Must I live with a writer's block?

There's no writer out there who doesn't speak, with anger or with pride, about their writer's block. I understand this blockage to be the intensification that comes when the emptiness of content ("I have nothing to write about; my mind is empty") meets the fullness of demand ("I should, I must; I have this deadline, I have been ordered to write and can't avoid the work").

What happens when I have nothing in mind – nothing to hang on to, while this terrible pressure to write rages within me like a hurricane? This slightly complicated and complicating question forces me to break its meaning into separate, more manageable, bits. What is this pressure? What is an external force, and why is it there, facing the subject, causing pain or anxiety or tension? What is the writing subject in relation to this exterior and in relation to this pressure?

The pressure of the world

Where nothing presents itself to me as writeable, I understand that the world, which is a text, resists its perception. In other words, it resists the intervention of the transformative subject that I am. When this happens, when I have to face the world in terms of an opposition, I am left with the only choice of behaving like an angler on the banks of a rapid river. I tease the waters, casting my line haphazardly, not knowing what might be there, not knowing if the line is strong enough, or if I will be strong enough to hold the text-to-come – my catch of the day.

Source: Wikipedia

This teasing, though, this toying with the laws of hazard, is not a simple form of play. I mean, it is a game alright, but not a facile one. This angling about, full of hopes but with no certitudes, is a game that defines the very essence of writing. As I can see in the relationship between the subject and the imperceptible world, the play with the hazards of the yet-unknown reveals the weakness of my position in relation to the world – in relation to the text of the world.

When I cast my line I am, in spite of being the one with the lure, with the trick, with the intent to murder the creature of the waters, I am, in truth, the weaker part. Weak because I can't see that which is about to become my victim. I am (to take this issue to its utmost conclusion) a murderer who keeps missing the body that he wants to kill.

I can't see my catch-of-the-day, no matter how hard I strain my eyes, no matter how many tricks I employ, how much I rely on sonars, UV glasses, and other similar cheats. To be more precise, the catch remains invisible to me even when I see it right there, inches from my hook and bait.

The deceiving nature of the world is that it is not what I can see, but rather what I can say. As a creator, my perceptions alone are of little importance. It is not the premise (the observation, the awareness I have of the world existing) that matters but the conclusion (the outcome, the output). In my quality as a writer, the difficulty doesn't start until I am obliged to put into words, images (artefacts), that which I believe to be the world. This is why I speak of an external pressure, a deadline of sorts, which is the demand formulated for me (against me), a demand which forces me to write the world down, to put the world into expression.

Luring the subjectless world

The world, insofar as it is mine, is lured into being by means of language. This is why what's outside the sentence, outside the film, outside the statue, outside the painting, is indeed more important – precisely because it is outside the subject, and therefore more likely to stand where the world stands.

The subjectless world is what I, the creative subject, love with passion. As in the case of the inhabitants of Plato's cave, the shadows I see projected onto the wall are not the world; they are just shadows, subjective misrepresentations of a misleading world. And will go away like shadows, with the coming of light.

The catch that lurks under the surface is not the catch of the day – it is only a shadow (a foreshadowing) of what might be my catch. Not yet here, not yet mine, it, too, teases: it teases me, it plays with my angler's nerves, it shows itself and hides itself, exposing its flesh only in order to make my awaiting even more painful, even more treacherous.

In order to see that fish as a catch-of-the-day, I need to see it caught – in my basket, in my grasp.

And so I will perhaps be allowed to say that writing is like angling. The action of testing the waters and fooling the fish so as to have it take the bite and hook, is the writer's searching about to find the right expression (the right catch). There are differences between a fish and an expression, no doubt. But I want to point out their similarity. The fish I have caught, like the expression I seem to have discovered, is an apparent certitude – indeed, a deception. What I have here, in my basket (in my vocabulary, on my page etc.), is far from what my angling about is truly capable of yielding. How do I know that this fish did not take the hook from another, bigger, fatter one? Since it's impossible for me to see what alternatives there were at the moment of the bite, I will never know what I've truly missed.

