For the temptingness of the metaphor itself
/27th May, 2011
Sydney, Kingsgrove
“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” (Rainer Maria Rilke)
“Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself… It’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.” (Harper Lee)
"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple." (Jack Kerouac)
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” (Maya Angelou)
“Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.” (Mario Vargas-Llosa)
“To touch the heart. Yes, that we appeal both to the heart and the mind, in so doing reveal the richness and horror of life, to expose the hidden life.” (Nick Kyriacos)
“With writing, we have second chances.” (Jonathan Safran Foer)
To write is to ‘carve’ or to ‘sketch’. Yes, that sounds right, even if it might be for the temptingness of the metaphor itself.
Courtesy of Eleni Michael (Michael Family Archives)
So why exactly am I doing this? Engaging in this ofttimes painful process of the ‘carving’. Do I know… will I ever really know? There are times when I think I have hit on the answer or to have discovered the good clues. Is it a need that I can’t rightly describe? In some measure it has to do with repair and reconciliation. The Dominican-American writer and MIT professor Junot Díaz has put it much better: “Because I can’t seem to escape it [writing]. It’s a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human.”[1] It is because we are not one but many which makes this such an unforgiving task: to not only put down the essence of “who” we are but to bring together the many into the one.[2] So if the metaphysics alone weren’t enough, there is also the lasting fear of getting it wrong, to give those who might one day be reading our pages a different picture to what we are trying to piece together, like a tricky puzzle or an ancient mosaic. Of course, some pieces of the picture will remain forever lost or hidden, either by design or accident. Those pieces which are too humiliating to document, (but which if we are to be honest, we should as a minimum leave some plain hints behind). The ledger, however, has to be balanced. That is, maybe we should also not be too quick to include those other admittedly fewer pieces which might reveal a loftier spirit inhabiting this contradiction of a ragbag heart and bruised bone. There are at least a couple of things which we can take hope from, lest as C.S. Lewis says, our efforts at writing do not simply become an occasion for “vainglory”. Most of us move somewhere in between those two extremes: ‘the saint and the sinner’. That is, we are neither too much of the one, and hopefully, not too much of the other. We inhabit the pulsating skins of both. So if we write, it would be good to admit to this, for otherwise our words could fall into the extremes and then we would be entering into the realms of caricature and fiction. We try to pull the saint and the little devil closer into the middle, like when you pull on a rope, and the rope pulls back against you, and see what happens after we let go. The exciting part to all of this, that these two entities (“saint” and “sinner”) are different for each one of us. Informed by different life-legends and experiences. This fact alone makes our story and our art unique expressions of human existence, and worthy of a creative process and broader sharing. We are the “participant-observers” to our story.[3] The other truth? We are ultimately, all of us connected by the one and the same quest: to be Saved… or to at least fill in the gaps.
[1] This telling quote from JD was later added to this entry on 23rd August, 2021.
[2] See Richard David Precht’s fabulous philosophical and readable analysis into the “heart of human existence”: Who Am I?: And If So How Many? (New York: Random House, 2011). https://www.amazon.com/Who-Am-If-How-Many/dp/0385531184
[3] https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/participant-observation-2