I’m a bad writer. By that I don’t mean that I lack talent. I mean something more like a moral judgment. Something that makes me feel some black, sheepish way about phrases like “literary community” and “creative class.”
I wasn’t a kid who dreamed of becoming an author. I don’t believe in the “power of language.” (Whatever that means.) I don’t even really believe in the power of stories, to be perfectly and cynically frank. I just did well in English classes and now, I guess, I’m here.
I started thinking about this over the summer, when I got lunch with a friend who’s also a writer. (And a good one, I should add.) At the end of the meal, she leaned her chin onto her palm and sighed: how lucky we were to get to do what we loved. I found myself having a difficult time agreeing.
I don’t love writing.
I love my family and my friends. I love the sunshine and Roy Ayers. I love oysters and sex and silk sheets. I don’t love sitting at my computer and bashing my mind against a keyboard for hours on end.
And, to be honest, I’m highly suspicious of anyone whose idea of a good time is sitting at a desk for entire days, not seeing anyone, and muttering to themselves about rules of syntax, flow, and clarity.
While others seem to wake up chomping at blank pages, I don’t really relish this thing that I do every day. But I don’t think that I should have to.
As I was thinking about my spiny reaction to all this “I write because I love it!” chat, a friend sent me a clip from a documentary on Doug Aitken.
In the clip, Aitken said:
“This idea that we’ve been living, for the last several decades, in a world which is accelerating faster and faster…that has brought us to a place where we really desire the tactile,” he says, and further explains that he wants his work to “amplify the experience of the real.”
The “experience of the real” is, for me, impossible to touch when I’m holed up in a Word Doc.
The reality of that moment is being alone in a room, hunched over a computer and throwing characters into white space. What is the physical difference between that and being an accountant or an analyst or a hacker? While we may all do different things on our screens, the embodied nature of our jobs is essentially the same. One could argue that the product is what sets these jobs apart—but I’m slightly more cynical about human nature.
When I was 19, I spent the summer in the kitchen of a retirement home in the countryside, working with a Korean War vet named Bob. Each day, when I arrived, Bob would have a sandwich ready for me. Usually a Cuban. We would go out back and sit on turned-over milk crates and I’d eat the sandwich and Bob would hand me a cigarette. We’d smoke and stare out at corn fields and he would tell me about the aches in his body, his days as a cook in the army. Then we’d go back in the kitchen and start working. There were parts of this job that I absolutely loved. Smoking on milk crates with Bob was one of them. The other was the physical act of washing dishes.
I genuinely loved it. The unthinking, mechanical scrubbing and rinsing. I loved when exhaustion turned my body to machine. The satisfaction of dirty plates coming out clean.
I felt better at the end of one of those shifts than I’ve ever felt at the end of a day of writing. (And to be clear: by writing, I don’t mean journaling. I mean shaping a story or article or essay—writing with the intent of being read, which is an entirely different thing than writing with the intent to clear your mind.)
But I know that I’m not supposed to be a dishwasher forever. (People would call that “a waste,” like talent is a resource that can spoil.) And although I didn’t dislike the work, I disliked the job. The way the boss treated me, the way other people reacted when I said it was what I was doing that summer. The labor was physically satisfying. The social context, however, made it unbearable.
And that’s the thing about writing: it’s the social context that makes it bearable.
If I’m being totally honest, I became a writer not because I loved writing but for the carrot-on-a-string of freedom. The idea that I wouldn’t have a boss. No timecards or a schedule or a sad, small desk in a sad, small cubicle.
I don’t know if this is just me being myopic and self-centered but I have my doubts that writers who claim to loooooove writing really get off on the act of it. I suspect that 99% of writers, if they’re being honest, are some version of Dorothy Parker, who once proclaimed: “I hate writing, I love having written.”
The identity of being a writer is hot. That’s a fun thing to tell people at bars.
But the act of agonizing over “that” or “which” and em dashes? I simply don’t see the appeal.
