My favorite album by the mode is Black Celebration. I bought the cassette just short of my twelfth birthday in May, 1986. Over the ensuing years I’d burn through two additional cassette copies of Black Celebration before purchasing it four times more in both CD and on Vinyl. Yeah, I could have just made a copy of the original tape, I suppose, but I wanted more than the music; I wanted the tactile scent and feel of the art in each formatted copy I possessed. Maybe, I thought, in buying it again and again, I would somehow get to experience it for the first time.
Though I don’t listen to Black Celebration as much these days, it still spins deep inside of me. The fifth track is a ballad sung by Martin Gore entitled It Doesn’t Matter Two. It is haunting and masterful and tells a sensual tale as old as time—of a boy and of a girl embracing in lust for a fleeting moment in which they feel like pioneers/telling hopes and fears/to one another. It isn’t real love and so therefore… It doesn’t matter.
****
I caught myself saying out loud last night, as I closed my laptop to wearily head up to bed, it doesn’t matter, Russell. I had spent the better part of two hours writing and rewriting a three-sentence paragraph. I was distraught. I felt as if I had wasted my time.
Truth is, I say—it doesn’t matter—a lot. Been saying it to myself for years.
I am a writer…it doesn’t matter, Russell.
But…
…when I write, even when I’ve expended all of my energy towards something that collapses in on itself, I feel, somehow, like a pioneer.
****
I remember the young man in the photograph above, standing there in his pink oxford polo where the walls of his freshman dorm are papered with some of his hopes and fears. To look at him now is to hear him. His voice is not unfamiliar. Standing there in the past, he asks, does it matter that I think I am a writer? And I, crafting this sentence in the present, respond, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter. Be a writer anyway.
****
Many years ago, I was living in Indianapolis and working for a large pharmaceutical company. I was young and very much of the self-opinion that I was one of those lucky few who was most certainly going to get to have his cake in life and eat it too. There was plenty of time to be five different kinds of success in ten different ways—or was it the other way round?
No matter.
I decided I needed a new suit for an upcoming presentation I was slated to give in front of several important executives. I ducked out of the office and headed a few blocks to the Circle Centre Mall and entered the men’s department at Nordstrom. An attractive black woman attentively suggested a particular grey suit and brilliantly fitted it to my frame. She was wonderful. During the course of our brief time together I told her what I did for a living, but that I was also considering writing a book. I hedged in telling her this. She listened; made no expression.
A few minutes later after everything was in order, I followed her to the counter to pay for the suit and collect the retrieval ticket for alterations. She rang me up and then walked the length of the counter out and around to place both the receipt and ticket in my hand. I thanked her for the excellent service. She looked at me and without blinking said in a direct tone: If you’re a writer, say you’re a writer. And then she turned and walked off.
I was twenty-seven at that moment.
I am forty-seven now.
It took me thirteen years to finally do what that extraordinary woman presciently advise I do. In the span of the last seven years, since turning 40, all of my former corporate identity has been entirely removed, but…
…it doesn’t matter.
I have been seriously writing instead.
****
One of the several outlets (forthcoming) to emerge under the brand I am building with These Small Hours will be this ongoing column of sorts I am entitling …it doesn’t matter. I intend to write candidly about my work (of the messy process and discovery of the writing and of the reading). It doesn’t matter that I am unknown, unpublished and, in the literary sense, bereft of any lettered pedigree. I am going to do it anyway.
I will leave the comments section in this particular column open. In time, I trust and believe there will be others like and unlike me who will recognize a bit of themselves in what I’m going to discuss and share. I welcome those comments and hope that my writing in this sub-column will spur a forum of conversation to enliven the effort of being a writer even when it feels like the work doesn’t matter or ever will.
…it doesn’t matter. Let’s be writers together anyway.
To write is to be a pioneer—to offer something of our own hopes and fears with each other and in the face of a world that is otherwise and far too usually full of nothing. The stories we write, the ones that help us to find our own voices are like songs and when they are sung they shape the world as it really is, as it ought to be, and anew for the very first time.
Does it matter?
It doesn’t matter…
…write anyway.
RCS
7 February, 2022