On Art and Spirit
The Road to Published Series
Journal. On meditating.
When I close my eyes and let go of all the thoughts—the grasping, grinding, panicking, juggling chaos—I feel a ragged hole at the center of my chest. It is a void exactly like I felt when my father died and I realized there was no hope left that I might someday have a close relationship with him, that the story of us as father and son was in the end one of reproach, disgust, and bitterness.
That same apocalyptic sadness engulfs me almost every time I meditate, and I have to breathe through it, make peace with it, rather than hide from it.
Carved into the walls of that hidden, fifth chamber of my heart are the stories I want to tell.
“Inside Bag End, Bilbo and Gandalf were sitting at the open window of a small room looking out west onto the garden. The late afternoon was bright and peaceful. The flowers glowed red and golden: snap-dragons and sunflowers, and nasturtiums trailing all over the turf walls and peeping in at the round windows.
‘How bright your garden looks!’ said Gandalf.
‘Yes,’ said Bilbo. ‘I am very fond indeed of it, and of all the dear old Shire; but I think I need a holiday.” - The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien
It is not an exaggeration to say that these few brief lines of prose once represented to me almost the entire hope of my young life: a cozy study full of books—a table by an open window over a sunny garden—pen and paper at hand—a cup of coffee—one very good friend.
I almost didn’t care if there was nothing beyond those four walls and that golden circle of view. I’d be safe, have everything I needed. Shove a tray of food through a slot in the door three times a day, and I'd be perfectly happy thinking and writing, dreaming my whole world as though knitting a blanket.
It still sounds nice, if I'm being perfectly honest. I still occasionally yearn for some nice cozy robes, a window, a cot. I suppose you can see, of course, the doubled image of a monk's cell and a prisoner’s.
For most of my life, I imagined that through writing I could insulate myself, that I could inhabit with the quiet inscription of words a gentler place than our disconnected, discontented world.
Strangely enough, that idea—that writing would wrap me in some magical bubble and whisk me away to a protected region of the mind where anxiety, shame, and homophobia do not exist—that illusion was absolutely the thing holding me back.
There was good reason never to finish. The minute my fantasy stories moved beyond my upholstered little bubble and out into a wider world full of complexity and trouble—the minute my pen stopped moving, too, and the workaday, imperfect world intruded—the illusion popped and I was stuck, once again, with the feeling that something was terribly wrong.
With me or with the world? Did it matter? I was different: I had a terrible secret I could not express to my family and friends. (Not so secret, really, but that’s another story.)
Why write? Because I imagined it as a lifeline to sanity, connection, and a future I could not see in the “real” world, being what it is.
What kept bringing me back to writing novels when, for the umpteenth time over more than three decades, the 30-50 pages of slop I could no longer face were chucked in a drawer with the familiar refrain, “Fuck it! I can’t do this!”...?
Sometimes I resort to the idea of a calling—that there was an angel hovering by my ear whispering Write.
A few weeks, a few months or years after the torment of each failed attempt faded, I would return to the page imagining this time would be different. This time, I would keep going. This time, the writing muse would surround me and protect me, would nurture my hopes and guard against frustration, and I would complete a first draft and then just … keep going.
Onward—to destiny.
More in this edition:
→ “Queer time”
→ The power and magic of Art, Stories, and Imagination
→ David Lynch on “Ideas”
→ on keeping love and memory alive
→ The best classic writing book you’ve never heard of