It’s the meaning we load into jobs that makes them (in)tolerable.
Earlier this year, I was at a Weyes Blood concert. It was one of those weeks when we were all breathlessly, nervously, sarcastically talking about ChatGPT: it was on the front page of news sites and NYT push notifications.
Blood got on stage and began making grand proclamations about how AI wouldn’t ever take the jobs of artists and creators. Not really. “You like to listen to a human, right?” she yelled out to the crowd—who, of course, cheered back echo chamber agreement—before she started singing some amorphous, ethereal ballad under a harsh spotlight.
As she sang, my mind stuck to her question. Like an anxiously attached partner, she was asking: Am I in danger here? Should I be worried? Do you still love me?
I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “Doesn’t this feel like the start of a bad sci-fi movie?”
At the time, I interpreted that moment as proof that AI was going to win one day. (Probably sooner than we’d think.) But lately, I’ve been thinking that moment aligns more closely with my writer friend at lunch.
Both creators shared some insistence that there was something meaningful about their creations. That meaning may have been the finale of some childhood desire or some last revolt against our coming machine overlords—but each had some justification for why they spent their time creating.
I really, profoundly, deeply hate this way of going about life.
To insist upon the meaning of one’s own work is to co-create a world in which the only things that are given value are those that can prove their worth.
Perhaps because I took the story of “Frederick” by Leo Lionni too closely to heart as a kid, I deeply believe that you shouldn’t need to produce something “of value” (much less defend it) in order to be valuable.
(Sidenote: just learned that Lionni was a commie, which makes so much sense lol)
When creativity is under threat of social devaluation, directly fighting its slipping socioeconomic value seems naive. And I don’t think that being grateful for your own lucky little life of mind x screen is any better—via that route, we’ll end up with an isolated industry of nerds writing only for each other.
The artist Cai Guo-Giang once said: “Art is not as important as people think it is; however, what is important about art is actually the unimportance of it.”
Stories are not essential to the turning of the planet. (Hell, humans aren’t even essential to the turning of the planet.)
We shouldn’t defend human art because it’s better than robot art or because it makes lives better or the world more empathetic or whatever reason we’re telling each other that we make art now.
We should defend human art because somewhere, some human has decided to spend their time doing something as completely banal as painting a picture or writing a song. That is a batshit crazy way to be spending your time. But the world itself is batshit crazy. Artists—particularly struggling ones—are people whose lives come closest to that pounding, constant truth.
Good art should remind us that it is totally useless. Not just art. Life itself. A total aberration. Like—what the fuck! None of us was statistically likely to be here and yet here we are! Isn’t that wild?
We don’t matter. Writing doesn’t matter. Substack doesn’t matter. This blog doesn’t matter. But here’s a fucking essay anyways—and I just can’t help but be bowled over by that beautiful uselessness every single time I encounter it.
In a society that requires purpose for worth, the only way in which we will begin to reclaim the value of creativity is to not just accept but lean into an uncomfortable truth:
Writing, like life, is utterly futile and completely meaningless—and that’s precisely why it needs to exist.
xoxo
UPDATE 12/11/23: JUST FOUND OUT THAT KURT VONNEGUT SAID WHAT I WAS GRASPING AT. “THE VALUE OF ART LIES IN THE PROCESS.”
ALSO: PSA.
BJORK IS NARRATING A MERLIN SHELDRAKE DOCUMENTARY ABOUT FUNGI. GRAB YOUR SHROOMS + YOUR HIGHEST FRIENDS. THEN HEAD TO THE CLOSEST IMAX.
BRILLIANT - well who am to say whether you are or not but what I love is you putting into words (elegantly arranged) that help me make some sense of the mush that goes around in my head when I ask myself what the fuck am I doing spending hours of hours of quite painful (physically, emotionally and mentally) effort writing a post that will at best be read by 60 people...THANK YOU...