Of Four Kinds of Writer's Block

In the imagination there is no daylight and,                                              

Like Wallace Stevens, I know the dark is crucial.                                         

I sing, I grieve in it, I dream what haunts each night:                                                       

These bodies, even lynched, still are thinking.                               

Nothing is final, I’m told. No man shall see the end—

But them, my fathers, lifted into fire, like tongues.--Rickey Laurentiis.    

 

Poetry is a finikin thing of air

That lives uncertainly and not for long

Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.--Wallace Stevens.

I am often teased by my peers that I write so much;* I frequently answer truthfully that I am no perfectionist and that I have always worked with low (and very low) teaching loads with courses that directly (or indirectly) fed into my research. So, I may be utterly unqualified to write about writer's blog -- 'look who thinks he is nothing!' --, but I am intimately familiar with four kinds of staring at a blank page:

1. I have nothing to say despite (or, perhaps, because) having embraced the image of being a poet or philosopher. No, no (you suspicious mind) not so much from some purported high status that is derived from these venerable terms 'poet,' ('philosopher'), nor with the idea that if I wear black and smoke Gitanes, some beautiful woman will whisper her phone-number into my ear while I babble on about Rilke and Sartre.  No, it's because I regularly have sensory overload, where each pleasure and each pain has an exquisite and hitherto ignored delicacy so that I assume that the world requires me to channel the cosmic fire into words. Even so I stare at blank pages recognizing the painful truth that, perhaps as of yet, I have nothing to say of enduring consequence (few do I learn over the years, but that offers little consolation). Professional philosophy solves this problem by after considerable education, inserting us into a tradition that either embraces the intellectual division of labor, which bequeaths each of us open-problems, or  that allows us to re-tell the same historical story with minor, corrective variations in both cases advancing 'the discussion.' It's possible that if one is 'productive' enough, or mesmerized by chasing the next career step (dissertation, a job, tenure, etc.), one forgets this kind of writer's block.** I have speculated that the existence of  this kind of half-forgetting helps explain some of the professional bullying we encounter.

2. I lack skill. At some point half way through my graduate education and a few years out after the PhD, I could spot problems in what I read and I could sense that an alternative might be philosophically more satisfying, but I didn't know how to start organizing my thoughts. Sometimes the blank space would be filled with extensive notes, and long copiously footnoted excerpts from others (many of my dissertation chapters started like this), but even so I would be unable to find a path from the complexity I perceive (and that I think eminently worth sharing) to something that might count as intelligible to an outsider. Within analytical philosophy, this problem is solved by decomposing the complex mess to something that one can take a stance on, a thesis, (and then argue for while recognizing and incorporating a sub-set of  the innumerable objections one might discern.) In addition, there are tacit templates for journal articles that help set further constraints. At some point, practice, repeated feedback from more skilled others, and, eventually, repeat 'success,' evaporated this kind of writer's block. I re-encountered a version of this kind of writer's block, when I started to write for non-professional audiences or new formats (e.g., newspaper editorials, interdisciplinary venues, blogging, etc.), but without accompanying panic (hence, the past-tense in this paragraph): decomposing and practicing in the new genre always removed the writer's block over time.

3. My silences make me complicit.  One day a long time reader of my blogs calls my attention to Rickey Laurentiis “Of the Leaves That Have Fallen,” which is in critical, almost prosecuting poetic conversation with Wallace Stevens’s “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” It's a shock; not because I have to adjust my admiration of Stevens (he's not on a mental pedestal; my needy taste for him sporadic). But because in my repeated silences, which are the gaps and hesitations in the thousands of words that I publish, of the "swank violence" that we are shown in the daily news and share in our links on Facebook, could be a "crucial History...restored and made endless." Stevens's invocation of "death," the "sigh" (and the explicit awareness that Whitman is a flawed, but better exemplar-poet-philosopher-Americanprophet on racial matters) suggests he is not suppressing the lynchings. Even so, his poetry does not name, does not show (but see "tear off/the spittling tissues tight across the bones"), does not call to arms, does not mobilize, rather it appears to disown agency: "Autumn beguiles the fatalist." Stevens does not question his own privilege, does not even seem to wish to contribute to the goal of justice; he states his preference for "men in abstraction" over "the affairs of men" even though he recognizes that "invisible currents clearly circulate." And I recognize that I am no better than Stevens and with a furious mind, I decide that world does not need another essay on the reception of Spinoza. But...if we have to delay all poetry and philosophy, and disallow the charms of beauty and elegance, until the never-to-be-reached-promised land has arrived, then it's not obvious we have a life worth living (one can recognize this truth while simultaneously recognizing how this can slide into Stevens's Nietzsche-an elitist aesthetic about "the last man.") Yet, Laurentiis shows there is a false dilemma here: one can be poetic and serve, in some sense, the cause of justice. *** But this did not end the block; it rebounds on the quiet shame of privilege. Until I notice Stevens's call in his final line that the "wise" do not escape the world, but "avenge" by building a city, that is, true philosophers embrace the order and cause of justice; this settles the furies, at least temporarily (recall). But whether there is room for poetry within the polity (recall) is left as an open question by Stevens--one that Laurentiis seems to answer. 

4. Maybe there is a better use of my talents. There are days I can't write not because I think it is futile or self-indulgent, but a sense that, perhaps, the world would be modestly better off if I re-trained as a lawyer, and help, say, refugees and illegal aliens battle the cold, heartless bureaucracy and legal system that masquerades as justice and the rule of law in my self-satisfied homeland. I might even use my philosophical skills by becoming a publicist and advocate for good causes--to embrace a noble life of quiet heroicism without dazzle. This block has a family resemblance to the previous one, but cuts less because it it is about opportunity cuts and does not make me doubt the worth of philosophy at its best as such; I associate it more autobiographically with my modest academic mid-life crisis (recall) when I note at the start of the writing day how little of my academic work is read and discussed, that recognizes that my professional education has deformed my character (here; here), and that it is an open question if my teaching really makes young minds better off (as I hope in my better moments); let others have a shot at my academic position(s) and let me fight on behalf of those that need my voice and talents. This is a recurring temptation that I may give into, but not today.

 

 

*I am from the generation where 'publishing too much' was a sign of low-status (recall); see here for the reality behind the long CV.

** In writing this paragraph I had to think of Brahms.

***This is not to deny that a 'lot of poetry/philosophy in the service of' is mere gesture or false consciousness. We all know how being on the side of justice can  easily slide into a professional industry with the privileged in a bubble of good-will.

Comments

[Ian McCready-Flora]

A lovely meditation, in which I recognize much of myself. Thanks for taking the time.