Talk, Talk

A History of Illuminated ManuscriptsI talk a good game when it comes to writing. The other day I was talking to a woman at the library. She asked where I get the ideas to write so much. I told her that I don't bother to wait for ideas. I just start writing and follow the words wherever they take me. Yet this morning, sitting here in front of my computer screen, I was doing the opposite, struggling to find an idea to get started with. Finally I remembered my own advice and just started in. 

In "The Plague" by Albert Camus, there is a character who is working on a novel. He is so obsessed with getting the first line just right, that he never progresses beyond the first line. I remember laughing at this guy when I read about him for the first time. Later, I read a brief excerpt from one of Camus' letters and he talked about "writing everything as it comes" not forcing organized thought on the words until after they'd found their place on the page. That passage had a profound effect on me – and its what I strive to do when I'm writing. In the format of MAWMAP I don't take the next step, which is to go into the work, pull the good from the bad and start revising and polishing. The task would be anathemic to the work. MAWMAP is about the raw material, the unpolished, unedited, unholy mess of it. The writing is haphazard, sometimes good, but often slipshod, grazing ideas but rarely delving deep into them, writing thoughts without considering them first, letting them go like water over a waterfall, hoping that the whole will be considerably more than the sum of its parts.

That may or may not be the case in the end. We never know really what the worth of the things we create may be. This I know: I find a great pleasure in the work. When I am working, writing or painting, I feel that I am in my proper place in the world, doing what I was made to do. When I find myself in a place, as I have this past year, where I have the freedom to work on MAWMAP and nothing else, I find that I enjoy everything a lot more than usual. I love working. When I stop working, I enjoy the break. If I go for a walk, I enjoy the walking and then enjoy stopping when I get home. The sky looks bluer, the air seems more substantial, the food I eat has a distinctly cleaner flavor and I feel like all is right with the world. If I stop the work, I start to worry about things, I get anxious and start dwelling on how I look to other people, wonder what I'm doing here at all, and so forth. Those worries and anxieties go away when I am working. It's a very simple equation: when I'm working on the project full tilt, I am the happiest and richest man in the world. When I stop, even if its to earn money, I get poorer with each day I don't work.

This was at its best when I lived in Boston. I'd work part of my day to make money by playing music. When I made my daily bread, I'd go to a café, library, or other public place and work on MAWMAP and would work until I couldn't work anymore. I'd go home, pleasantly exhausted, and fall into happy sleep.

Here in Arizona, it hasn't been that simple. I've held down a few full time jobs, and they were involving enough that when I was done I'd have no energy to work on the book. The jobs were not particularly difficult, but they were exhausting spiritually. One job was working for an inbound call center, providing customer service for a health insurance provider. That one was more draining than the others, because very frequently I was required to put people off without providing any meaningful assistance. Another was designing ads for a newspaper. That one was a bit easier to take – I enjoyed the work in that it utilized my design and art skills – I enjoyed it enough that when I was laid off, I was sorry to leave the workplace. It took me awhile to find my way back into MAWMAP though – during the years when I worked for the paper and the call center, I did not work on it at all. I got the volumes I'm working in now nearly 4 years ago – they sat on the shelf for a long time. So after the layoff, I spent all my time looking for a new day job, and worrying about what I was going to do for money and so on. I was feeling very empty, kind of lost and very, very depressed. I couldn't find the ambition to do much of anything. Occasionally I'd pick up my guitar, but when I tried to croak out a song and found my voice still essentially useless, I'd quit fast. Last year in early autumn, I took out the current volume, and started to write. It didn't take long to hit my stride and to establish a routine and within a few months I'd begun to feel I was on track again. I stumbled like a blind man through the early pages, looking for a format that worked for the scale and surfaces the book had to offer. I went back to images and styles I've worked in before, and started trying to loosen my rusty voice (written voice, that is) and to find some of the narrative tools I'd used in earlier books. When I look at the early pages of the volume, I have to say that it was like clearing my throat. About three months ago, the current format asserted itself, and the book started to jell. And right now I am totally involved.

I've since stopped asking what its for – I know what its for – its for enjoyment. Right now, its my enjoyment. Someday soon I hope that other people will be able to enjoy it too – either in gallery exhibits, or in some published form. I don't want to dwell on that aspect too much at this point because I need to learn a lot more about marketing before I can decide where best to apply the finished product. What I do need to focus on is how to produce the modest income I'll need to continue working.