Reading on Purpose

(I began this blog post in June of 2009 and I've decided to finish it now. Below picture from Dorothy Dehner, her "Blind Machine") 

June 2009

Lately I’ve been drawn to reading books that are incredibly depressing and brutal. I do this in stages, usually when I tire of too beautifully crafted, hopeful books that leave me wanting. It amuses me how insatiable I am for these books recently. As artists, I wonder why we continue to seek instability during moments of calm. For me, while I deeply enjoy emotional contentment in small doses, I find that if my personal life is fulfilling, I must throw my artistic life a few rough winds. This can happen in terms of what I am writing about, whether I completely abandon a form that has become a bit rote or by using a topic that I find maddening to negotiate.

I began my book escapade with Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson. A heady, wonderful book that, like much of Anne Carson, befuddles and enlightens at the same time. Then I read The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer an incredibly fanciful, depressing work in which no culture, religion, or character escapes a painful ending. Then, W by Georges Perec, quite possibly one of the most brutal, shocking books I’ve ever read about the Holocaust. He sneaks up on you, plying you with seemingly inane statistics and memories and then bashes you over the head with a mountain. It was amazing I could get out of bed the next day. Then, The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. Don’t see the movie, read the book, I was revolted and riveted. Now, I’m tackling the book Stoner by John Williams. Another quiet, painful illuminator.

February 2013

All this makes me believe that part of being an artist means diving into the mess and seeing what happens to us, as a result, on the other side. In June 2009, when I started this blog post, my life was relatively stable, but, today, with an infant and two close loved ones dying, my emotional terrain is a mild earthquake on good days, a raging hurricane on others. Writing has definitely been incredibly difficult due to time constraints and energy. However, my reading seems to be going full force, similar to where I was in June 2009. These past few months the tone has definitely changed. The past few weeks I've read Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams and A God in the House--a series of essays about the writing life in relation to the divine. I've also been catching up on my Paris Reviews.

From a reading perspective, if reading is part of the writing process (compost, if you will, for the writing-to-be vegetable garden), then what is the benefit of constantly seeking to use reading to balance our emotional states? Unhinging us when we are calm, as I was in June 2009, or providing succor when we are stressed, as I have needed lately?  I am constantly amazed by writers who lean towards one end of the scale or the other emotionally. Writers who are always seeking to read things that are incredibly charged politically, angry, demanding response, causing them to rant and drink too much coffee (or whiskey). Or, writers who never want to read anything that stirs them. Who seek a constant state of calm, go for the "happiest" of stories, a soporific stupor to go with their chamomile tea. Doing this doesn't account for our responsibility as artists, in my opinion, to be emotional weathervanes while also helping steer the weather. What this means is that to produce deep, complicated, heart-bursting work, we need to allow the difficult and the soft in. We can't fill ourselves only with awful imagery and expect to produce anything resembling redemption. And, we can't sleep through our job either.

 

Maybe I'm the weird one, seeking always to stir things up when I feel too complacent. What can I say, I get itchy when everything is too calm. But, my current state of sadness and chaos doesn't allow much room for creation either, so I seek solace and attempt to persuade the wind in my head to slow. Audre Lorde once brilliantly said, "Shall I unlearn that tongue in which my curse is written," obviously referring to Eve, but I would say it is a prescription for all artists. We are a somewhat cursed lot if we take our job seriously. Our charge in life is to speak what we shouldn't, to write what causes distress in others, and to illumine the shadows. Doing that doesn't mean only eating bitterness or spewing light. It means holding both in our mouths, adding honey when we only have bile, and seeking tannin when we are filled with too much sun.

In the end effective art-making is opening others to all the facets of life and to do that we must unlearn, relearn, be conduits to it all once more and again.