I haven’t written anything substantial in a long time. Regrettably, I don’t write as much as I would like to. For someone who used to write almost every day, not writing feels eerily like a growing detachment from rather than a complete abandonment of introspection; it is a temporary suspension of the intellectual will. And as much as I’d like to assign blame to what I think is my literary insensibility, I don’t believe that is the actual wellspring of the ongoing creative doldrums. I see life, I see love, I see fire; and, once again, I am confronted with the roaring solitude of the blank page and the creeping realization that I am still not writing.
From what I’ve learned over these past few months, not writing doesn’t necessarily mean not thinking. In truth, I would catch myself thinking more expressly and rather deeply when I was doing something else entirely alien to the world of letters. The opposite also happens to be true: Writing sometimes poses a hindrance to conceptualization. When I write, I tend not to think too hard, or rather, there’s some resistance to my thinking. I admit that my words come out in staccato instead of flowing, but I scarcely think about the intentions behind those words or come up with an ad hoc explanation to maintain some semblance of authorial control. Once begotten, my words either live or die of their own accord. They are a sliver of me, yes, but they are also not. But like the return of the prodigal son, my words will come home to repent later, and they will remind me of how and why they are flawed, shabby, and not up to snuff. They will come back to haunt and harry me, possessing me, forcing me to chisel them anew. In the last instance, I am forced to rationalize them; I am forced to become their Father. As if through the looking glass, I come to recognize my role as the writer of their existence. This, I would argue, is the primary contradiction—the most palpable and most basic level of textual intensity—that constitutes the turbulent relationship between the writer and his object. The writer is incapable of fully expressing what he means because his prose elects to defy him, even though it technically comes from his fingertips. Eventually, it beckons to him and asks him for a sea change that only the writer can grant, viz., an aesthetic revamp, a logical repositioning, a syntactic alteration, etc. Instinctual disobedience turns filial piety, and authorial intentions arrive much later in the process of (re)writing. This is all to say that the process of writing is in essence dialectical; Hegelian externalization entails a revival of self-consciousness with a more vivid picture of life.
But conceptualization is not introspection. While conceptualization may involve introspection, they are not one and the same. Conceptualization can be done independently of writing, but introspection requires a voice and a distance. What conceptualization can do without is vulnerability. In the realm of writing, reflective moments of sheer honesty and guilt humanize the invisible writer and slowly introduce him to the invisible reader. (They are in close communion with one another.) Plus, it’s infinitely more difficult, almost quite impossible, to write about something that you have little knowledge of. This is why, I think, some writers of considerable talent tend to gravitate toward the memoiristic mode. It’s very hard indeed to produce a work of writing that one feels confident enough to classify as impersonal. Not only because of the familiarity and nearness of the subject alone that convinces the writer to write about his own life, but also because of the fact that writing has to do with memory. Writing is also recording, and the writer’s introspective self must have records in hand to examine, make sense of, and question. These records have to be investigated, otherwise, the reader will lose faith in him. They have to be questioned, not in the sense of historical falsifiability, but on the basis of whether or not these records came from the place of writing, that is, introspection, looking back on itself. In the case of mediocre writing, the reader will lose faith not because these records are semi-fictional, but because the writer attempts to conceptualize while writing, capturing, evoking, recalling, and recording concomitantly. I suppose writing, in some respects, must feel like undergoing a lobotomy, not that I have a real sense of what it’s like, but I believe Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest to ever do it, was in the right ballpark when he said: ‘When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.’Â
So, what is not writing? If you look up the phrase ‘on not writing’ on Google, you will find hundreds of articles and blog posts about the benefits of not writing. Writers writing about writing is as tiring as writers writing about not writing, and yes, I am completely aware of the irony. Since time immemorial, writers have been known to make a fuss about their craft, which is usually indicative of their self-pity and inferiority complex. They kvell, sometimes. But on most occasions, especially in the type of interviews that you would find in a Paris Review issue, they seem unhappy about the fact that they write. What is most reductive of all is their usual approach; at best, these writers assert normative claims about writing/not writing and do nothing to back them up or investigate them further, and at worst, their subject simply walks away from them, right off the margin, the writers try writing about something else instead. Bill Hayes’s 2014 piece titled ‘On Not Writing’ for the New York Times is a classical example of what I mean. Some other writings on not writing center on personal anecdotes. Their approach is somewhat better than viewing writing as some sort of exercise, which is essentially a gym rat’s mentality that runs counter to introspection. With that said, one of the pitfalls of the memoiristic mode is that the memoirist always feels the need to draw some kind of moral from whatever he is writing, that there needs to be a lesson distilled from the chaos to make sense of the chaos itself.
If writing is introspection, then not writing, for me, is simply conceptualization. You don’t try to dutifully examine records when you are not writing, since there are no records to be found. As opposed to writing, which is really quotidian drudgery like checking a ledger, not writing opens the writer up to the possibility of dreaming. Half-formed thoughts, incoherent non-sentences, and allusions that escape you flash up now and again, like auguries and seemingly irrational dreams. All the writer must do when he is not writing is to try his best to navigate and map the terra incognita of his own psyche. This is why the Surrealists were quite fond of walking. Like Henri-Cartier Bresson, who was in fact not a writer, the literary observer extracts an essential truth from the mass of reality (what is called ‘the decisive moment’) and forms a concept of or around something he is not fully ready to comprehend. In the first few chapters of How Fiction Works, the critic James Wood argues that the prominence of the flâneur is associated with ‘the rise of urbanism, [with] the fact that huge conglomerations of mankind throw at the writer—or the designated perceiver—large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail.’1 Flaubert has, of course, a great eye for detail and almost an obsession with pictorial form. But we know from Wood that Flaubert is different from Balzac in that he is simultaneously a realist and a stylist; the stylist in Flaubert wouldn’t let him run off with a muddled picture of Paris. As Wood tells us, Flaubert wants to ‘discipline this welter of detail, to turn it into immaculate sentences and images.’2 As Walter Benjamin puts it: ‘It is in this world that the flâneur is at home.’3
What I disagree with many conventional descriptions of the flâneur, however, is the idea of the flâneur as a passive recorder; as a matter of fact, he is not recording at all when he is out on the street. My view of the flâneur is that he is the exact opposite of Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin, who states outright that he is ‘a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’. Flaubert was not simply recording Paris. I believe that recording happens after the fact, however odd that may sound. The task of the writer, when he is not writing, is to try to deal with the flood of detail, the obscure imagery and beguiling whispers, the mumbo jumbo of day-to-day existence. It is on the (active) side of thinking that the practice of not writing makes writing, which is on the (passive) side of recording, possible in the first place. Another reason that writing is recording is that not writing cannot be anything. Not writing is meaningful only in relation to writing. Doing laundry, driving your children to school, playing video games, falling in love, having sex, etc., can only be considered not-writing practices when they’re done with writing in mind. A good writer has to make a conscious choice on how not to write, and in order to make a conscious choice, he has to be active.
And so, the writer sometimes might have to go fishing and step away from the typewriter. I would like to believe that when writers don’t write, it is not because they have writer’s block, which is a dubious concept in itself, but because they fear that they will become passive like a soulless ghoul stuck to a machine.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 48.
ibid., 51
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Verso Books, 1997, 37.