I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
To write, to try and craft meanings in words, even to philosophize in the right climate, is not to commit yourself to a search for happiness or even fulfillment. It is not fun. You are not serving some higher expressive purpose nor are you giving shape to some transformative normative political vision. These are comforting careerist illusions. Rather, to write is to lead a non-life devoted to the possibility of fire, of being engulfed by flames.
Simon Critchley, Mysticism
Critchley was inspired to say this by Annie Dillard’s short novel Holy the Firm, in which she writes:
How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you’re not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.
To be a light in the world sounds like it might be an elevating, ecstatic experience. But instead, what if to be a light in the world requires that you burn yourself up? To suffer flames so hot you turn into ashes? That you take the cotton wick of your life and sacrifice it so that others might have light in darkness?
Strands of my life are braiding into the idea that I need not write as a way to make money (Critchley’s careerist illusions). Maybe I write as sacrifice and as prayer, as a way of touching the divine, and even sharing it. Maybe I write to burn myself up.
I already feel burning flames when I write of things that matter to me, and that I think might matter to others. I hesitate. I say to myself, “I can’t write about that.” It’s too painful or too private or too real.
Critchley again:
Let’s be clear, although this will sound like raving: to write is to try and immolate yourself. It is to go at your life with a broad-axe, to become a wick for the sake of the flame. I take what Dillard says very seriously and I don’t care if it sounds romantic—what is art without a decent dollop of romantic naivety? Some endless morality play of social manners?
Am I ready to go at my life with a broad-axe, become a wick for the sake of the flame?