Why I write

[Listen to this essay read by its author.]

What I write here I write for myself. I write to make sense of the world and my place in it.

Writing expressly for an audience of others -- like you -- presumes knowledge of your world and your place in it. How much of another's world can I truly know, struggling, as I do, to know my own? Perhaps between our two worlds there is sufficient common ground for you to find partial relevance and meaning in my words. I hope so.

Yet why write at all, whomever the intended audience? Writers need readers, or listeners, yet few are listening, fewer still reading, what with the din of social media. Harry and Meghan, the Sisters Kardashian, our Commander in Chief -- they are the trendsetters of our age. They command our attention. Hail to the Chief! Their tweets and memes, the tabloid stories and TV episodes about them -- these media are consumed like county fair cotton candy, neither chewing nor teeth required. In comparison, who then am I? One answer I take from Shakespeare: "a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more." And this blog is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" [1]. Alexa? Siri? Hello! At least you're listening to me, aren't you?

Nonetheless, I do try to write, accurately, if only to tell myself the stories I need to make sense of the world. Expressing verbally what I experience bodily can crystallize my vague impressions and winnow my wishy-washy opinions. Life's experiences can at last come to fruition, even heal, once one has tried to communicate them in words. Notice I wrote "can", not "will".

Verbal expression often fails. I lack the necessary ability. Even worse, language lacks the words. The poet Rilke admitted as much: "Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, [and] take place in a realm which no word has ever entered ..." [2]. My words scatter over vast oceans of emptiness and silence. This blog is but an outpost on some unmapped Pitcairn Island. We humans seem marooned mutely inside our subjectivity. Its terrible silence we cannot stand, so we drown it in the unceasing clamor of our celebrity talking heads.

And yet, for all of its futility, the marooned person still seals messages inside bottles and tosses them into the tide receding. Sisyphus returns to his boulder. The specificity and seeming solidity of words lure. My copy of Roget's Thesaurus can be a book of hope, a gospel of the possible, a motivation to seek once again the elusive word that works. I am human. I desire. I insist that language perform even better than it does.

I suppose I ought to consign these words to a private journal, or diary. Already the babel is bad enough. Must I add to it? Effectively, these blog posts are private. Web traffic statistics for this blog show few, if any, visitors. But no. Publishing my words in this public blog is useful. Posting to the internet obligates me to edit and correct, to revise and rewrite, regularly. My diary entries I never rewrite; these blog posts I sometimes rewrite. Potential readers, I tell myself, will notice my gaffes.

Having served its purpose, any day now this blog is apt to be deleted by me. Writing, like its writer, is mortal. Return to silence so that others might be heard.

Footnotes

1. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 5, scene 5.

2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (translated by M. D. Herter Norton), letter 1, 17 February 1903, WW Norton, 1982.

created: 2020-01-11
edited: 2020-01-21