And here I am, after just a few weeks, writing you again.
It is Easter morning, and I am home alone, and I have serenaded myself with a playlist of Easter songs so affecting that my tears feel hot and urgent. I am thinking about failure, and I am also thinking about thinking. I am – specifically—thinking about my failure to think. Or to think correctly. To think clearly. To express what I have thought about. To be perceived as someone who has thought through a matter—to be regarded as a thinker. It is a vanity, yes. But it is one I have carried keenly. Let me explain.
I, sometimes, will get comments about a work I have written, and the comments will go something like so—you are a soulful writer, or you are a beautiful writer. It is a kind of flattery which I tend to appreciate but which in recent times has begun to bother me. The reason is that—when I write, I do not aspire for beauty, I aspire for thought. Yet it would seem that I am unable to think, or to think clearly, or to express what I have thought about. Beauty of expression (if one can manage it) is necessary in the same way that formal conventions signal artistry and even innovation, but when I come to the page, I do not come for form, I come for light.
I count, among my failures, the inability to achieve obvious things, simple things—the banality of pursuing human desires. Take for instance my failure as yet to fall into romantic love; pick a partner, master the trick of getting them to pick me. Or my failure of faith—to love God and yet to be wholly insufficient in such a simple task. And now more pressingly—this failure to think. What I mean to say is that I think I may be bad at thinking. By thought I do not mean discourse, and I do not mean the politics of meaning(s) that writers impose on their work. I am not given to obsessive hermeneutics where the text becomes a tool for extracting the latest debates and topics. What I mean by thinking, then, is the way in which the work appears as itself—its proposed epiphany, the thing that it is struggling to say, or maybe the thing that it eventually says, which can be very different from the thing that the writer sets out to say. Is it silly to even suggest this? That the work has a word, its own word, its own logics of meaning—beyond beauty and form, beyond argument and ethics?
One way to phrase the question—how should a writer be, is by asking—how should the work be, and a better way to phrase the question is—how should a work be read? How can thought be recognized? How should we read our writers? I think that it matters. It matters how we show up to literature and art. The writer, presumably, will grow over time, as will their work, and the ideal reader must also grow. All writing is an act of faith, yes. The hope that the work will have its word, and that the reader will have the impulse and generosity to search out that word. For instance, what does it mean to say that a novel is good, or that a painting or sculpture is good? Even if this goodness is instinctive, affective— there is always a why. How do we trace narrative voice in Genesis, or the ethos of creation. What is affective about Achebe’s invocation of the sacred duality of the colonized subject? What is it that makes us stare at the painting of lovers or children or trees. Every love subject – I think—must bear the imprint of recognition.
I know the spark of inspiration, that flighty feeling when a story presents itself like an image or a memory and you, as the artist, can sense that a grief held on for too long will give itself to art, as would joy and love and loneliness. But what about thought—where does it come from? That pleasure that is born out of mental tension and wrestle – sometimes a dialectics of meanings or a simple dialogue—an exchange of the old for the new, or the new for the old, sometimes pure like a child’s curiosity. There is a pleasure of thought that sometimes comes after the fact, when the idea is no longer abstract, but becomes a grain, a question, a small but victorious sound of clarity. Also, there is pleasure when the thought is recognized by another person—not necessarily in alignment but in the tension of disagreements and complications. Humans are fragile, yes. Ideas? Not so much. Thoughts—if not thinking—should be allowed to wrestle.
I should say that I do not like the idea of thinking for the sake of itself, where knowledge becomes a kind of taxonomy, a hermeneutics of display—that academic impulse of thinking across thinkers and histories and disciplines, so that the work has no word but becomes a cartography of many works, a collage of echoes. Paul says to think certain kinds of thoughts—those that are noble, pure, of good report, and also to take thought captive, to bring it into subjection against the knowledge of God which Paul evokes as a transcendent reality. Which is to say that all thoughts are not equal, but all thinking can give way to transcendence.
To think is to move towards language, which is neither merely words nor letters, but language as a set of logics, as premise for love, or action. Essentially, to think is to touch the most unreachable parts of life, it is one of the crucial ways by which we might encounter the other. And now I return to Easter and what I think to be its message—to love the other because God loved the whole. Love can stand as command, as philosophy—as an idea so abstract and unreachable, as the beginning of a journey as well as its point of departure, as many things and yet as nothing. But love for others as a thought in my heart—as the object of contention and focus and repetition and failures? Surely that is something worth pondering.
This is an incredible piece!
While I will say that there's something poetic about an essay about a writer's failure as a thinker becoming itself a profound cause for introspection, I find myself asking questions about the reliability of "truth." Is "a truth" "a piece of thought?" If so, are we all thinkers? How well thought out does this truth have to be for it to be a valid "thought?" Wouldn't it be a problem if billions of people, because of their individual "truths," have thoughts? Will that be a problem? Is that why the world is in chaos?
I feel like I'm going off tangent, but I am working on my MA thesis, so I am questioning some of the "thoughts" I am trying to espouse. But I guess the beauty of literature is that we can all pretend that we have "thoughts" because of our ability to critically engage with texts. Or maybe that's enough for a thought?
For me, the pathway to beauty has always been towards love, so it’s interesting to think that you might be wanting to chart another course toward love and it is not beauty but thought, even though some might argue that beauty is a thought. I am thinking about this concerning the racialization process which some might say was some kind of un-beautifying of the other. This is definitely worth pondering especially as you noted, ‘what is it to be read.’ I am of the feeling that we are in some kind of edge of language era which might also be an edge of thought era. The people who are telling you that your writing is beautiful and whom you seem to be unconvinced by might also be demanding from you develop a discipline of beauty that is beyond language itself and arrives at thought that is true and pure —unpretentious love of the other in action. Thank you for taking us with you through these murky waters, we are many here.