In my experience, writing is like opening a door that leads to a room with more doors, and then repeating this process until it feels like I’ve opened enough of the right doors and explored enough of the right rooms. "Enough" meaning enough to have revealed/discovered something and satisfactorily conveyed it.
The writing doesn't stop there, though. Without fail, my brain will linger for days or weeks on what was revealed/discovered and expressed, considering and reconsidering the thoughts, and continuing to make edits to improve both the ideas and the syntax.
It's the strangest thing, to be taking a drive long after having written something and then, without consciously thinking about it, suddenly become aware of a mistake or oversight. It's as though I've forgotten to open (or close) one of the doors or look through one of the rooms, and then the realization comes and hits me much later with a misplaced sense of immediacy.
The mistake/oversight could be something complex, like a subtle flaw in logic, or something more straightforward, like the misuse of a single word or punctuation mark.
There are several insights I can glean from this, but the most important one, I think, is that every instance of writing initiates a process (or sub-process) that never really stops. Once started, it goes on, consciously and subconsciously, creating more doors to open and rooms to explore. And this has, in some ways, become my reason to go on. I’m basically a dumb dog that somehow trained itself to open doors and explore rooms, and now it’s all I want to do.
This whole process happened most recently in the days after I wrote my long-winded question to Nick Cave. I shared that in full here already. It’s relevant to the rest of what I’m about to write, though, so for those who haven't read it, here it is once more:
UnHerd has just published an excerpt from Faith, Hope and Carnage. In it, you say, "I love this world — with all its joys and its vast goodness, its civility and complete and utter lack of it, its brilliance and its absurdity. I love it all, and the people in it, all of them. I feel nothing but deep gratitude to be a part of this whole cosmic mess. I have no time for negativity, cynicism or blame."
I find this deeply righteous and beautiful. But if I'm being honest with myself, I relate to it more as an aspiration than something I'm able to actually achieve for more than a brief flash here and there. When I'm doing something I love, for example, such as writing, I am able/lucky enough to find my way to the feelings of love and gratitude that you describe. (I say lucky because I know people who don't have a creative outlet and seem to not love doing anything.) I'm now in my mid-forties, though, and have not had any "success" doing the things I love. Like the millions of others sitting in this same weathering boat with me, the money simply did not follow.
I still do the things that I love, and that guide me to my feelings of love and gratitude, of course. But for the 40–50 hours a week or so that I must set them aside to (again, be lucky enough to) work a job that I merely tolerate, and that provides for my family, I find it very difficult to circumvent the negativity and cynicism and various other darknesses that lurk within.
To be clear, my life is good and could have been so much worse. I have been fortunate where so many others have been far less fortunate. None of this is lost on me, and I'm not writing out of self-pity or entitlement, only honesty and exploration. But just as you appear to have had great fortune in your life, so too do you appear to have experienced great grief, loss, "carnage," and so on.
Do you think this balance of light and dark is essential? Do you think it needs/tends to be proportionate? (Lows as low as highs are high. Highs as high as lows are low. Et cetera.) Do you think it's harder to feel "nothing but deep gratitude to be a part of this whole cosmic mess" when one spends a far smaller share of time doing the things they love than the things they merely tolerate or even hate or resent? Do you think it's easier (harder?) to feel it when the weight shifts the other way, when the majority of one's time is spent, say, immersed in the loving act of creating art?
And lastly, do you, as someone who has experienced extremely high highs and low lows, have any advice for those of us who feel a sense of unfulfillment and entrapment here in the middle ground, doing what we don't love because we have to, which is most of the time, and doing what we do love—that which better enables us to feel love and gratitude—only when we can, which is rarely?
In other words: Help me. Please show me the way to the unbroken love and gratitude you speak of. Please deliver me to a lasting clarity and peace.
In other other words: Please be the imagined reader on the other side of my writing for a minute, Mr. Cave. I have some things I’m trying to sort out, and an indistinct sense that the guidance I’m looking for will come to me on its own if you just allow me to pass those things through you first.
Lo and behold, that guidance did come to me on its own—slowly, little by little, and incompletely, but still with plenty there to work with straight away.
What was it? Well, if you can stomach the savage navel-gazing that I’m about to lay on you, then please read on, because I'm going to summarize it via responding to my own message. I don’t know why it seems to me that I need to write it to myself this way. It just does. It’s the only next door I see, a necessary sub-process of the larger process that was initiated when I first wrote to Cave—the sub-process wherein I go back to straighten up some of the mess that I left in the rooms behind me.
[Dog barks]
[Door opens]
Dear Brian,
The scenario you described in your letter is one of needless suffering. You’re suffering because you’re clinging to that which you love and pushing away that which you do not love. It is needless because it doesn’t benefit you and you can stop doing it. You should, therefore, make it your goal to stop doing it. Here are some things to keep in mind that will help you achieve your goal:
Keep writing and letting it fill you with love and gratitude and peace and clarity and all the rest.
Keep meditating and learning how to (a) let those loving feelings survive the tedium of everyday life, and (b) let them go without resistance or resentment when they don’t.
Remember that, for you right now, the key commonality between writing and meditation—the thing that brings you “love and gratitude and peace and clarity and all the rest”—is the concentrated focus on one point for an extended period without distraction. Remember also that the main purpose of your meditation practice is, as Sam Harris’ voice regularly reminds you, to dissolve the boundary between your formal practice and everyday life.
On that note, don’t forget this David Foster Wallace quote that I slipped in your pocket many years ago, and that that singer-songwriter you admire unfolded and held up in front of you when he wrote to you a few years back: “If you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”
Re: your question about an individual’s balance of light and dark being proportionate: Who’s to say? But yes, some balance of the two is definitely essential. One cannot exist without the other. It's exactly as you described it the other day, when you said of your darker instincts: "They are, I think, like vessels that we must inhabit in voyage to the light. Without them, we would have no mode of transport or reference point." I think this is correct. There is literally no such thing as light without dark or dark without light. The two are inseparable and nutritively full of the life that thrums in one another.
Lastly, here’s a tl;dr version of everything above. Keep this in your pocket next to that DFW quote and remember it as you press on: If you cling to nothing you will feel pulled away from nothing. It is all the same constantly changing space. If you can feel deep love and gratitude when, say, “immersed in the loving act of creating art,” as you put it, then you can feel it anytime and anywhere. There is no boundary.
That’s all for now. I’ll send more as it comes to me. Until then…
Godspeed,
Brian
[Dog passes through doorway]
[A room with several doors appears]
[Dog barks]