the life of a writer
Writing is a solitary craft. The life of a writer is a solitary life. It doesn’t have to be so, but I write here of myself and my own experience. My own privileged and self-centred life has landed me just prior to my sixty-seventh birthday in a position which could (perhaps) be described as “in the world but not OF the world”. I imagine that it is a position somewhat analogous to that enjoyed by monks and nuns - except that their work is an ‘interior dialogue shared privately with the Gods and of little concern to anyone but the participants” - whereas my work is “an interior dialogue shared with the world and of little concern to anyone but myself and those who chose to be my readers”. The work of writers (like monks and nuns) is done in the private chapels of the interior of the mind, where none but deities may enter, and where the resultant work becomes one’s ‘prayer’ sent out to the world.
I write creative non-fiction. I write about myself, that strange and unique collection of aggregates which is a person. I write about myself, for in truth I am endeavouring to understand what a person IS. The one model I have as an examplar is myself, though I have children and ex wives and lovers as companions on the path, essentially I am a man who in solitary contemplation moves along at a strange and mysterious pace dictated by random fortune. Like all human being I have to make sense of the world, and thus far, I have spectacularly failed to do so. The struggle continues and this is what I write about. How to BE. It is a strange and compelling conundrum this business of living and I can hear my own interior voice sneering at my indecisiveness, telling me that life is simple and explicable, but there’s a right little ding dong of a battle going on ! The question (for a writer) is what to DO when one is not writing !! The writing part is, in a sense easy - it’s the living part that’s difficult ! Perhaps that’s why so many great writers take to the bottle !
I live in a bus. I don’t want to live in ONE place for I already live in one place and that is my own interior landscape. I don’t want to live in an idyllic rural setting with chickens and horses though I am happy to visit. I don’t want to live in New York, London, Marin County, Ibiza Paris or Amsterdam (done all of that) and I don’t want to live on a desert island. I live in a bus specifically so that I don’t have to live in any one place - I can live wherever I chose ! I am fortunate in that (at the moment) I live in Australia and have before me a trillion magic options when it comes to ‘parking my butt’. The external landscape is mine to explore or to chose to ignore. I can wander, if I will, wherever my fancy takes me. This theoretically idyllic existence has it own problems and they all revolve around other people. It is interesting that so many problems that writers seem to have are related to their relationships with other people - mainly those whom they love.
A writer is a slippery soul and cannot be captured by conventional means ! When he tells a woman that he loves her she needs to be able to understand (and accept) that he is already in love ! That he came to her already promised to another! That other lover is his constant companion and pre-occupation - she is his work. No writer can feel comfortable writing with the vulture of conflicted love perched beside him in malevolent jealousy which is why so many writers have multiple failed relationships. The partners of writers seem to feel excluded by the very process of writing, feel neglected and unloved, and a battle begins for the attention of the writer. It is all so utterly predictable and the writer for his own protection (and in order to continue unmolested what he has chosen) begins to find it ever more necessary to guard his pitch, to make sure that his boat is safely moored in a sheltering harbour. This harbour, the writer begins to think, is yet another figment of his imagination. It simply doesn’t exist !
The problem is very much related to a misunderstanding of what a writer does. How it IS to be a writer. The conventional understanding has the writer sitting at his lap-top (or type-writer) slaving away writing the great work which will see him become immortalised ! At the lap-top is where the work is done. In my own experience nothing could be further from the truth. The coal-face of writing, where the writer hacks away at his pre-occupations, is NOT at the lap-top at all - it resides in the day to day minutae of his life. THERE in the viccisitudes of existence the writer patiently watches the grapes of his own ideas either flourish or wither on the vine. Dylan asks his lover in one of his songs “are you so blind you cannot see I must have solitude, when I am in the darkness, why must you intrude?”. He also plaintively titled one of his songs “No Time to Think”. And there’s the rub when it comes to writers and love. His lover sees him patently not writing ( he’s not sitting at the lap-top so how CAN he be writing?) whilst not realising that most of the work is done away from the machine, the guitar, the piano. Writing is a contemplative art - it is an art that needs ‘time to think’.
I do not write novels for I have always felt since I was a little boy that I was trapped in the novel which is my life. The endless pre-occupation with one’s own life is of course a narcissistic perversion of all that is ‘normal and healthy’ and is certainly not conducive to harmonious relationships. It has nonetheless historically produced some wonderful writing though at terible emotional cost to the writers ! The book gets written the woman leaves him, or the book gets fought over and in exasperation the writer leaves the woman.Or the woman destroys the man ! It’s an old story, as old as writing itself! Elias Cannetti’s Auto Da Fe springs to mind, that perfect exposition of the writer’s problem which earned him the Nobel Prize for literature.
A woman quite rightly wants her partner to be interested in her and to live a happy and contented life with the man who is her lover. It’s not much to ask ! But how is one to live with a self-centered man who walks around with his ‘mind’ somewhere else other than in the ‘here and now’ ? A man who has a constant interior dialogue going on to which he pays close attention ? I honestly don’t know the answer to this question ! The ladies I have been fortunate enough to love, and who have loved me, could probably answer it better than I. But I will try to answer the question as honestly as I can, to do honour to those whom I have been fortunate enough to love. One cannot ‘own’ a person nor can one limit the imagination - they encompass the whole universe ! One might as well wish to posses the moon and stars ! To chose to live with a writer is something of a thankless task, for as I have said, he is already ‘promised to another’. The best that can be said, given that one cannot own the ship, is that one can only be the very best friend of the captain ! In that way the voyages can continue and the elusive dawn of happiness may yet appear far on those eliptical horizons which are our lives.
© sam cutler 2010




