The Reason I Write (God, Freedom, Change, Acceptance)
A Diary Entry
But: What’re you gonna do? Eh? What can any of us really, actually do in this life except try to survive, try to follow your passion, try to grab at life in the most elemental way, hope to love and be loved, hope to achieve some measure of success not so much in Society’s eyes but in your own inner eyes.
I get down on things sometimes. It’s depression, I guess. Consistent, low-level, non-suicidal depression that doesn’t totally obfuscate or hinder so much as feel like a tiny little thorn prick in the metaphysical side. Pain in my ass, more or less.
Sobriety I am grateful for. I think I have a belief in “God” but not in the [historical] Jesus Christ as some spiritual shaman who literally came back to life and moved the stone from the cave and raised Lazarus and parted the Red Sea, but more like I “see” and “feel” God in the form of understanding my own molecular insignificance inside of a universe which is likely one in a billion, maybe a trillion other universes which Man can never truly, honestly fathom.
Where is my [dead] father now? Looking down on me? Where did his soul go? Do souls even exist? What is the point of existence? As Kierkegaard said: The point of life simply cannot be to just work your ass off in order to continue bare existence. That seems too miniscule, too unspiritual, too pathetic. Work must be done in order to bring us closer to our true dreams, passions and ambitions, to our own lonely understanding of “God.”
Perhaps GOD means Group of Drunks, or else Good Ole Death. Because death is a release into the atmosphere, a total release into the black void of the heavens which we do not really grasp.
When children, we smile and play and have fun. We are innocent. We know nothing of the way of adults, of suffering, of self-awareness and vibrant consciousness. We are like dogs, not aware of the simple fact of our impending deaths, and so mechanically endowed to be loyal and eager and happy. Man is cursed with the knowledge of his own demise, and he doesn’t know when, why, where or how it’ll happen. And yet we all work and fuck and play and bitch as if this life is eternal, everlasting, going and stretching forever. Lennon said: Life passes most people by while they’re making grand plans for it.
As a teen, punk rock moved me because it offered the perfect metaphor, the perfect symbol of life unleashed. It was all about the mosh-pit, meaning power, meaning the swirling, righteous vortex that is the center of our fear of death. Life rapes us, it’s true; forces itself dully upon us, and in the end it wins, and yet we have the epic power of individual choice in this drama we call existence. We can choose what to do, what to not do, what to think about and focus on, what not to, etc. Existentialism, baby.
Reading Norman Mailer’s letters. Born 1923. Died 2007. Right now I’m almost halfway through: The spring of 1965, right after his serialized novel, An American Dream, came out. Over the course of eight months he’d serialized the novel in Esquire, the preeminent [literary] magazine of the day, in 10,000-word installments each month, for a staggering $125,000 advance from a publisher before a single word had even been written. (This would never happen to a mid-level writer today.) Harkens back to the 19th century when Dickens, Dostoevsky and Twain were serialized.
Mailer strikes me in his letters—in 1965 Mailer was a tender 42, slightly older than me now—as a strange and at times almost incoherent yet brilliant master of prose, wit and style. He’s bold, an odd mix of mature and childish, angry and calm, self-aware and clueless, generous and selfish, egocentric and narcissistic yet incredibly kind at times. He contained a basic, lazy sexism within him, but this was “normal” in society at the time. Yet he was fiercely supportive of the Black civil rights movement. He also had many gay writer friends such as Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal (though they were frenemies). Mailer became both a TV/radio personality and local NYC celebrity and also a genius author. Often reviews of his books were polarizing and sharply mixed. Some critics lauded his work; some loathed him deeply. In this way he mimicked the critics’ reception of some of the Beat writers, primarily Kerouac, who was almost always universally panned.
Mailer grasped that writers were a mix of tough and weak, masculine and feminine, hard and soft, sensitive and brutal. Dialectics were what turned him on, both in romantic and platonic relationships, and in his writing. Not binaries, but a constant back and forth, push and pull, opening up the gaps to locate some semblance of The Truth.
Which brings me back to the inevitability of Change. It’s impossible to avoid change in life. It comes for you whether you like it or not and whether you’re ready for it or not. Like this plan of ours to move to Spain. Now we’re planning to sell my house in the Bay Area which I bought in 2015. Almost a decade. Wild. What a metaphor that house was and is. Family. Protection. Stability. Safety. All the things which terrify the shit out of me. I’ve always lived my life as if it were an emergency, because I felt like an alien who’d landed on the wrong planet and I needed to escape soon before being captured and put out of business.
Writing—somehow—opens something deep and internal for me, allows me to somehow transcend the fear of death, the terror of safety and love and warmth. I am a strange creature. I crave love and attention, and yet I also push these ideas away. I know I am not easy to love. Even for myself. I’m always afraid society will reject me outright; that all the people who call themselves “friends” are really just faking it. I do not know where this paranoid, irrational fear comes from, but probably it’s genetic. Both my parents were—my mom very much still is—afraid of People. The world would be a lot better off without people, Mom once said. At the time—being young—I laughed, red-faced. But now I’m not laughing. I understand her spiritual swansong. She’s correct. And of course she’s also deeply wrong.
Life is a bellowing bucket of bad contradictions. Nothing is ever exactly as it seems. Letting go is the answer; relinquishing control over the things I have very little or no control over anyway. Easier said than done. As humans we tend to lean towards control. It’s just the way things are. Some people allow themselves to be dominated by others, by bosses, by women, by men, etc. I’ve never been one of those people. For me, power has always been in my possession. Not power over others but power within myself. And yet I almost drove myself to the grave with that power. I had to look for other, healthier, more sacred sources.
When I write I feel free. Not physically free—although, yes, that too—but spiritually free. God feels to me like a plumb tree bearing all those thick purple juicy fruits, hanging low from thin gray branches. God gives us warm pleasure; life; sustenance. Writing does this for me. Writing is God, then. Not that writing can save me from anything, really, but it gives me the power and the juice to fill up my low metaphysical gas tank and to hit the figurative road again. Roads—American highways—have always symbolized freedom to me. Ditto railroad tracks. It goes back to Kerouac, to Chris McCandless, and to my five years on and off of thumbing around America in my twenties.
Yet too much freedom can lead to too much choice, which can lead to feeling like one is yet again back in one’s cage. Inner cage, if you will. Which leads back to writing in order to break out of that horrid cage. Work is a cage. Family is a cage. Even love is a cage. And yet of course they’re also the opposite of a cage. The bars of these “cages,” then, are ultimately made of dark shadow only. One can walk right through those shadow-bars. It’s Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We’re all seeing only the wall of the cave with the dancing and popping and licking flames. Beyond the walls is a whole world yet unexplored. I want to see that outside world, explore that vast open wilderness. This is why I write.
"Mailer grasped that writers were a mix of tough and weak, masculine and feminine, hard and soft, sensitive and brutal."
Definitely agree that many of the greatest writers possess these kinds of extremes within a single self. The contradictions to which Whitman referred? Maybe. I think people can find long enough periods of unchanging life if they try hard enough: some biographies I've read suggest such lives have already been lived. But I think for writers it can be a challenge. When Jack London was at home in California, he had the desire to leave; and when he was away, he had the desire to return. He could never reconcile those two visceral feelings.
Michael, excellent piece of writing right there. Enjoyed reading it and in fact, I read it twice. Thanks for sharing. - Jim