The Other Love of My Life

                     As I've sat tucked away this past week in a châlet in Megève, I've been doing what I do best in my nannying down time: reading. This week, in particular, my reading has been Maurice Blanchot's L'espace littéraire, which is essentially a critical essay on the art of writing and what the boundaries of the literary space are--what makes it, what its demands are, the relationship writing has in an artist's life in the realms of solitude and death, and just how closely they are related.  I also tackled an anthology of critical theory of poetry, several articles on narratology (thank you LORD for Hayden White) and, to my delight, stumbled upon a compilation of Fitzgerald short works.

                    Talk about bibliomancy.

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                   At a time in my life where I am not seeing anyone and have no prospects, it has been rather lovely to have free space for the smoke and dust to clear so I can see what matters most. I have been conjured from the dead realm where I try and forget what has been my siren song since I was very, very young: writing.

                   It was in reading Blanchot and his case study of Kafka, particularly Kafka's struggle to let himself be a writer, the difficulty of releasing the ¨I¨ and the ego, of the self-effacement necessary for the writer, to speak about the ¨he¨ or ¨she¨ or ¨they¨ that it all started to come into high definition lucidity for me. The absolute and sheer brutality of the solitude the writer needs to disappear, to vanish into his art and let himself become a vehicle for something else and someone other. How this, in a way, his a death, a willful suicide the writer commits for his art, and how in many ways, this takes the form of a written journal: many a famous writer has kept a personal journal, as if this were an anchor to his former self, the self that exists in non-existence, so the artist will not forget who he is when he resurfaces and is not simply a host to something higher.

                  Writing is the other love of my life. I have been scribbling stories since I was in the fourth grade, conjuring my own neologisms into my invented universes. By the time I reached sixth grade I was dabbling in poetry, and by 7th and 8th I had progressed to novellas. At 15, I had written a short novel, sought agents, nearly had one, but was all around rejected. Rejected, but told I had talent and to keep at it and once day I would be published.

                  My relationship with writing has been rocky ever since. School demands have often forced me to put my art on the back burner. But I am at a point where I am tired, utterly exhausted, of analyzing other people's art and work. I do not simply want to sit on the side line and analyse: I WANT TO WRITE DAMMIT.

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                  Accomplished writers will often say that a first novel is largely autobiographical and this has to be written out of one's system. After deep grounding in mimetic theory (thank you Aristotle and Eric Auerbach), I understand why this is true and am glad to have done it at fifteen.

                The one upside of having such good academic training in my field is that I have an insane three hundred and sixty degree view, inside and out, of just how this thing called literature works. I have felt the demon tug of being dragged, tooth and nail, to the paper and the pen as the trance like force of inspiration overtakes me, screaming screaming screaming screaming until I wield. It is one thing to read Plato's Ion and another thing to know, instinctively and deep in your gut, to the point where it raises the hair on your arms, what he's talking about.

                 This love I have for literature and for writing is not my choice: it is unconditional, woven into my DNA. It is the other love of my love, and I suspect it has drawn me to a country with a sacred respect for the writer and language.

                  It was after reading an article, Louis Mink's, in fact, on how narrative is a cognitive human device that we use to make sense of our world and construct meaning, that I began to construct one of my own, another piece of my own story: I am a little girl whose imagination was so big it spilled onto the page and into novels as she grew, it was put on hold as she went through high school and college, and now as she looks back she knows: this is what she is meant to do. She has been a creator, an imitator, a dreamer, for too long and with too much investment to turn back from it now. The word, the written word, is her stormy lover who throw her into tempestuous fits of passion and then she scorns him, leaves him jilted, comes clawing back.

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                    I am a bit like Henry James. Maybe not as scandalous, but as raging in the sense that my emotions, the powerful and torrent waves that wash over me, the result of failed relationships, of anger, of sadness, fuel everything I write. I write better when I am jilted, bewitched, irrational. It bleeds out of me like a swan song as I wilt into suicide.

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                    My boss's brother is a player. One who has attempted hitting on me more than once. Not going to ever happen. But I am always curious as to what he reads. On his bedstand this trip is a copy of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. It made me smile. As if the universe were speaking to me. 

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                      Once Kafka got there, he became nothing other than literary. Unapologetically literary. Several failed engagements later, he committed his life to writing. So I ask myself: what sacrifices are going to be necessary for this love of my life? Will finding a significant other and writing be incompatible? Are they incompatible? 

                      I don't know. All I know is that writing is the other, very powerful, love of my life.