THE PAIN OF WRITING

Over the years I’ve read very little about the pain of writing.  I don’t mean developing a flat bottom from sitting so long.  I mean the soul-wrenching work of trying to realize and understand what you know.  It might not be the ordeal of childbirth or torture, which they say one doesn’t remember anyway.  I mean it might be understanding that you contributed to a death or that you deliberately wiped out years of your life because of not understanding.  Or that you have a great gift that cannot be expressed simply because of living in the wrong time and place — Beethoven without a piano.

When a person goes to confession, the work of the priest is not telling you how many Hail Marys one must say in order to “pay” for a sin.  Rather he is supposed to be showing you the Deity-headed system that will explain what you have done, what remorse can earn, how gracious ideas can be.  It takes a person of some experience and capacity to be effective, but the furniture of a confession cabinet is not necessary.

In a Satanic and destructive world, it is good to have an effective listener.  There is nothing to “do,” but the simple realization of unbearable suffering in the world, esp. if it has no meaning, can be shared.  That helps a little bit.  This is not a common practice in our modern world.  The Satanic part comes out in cynicism and a parody of real sin.

Recently we witnessed the vengeful punishment of a priest who told a mild truth, simply recommended fairness.  It was reassuring — sort of — that he was restored.  The point of the chaplain is not ornamental poetry or honoring a religious institution or even setting a civilized tone for a contentious body, but to tell the truth.  We’ve lost that.  Even in my small sympathetic congregations there were things I dared not say, even though they were crucial, NEEDED to be expressed.  Things about madness and selling out and greed.

I sometimes think that the role of the court jester should be returned to service so that outrageous people can be pulled up to consciousness of themselves.  But currently we don’t have leaders who can be mocked into virtue.  Certainly some astounding mocking has had no effect.

The fact that a human being expands consciousness by growing can lead to pain about one’s own past, the selfishness and malicious intents of childhood and adolescence, or in the more unfortunate parts of the world the constant loss of family, friends, and dear places.

Most people feel that writing is a comfort, even a cure, and keeping a diary can be cathartic and forgiving.  Maybe it is — until you go back one day and read something that shows what a fool you were.  On the other hand, one can reinvent a puzzling and punishing person from real life as a character in a story and through that lens finally understand what he or she was up to.  It’s not necessary to forgive.

Working in the depths can surprise you with its agony.  It can put you writhing on the floor instead of writing at the table.  Days of unconsciousness — at least of that psychic place — can follow a person until they have more courage or enough moral force to overcome cellular resistance to anything so potentially damaging.  The quote is “when I write, I just open a vein and let the blood flow.”  (Let’s not really do that.)

An editor can work like a therapist to soothe, deny, or to encourage damage to the soul left by slashes of the pen.  They rarely explain the way a therapist or confessor might.  An editor is less likely to be moral and more likely to enjoy the sales of a book that left the author only a husk.  There may be no care for the reader.

Can writing lead to exaltation or just calm happiness?  Oh, yeah.  But that’s so common, so boring, so unenlightening.  Such writing is not likely to get you burned at the stake.  So what does?  Conviction so deep, revelation so blinding, stubbornness so self-destructive that death is a relief.  In civilized countries we just give you a pill.  It’s a diminishment.

Writing is not about vocabulary or sentence structure.  It’s not about narrative that controls the scene or explains a person.  It’s not even about print.  It’s about the highest and most intense concepts you can form.  That hurts.