It has been many months since I last wrote you, a time I spent in the shadows trying to find myself. It seems to me—now more than before—that I do not know. I do not know who I am. This is not to say I believe that we can be known to ourselves, but maybe we are knowable, and maybe there is a distinct place of spirit familiarity, in which we stumble into a place, or an experience, or a task and think yes, this is who I am—this is what I am supposed to be.
What I mean to say—really—is this: I studied law for my father, for the sake of his pleasure and approval, many years later still a failed enterprise. When I began to write fiction, it was purely experimental, an accidental preoccupation. I did not have a childhood happy with books, I had—in addition to an absent mother and the terrors at home—a strange inability to comprehend. School was hard and full of shame; I was bad at learning. When I began to write fiction, there was no conviction, all rhymes aside. I was merely imitating the kind of writing my Facebook friends were doing. Before then, words, to me, were supposed to soothe, to move towards ethics and recuperation, towards justice and self-growth. Words were how I knew to believe and expect goodness of myself. Essentially, I was an inspirational writer, tired and trite as that phrase is, born belatedly from battered and recycled hope. I still think, on a fundamental level, that this is my true genre. But I started writing fiction with its universe of made-up things, its playfulness, its lazy meandering occupation with falsehoods and imagination. In fiction, I found a new kind of freedom where I could shake the structures of my past and ask the questions that have travelled life with me. But it felt too casual, too simple. I found myself quietly ambitious, privately improving, yet too prosperous in this craft. After a childhood of not being good at anything, my adult life of writing felt, to me, suspect.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Art—the artfulness of things, like my own instinctive attunement to the shape of trees in winter—the spiry naked branches, the texture of its barks, the smell of dried up leaves, an affect that feels almost ancient, certainly prophetic. I have also been thinking about the art institution—the establishment itself a kind of superstructure peopled by collectors, critics, creators; I have been thinking about the art institution in the West, but also in its planetary invocations, and about the people and movements who have tried to resist it—and failed. Thirdly, more strangely, more maddening, I’ve been thinking about art in relation to my work. My life. Seeing that I love literature and I write fiction, what does that make me? Another writer screaming into the insatiable hunger of human want. A writer not screaming but making, for who? A writer who makes art—who waits like the animals in Genesis for Adam to give them their name. A writer waiting for readers to decide who she must be. I have been thinking of the ways we are christened—we become artists because we are called so by people—readers, intellectuals, critics.
I do not always [mentally] agree with the ancient philosophers, like Paul in his letters, or Augustine with his confessions. Before them were the Greeks, wise and sincere, but not always generous. Take Plato for instance, who says that there are three kinds of beds: one made by God or nature, the other made by a carpenter and the third by a painter or poet. What he means to say is that art exists as an intrinsic claim to truth. That real art is nature. That the carpenter or the poet are at best copyists. I do not doubt this entirely, except that Plato also suggests that the copy of a thing (cue in artiste) is of no use, since, as Susan Sontag paraphrased him ‘the painting of a bed is no good for sleep.’ Essentially the gist is this: all art is imitation, and if it is imitation, it has no intrinsic truth-value. This is where I disagree, I think that the question of truth or transcendence is a complicated way of thinking about the value of art, or of any work. Our philosophies are obsessed with interpretation and analysis, we give meaning to things so that they might in turn give meaning to us. It is not only in art that meaning is mediated, we also inscribe our interpretations on the artists themselves.
In my last letter, I hastily shared a desire to write on authorship and identity, what it means when the writer comes in contact with the reader—that liminal construction of self that is authentic but also performed. Let me now phrase this differently: how should a writer know themselves when they are filtered through the gaze of their reading publics? For instance, it is not strange or uncommon to want our favorite writers be models of truth and ethics. We want their assent in our politics. We want our celebrities to mentor our teenagers, to comment on our social crisis, and when we stumble upon them in a reading (like I did with Jhumpa Lahiri), we expect that they will drop everything to take pictures with us because, how dare they not? Our favorite artists create new worlds for us, and we in turn make them into our image and likeness.
These days, as a writer, even if one yet unpublished, I feel like I do not know myself and cannot know myself except what I am supposed to be, how I am supposed to be. This pressure is born from observation rather than instruction: there is no one breathing down my neck demanding I change form, or act a certain way. But I do feel the magnitude of my own delusions—an unfounded anticipation for success, a laughable aspiration for an obscure and belated thinker, born mostly from childlike faith. Still, I carry these thoughts everywhere, that this is a thing that might happen: the feeling that I will, in fact, be published. Then read. Then admired, and then what? What happens? Who will I have to become?
I will return to say more…