A little story of was and were

Introspection is too often the bane of the nascent writer’s experience. More frequently than is good, we butcher the basic principles of decent communication in the attempt to manifest our personal experiences into the a global perspective, into the ever-elusive and overly-revered human condition, which is to say we tie ourselves inside a cave beyond our own ability to escape and then spend the better part of life describing the things that go on outside by the mere shapes of shadows the sun we sought to escape makes dance on the walls inside. And then we call this insight. I see this all the time, mostly reading my own blog—or my old essays—or most of the things I have written. Nowadays, with a veritable barrage of pseudo-semi-biographical rubbish making it to paper, film, or radio, I can at least feel somewhat proud that I hardly ever waste any paper printing the junk I write—save a tree, I say. Still, I hope one day to grow up, to tear this selfish little cocoon all us fakers weave around our fragile, brittle egos and write good one day.

In just one paragraph, I used the word “I” six times and made other references to myself seven times; all that in just 188 words. And that’s assuming I can count.

I grew up reading real writers. When they say “I” they hardly ever mean their real “I”s but rather the characters they’ve masterfully created and subtly developed to not only arouse interest, but real concern on our part. Real writers need no readers. They suffer our intrusions into the worlds they have created and sometimes guide us through, to no benefit of theirs. We follow, just outside the reach of their candle-light, and sometimes peek over their shoulders at their lives, prurient observers morbidly curious—seeking to gain from their experience what we cannot in our own, or (even worse) to have ours validated by searching blindly through their work for what we’ve grandiosely chosen to call “the human experience.” Except that in the vast expanse that is such experience, one hardly finds the sense that is so often the point of their writings; the best descriptions of it are those that dissociate completely from the purpose of such enterprise and make art of the sharing—by which I think I mean that I appreciate subtlety.

Likewise, the greatest stories of love are about loves that never happened—success made sweeter by bitterly remembering it from most abject humiliation and defeat; or contrariwise, the worst in life somehow ennobled by reminiscing from the warm and comforting protection of (principally unearned) luxury.

I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, of structure, of sense. We seek the sense that life often lacks and in so doing force a shape on the shapelessness we have been given; this, in turn, is like the proverbial pebble in the shoe—and in the end, who can feel the pebble in his brother’s shoe?