You always said people don’t do what they believe in,
they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent—Bob Dylan
. . . some things you know...
And some you just believe in
And hope it comes out even—Aimee Mann
A heart needs a home.
—Richard Thompson
Dylan, Mann, and Thompson are good songwriters.
You probably knew this.
The best songwriter I know, I mean actually know, is my friend Kirk.
In talking with him about not writing or, more accurately, the tribulations of creative work, he said: “My life is what my songs say back to me.”
Is my life what my writing says back to me? I dunno.
Often, in that inevitable way, I can’t distinguish the nagging and persistent questions about quantity (why not more?) and quality (why not better?) and unfinishedness (why nothing ever, ever completed?) from the writing itself.
Would a larger, finer, more milestoned life sharpen my ears to what my writing says to me? Or would it dull them?
Is greater sensitivity to what I might hear a matter of form? Of effort? Of audience?
Does my writing bark back to me “essay?” Does it whisper “epistle?”
Does it shout my life is fiction because I have not written any?
And yet what’s the dance or lilt of a day if I am not tapping at it?
Well, there is more to say on this but for now, I’ll beg off and sift through Spotify for the music of my betters.
The word 'essay' has always appealed to me, if we can reclaim it from its schoolroom resonances, because it means 'an attempt', and that's exactly what I feel I'm doing when I write. It won't always succeed, sometimes the falling short becomes part of what matters and makes the writing real.
And then there's something the solo bass player Steve Lawson said to me years ago, in a conversation about improvisation: you need to leave space for the audience, the listener, the reader. If your work is too finished, too complete, too convinced of its own perfection, then where's the room for the people you are inviting to meet you there?
Someone said of John Berger's essays that he always showed his workings, they are a document of thinking in process, rather than an artefact of finished thought. (And now I think of Tyson Yunkaporta telling us that modernity is interested in the artefacts of Indigenous thought, but doesn't want to know about the processes of Indigenous thinking.)
When I met Berger, I gave him a copy of the first Dark Mountain book, and I wrote "Thank you for the shelter you've given so many of us in your words." That's what I mean about writing being an invitation and a place where we can meet.
Some unfinished thoughts, this morning, set off by the dance of your writing on not writing.