I’m reading Patti Smith’s new book, it’s called “Devotion,” an exploration of writing and creativity based on a lecture she gave to students at Yale University. I was invited to lecture at Yale once, and even driven there in a fancy limousine and housed in a 200-year-old apartment occasionally occupied by former Presidents and Senators.
I love the book, I am a longtime Patti Smith admirer, and felt very connected to what she wrote, although I have no illusions about the interest of the world in why I became a writer. I often wonder about it though. I wanted to be a writer since I was eight, except for a brief flirtation with the idea that I might be the next Clarence Darrow. But to do that in our time, you have to go to school and do your homework.
I never made it as far as I wanted as writer of books, but the odd thing is that as a writer of a blog, I have gone further than I ever imagined, and am going still. There are about four million people a year who read this blog each year, about half of those unique visitors. The blog is my living memoir, as it turns out.
Why is one compelled to write,” asked Patti Smith in her lecture and her book.
“To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words.The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite.”
I am no Proust or Woolf, for sure, but I believe I began writing to cocoon myself, I have my place, I have my farm. Maria has her place, she has her studio.
The Christian philosopher Henri J.M. Nouwen wrote that Jesus Christ found his ministry in the lonely place where he went to pray, early in the morning, well before dawn. That is the place where I often go to write, and where I became a writer.
I have my cocoon in a way, but not the solitude I often crave. People in our world are never alone really, there are a thousands voices in their head each day – that is how many messages I get – and so many of them are intrusive or not especially nice. Just today, one person scolded me for not mentioning our visit to Disney World five years ago that some people gave us as a gift after my Open Heart Surgery. when I talk of our real and upcoming vacation. She wasn’t there, this is our first real vacation, for sure. (Is there really someone paying that much attention to me and remembering so much?)
Another challenged me to an online debate about whether the people who don’t like the photos I am taking with my new lens are stupid. She accused me of suggesting they are dumb for not liking some of the new pictures. How dumb would I have to be to want to participate in a debate like that? I have seen very few healthy debates online. I eagerly deleted her.
A man I don’t know named Neese accused me of doing great harm with my “bloviating” about the troubles at Blue Star Equiculture. A woman messaged me very early in the morning from North Dakota to urge me to stop gassing off about my life and put up more photos of Gus and the other animals. That, she said, is why you are here.
Some strange impulse or twisted wiring in my head caused me to obsess on the word “bloviate” for an hour or two, and I should have been writing of course, not bloviating internally. I love the sound of the word.
I couldn’t get it out of my head, so there you are, Patti’s reasons for writing seem a fantasy to me in the modern world, we need a new narrative, there are no cocoons. I read these comments aloud to Maria, and she yawns and asks me when I am making lunch.
And all this excitement and chastising was before I wrote a word. I’m reading the new biography of Henry David Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls (it has been called a masterpiece, and I think that is true), and I like the idea that all writers are really performance artists of one kind or another, we just pretend to be more substantial.
My world is not the world of Virginia Woolf or Dylan Thomas, and not only because I am not nearly as gifted as they are. Every one of my favorite writers – John Updike, Thomas Merton (or Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Flannery O’Connor, Marilyn Robinson, Anne Tyler write in complete isolation, seclusion and concentration, cut off from the world for weeks and months at a time. They cocoon themselves to great affect, writers always have.
To get to my lonely place, I have to get up very early in the morning, like Christ, I suppose before the many voices of the world swirl around me, sometimes like horse flies around the donkeys in the summer.
No great work has ever been created on or near Facebook Messenger.
But here is what I am learning, and have written. The very idea of what a writer is, is changing, and I am a part of it, however unnerving it is.
Patti Smith’s beautiful evocation is really not all that relevant any longer, it speaks to a different time, her time.
There is no lonely place in our world, we are all “friends” now, linked by Facebook and Twitter and text messages. Anyone in the world can say anything they want to anyone in the world, (four people messaged me today to ask about Gus’s puppy food) and if I seek to run and hide, or God Forbid, reply I am arrogant, delusional, or cowardly.
So since the world is not changing, I have. I do not intend to spent the last years of my life squawking about it. Just every now and then.
Everything is a gate or a door, you can walk through it or into it. I have a habit of walking into the door, but I am challenged later in life to grow and change. I see many more things as gates. I am no Duras or Proust, but I take a back seat to no one when it comes to change.
The pundits who say people can’t change in their 70’s are bigots, really, and ill-informed. The elderly are the last safe group to patronize and stereotype, mostly because no one wants to be old or get old. There is not even any way for old people to protest, they have largely vanished from sight away from Florida, and you will certainly not see one on any television panel.
I started writing when I was eight years old, I sent letters to the Providence Journal that got published, to the shock of everyone around me, especially my teachers.
But I always knew that I wrote to cocoon myself, just as Patti Smith says, rapt in isolation, despite and in defiance of the badgering and demands of others. And here I am now getting too many messages a day to count. The world is a fascinating place, in fact the world is now right with me in my lonely place, blinking at my new photos, checking my vacation history, angry at me for speaking my truth, challenging me to a boxing match on my own blog, and assuring me it is what i want.
I think I got a big chip on my shoulder when I was 8, and it has fused with me now. It is the size of a fat steer.
The odd thing is that I loved being a writer when I was eight years old, and I love it even more now. I think this new world inspires me, it is my muse in so many ways. Why else think about it so much?
Because this new world, this new way of being a writer inspires me, that is what I haven’t understood about it. It really is a gate.
Inspiration is the unforeseen quantity, writes Smith in Devotion. It is “the muse that assails us at the hidden hour. The arrows fly and one is unaware of being struck, and that a host of unrelated catalysts have joined clandestinely to form a system of its own, rendering one with the vibrations of an incurable disease – a burning imagination – at once unholy and divine.”
Pretty sweet writing about writing. Amen to that.
