I am intimidated by people's belief that other's will care what they have to say. Perhaps it is my cynicism towards my own ability to say anything of importance. Perhaps it is the insecurity of my lack of focus or set perspective on life. How do people begin to make sense of things in a way that can be serialized and then have the confidence to publish it, promote it, and build on it?
In Joan Didion's essay "Last Words" she focuses on a passage in Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms". This intimate examination of less than 150 words, exposed the difference in how I read, versus how a writer reads. Didion reads in a world where the words reveal truth. I read as if the words obscure a truth that exists in the world separate from the author or the book. I read how a playwright wants you to read, as if it is only the first step to see words on a page, for in reality the words live on a stage and are housed not in bindings but in the breath and movement of actors. And maybe that’s how I think I should write, as if the words I write actually belong to me in conversation and not to a one dimensional deposit. However, I don't think I read or write correctly, and there lays the paralysis that prevents me from making anything.
Goethe writes, although I read of it in Kierkegaard, that Hamlet's soul is like an acorn planted in a clay flower pot, and upon sprouting into an oak, shatters it. I've always contended that by asking "to be or not to be" Hamlet is exposing his own logical fallacy as by asking that question he has introduced a third thing into the mix. His asking is the same as roots growing, stretching, pushing up against the pot's resistance. And perhaps my paralysis at creating anything should take a note from this, by asking myself "what should I do", the tension between "to do or not to do" is rendered void. People find the confidence to write and make sense of the world because they have asked questions of it, and they have grown roots. Serialization and repeated creation are just questions bearing the fruit of speculated answers. Right now I feel like a lonely seed dropped in the middle of a field, I hope to figure out what my pot looks like, and if it is even made of clay. I hope that you will join me.
I think I sound sufficiently pretentious with the examples I used in this piece, but in my defense I just finished reading Didion and Kierkegaard. It’s not as if I have these quotations sitting for years in my brain in perfect order. No, they are just sitting on the nightstand waiting to be put on a shelf and forgotten.