Taped to the bottom of the monitor at my writing desk are the words: Novelist plumbed the soul’s depths. These words, now yellowed, are taken from a newspaper clipping of a Los Angeles Times obituary I carefully cut from the paper on the morning of November 2nd, 2006. William Styron was dead. Now that he was gone, I took only minor comfort in knowing that his books still existed on my shelves and that I would continue to read them, which I have. In the years since his death I have made Styron my literary Godfather for reasons I won’t bother to get into here, save to say that his voice comforts and advises me in the small hours when the writing is agony.
It was because Styron did plumb the soul’s depths that I trust him the most. His writing came painstakingly slow but he persisted to write every day. He admitted writing is an agony, yet if I don’t do it I am defeating myself. It breaks my heart and my back and my fingers. It’s never as right as I want it to be.
In life nothing comes easily and I am grateful it doesn’t, even though I am loath to admit I am. I’d like something to come easy just once in my life and most particularly in my writing life. Some things I consider are mostly just distant abstractions of ideas in the form of something profound to say and usually too airy and elusive to worry about. Art is no different than truth, it arrives only of itself and entirely when it means to and not because I have any say in the matter.
Norman Maclean sitting at the edge of the Big Blackfoot with his father and brother Paul noted the sound of the river making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us. It was his father who taught him early in life that grace comes by art and art does not come easy.
I think to work at something long enough means eventually getting to hear its sound which happens to be the sound of your own voice. The more you do it, the more you recognize its sound–you get to know its quality and eventually, trust it.
Good things take time. Finding time and then working diligently in small, often futile increments of time is the key. There, somehow, and against all odds, I attempt to plumb the depths of my soul to figure out what it really means to be a writer. The effort is worth all the despair. Or so I keep telling myself.
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To create in the midst of the desert as Albert Camus suggested is the best ambition of art and moreso of life. Art is the antidote to nihilism and futility. It is the reason for declaring we are alive now and intent on being alive and understanding why living matters. To try to make something in this space of time with all its frustration and obstruction is quite possibly the point altogether. No further accolade is necessary. As Camus suggests: thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment. What justifies thought is its extreme consciousness.
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The King Sisyphus of Ephyra was made to suffer an eternal punishment. His task was one of naked futility whereby he would, over and over again, roll an immense boulder up a treacherous mountainside only to watch it roll back down every time he approached the top. His labor was such that he had no power but to turn and slide back down to commence again to roll the boulder to top of the mountain knowing full well the damn thing was never going to rest at the summit. There would be no end to this repeated burden; this mindless, unavailing expenditure of Sisyphus’s best willful spirit and dogged determination.
Camus wrote that perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer his naked reality. Of Sisyphus, Camus concludes: the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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Novelist plumbed the soul’s depths…
These are the first words I see in that early hour when I rise to write in the morning. The print and texture of the paper is yellowed and worn. It has traveled hard with me. Adjacent to these words is a silhouette image of a man working a mop with all his solitary might. I consider the thoughts he keeps as he labors under the shadow of the eave of the great hall above a shining floor he prepares for countless feet to walk upon. During the course of the coming day the floor will lose its lustre but in spite of this most naked futility I imagine a smile on the man’s face.
RCS
25 July, 2021