A few Fridays ago, I had the pleasure
of spending time with some of my writer friends. We—a fellow graduate of the
program, her husband and one of our instructors—met in Annapolis to attend a lecture
by James Wood, a pretty incredible literary critic (New Yorker) who spends some
of his time at Harvard. I decided to go less because I wanted to hear Wood and
more because I looked forward to the company. I’d been feeling very
disconnected from the creative process lately, and I knew whatever
conversations might pop up between Jen and Bill and I would be a tonic, even if
a temporary one at that.
And so when we learned the
lecture had been canceled, I couldn’t help but marvel at my good luck.
We found a corner table in an Irish pub (
But first, I think I need to
back up a moment and talk about this question, “why write?” People have asked
me that in the past, and I’ve had this particular conversation with other
writers. It can be an arduous task, even
when there’s not the immediate specter of loss looming in every corner. I’m not
unique in the art of avoidance. Yes, my writing friends and I agree, the payoff
is worth it. When you hit upon something, when that epiphany cracks open the
world in front of you, it’s euphoric, but the process. Ugh. The process can be
hell. I remember a decidedly non-writing friend of mine, after listening to me
complain about a particularly difficult bout with a short story, exclaim--with
no small degree of incredulousness-- something to the effect of, “why on earth
do you do it then?” And honestly, I couldn’t answer. As I said, it’s not the first time someone
has asked me that, and the only thing I could do by way of response is shrug my
shoulders and mumble something like, “I just have to…”
I’ll say here that answer isn’t
necessarily wrong. Something, somewhere inside really does have to, though it seems a pretty cruel joke to feel compelled to
do something that at times can make mucking out the Augean stables feel like
scooping up kitty litter.
It wasn’t until Friday night
that I figured it out. We started talking about Ann Carson (who is quite
possibly the smartest person on the planet, certainly one of the finest
writers. Not convinced? Pick up the Autobiography of Red
and then we’ll talk), and Nox, the
artifact she created about her brother, Michael, which one experiences, rather
than reads. In much too simple an explanation, Nox is Carson ’s
attempt to get at something—her brother’s life, his death (the news of which did
not reach her for several weeks, as Michael’s widow didn’t know how to reach
his family),their estranged relationship, all of that “stuff.” And to do it,
she not only uses her words, but words in translation, images, photos, scraps
of paper—these little bits of her life and his, little scraps of quantity that
hopefully add up to something.
Hopefully. Because it never really does. The title I’ve used, “Meditation of the contours of Absence” is a quote from Meghan O’Rourke’s New Yorker review of Nox. I re-appropriated it here, because that’s exactly what I do, every time I sit down to write. I meditate on the outline of something that isn’t there—be it loss or love or grief or regret or anger or pain. I’m forever trying to get at something that can never, no matter how hard I try, be captured. I might get close every now and then, but I’ll never actually reach the goal. And that’s a terribly frustrating thing to grapple with. This acknowledged rock that will, no matter how many times I get close to the top, always roll back down. And yet, I keep pushing it back up. Every time.
And every time, I think, This is it. It’ll work this time.
