I guess if you've ever tried your hand at writing, you realize it's a bit like fishin'.  There's often no rhyme nor reason to it, you just stand there and sometimes something happens.  You may not even have any idea what you are fishing for, or what it will look like when you do catch something, or even what it is when you catch it, nor what to do with it now that you have caught it.

It can cause you to end up feeling a bit displaced sometimes, like it almost doesn't involve you.  You see yourself as, as they say, just a vehicle.  That can come off sounding like some sort of holy mumbo-jumbo, so neither is that anything to go around crowing about.  Were it not for someone respectable like Joseph Campbell, saying that he felt that more and more, being the vehicle of something, as he got older and older, it would be too embarrassing to mention, too much of a claim.

Well, if you realize that it's not you so much, more a matter of just being there and letting things come to you as haphazardly as they do, it's a bit humbling.  And maybe some days, as much as anything else, in realizing your own personal insignificance, you see yourself pretty much as a bit of a degenerate scumbag.  (Were it not for the fact that you are capable of keeping yourself in check, and actually being fairly polite, a member of society, as much as you can be, as much as you can feign it.)  If you are 'just the vehicle,' you end up being so humble, in a way, you paint yourself into a corner accepting simplicity over respectability.  And you wind up feeling very awkward, either because of setting aside the time to write, or for all the things you accept in order to do it, like the job you work or the exercise program you subscribe to.

Thus, the awkwardness of being a writer.  You're almost obliged to be a bit different, a bit removed.  Perhaps that's why many gravitate toward odd jobs, jobs at the fringes of society like being a musician, or an actor or a bartender.  In it, but not of it.  Removed, in order to observe.  Scattered evenly throughout writing we find an unmistakeable geologic record of the embrace of outsider life.  We see it, of course, in Twain.  We see it in the poet Dickinson.  We see it in Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, the embrace of the outsider.  We can see it in Shakespeare's familiarity with the range of humanity, the isolation of everyone from clown to king.  Conrad, Melville, David Foster Wallace, Ray Bradbury, you name it.  (Call it the human condition.)  Add to that the lifestyle choices, Shane MacGowan, for example, who does indeed bring us a certain kind of world that exists all too readily.

Let's face it, no one respectable, except for the odd moment of curiosity, really wants that much to personally engage with a writer, as being a writer is almost a matter of not being there when of course everyone else is trying to be there, engaged with making life happen.  (Unless of course it is a considered act, this engagement.)  This, "I'm just a writer, I'm just the vehicle," really, the logical mind must ask, 'what is this bullshit?'

Okay, some of it is honest sitting around questioning things to the extent that they can be questioned.  It's not complete lunacy, at least if you come up with something every now and then.  But in the search for inspirations from within, you do come to see your own faults, even as you miss some of them.  Writing itself is a fault, maybe, once you have made the initial mistake of becoming a writer.  It's easy to see why evangelical types, who must come up with something to say once a week, are obsessed with sin, though they won't admit it about themselves unless in some usually grandiose self-serving way.  Sin is plain as day on the landscape, ever-present, when you sit down to catch a few thoughts.

But still, but still, you know enough of the mother ship to sense some form of dissatisfaction, some basic issue with either existence, personality, society, perpetuated understandings, etc.  You know enough to instinctively go snooping around Emily Dickinson's house, though you don't know what it means.  Nature must be remembered;  things must be analyzed and observed.

Still though, writing is something to stay away from.  People may read something good a writer has come up with, but my guess is they won't feel like getting more intimate or friendly with the writer, not unless they themselves are writers and know what it's like.




I can easily understand why the attempted writer would go about in a sort of hang-dog way.  I can understand why he would be slowly relegated to a down sort of life, shoulders stooped by the weight of his burdens, a kind of life Orwell wrote about in Down and Out in Paris and London.  And if it isn't directly the circumstances fallen into, it would be within his range of attitudes.  Being silent, superficially agreeable, passive, aloof, all makes him feel he is essentially strange to normal people, and this feeds on itself.  It is not that hard to imagine the sort of storm that might blow up to someone predisposed toward psychic and mental illnesses, depression and the like.  (Depression itself, hopefully of the kind combatted and ultimately conquered, is the part of many a story.)  In the writer's isolation it is easy to imagine the sort of paranoia that might arise over his work, making critique a very complicated and loaded issue indeed.

And yet, there is something natural and necessary, vital even, to the process and the work.  Writing is something that must be done, that we cannot live without.  There is of course a correspondingly fine feeling when you get something down right.  "Lonesome people of the world, unite."

You find yourself doing it a long time after it ceased to be comfortable and enjoyable, long after it had become difficult and painful and personally trying.  And so indeed there is at least a faint ring of the heroism inherent in writing in a multitude of works.  The eye gets Crispin Crispian's Day speech in Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth,


And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother;

because it sees the heroism deeply embedded in the writer.  The eye gets Emily Dickinson's "not one of all the purple host who took the flag today can tell the meaning, so clear, of victory..." because it speaks so clearly of the writer's turmoil and ultimate bravery, to go on when it is nothing but deeply painful.  It shows some integrity, even if the ship is taking water.  The Gettysburg Address derives its tone from the suffering and bravery of the man left to make sense of it all in words.  And one need not even be very productive ostensibly to garner such feelings--it can happen without writing a word, leading one to think that writing is the only way to exorcise it.  Not by coincidence is writing one of the places we steadily find wisdom herself.

I would gather it might be hard to pick up such a weight in the morning, to not want to run away and hide from its burdens.

What sort of a decent life is there out there for a writer?  What sort of work allows him to stay in the zone?   What allows him a healthy distance from it, so that he might go and pursue living a normal life?  How can he promote the respect and understanding that people should direct toward a writer?  What help can be provided to alleviate his pain?  No wonder writers seek refuge in the spiritual, as Kerouac did in both Buddhism and Christianity.    One supposes recognition (as a writer) would help matters.

Maybe now in particular do we need to bring forward the kind of writing that is real in its depth, more than the blip about 'what's hot.'  Something that has faced the withering fire of the dragon and proven to aid survival.  Something that acknowledges the great and greatly unpopular dismal quality of our existence that no act of materialism can assuage, things we don't want to face but which the writer, in effect, has to, meeting it head on and hopefully not consumed by it.

Such is life:  some people instinctively embrace the experience of the outsider, the loneliness, the misery, and some people run away from it.  Some chose to be writers.  Some chose not to be.  Some like deep stuff.  Some like ad copy.