"The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words." --Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Even though I’m carrying a pen and notebook around everywhere again and even though I’m theoretically working on two articles, I’m not writing anymore. I’m not writing for this thing; I’m not writing e-mails; I’m not writing many of the documents I really should be writing for work. And where two weeks ago the problem seemed to be moving words from my head to the page (hence my purchase of a smith-corona portable typewriter), now the problem seems to be putting words together.
They don’t fit. Nothing I write seems right, and I don’t have the patience to fix it. It’s like I’ve decided that things are inexpressible and given up.
But I really haven’t. That’s why this quotation hits so hard for me: it expresses precisely my own arrogance. At a basic level, I’ve convinced myself that anything I think or experience I can write. In addition to being someone to whom things <i>happen</i>, I fantasize a writerly self who makes sense of it all.
The power to interpret is the power to imagine yourself in control.
And I guess, part of the reason why I’m having so much trouble right now is that in trying to write about the world through my own experiences I can’t help but sound tinny. I hear the privilege in my own voice and wonder why anyone else would bother reading.
And the answer to that is of course to write something worth reading. So I imagine myself doing that. And then I’m back in control.
I’ve wanted for awhile to do some work on the passage after the rape in “Lucrece” where despair overwhelms Lucrece, until she can order her thoughts a little by writing them down. I’d argue that it’s then that she gathers the resolve to commit suicide. In <i>Astrophil and Stella</i>, too, Astrophil’s sonnetry is clearly an attempt to get a grip on himself. He’s writing so as to understand himself as a unified self, despite the contradictions between what he wills and what he believes. (That’s the closest my foggy brain is going to come right now, even though it’s not at all right.)
These writers keep using the image of pregnancy, in interestingly different ways. Compare:
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.
--Sidney, <i>Astrophil and Stella</i>, Sonnet 1
Go, wailing verse, the infants of my love,
Minerva-like, brought forth without a Mother:
--Daniel, <i>Delia</i>, Sonnet 2
For Sidney, the important part of the birth is the pain and the lack of control, while for Daniel the birth is almost effortless (but followed by pain and a certain patheticness). I can feel myself losing my precision here, as I write about this, but for Daniel, verse seems to be a side effect of his love: he loves, and verse pops out of the side of his head. For Sidney, on the other hand, there’s this enormity of feeling that’s both preventing him from writing and simultaneously compelling him to it. Writing is making him helpless, but it’s also his means of discussing and contextualizing his helplessness. And, this, for Sidney, is a way to begin to talk about the moral role of fictions. I don’t have my copy of the ‘Defense of Poetry’ with me at work, and I don’t have time to search for the right passages, but he’s immensely concerned with the problem of how poetry (and fiction) can function morally.
And I guess I am, too. I want to write this article about books and economics and dematerialization and aura and the internet and reading and so forth, but I can’t convince myself there’s value in it. And maybe the only value in it is in helping me learn to be a better writer, so that I can some day do something of value.
Even that sounds too ambitious. Then again, all of this sounds miserably pretentious.
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry…
--Pound