The subject under pressure

And hence, more pressure exerted on me. This time, the pressure of suspicion. There is no way I can free myself of this doubt, of this question: Have I acquired the best of all possible results? Have I written the Sentence? It is because of this suspicion that I have to do drafts; because of this suspicion that I have to spend sleepless nights reading the words of others, so as to make sure that what I'm doing is not mere repetition; or, even worse, that I am not unaware of my repeating the words of others.

I believe this suspicion is another reason for the blockage I experience when I say I have nothing to write. Nothing, as in ‘nothing original.’ Nothing, as in ‘nothing free of the fear of repetition.’

Technically speaking, there are various ways in which not-writing can be counteracted. Writing à la Surrealists or à la seance, as an automatism, is one of them. An easy drill: take a piece of paper and write anything that comes to mind. Any sequence of words will do, as no logical (i.e. grammatical) structure is expected.

Source: The Independent

But this is a mere technicality. It is a step-by-step set of operations that ease the pouring of words onto the page. (I don't want to talk now about the virtues of automatic writing, which reflect something fundamental about the art and the craft of scribbling: the arbitrariness of the entire process. But the point is worth keeping in mind.)

To a creator, who seeks to create order out of the disordered matter given to them in the beginning, automatic writing is like the training of professional wrestlers: it is not with the push-ups and the hours spent on the treadmill that the wrestler wins the fight; but the push-ups are crucial to winning, insofar as they represent the foundation of everything the wrestler can accomplish. With the push-ups, the wrestler is more likely to think of his fight as one free of the wrestler's block.

But the block is not completely avoidable. Never. In fact, the training represented by disordered scribbling does not eliminate the suspicion I spoke about a little earlier. On the contrary, it intensifies it, precisely because I hereby become aware that the haphazardness of it is not unique; that I cannot be the only one stumbling upon this very combination, this set of words, this seemingly original idea. Other writers (I'd call them my adversaries) can easily do the same. And so, what are the odds of me being so completely original? How can I say with certitude that the version I'm contemplating is the version that will satisfy my writing self forever?

So to answer the question in the title, I must say yes, I have to accept writer's block, since I cannot be without it. It is one of the most fundamental elements of the creative process. There is no way I can live without it, since there is no way I can acquire perfection. So there.

Why I think writing is super-human (2)

Let’s come again to why I think writing is super-human. The question put again. The question re-membered.

Writing is more like a divorce

You see now how close writing is to data storage, which is the thing we tend to associated with computers. They (writing and the computer) both preserve texts for the use of an entity different from the one that’s doing the storage. What this means, if I manage to put it into simpler words, is that mere storage – mere writing – is not sufficient if taken in isolation. A piece of text can stay where it has been written for thousands of years and be a masterpiece; nobody knows about it – it’s useless. So the text is nothing if not read. Reading is the soul of writing; it is the life blown into that text. Can you imagine an archive? Millions of texts sitting there; so many, it has been impossible for the whole team of archivists to go through them all – to even know what many of them contain. Those are dead texts. Inexistent texts, in spite of the fact that they are right there, in that confined space of the archive.

Writing is separation.
Source: www.astavki.com

And from the above sentence I arrive at another one: writing is separation. Only things cut away from their source can be stored. Right? Let’s take a look at our thoughts again. It wouldn’t be hard for us to agree that it’s impossible to pickle them inside our brain, like millennium eggs, and keep them there for eternity. No, that is not humanly possible. Maybe in the world of Funes the Memorius, but even there, some problem will arise at one point or other, and the whole castle will crumble, as attested by Borges, who would have liked things to be different.

So now, if we’re taking these thoughts to their logical conclusion, we may finally say that writing is not human. It is, indeed, super-human – not as in Superman, but as in prosthetics.

