Prudence in Hell 020
How Do I Love Thee, Part III: Writing
Writing lately makes me feel completely consumed with ardor, urgency and meaning. I am seeing increasingly implausible connections among things, wonderful ones; ones no one has read before.
I could make a dent in how we think about aesthetics if I could commit to just reading and writing. I come alive completely. You’ve not yet seen me writing. It’s like watching someone play the piano: it is obviously a lot of work, but fully imbued with Funktionslust. It’s pure performance.
The formal life of the mind is a fire to me. It transcends the qualifier of ‘interest.’ It is a way of knowing.
This has not always been like this. I have had a complicated relationship to writing, with vast dry spells and a sort of contempt for my ability, as if writing were a lesser talent (it is absolutely not).
This is also how I deal with starts and endings of which I am having many, and of a very high order. I am —through and through— a thoroughly apocalyptic writer.
(I’m in a world of love and pain, clearly.)
I hope I have the time, enough time. To finish something. Not everything. Just enough.
(I don’t feel we discuss our enthusiasms —our possessions and our self-possessions— remotely enough.)
I am driven by a sense for greatness. But it’s a word you don’t hear that much anymore. It is not a contemporary affect (and so cannot be a contemporary bestowal).
It isn’t about anything else. There are no agendas. A writer can be deep or they can be spectacular, but they must strive to meet at least one of the two extremes.
I write because that’s how I know. Not what; how.
Then this one by Akhmatova lands on my timeline’s lap.
With many thanks to my readers:
If you knew the things I’ve seen and still am privy to. I hold little pieces to many big stories, some going back decades. I’ve been a monster of discretion; sometimes out of decency, sometimes for sheer perversity. But some of you do spot the needlework; pick up on the opaque allusion —on the ritual need for obscurity and deflection— and follow the threads for those who have hands.
Now, read me with your eyes closed and closer.
Nota bene: This is the second time I illustrate something in this substack with a Brion Gysin; in this case, I Give You/You Give Me. Ink on paper. Made during an LSD trip with John Giorno, May 28, 1965.