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Tuesday - On Writing - Sean Best

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets

Ideas punctuate the mind like fireflies in the night, emerging out of the darkness for a fleeting moment before retreating back into the blackened void.  The modest task of the writer is to seize these ideas from the ether of consciousness; to preserve the glow of the firefly, smearing its inky luminescence indelibly across the page.

The writer, then, is not merely interested in being an honest witness to their place and time, but strives to illuminate a previously unknown or seldom acknowledged corner of the universe.  We are carpenters who aspire to add another inch to the house, yet hammer in hand, we tremble.

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse

What is the meaning of words today?  Who has the patience for the unfolding of verse or the ciphers of abstraction?  What remains to be said about a world that, paradoxically, is rabidly afraid of silence yet stopped listening a long time ago?  In a word, who believes in beauty and truth, or that the pen could somehow be mightier than the sword?

What message could be so urgent so as to rise above the din of a endless parade of everyday banalities?  What glimmer of light vibrant enough to guide the way in these desolate times?  The self-assured writer can only exist as a flimsy fiction since the task of writing is irrevocably grounded in a fundamental condition of uncertainty—an uncertainty of voice, of moral judgments, and of purpose or success.

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

Against the fear of rejection and a latent sense of inadequacy, there still remains an inexplicable desire to create; to roll the universe into a ball that, for all of its imperfections and idiosyncratic distortions, is intelligible nonetheless.  To write is to risk one’s own identity as a being that is capable of the communicating the essence of one or another fragment of the world.

It is this risk that endangers yet justifies the enterprise of writing, serving at once to both dissuade and compel.  The writer risks their own identity in order to preserve it, and in so doing does nothing less than attempt to change the world around them.  Writers are romantic fools who cannot help but be seduced by the vagaries of a world that, in the final analysis, remains human, all too human.