Writing

Writing has nothing to do with health and everything to do with disease; if one were healthy one wouldn't write. Writers pretend writing has something to do with becoming healthy, sometimes they say as much, that they write so that they can become well, but I think what they really mean is that they really want, consciously or unconsciously, to be like others and to feel the comfort that comes from belonging to a tribe. To really write is to reveal your humanity through your monstrousness, to stand in the pathway of the acute difference, the division you feel from others, and to find the right words in the right medium for that feeling, even if what you have to say finally is that you are really the same. When a writer feels this way and writes this way, he or she is close to creation.

Writing is a matter of will. The 31 letters Kierkegaard wrote to Regine, the 15-year old he almost married, are beautiful but very difficult to read. It's a portrait of one of the great love affairs of all-time, right up there with Abelard & Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, but it's also a portrait of the writer becoming a writer, the writer as sick person, a person who's in love as much or more with the other that he's created with words, with the abstraction and the possibility abstraction presents of allowing its creator to create a perfection no human could ever live up to. Kierkegaard had asked Regine's hand in marriage, presented her with an engagement ring, then called the marriage off at the last moment. Regine was not real to him as a woman, she was really only real to him as an image, as an abstraction of the real, she was not real until she was written about, she was therefore a fiction. At their last meeting Regine supposedly said, "kiss me one last time, and then have your freedom."

Last evening in Mary Risley's garden, I was talking with Mark _____, an Episcopal preist. I asked him if it was fair to say that the Episcopal Church is a progressive version of The Catholic Church. He said it was, and that furthermore the Episcopal Church had no Pope. He asked me if I was religious. I told him that I was raised as a Christian Scientist and had practiced that religion for a short while as an adult, but that I felt now it was a denial of existence, an abstraction. "That's the problem with most religions," he said, "east and west--they're too abstract." 

I liked what the writer Pankaj Mishra was quoted as saying in todays' The New York Times that "My dominant feeling every day is one of great ignorance."