Meta-Addendum
Dear Readers,
Yesterday I posted a long piece about Gaza. Even by my standards it was typo rich. While you might be able to bake cookies or grow flowers or play music, I can proofread fruitlessly.
Here is slightly cleaner version of what appeared in your inbox yesterday.
After many good (but difficult because of the topic) conversations, and while rereading, I half wanted to argue against much of what I wrote or ammend furiously. But I will leave that for another time. I suspect the topic of Gaza and the subject of the phone are not going anywhere. If we survive it, there will be plenty to say.
But let me say add that in the face of horror some people protest and others send money and still others go fight. Sometimes I protest or send money too, but mostly I write. (I do not know whether my desperate lack of attachment to anything with a flag or a history serves me as a citizen of the world or condemns me for my failure to serve it better, but I am sure it influences how I think and write, for better or worse.)
I started this newsletter a few years ago, at first writing every day, then a few times a week and have yesterday posted a piece for the first time in a month. I do not think that helps grow my readership. It certainly does not model what Seth Godin, who I greatly admire, calls “The Practice.” I wish I was a better writer. I wish I wrote with a rhythm or in a fashion the current modes of readership found easier to pick up. Maybe there is no way to manifest the latter without working towards the former.
But mostly, I am selfish. I write to try and understand myself and the world and that interaction. Perhaps like you with cookies or flowers or music, or with your own writing, I write because I must.
What rereading this morning reminded me of, though, is that the clarifying function writing promises rarely happens in the doing, as is often said. Though I suspect other writers experience this too, for me at least, the process itself draws you away from the purpose. What I mean is that I probably did not say anything in that long post other than: STOP. CHANGE. And maybe a post that only said STOP. CHANGE. repeated over and over at infinitum would have been more effective. What’s more, I did not post what I had written feeling clearer but, instead, felt a kind of familiar fog of thinking I was at a stopping point. (Occasionally one write something with that lighting bolt of clarity, beginning to end, but such pieces must be shorter. And while, yes, these pieces are often best, they are just as often the pieces you most regret making visible, especially to yourself.) Mostly I think the desire to offer insight or a turn of phrase or a new perspective is just as addictive (and dangerous) as a drug. It is why “kill ones darlings” is as famous and as useful an instruction any writer can follow. Invariably, the things you like the best are a drink too far.
Thus I was reminded this morning that it is not previous night at the bar that makes the doing worthwhile but waking up to see that you survived your night out, made it through the fog, and that despite the embarrassing things your darlings said to you (and you to them), what’s left is a record of trying to be something other than a killer. Or rather, a record of being a killer (or drunkard) in the ethereal (or spiritual) space of words and ideas and internal deceptions worked through imperfectly rather than a soldier in the bloody world of commerce, guns, and reality.
It is nothing new to say that we cannot live exclusively in either the ethereal or real world, that the one without the other makes life a bore or terribly short. Yet the bridges between these two worlds—art and culture and civilization—support less and less weight now because words are spiritual conveyors, not actual things. That is why, for instance, god is best, and really only tolerable, as an image of speech.
My darlings? Overworked metaphors. My work? To drink deep, cross that bridge, and soldier on.
Ted