Writing to Write

Writing to Write

          The Nobel laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner and long-time Dean of Humanities at Princeton, Toni Morrison died at the ripe old age of 88.  She will be eulogized and obituaried by many more eloquent and articulate than me, but it still strikes an important chord in me as a writer and a human being. 

Toni Morrison was the daughter of two southern-born African-Americans who “escaped” the oppression of the Deep South (Alabama and Georgia) in favor of the supposedly more-enlightened and integrated north of Ohio’s rust belt.  Her life did not mimic the life of her character, Sethe (played by Oprah in the movie) in her award-winning novel, Beloved. Unlike her parents, she did not witness any lynchings first-hand. Nevertheless, she had her hardships growing up in the depression and witnessing firsthand the evil of such men as her family’s landlord, who torched their house due to a rent payment issue. 

She got her education at both Howard University and Cornell and went on to teach and write.  She became a groundbreaking editor at Random House and brought black authors to the stage of international awareness.  Authors such as Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Angela Davis (of Black Panther fame) and Muhammed Ali (The Greatest) among many more.  She returned as a visiting professor at Cornell and received countless honorary doctorates from schools around the world who lauded her accomplishments and her trend-setting literary views.

When Toni Morrison received her Nobel Prize, she ended her acceptance speech with the comment, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”  She did not want to write autobiographically because she thought her life too insignificant and unworthy of such attention, and she admonished her students to look beyond their lives in their writing for the same reason.  She felt that writing was meant to change the world and it is fair to say that her writing did just that.  She initially had the benefit of being the first black woman to do this or do that, and garnered that attention accordingly. Then as her acclaim gained momentum, her voice was loud on the merits of her awards and accomplishments.  Eventually, she was listened to for her wisdom and importance in the landscape of great intellects, writers and activists.

People are forever wondering and asking me why I write.  Some come right out and say they don’t get it.  Others who might occasionally read my stories just stay quiet, but I can see it in their eyes that they do not understand.  Others still neither comment nor likely even read what I write, which I presume is based on abundance of indifference.  I know for a fact that more people read my stories than are willing to comment about them or even acknowledge that they read them.  They either secretly like them or they think they gain some edge over me by virtue of reading my stories.  I remember that scene from the early part of the movie Patton when George C. Scott yells to the heavens after his victory at El Guettar in North Africa, “Damn it Rommel, I read your book!”

And yet, every once in a while someone tells me that they have been moved or touched by a story that I have written and that is enough to remind me about why I write.  First of all, I call my writings stories because I fancy myself a storyteller rather than a writer, per se.  The truth is that much of what I write, like this very piece is more of an essay, composition, treatise or monograph, but I prefer still to call them all stories.  That also seems to relieve me of any inaccuracies that my facile fingers conjure and that intensive research may discover is “three degrees off top dead center” or less than “Dead-on balls accurate”, as Marisa Tomei might have said in My Cousin Vinnie.

I am burdened with an over-active imagination.  I’m the guy who sits on a park bench and makes up stories about everyone who passes by, for no reason whatsoever.  I’m the guy who wakes up early on vacation and is driven to write a compelling rendition of what happened the day before and share it for everyone to read.  I’m the guy who has to mute the TV so I can read my wife my latest piece regardless of whether I think it is good, bad or indifferent and regardless of whether she wants to be interrupted in her viewing at that exact moment.  I have a need to write and a need to be read.  It can only be explained as a desperate need for expression.

I have trained myself through disappointment to not worry as much about the reading as the writing.  It always seems to me to be like that old expression that you should worry about loving, not being loved.  I simply enjoy the process of writing.  The only real “work” in it is that my blog company reminds me every day about what sort of a writing/posting streak I am on.  Right now I have posted to my blog for 113 days straight it tells me.  Why would I want to break that streak?  Nobody knows about that streak except me, but it still motivates me to make sure I post a new story each and every day during the technical day hours of Eastern Standard Time.  When I was on vacation in Europe I actually thought about what time it was in New York before I posted a story so as to be sure I was keeping my day streak going.  That’s a little perverse and silly, but hey, who doesn’t play little games with themselves?

The real point is that I have forced myself into the discipline of finding and writing about reasonably interesting things each and every day.  Some days I have three great ideas and I can’t wait to get them into written form.  Other days I struggle and stare at the wall trying to come up with an interesting topic that is not too repetitive with other pieces I have written since February.  I occasionally wonder if anyone would notice if I repeated myself, but I would like to think I can figure that out myself and keep out ahead of it.  An example is the current heat wave we are all living through around the world this summer.  I want to write about it every time I get hot, but I worry that I am getting too repetitive, so I force myself to find new angles on some of the same topics.  It’s a great discipline, for what I’m not so sure, but it sure seems important.

As Toni Morrison suggested to the Nobel Committee, writing may be the measure of the value of my life.  Thank you, Toni.  That is a difficult thing to contemplate and we are probably all driven to suggest that it is more about our children or our love.  But those are priorities and measures we all share.  My writing is both unique to me in my desire to put on the record the things that pass through my mind, and I would like to think that my observations of the world in which I live are meaningful in some way to the cosmos if to nobody in particular.  So, I write simply to write and when I die, my writing will stop, but my thoughts may linger.