themselves, another job entirely from the one they honestly pursue. (A rude awakening.) And even success, the success of wildest dreams, will be highly problematic, as the great gentleman practitioner knew. Quixotic as all of us, the gentleman of writing we have lost knew that there is always something fresh to write about, that even if a day comes when nothing happens, when even months go by, that around the bend there is something honest to write about, worth writing about, through the queer circumstances that the world throws up at us.

Some will take other jobs, jobs of toil, jobs offering ultimate disillusionment. Some will work at something simple, like tending bar, a bottle for some quick but real comfort at the end of a day. Some will have to endure the diabolical task of educating themselves in such a way that they have a credential toward the craft, made further diabolical by having to teach other people whatever it is you might need to know to write, and who really knows what that is, other than live life and ‘well, just go and write, if you want to be good at it, like anything else.’ It would be perfectly fine to simply be as Blake, doing your own thing, if you could get by.

For reward, you get published. Then what happens? You have to give readings, for one thing. Maybe you lose a bit of that straight path you took into the world, the one by which fresh things would of themselves come at you, little miracles to write about, telling you what you must, or what you can, write about. Throw recognition into that, maybe a good thing, maybe a bad thing. Maybe you don’t lose anything of your original perspective. You’re just famous on top of it. Then maybe you suddenly realize you’re no longer in the process of growing up (as Hemingway’s early stories depict), that what you have to write is looking back on how you came to be a writer and what it was like to practice the craft as you were discovering and through haphazard ways of trial and error, making it your own.

The writer is as the Border Collie to the dog world. Very intelligent. A herder. Even other dogs, in a playful way that speaks of the enjoyment of finding ‘one’s work.’ Maybe thrown in to a room with a whole bunch of potential herders—a facet of all people--is irritating in some way, maybe highly so. Maybe that’s why writers crave a bit of quiet and solitude.

A huge part of coming up with something, at least for some of us, is going down into the depths and finding your way out. Part of a cycle. He had so many fine things to say, so deeply sensitive and appreciative of human nature, so finely reaching out to those who, in reading, sought to touch him. The lowest of the low, maybe part of his job, a critical danger he must have bravely faced again and again and again. He was doing what he loved to do, the finest example he set. To him the lows were welcome, because he understood. As it was his job. Pursuing the wisdom of a beatitude.

An Irish wake, I wish him.