Hello beautiful human,
Yesterday I wrote these words behind the paywall, as a glimpse behind the scenes for my most invested audience:
To return to words, here in this Space, after venturing far and away, is to return to the simple tools of a craft. A cobbler picking up the leather to measure and cut a shoe. A baker once again heating the ovens and getting out flour, yeast, salt. The adventure resides now within the one who adventured, to live there and inform the shoes, the bread, the flowers grown and the words written. There is no failure in finding ourselves, once again, where we have always been. The world, after all, needs shoes. And bread. And poetry. To devalue any of these would be to strip life of meaning.
I keep thinking about that—the image of a writer picking up her chosen tools once again, to try to make something. The writer as artist, craftsperson. Maker. Of all the arts, it seems to me writing is the most vulnerable and compromised.
In the first place, we must use language in order to create anything, and language is a limited, human-made material that is generously flawed no matter what language we choose. Music, art, dance…these speak across what divides us from each other globally in ways language, sadly, literally cannot.
Writing is also vulnerable to being used for purposes beyond simple expression. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this. Things must be sold, measured, explained, communicated and recorded and we use language because it is the tool we have. It’s a good tool for those things. Or at least, it’s as good as we’ve found yet.
But we must take care, I think, in this moment of AI and algorithms and late stage capitalism to save spaces for words to simply be expression, imagination, gift, occurrence. Not spontaneous, and also, not calculated.
As I return to writing, and my sense of myself as a writer, after long adventuring away and afar, I come back to the notion that I write these small made things like a singer with her song. I use words—I want to use words—to express: to shape a feeling, texture or experience into a crafted moment. The only ask from me right now is a poet’s ask: for a reader’s generous, compassionate, curious attention, for the two minutes it takes to read these lines. (Maybe that will change as the months go on. Maybe I’ll someday once again craft new opportunities and projects and communities and use writing, use words, to invite people into new spaces and engagements. Never say never.)
Of all the arts, it seems to me writing is the most vulnerable and compromised. It is the most human, the most frail, of all arts. And I love it desperately, devotedly, for that very reason perhaps. Writing these small made things, I am an animal playing with broken spoons, but broken spoons is what I have. There is a crack in everything, as Leonard Cohen wrote. That’s how the light gets in. And for all its fragility, language is tenacious. Here’s the pivot, pay attention: for all its fragility, language is tenacious. It’s deep wired. We inherit words, grammars, patterns of expression and these shape our patterns of thought… we writers have an opportunity to shape and reshape, to discover and create new possbilities and thereby to reconfigure the thoughts it is possible to think.
Imagine that.
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Your time and attention are the true gifts. Thank you. xoS
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