January 9, 2007
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I must contradict Nephyo’s last post. It is nonsense.
With regards to writing at least as an art in particular with which I am well acquainted, I do feel that it can fill a crucial need. Oh it’s not a “real” need in that you’ll die or suffer eternally without it but it is “real” enough that people are driven to fulfill it and feel a very real emptiness when lacking a means to fill that need.
For the most prolific writers most likely it is the need to be understood. Each written word is a struggle to try and project one’s consciousness to the world so that others might well if not appreciate it at least acknowledge it. The need to know that there are those who will say, “this was a unique individual who lived”, not some shadow who simply persists. The deeper that need the more likely you are to express yourself in art and the more frequently you will go about in doing it.
To say that there is no such thing as people who feel compelled to write disregards the degree to which one’s state of mind can effect their behavior. Even without knowing what it is, many a person just knows instinctively that there is something lacking in them that they realize their expression of art helps alleviate. To resist this compulsion can be painful and distressing. No it won’t kill you, but let us not pretend that mere pain leading to death is the only kind of suffering we ought acknowledge. It does not take a genius to realize that a single word spoken at the wrong time in the wrong place can destroy someone as surely a rocket or a bullet. If there is a difference it lies in only that there is time and surety of possibility to recover from pain of the latter sort whereas recovery from physical injury is not so certain a thing and death has no do-overs. A single word can shatter your consciousness and make you feel a pain in an instance that seems like an eternity, but then it always passes and you’re still you only hopefully a little wiser and you can heal.
If we acknowledge that pain need not be primarily about the concrete and that insubstantially sourced pain can be as much a detriment to a person as the other, then we should rationally acknowledge that fear of the persistence of insubstantial pain can be as much of a motivator as fear of the persistence of concrete pain. The obvious analog is torture. A person who has a painful emotional deficiency feels a seemingly endless pain and would do anything to alleviate that deficiency, just as a person being tortured beyond a point would feel a compulsion do whatever possible to cause that pain to stop.
And that’s the way for some writers. We don’t choose to write because we want to, nor because we hope to achieve greatness. We do it because we have to, pure and simple. For our sanity and persistence and to escape to continuation of pain, uncertainty, fear, and despair, we write. There is no choice.
- Clef
