There’s nothing like having a cancer scare on the cusp of a new year to get you thinking about things, big and small. To make you reconsider, question, mull over, think twice. It’s a new year, but it also feels like something more to me in light of what I’ve just been through. A chance to do things right, to do things better and more honestly, operating under a new understanding that each of us get few if any ‘do-overs.’ I so clearly understand that instead of this being a moment of reevaluation and adjustment for me it could just as easily have been a much grimer time with darker options and preoccupations. I looked that possibility in the eye. I know I’m lucky that it flinched and cast its eyes downward first. I know I’m lucky to be thinking of writing today and not of mutant cells slowly eating away at my insides like acid.
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All of the writers I admire most – be they bloggers or journalists, poets or writers of essays and prose – are the ones who really and honestly spread their guts out on the page. The ones who ride that razor-thin edge between sharing and confession – sometimes dipping lightly over into one, then back to the other. Show, tell, yawp, bleed, lick wounds, repeat. It’s not a game, mind you, it’s a fucking art form – that fire-singed-and-still-smoking compulsion to lay it all out and say what needs to be said, even if it’s risky as hell. To put down in words what’s true and real even if people won’t like it, or like you because you’re the one saying it. It takes daring and strength and the willingness to get bloody. How many writers do you know of that have that, or anything even close to that? How many writers regularly shock, surprise, confound, dazzle and amaze you? Not as many as should, I’d wager.
We live in a confessional age, but also a timid one. A mild and mediocre one. Most of the confessions I read these days are tepid at best, and poorly written. Moreover, most leave me yearning for an earlier age of writers, the age of bold debauchery and passionate dissolution, of hearts and souls and psyches put on the line, of questionable decisions and dangerous liaisons and candles burning at both ends – all put down boldly in ink with no quarter. Where are those writers now, can someone tell me? I would like to link arms and walk beside them, if they’d let me.
Are we living life less passionately in ye olde late capitalism, or are we hiding our passions more? And what are we so afraid of, and why are we living our lives in words so much more timidly and reservedly? Are we afraid of judgment, of not being liked? Of someone calling us names? Of not being invited to the party? Pardon and excuse me, but boo fucking hoo. Every writer worth a damn – worth reading at all – in the history of all histories has been mocked, hated, and vilified, time and again. And loved and revered, of course – but precisely because they said what they needed to say and spoke their truth and made no bones about it, regardless of what the community would think. These men and women, they are the writers we love most, and most enduringly. And yet most of the writers I read now don’t follow their example in the slightest. Instead, they blandly hem and haw and skim the surface of things, presenting themselves and their lives as tidy, prettified, easily digestible objects of desire/aspiration. There is no reality, no grit, no risk-taking, no soul. Their writing is dry and bloodless.
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This isn’t a manifesto, it’s an observation. But also, maybe, a call to arms for those able to hear it.
Time’s for a change. I will eat a peach*, and write my truths here in blood, when I write them. This I swear and promise. Will you dare?
[* from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]
