Between melting and freezing, my own soul’s sap is quivering with a tentative spring. Though at 53 years old I’m more in the autumnal time of life rather than winter. Still, a spring time out of time’s covenant. My pedometer may continue reading only 300-400 steps/day (especially since starting the Estradiol patch in August 2024), but I seem to be doing more with those steps. A bit more cooking in the kitchen. A bit more trimming and planting in the garden. An hour or two more out of bed here and there.
And, of course, I’m writing more. I’ve got three essays out on submission. I'm regularly studying masters of the craft with other essayists. I’ve borrowed or bought a mountain of essay collections—and sometimes even get around to reading them. And I have an insane eleven essays started (all of different topics and tenors so I pop back and forth among four or five of them depending on which Muse is visiting and/or how thick the brain fog). I may be every bit as gullible as my blueberry bush with all this writing—most especially in re-starting this blog. An ME/CFS freeze may yet come and kill all of this at any time.
Despite all this writing and attention to craft, I have no plans to seek the Holy Grail of every writer: a book deal. I can't. I am too ill for the editorial and promotional process that a book deal would entail (to say nothing of the potential complications with my welfare benefits). As someone who has always been the competitive, eyes-on-the-prize, notches-on-the-belt, build-that-stellar-CV sort, this has presented me with a conundrum: what then is the point of spending all the time and effort in the literary magazine submissions grind if it’s not going to lead to something beyond ephemeral magazine publications few will read?
I had turned to philosopher Simon Critchley’s book Mysticism for help with an essay I’m working on that may or may not include insights from apophatic mystics such as Pseudo-Dionysius or Meister Eckhardt. However I’ve found it even more helpful in how to approach writing. At least a quarter of his book is spent examining how mystical experience exists beyond traditional religious practices in modern aesthetic practices like writing and music. Mysticism, he argues, is “the cultivation of practices which allow you to free yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings and see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically.” (Emphasis his) It is about freeing yourself of yourself, about “an experience of freedom that is not freedom of the will but from the will.” (Emphasis mine) Self and will are nasty little tyrants—cruel, oppressive, and arbitrary—in a life that can only be occasionally other than tedious and banal. Especially when ill. It is impossible to avoid solipsism when sick as self-preservation kicks in, leaving you trapped in an increasingly fetid cell of self. Mysticism becomes a tool for escaping the enshittified self through union with the Divine and all Being.
Except the self can never be erased fully. And there is no art without it.
In addition to medieval Western European mystics, Critchley looks at three modern writers. There is Anne Carson, utilizing that most standard tool of mystics: paradox. She borrows philosopher Simone Weil's idea of decreation and applies it to art in which “the self is displaced from the center of the work and the teller disappears into the telling.” Yet that decreation in writing can only occur with the carefully crafted magic trick of creating a self to do some telling about the self disappearing from the writing, thus constructing “a big, loud, shiny center of self.” Decreation for Weil may mean self-abnegation (isn't everything self-abnegation with Weil?) but can it not also include some kind of re-creation? Play, even?
There is Annie Dilliard asking “How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you are not alone.” But, of course, “it is alone that we write,” notes Critchley. Instead of a name and a face, in art there is only a candle aflame, lighting a world that is wasteland without it in which the artist and the wick of that candle are one. When the work is over, when the candlelight is gone, who needs the wick? “The people one writes for (if one is lucky enough to find some),” says Critchley, “do not care about you. They care about the fire. The flame and not the wick.”
There is T.S Eliot insisting with a sigh that “the poetry does not matter.” Ah, but it does. It is the poet who does not matter. The poet who must go by the way of dispossession, must not cease from exploration, must always remember “quick now, here, now, always—/a condition of complete simplicity/(costing not less than everything).”
I have been spending a lot of time this month with Little Gidding. It is the fourth poem in Eliot’s famous collection, Four Quartets, and the last major poem that he published. The late Paul Scofield has been reading the Four Quartets and The Wasteland on my mp3 player for years now but from time to time over the last year I’ve been selecting a Quartet to be my poem-of-the-month (a long poem/collection of poems that I listen to each day for a month because illness makes reading hard and listening requires lots of repetition).
Because it’s Eliot, there is a surfeit of learned critical analysis of this poem. I am not learned in literary criticism (though I love to read it) and thus will not attempt what would almost certainly be a cliched, confused reading (I can’t even pretend to fully get this poem—it is the puzzling out of meaning with Eliot that I enjoy—but if you’re unfamiliar with it, I, for one, will not judge if you start here).
No, I’m going to do something worse: I’m going to use it as a means to navel gaze.
I’ve been meditating especially on this bit:
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
I must confess, dear reader, I like having a name and a face. And I do not like being so alone. Spending twenty years in a bedroom where I have been merely a name (or worse, a number) on a medical chart or Meals-on-Wheels list or collections call has been like having my face and skin removed. Bit by bit much of what seemed to make up “me” has been vegetable-peelered away with enough gory psychic bleeding to please even the most batshit crazy medieval mystic (though they would have preferred the sticky, tactile stuff). To see my name in print is to have a face again (literally so when the publication asks for a contributor photo). It feels tight and itchy, like new skin. But also glorious. For a day, a week, maybe. And then—poof! The feeling, the glory, fades. Like a sugar high.
...See, now they vanish
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved
Them
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
What about kneeling? Approaching writing as prayer, whatever that might mean (and how is it “valid?” what a funny adjective to use). It may indeed mean surrendering sense and notion and verifying and instructing myself and informing curiosity and carrying report (though all of that certainly must happen in writing). Who or what I may be invoking, however, is unclear. Obviously, there is much contemplation and meditation. And if I’m lucky, moments of ecstasy.
I had such a moment finishing up one of those essays now out on submission. Like Melissa Febos, the aesthetic demands of the craft (in this case, revision) forced a revelation and catharsis I would never have experienced otherwise. The ecstasy of that moment has not gone up in a poof! The ending I wrote changed me; it still has me tearing up in gratitude months later.
But can it change others? “That is the real test or warrant,” argues Critchley, “for the authenticity of a particular mystic’s account of personal transformation: whether it is transformative for others.” Submitting to literary magazines hones and disciplines that ecstasy, moves it out of solipsism. If art really is here to light the wasteland of the world, it can only do so as part of a conversation. Otherwise, it’s just mystical masturbation.
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
By the manner of purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
“The writer writes,” says Joy Williams, “to serve—hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve—not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.” Some grace of neurons and hormones and ions and magic fairy dust appears to know me—for now. And so I peek my head above the soil, send out faint pink blossoms in January not knowing if spring or a cold snap is coming.
While this grace remains, I hope to not cease from exploration, perhaps arriving where I started and knowing the place for the first time. Hope to be a wick subsumed in the blaze of art (or do I really?) crafted and complicated like a crown knot of fire. Hope to de-create and re-create. Grace and resurrection whatever the season.