Writing is more like a fake limb

All forms of art (and writing is one) are prosthetic in nature. They do what we cannot do by means of our physical abilities. At the beginnings of science, the scientific disciplines were called arts – you probably knew that. So seeing further (telescopes) or deeper (microscopes), helping people walk when no limbs are in place – all this, of course, implies prosthetics. Prosthetics help the human individual do what he/she wouldn’t be able to do by using their limbs/bodies alone. And so with writing. It does something our minds cannot do: remembering.

iHand. Source: Designboom

For this reason alone, writing is, indeed, super-human. (The title of this piece finally makes sense.)

And now you’ll look upon your daily scribbling in a different way, won’t you? Nah. Maybe not. In fact, writing has become so closely tied to you – your breath, your heart beats, your blood pressure, your bone marrow – you don’t believe it possible for you not to have it. The thought of not having writing is perhaps more tormenting than the thought of being left alone in the middle of a jungle, snakes and tigers and tarantulas lurking around and looking at you from the dark with fiery eyes. That’s how deeply writing has penetrated into your blood stream. And it’s not at all a bad thing, because without this forgetting of writing’s nature we would never be capable of accepting other, more subtle, more sublime, more miraculous things enabled by writing. I say ‘Literature,’ and I need not go any further.

Let us not disparage writing, though

I said here things that have put writing in a bad light. I said it didn’t help memory. Well, it doesn’t – in principle. But writing is not entirely foreign to the things we remember. No. The device, alright, the device is the holder of the memory. That’s where we believe it’s safely deposited, like a bonus bond promising a certain return. But there’s a process taking place here. The very process of scribbling; of putting pen to paper. Well, it so happens that between pen and paper something occurs. And that’s a mental process: we activate the thought that will be immortalized on the page. This thought navigates from our brain to our hand, and from there not straight to the paper but to our brain again.

I say, to the brain again. How’s that? Well, writing doesn’t happen haphazardly. Yes, Master Plato, it doesn’t. It is the result of a mental process and it generates another mental process. If it weren’t this way, we wouldn’t be able to re-member with the device. We would not recognize the text. But as we very well know, when we see the post-it on the fridge we recognize it. We re-visit it. We recollect having known it before. Which means when we read the message we are in fact finding something we have always already been familiar with. We are returning that thing to the receptacle of our mind, where our mind rejoices at the sight of a dear old friend. What we recognize is not only our own handwriting, but the very nature of Writing itself: the inscription of marks on a solid surface. That, before anything else, appears to us as a recognition of writing. The device is showing us the way. (The Tao of Writing. Somebody should use this as a title somewhere.)

I just can't resist the association.
Source: www.peachesandhotsauce.com

This sounds good, I know. Feels good too. It feels like relief. We’re not so doomed to be Platonic failures, after all. But beautiful as this may seem, we need to realize that we won’t escape the device. Technology (and this is a word I haven’t used in my posts so far) is the grand mediator without which we would be left with a huge gap between us and the thing we like to call ‘the world.’

Proof? Don’t forget the way we store phone numbers in the phone’s internal memory. At least that. Oh, and maybe this as well, from Edgar Allan Poe:

“If you wish to forget anything, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”

Just to take us back to the post-it issue, and the super-human nature of writing.

Why I think writing is super-human (1)

Let’s try to clarify one thing about writing: its association with memory. Writing enables us to remember things – that’s how the saying goes. But I wouldn’t be so fast in perpetuating this almost dogmatically embraced dictum.

Let’s take a look at the most recent thing you’ve written. I don’t know – anything. Say, the email you’ve written this morning. How much of it can you remember? Really. Not just recollecting (which is a milder version of the same thing, don’t we agree?) but remembering: putting the members together. Got it? Re-membering. Yeah, that’s what I mean.

Writing is not (our) memory

So. How much can you remember? Let’s say, a lot. Let’s say the whole frigging thing – commas and full stops and exclamation marks and all. Every single thing, to the breath in your lungs while you were typing the message after having brushed your teeth with your favourite mint-flavoured tooth paste, and after having had your breakfast eggs the way you like them: sunny side down. Let’s say.

