A perfect waste of time
Nothing's more useful than the useless, depending on where you stand.
No. 135: A perfect waste of time
Why write?
You have to ask. Especially as one considering themselves a writer.
Why?
What sense does it make to spend life’s energy writing stories about life, the mind’s meanderings, people? By the proscribed measures of success, working some job or engaging directly with the world would be better than sitting in front of a piece of paper, typewriter, or computer, stringing together sequences of letters, dots, and lines.
After all, you could be outside instead of wistfully looking out the window you’ve pushed your desk against to simulate being outside. You could be spending time on something that yields a visible outcome, like money, fitness, or food, rather than letting hours fly by on projects that only take shape when someone’s around to read them, like clouds. And we can’t forget that more gruesome aspect of writing, that voluntary and bloody operation of plumbing one’s own puss-filled depths.
To go for a supermassive answer to this question right of the bat, writing has to do, I think, with the visible and invisible, trending slightly towards the latter. Writing assumes and then confirms there’s something invisible about being alive: the soul, ideas, feelings, our proximity—close or far—to what we might call God, one who’s been said to have created humans in his likeness.
Writing is a waste of time, like prayer is, like hiking a loop is, like watching a baseball game is—even with the pitch clock. And yet, as we condemn these activities as time-sucks snipping the ends off the already-tiny thread of time we’ve been given on Earth, we know these “pointless” activities are in fact the most important of all. As soon as any of these are assigned some utilitarian raison d'être, they have been violated. Gut-feel affirms that these moments of time wasted are the most glorious of all. Thus, time wasted is no time wasted, if you can forgive the paradox. Laziness has no excuse, but activities that fulfill the interior life and, by a series of not-entirely-understood events, the exterior, too? There is every excuse, and every reason, to “waste” time on doing them well and often.
The question remains, though. If there are many excellent ways to burn the hours of the day, why write? My theory goes something like this.
The first time we read a story, we feel a closeness to the invisible by tasting what it must be like to be God—yes, we’re going there—or what might be called the act of being itself (to be, to be) when to be is not limited to our existence alone. In other words, we witness the complex story of another, an experience that can only occur as the creator of all things or by reading the stories other humans have written.
If we know anything, we know ourselves. That’s it. With a story, we can know someone else in a way more intimate that merely what we can pick up in conversation, the requisite for conversation being two or more separate entities communicating. In stories, we can enter into the mind and life of others. We see their thoughts, actions, choices. We see their relationships and life situations. We come to understand their goals and fears, wins and failings. They are like us, and we are like them. There is a likeness.
But this phenomenon isn’t as simple as picking up a book and reading what it contains, I don’t think.
In the shallowest interpretation of words, we’re entertained. In the deepest, we’re in love. I doubt whether love is even optional when we read and, by reading, recognize our likeness in another. Grace—whom some of you know as my fiancé—asked me a question related to this the other day as we hung out in a restaurant along Chicago’s Millennium Park:
What if you could read the mind of another person and know all of their thoughts? she asked.
I think I would either immediately die, I said, or love them more than I’ve loved anything.
If this were possible, to be in the mind of another person, I find it hard to deny that I’d be bound to the person forever, like those flying dragon things in Avatar. To know them in the way I know myself? To know their fears, their hopes? To know those they love and those that have hurt them? To know everything? There’s nothing left to do in this situation but 1) die from some kind of overwhelming implosion that occurs when two consciousnesses become one or 2) love that person with unimaginable selflessness—for the self is effectively gone—and to always hope for their highest good, interceding where and when possible in their interest, and loving them despite their most egregious faults.
A writer gives that to us. They tell stories we know to be true, if only because they wrote them. Fiction or nonfiction, there is no difference. Every story has the potential to communicate a truth tangible only in its truthfulness, and these truths can literally transform human beings. Assuming we both experiencing the truth of a story and believing it to be worth something more than a mere tickling experience, our life must change. We’ve had an experience. Experiences include lessons. I know this to be true from getting caught with switchblade at school, which was when I learned to 1) pull the plug on my wanna-be greaser phase and 2) not bring a switchblade to school. In a similar way, reading Raymond Carver is how I learned 1) all people are equal and 2) beauty exists everywhere.
These takeaways were choices, though. And this is the big thing. They required belief—that subtle attuning to certain gut-feels and the subsequent choice to follow where they lead, rather than brush them off. The writer, in their first experiences as reader, learns this. They change because of it. This change is powerful. It’s as if they’ve discovered something arcane, and maybe they have. They’ve discovered words have power to transform people—the substance of reality itself.
The transition here is natural.
Write. ♦
Weekly Three
HEAR: “Real Love Baby” by Father John Misty
READ: David Lodge’s Author, Author, a novel about the American-British author Henry James and his efforts to produce a play. One of the novels that sticks in my mind of all the stuff I’ve read. It may be time for a re-read.
VIEW: I finally know how to make bread, which seems like a requirement for being a human being. Here’s the ultra-simple video that taught me how to make a baguette.
“I think I would either immediately die, I said, or love them more than I’ve loved anything. “
Such a raw yet deep answer… i believe it to be true.
Writing, like other forms of creativity (film, painting, a bread baking recipe) are I think one of the few ways we can achieve immortality, or at least as close as one can get to immortality. The lasting impression that our vulnerability can have on others along with the creative journey that one must go through in order to construct the proper words and sentences together to ensure understanding are a few ways that make writing the perfect waste of time.