Words, words, words ...

Why do I feel this need to, as Hamlet expresses it, "unpack my heart with words"?

I have been working on two manuscripts, revising a story that I will post here eventually, working on some essays too, and wondering how it is that most people feel no need to set down their thoughts in some permanent form. Is there a subconscious fear on my part that they will be lost to me or taken from me, if I do not write them down? But this danger must increase if my thoughts and words are shared. No, it is the need to communicate, to be understood, but also to affect others. John Fowles, who devoted seven years to writing The Magus, without any assurance that it would be published, says:

I was on jury duty at the Old Baily in May 1961. The law may be very fine, but there is no justice. A mental defective with five children, who had thrown the incestuously begotten baby of his eldest daughter into a furnace, stood fumbling and weeping in the dock. A nakedness of suffering and horror filled the court; all his children were imbeciles, his wife had left him, he had no money, no relations, nothing except his heavy dirty-nailed hands and his tears. I wanted to jump up and cry out. We did not judge him; he was the judge, and he judged the whole of existence. I know by reason that there cannot be a God; I felt it with my whole being, before that bowed figure. Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

On the news today several public officials were interviewed about the current crisis in Iraq. Whatever their views, whether for or against current efforts in that country, they thought in predictable and tired phrases. They spoke the banalities that one has come to expect from such figures. It was impossible not to be struck by the mediocrity, if not the outright stupidity of these people. To realize that the management of the crises of the world and the resolution of the most difficult moral questions of our times are overwhelmingly placed in the hands of such people is hardly an inspirational thought. It's even worse to consider the corruption in the legal and political systems of so many jurisdictions. It is mostly "energetic mediocrities" (Gore Vidal's phrase) who will always be in charge of the world -- except for the occasional inspirational figures so needed by the rest of us (FDR, Kennedy, King, Obama), who are usually taken from us much too quickly.

Why are we surprised by the state of the world? We shouldn't be.

Those of us who write "do little harm by our mediocrity," according to Fowles, if we are mediocre. I certainly feel that way sometimes, mediocre or worse, occasionally losing the battle against despair. Like most intellectuals, we "scribblers" face the accusation of self-indulgence. We cultivate our gardens, debate the fine points of culture and philosophy, as the world goes up in flames all around us. Shouldn't we be doing something more than writing? Can we do something more? Is writing futile in the age of video? Or can we still rely on the power of the written word to change the world? If Shelley were around today, would he say that movie directors are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world"? Luckily, most movie directors are also writers.

I think of Shakespeare's majestic poetry and wonder whether his words can possibly describe me or the people that I know, in our pettiness and greed, inhabiting the underbelly of the nation. ("What is a man? ...") Of course, the answer with Shakespeare is always affirmative: "I see you with all your faults and there is always hope," he seems to say. He writes about and for all of us. In fact, what is Hamlet about? It is about you. Fowles goes on to say:

I feel that I have three main ... obligations. First to be an atheist. [However much I may admire and approve of the Christian story, on moral grounds, I tend to agree with Fowles about this as an agnostic.] Second, not to belong to any political party. Third, not to belong to any bloc, organization, group, clique, or school whatever. The first because even if there is a God, it is safer for humankind to act on the assumption that there is not (the famous Pascalian pari in reverse); and the second and the third because individual freedom is in danger, as much in the West as in the East. The virtue of the West is not that it is easier to be free here, but that if one is free one doesn't have to pretend ... that one is not.

... I write, therefore I am.

In saying that he writes "in order to be," Fowles was defining freedom for himself and for the rest of his fellow "ink-stained" wretches, dreamers that we are -- at whatever level we find ourselves putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboards. Writing is freedom for us, regardless of the level of our achievement or lack of it. It is not that one gives up other things, such as solvency, in order to write. One gives up money and status in order to be, one writes just to "be" ... because one has to. Anybody know a publisher?