Wow. I’m hardly ever capable of that. I’m more of a Platonic type, you know. (Of this, a little later, though.) So well done you. Well done.

But.

If you say you’re so good at remembering things, I wonder: why did you need to write the whole damn thing? How is this feat of memory indebted to your having put all that stuff into words?

Of course, an email (you’ll say) is never written in order to remember anything, but in order to remind (presumably others). Not to re-member, but to re-mind. To re-mind. To make the mind feel good in repetition. But you are catching my drift, aren’t you? If not, check out another type of writing. Let’s take a post-it stuck to your fridge. Telling you that you need to buy milk and coffee. Now that’s a more accurate depiction of how we are made to remember through writing, right?

Wrooong!

You didn’t remember because of those words, but in spite of them. You remembered because you were endowed with a spectacular memory in the first place – you lucky thing you. You did not remember with the words on the paper but with the words in your mind. And in that mind of yours, in that beautiful receptacle of ideas, things are not written. Never. Not with a pen or pencil, no.

Source: TMG

Writing is more like putting things in a cupboard

The question that arises straight away is this: when we speak of memory, whose memory do we mean? Because, we need to admit it, some kind of memorisation is taking place every time we write. And we kind of agreed (have we?) that it’s not our memory, because ours is busy with all manner of things which are not written – cannot be written, unless we’re talking about writing in a metaphorical sense; but we don’t want to complicate things.

Here’s my thought: the memory we’re talking about belongs to the device: paper, computer, smart phone, tablet, piece of bark with incrustations on it, papyrus, wall, noticeboard – whatever. I mean the object itself, not the text upon it. It’s in the device that the text is placed. It’s in the device that we find what we stored earlier. So what does this make of the thing we call writing? Well, let’s say writing is not actually a form of memory. It is not mémoire (read this à la French, s’il vous plaît), but aide-mémoire. Help to memory, to be more precise: a prop, a prosthetic device.

Now we’re onto something. And that’s this: Writing is truly storage. It’s where we put things in order to find them later. Like a cupboard, if you like, or like your kitchen drawer. Or (yes, why not?) your bookshelf.

Do you understand now where our obsession with having things in the right place at all times comes from? Oh yes, we have derived it from another obsession, which is truly a necessity: the need to store. Since we can’t carry all our possessions with us everywhere we go, we need a safe place to put things to rest; to take them off our minds, in fact. Hence – writing, reading, and the whole OCD we have developed around correct reading, the ‘right way’ of texts, the ‘actual’ meaning, and so many other legends we’re not going to elaborate on here.

Source: Treasure Chest of Memories

So what was that thing that Plato said?

Theuth, the inventor god of numbers, calculation, geometry, astronomy, and writing, meets king Thamus to exhibit the extraordinary features of his arts. When it comes to writing, which he promotes as “a potion for memory and for wisdom,” Theuth goes:

“O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wised and will improve their memory.”

But the king, wiser himself than the god who’d spoken to him, finds the effects of writing “the opposite of what they really are,” and swears that those who employ the art of writing are doomed to millennia of stupidity:

“They will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.”

Plato is famous for this rejection of writing, in Phaedrus. The reason of his distrust is clear, I hope. Haven’t we, so many centuries after him, discovered the truth of Plato’s words when we started using the memory of our mobile phones rather than our own memory? We have given the device what has always been the device’s. We have embraced writing together with the reliance on its memory.

What can we say to Plato, then? Sorry, Sir, but among other things we have also discovered the pleasures that lie in the art of forgetfulness. Oh, yes, we have. We’ve built libraries and archives, we’ve conceived of human beings capable of remembering everything, and have invented machines that do so in real time. We have, in other words, fallen prey to the lures of this art, of this deceit. But man, we’re loving it.

(to be continued)