I sometimes had a terrible time writing when I wanted to "be a writer." Now that I just want to say things, from time to time, I never have that problem. If I have something to say, I say it; if I have nothing to say, I say nothing. It's a wonderful thing for me, this not being a writer. I can say anything I want now.

Fow awhile now I've been puzzling out whether I "wanted to be a writer." I thought I did once, and part of the issue has been just the constraint that Dale describes here. But at the outset, the problem with "being a writer" was that other people got to define what that meant. I accepted too readily that writing poems or short stories or reviews or journalism or scholarship were the options you had "as a writer." Maybe I didn't resist the array of options because it seemed capacious enough and I took for granted that I'd eventually be able to find my niche within those offerings. Maybe I just assumed that accomodating yourself to these options was simply what you did.

I never wanted to write any of those specific things, though. The issue of limited talent aside, I do realize now that I never wanted to write as a poet or a novelist or even a scholar. The idea I had of writing was something else, something rooted entirely in letter- and nondiaristic journal-writing, both of which I did obsessively and rather peculiarly thoughout my twenties and which always seemed on the way to mutating into something else for which I have no clear label. A "practice," maybe. I've sometimes thought that only the vocabularies of "therapy" and "religion"--not art--approximate what I was looking for in writing and I'm not even sure those are very close.

So that's one issue. If my purpose in writing were merely communicative, then yes--I'd be happier just saying what I wanted when necessary and leaving behind the role of writer and all its baggage. But what if it's a "practice" I want? That would entail commitment & effort and all the unpleasantness would be something to be worked through, meditatively or athletically or otherwise. Dale's admirably relaxed about "being a writer," and more power to him. But he does after all have that other practice which is deliberately kept in high tension...

Here's a further complication. Whatever sort of "practice" I've been casting about for and failing to define or assemble, I know it would have one important quality: it would be very directly dialogic. Yes, there'd be all sorts of byzantine qualifications to jury-rig just the right degree of privacy and publicity, to prevent the twin dangers of cold contractual individualism and co-dependent absorption. Still, this is key: I need other people dialogically. I need them far more than a writer needs his audience. Maybe this is where the analogy to a practice breaks down, in fact. Meditative practices are generally quite solitary; their communal dimension consists mainly of a little hierarchical guidance from a teacher and some group inspiration to continue the lone quest. Athletic practice acknowledges the need for the other person but only under the sign of a zero-sum competition whose malign and destructive features are only neutralized by making the game inconsequential and therefore repeatable. Neither of those practices is an image of dialogic engagement or entanglement.

I'm not sure I've ever found an analogic model for the practice I'm looking for--except maybe letterwriting, which is undoubtedly why I spent a large and relatively unregretted chunk of my life writing a dissertation about the epistolary ferment of the eighteenth century. A study of epistolarity and dialogue will quickly yield the insight that the journal, far from being a "private" genre, is actually a subcategory of letterwriting in which the dialogic exchange is introjected, the writer taking on both roles like a grandmaster playing both sides of a chess game. I'm not much surprised that when I was casting about for some ideal of what I wished weblogging could be like, I came up with an odd notion of "dialogic diary-journaling." I'm not pretending that's clear, even minimally, even to me, and anyway diarykeeping is orthogonal to my own writing exercises. Still, when it comes to variants of the practice I'm looking for, I'm willing to say that I'd know it if I saw it. Like pornography. Or like a few weblogs that occasionally catch the same scent. Or maybe more accurately I'm like that clairvoyant rabbit in Watership Down: I know what we should be looking for, a high dry place, even though I've never seen a single empirical instance of it, never produced one myself, never been able to describe its outlines to another person.

I think a central frustration in all this is the constraining power of genre. My envy of the literary communities is pretty simple at bottom. They work with a recognized and established genre of writing. That allows a kind of communal energy and interchange to be established with relative ease--at least in the sense that everyone has a basic understanding what the activity is, how one goes about it, where one might look for models of how to do it better. And even if that's completely wrong, even if competitive squabbling and denunciative countermanifestoing squander all that consensual energy, it's still the case that everyone agrees the practice is important, that it's worthy of intensity, worthy of the risks of sinking one's identity into it. None of that is in place for whatever kind of writing I'm imagining, some mutant offshoot of "letterwriting" or "journalkeeping." Nor do I see it on the horizon, notwithstanding all the hooha about blogging. Those generic categories confer neither importance nor intensity; there's no intrinsic call to creativity built into the generic label itself. The problem isn't being outside of some so-called legitimate genre--there could be many compensatory freedoms in that situation. The problem is finding yourself decidedly inside a genre: ephemera. The quotidian genres tend to declare themselves, or be declared, as that.

The frustration here isn't about ego or prestige. It's simply a pragmatic frustration about the fact that the practice I'm looking for involves a certain dialogic intensity. As I've said, that means I need other people, and not just in the relatively passive consumerist modality in which a writer needs an "audience." Take this post: it's a good case in point. I've got about five godawful pages of painfully produced, handwaving garbage in my journal which was going to form the backbone of this post. It took over a week to excrete it. Then Dale writes a few sentences in my comments section, and by responding to that friendly personal call-out I've written something infinitely more succinct and focused in about one-fifth the time, incorporating none of the previous material and clarifying matters to myself far more accurately and efficiently than when I tried to work it out alone--with or without an "audience." (I freely admit my dialogic motives are entirely selfish and possibly Taylorist. Dialogic relation makes me more efficient and saves me time in my quest to become perfect.)

So the problem with my preferred imaginary uninvented genre being declared by generic descent "ephemeral" isn't that it hurts my feelings or devalues my product. It's that the generic framing--if such a practice stood ready to be invented--would block so many other people from investing the activity with the same importance that I do, would prevent them responding with the same intensity, on the same wavelength. It would block the necessary dialogic investment from crystallizing and so would compromise the possibility of the practice. Even worse, it might lead to the writing of moronic manifestoes about Writing, like this one, in a desperate attempt to catalyze the possibility of the desired writing itself. And there's rarely any return from that hall of mirrors.

Now granted, I haven't tried to turn weblogging toward this imaginary practice more than occasionally, and since 9/11 the online war of all against all has made the conditions unpropitious for even attempting it. So mostly I haven't. I'm not a very good example of what I seek. But this imagined practice is what I started out wanting to do with a weblog. And so apparently even now I remain a sensitive register for any constraints placed upon its potential development. I'm sufficiently shy and easily enough wounded that I don't covet large audiences--I'm rather afraid of them, in fact. But it's harder not to covet the collective energy represented by larger readerships, because it seems like it would be theoretically accessible as energy if one were sufficiently cautious about using strategies of indirection and mediation-- hallucination though that might be.

All of this is explanation and not self-defense or exhortation, mostly explanation to myself of something about my motives that I still don't understand well.

posted by Turbulent Velvet on 03/02/2005