"To give oneself over to the objective business of writing," says Pico Iyer, "is to see how subjective the whole business of the self and writing is."
To write is to step away from the clamor of the world, to take a deep breath and then, slowly and often with a shaking heart, to try to make sense of the bombardment of feelings, impressions, and experiences that every day and lifetime brings. The very act of putting them down - getting them out of the beehive of the head and onto the objective reality of paper - is a form of clarification. And as the words begin to take shape and make pairings across the page, gradually you can see what you thought, or discern a pattern in the random responses, so that finally, if all goes well, you're convinced you've got something out of your system and into a domain where it creates a kind of order. Random experience becomes teaching, cautionary tale, or even blessing.
To write is to make a clearing in the wilderness in which, almost literally, you can see the wood from the trees. In the thick of anything, you hardly know who you are or where you'r going (which is the redeeming power of experience); at your desk, recollecting emotion in tranquility, helped by memory's editing devices and imagination's hunger for possibility, you take something that might only have been heartache and turn it into something more provocative, enriching and even instructive.
That's the theory. And it works. I know what I think of many things because I have wrestled them into clarity through long, long hours at my desk. I've told myself that I've made a shape, an argument, out of a barrage of sensations, and now I can tell you where I stand on Thailand, on the late romances of Shakespearre, or Susan, and her infuriating habit of talking about herself.
But there is a fatal catch in the process that any Buddhist might mournfully savor. The very process of sitting at the desk, day after day after day, alone, somewhat removed from the world, one's eyes literally or metaphorically shut, makes one able to see through (in every sense) the whole process of thinking and concluding, the very construction denoted by "I". The very fact of trying to explore the mind and its responses, intensely and inwardly, without stepping back, moves one after a while to see that the mind, and the self that talks to the mind, feels no more real than that cloud formation over the mountains, where the sun is beginning to set. To give oneself over to the objective business of writing," says Pico Iyer, "is to see how subjective the whole business of the self and writing is.
