I have written creatively for years now, and one thing I notice about the writing process is you must be mentally unhealthy or incredibly solid in order to have impetus to write. No sound person lends breath from their workaday to write quixotic notes on the chaos of their interior world. They are either content as clams and barnacles, or they have no time for the indelible arts of spilling your feelings into ink, paint, or charcoal. Hemingway summed it with hubris when he wrote, “All you do is sit at the typewriter and bleed.”
The sublime act of morphing vulnerability into consumable art is about as alchemical a feat as the modern artist can pull. In fact, most hermetic texts of old would nod their heady pages and say, “Watching our shadow selves arrive at the snowy train station of love, in their outgrown coats, ready for Christmas turkey, is what alchemy does–welcoming darkness into the home, allowing it to speak and so to fuel the fire of awakening, smelting lead to gold in the fireplace, the hearth a shrine of your transformation. And this vulnerability, this ball of molten emotion is nowhere more scalding than in Jack Kerouac’s infamous line from, On The Road :
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”
This classic bastion of his novels stands on the pillars of sex and drugs and hedonism. Far from the winter river bottoms of his other novels, praying to gods over cans of campfire beans. The cliché tag on the spine of this, his prophetic swan song, is but a whimper from the spirit of our own times. The alchemy of vulnerability is a forgotten art of our age. As strange to the millennial ear as chaturanga dandasana, the sanskrit yogic word for plank pose. Vulnerability is old world for millennials. Their taut hearts build a cabin of rawness. And the pliable are so full of emotion they don’t know who they are. In a frigid world whose cold shoulder brandishes the warm soul of the artist, the pose of poetry is just that—poetry—and writers could imagine life without poetry as no small feat of courage and fortitude, if not plain masochism.
For the poets find meaning in the grey bed of weeds they sow behind their foreheads. Any poet knows this thorny garden you grow must survive, if you are to continue on writing–if you are to find the way through.
This puts the creative mind in a loop, spending all its time creating in order to heal itself, and looking for more raw emotion to inspire its reasons to create, gathering scrapes in its garden.
This is Nietzsche’s
“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
You have to carry the fire. You have to bear a real burning in your heart to desire to create. Yet the only thing worth writing about “is man in contradiction with himself,” as Faulkner wrote, a liberal artist in the Jim Crow South.
Indeed, this is the essence of all fiction—contradiction. We find it is the wedge which drives all plot, in every library of the world, and it is the land that sows the very authors who write it. These contradictions concluded would bring an end to our creative pursuit, and to man’s search for meaning, and to any writing whose purpose is more than to catalog, say, the news.
So what is the young and old writer to do, trapped in such a miasma of contradictions?
“Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there’s a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody’s having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.” – JD Salinger
I discover the only writing I learn something from is by people who have gone further down the rabbit hole than I. A love story is new to the child. A tale of violence to the housewives. And a tale of transcendence to the lost.
The end of the writing is the end of mystery. The madness can be mended only through art. The writer is still there, in a rainy room. The kettle is on, and the fire heats it.
what we are stepping into 