Ruminations

Writers talk about writing what you know. “Good writing is true writing,” says Hemingway. “If a man[!] is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be” (By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, 215). If you’re going to write about bulls you better have grabbed one by the horns once in your life. (Contrast that to what my beloved Agathon says in Plato’s Symposium: “As for expertise in art or craft, don’t we know that whoever is taught by this god [of Love] ends up being famous and conspicuous, while whoever is untouched by the god is obscure?” [p. 31, Penguin], meaning that it isn’t truth that makes good writing, but love! How quaint!) And on the other side there are those that talk of nothing: Beckett, let’s say, writing a play in which the characters wait for someone who does not come, in which nothing happens. Twice.

All the rest of us are in some in-betweenness, having our conversations with what the real is. Maybe it would be best then to set off on a journey and sleep under the moonlight of Kilimanjaro or get into a passion with some fisherman who lives in an island off the coast of Turkey.

Still whatever you pick as your aesthetic, you’re still always in some relation to the real. You always pick a “truth” to represent. Horror of war. Existentialist dread. Injustices of racism. Gender violence. Always a truth to represent. The real for the fiction.

This puts someone like me, who writes, but also thinks, and who thinks of writing as subject, in an odd position. As a thinker-writer, you begin to sense behind each word the murmur, the whisper of what isn’t said. In another word, ideology. What thinking does is obviate ideology, and what’s more what thinking does is generate more and more words that close in on that shadow of the unsaid to grab it. Sometimes, as a writer (but not as an author), I like to not think, to not think at all. So that when I do begin to think I can surprise myself. I become then the type of writer that the thinkers like. This is the type of writer that is dumber than the thinker. Dumber only in that he or she or they only pretends the unsaid is beyond his or her or their awareness.

You get a type of thinker that looks at the unconscious, whether linguistic (deconstruction) or psychological (psychoanalysis), who reads a writer who leaves these gaps between the words. And then the thinker says this is my type of writer. As if to say my thought absorbs this writer; my thought is greater, larger than this writer. Or worse, I could use this writer to support the agenda of my thought and so the dead who have been long dead in their own flaws still in the bitterness of their life are pushed back up from the earth, forced to return to speak about the new.

But what happens when the writer and the thinker are one and the same. I’d say that many a writer would be very upset to be told that they aren’t really thinkers. (You begin to wonder if they feel a bit of absurdist shame at all the hubbub a book tour is: what are the writers talking about, what are they saying that isn’t already out in the Big Other? And if it’s already out there, I ask, what are you, writers, what are you?!)

What I find interesting, is how a writer can speak like a thinker:

“Why did you write this book?” a writer is asked.

“Because I think the world is in a sorry state and I wanted to represent the sorriness.”

But is the writer in the business of thinking? Which is not to say a writer can’t have an opinion. What I want to know is how much they can get away with in their attempts at thinking, especially when this thinking is not free of ideology, not free of that which the thinking was supposed to obviate, the thinking which escapes its own searchlight. Aren’t we disappointed when one of our dear authors starts to think about things they actually know very little, and then ends up in a Twitter quagmire? I am disappointed often. Sometimes even at myself. For thinking too much. Being, in thought, untrue. I hack away at the true because I’ve said too much, written too much, and so I want to practice being a little more thoughtless.

Which is ironic seeing as how we think the source of our ills is thoughtlessness. But perhaps this is what Hemingway meant in his own way. We have to write what we know. “A good writer should know as near everything as possible” (Death in the Afternoon, 191-2). For him this meant what was lived, real. I think he meant precisely the immediate, the without-mediation. The trauma was heavier than the impact. Makes us suffer more. The echo is more ominous than the source. The chittering of the desert mouse at the base of the canyon becomes a wailing shriek in the echo.