“On burning ground…”

“You write — don’t you? — because you’re more alive when you write. You write because in black and white on the page, on a computer screen, in a notebook, in pencil or pen, even on a old-fashioned typewriter, you enter another dimension when you write, you inhabit a different world then, a time-warp perhaps — perhaps one of those cosmic nodes that Einstein meditated on — or perhaps a neural tangle where you find yourself drawn into a different part of your brain. You write because you understand things, you learn things, when you write that you don’t know when you’re not writing. You write because you can master things in words that you can’t master in flesh. You write because when you dream a different self into being when you write. You write because you meet a new you in writing, and you you didn’t know you had. And you write because you’re sometimes happy, sometimes sad, and you can clarify things in unexpected ways on a page, on a screen, in a notebook. [....] But we also write, yes we write too, because writing requires absolutely precise self-examination and absolutely fierce linguistic consciousness so much so that it is not only the most erotic and exotic but also the most serious and difficult thing we can do. And yet if we are writers we must do it, we are driven to do it by guilt and pain as well as by the voluptuous desire Levertov so beautifully describes. We are driven by guilt because we fear we have failed ourselves somewhere, failed to see or comprehend some nuance of our lives, and so we must expiate by putting that truth or even just the half truth, into language.”

~ Sandra M. Gilbert, excerpt from “Why Do We Write” in On Burning Ground.

Since college I’ve kept a book (now books, plural) in which I record passages from poems, novels, theorists, essayists — really anybody that intrigues or inspires me in some meaningful way. As I type Gilbert’s words from my notebook to this blog, I realize how right she is.

In my own work I’ve been focused on the issue of “working through” trauma, which essentially boils down to the problem of moving past, though in a not curative or redemptive way, a crisis of representation. I’ve given a lot of thought to what keeps most of us from writing, trauma or no trauma. Gilbert captures a lot of what surrounds this issue in her short essay. We feel more alive when we write by putting pen to paper or finger to the keyboard, and getting lost there. It validates an existence about which many writers writing are still uncertain. If you’re not sure you exist — if you’re not sure you want to be or are allowed to exist — how can you write yourself into such an existence?? That’s the real problem of the crisis or representation. Plenty of folks push themselves through this crisis of representation but I’ve yet to find a formula for how to do so — despite the fact that the number of autobiographical trauma narratives is multiplying by the hour in a wide variety of literary and artistic forms.

Gilbert, however, reminds me that more often than not we write out of guilt or fear; we write because it is “the most serious and difficult thing we can do.” It’s admirable to write from trauma — to write one’s way out of trauma’s interference with daily life. It is the most difficult thing anyone can do. But to constantly write out of guilt and fear turns into something other than brave. It means making the writing process a perpetual wound. In her essay “Autobiography’s Wounds” Leigh Gilmore asks: “What does it mean for a writing practice to represent a perpetual wound?” That question has become the impetus for a project I’ve been working on. In short, a writing process that keeps a wound open can not be a writing practice that sustains itself through joy. Fear, guilt, and shame which causes authors to “write under the gun” for prolonged periods of time, or consistently, turns the writing process into a hostage-like situation. I can’t predict how these crises all turn out. For me, I imagine that the subject being held or holding herself hostage — with a figurative gun to her head — eventually grows tired and weary of the intense level of stress associated with such events. Eventually, I hope, I pray, the subject realizes that she (or he) doesn’t have to live that way. Writing doesn’t have to always come from a place of fear, doubt, or shame about existence. Eventually, the subject under siege must say to herself or her perpetrator — “Pull the trigger; I’ll survive anyway.” Because you will survive. It’s just a writing process, after all, and that little bit of grounding is crucial to both that which allows us to survive and to then flourish. Most of the writers I know — too many — write “under the gun.” It’s a common colloquialism that we all use from time to time, but the metaphor embedded in that saying has real, albeit invisible, repercussions. What does it mean for a writing practice to represent a perpetual wound? It means turning a practice that’s supposed to confirm human existence into one that denies the reality of the person fighting to live.

You aren’t human.

I’ve got a gun to your head;
you do what I say now.
Don’t speak.
Listen.
Now. Speak!
Say what I want
to hear.
Or else. You’re DEAD.

Just do it already.

You already stopped breathing
if, after the perp has gone
still sitting still,
like a stone;
gun to head.

How do I pull this thing down?
The trigger points:
Keep moving!
Write! Speak!
Answer my questions!
Tell your story!
(It’s imperative, they say.)

Put. down. heavy. warm melty metal.
Makes my hands sweat
With the need to walk
jump, no, leap over
this fence
holding hostage
words that could strike
as violently, but don’t.

There is a net of doubt,
no, shame.
that boxes, duels, fuels
an industry.
Treating humans like fish.
Once caught,
This livestock (lives-to-stack)
Found –
mouths gaping,
pried open with a hook,
Beginning a cycle of feigned deaths.

I died so many times I forgot
I’m still alive?

Writing is the most serious and often the most difficult thing we can do — Gilbert’s right. It’s brave. And, awesome. But, sometimes, the most serious and difficult thing we can do is also to write from a place that allows us to exist without guns or hooks that pull out our innards for all the world to see. Write to simply be — alone — with two hands on the keyboard, typing, and two feet on the ground. Just jouissance and breathing. Breathing in and out words that bring all that we don’t know — about ourselves, about others, about the human experience — into existence.