The House-lew

Preface

I wrote the essay below at a turbulent time. In December 2020 covid hysteria was pumping its shrillest choral notes straight into the amygdala of a million-million starving souls, and I was increasingly alienated from the habitus which had shaped my mature adult life.¹ I was angry a lot and often took out that anger on my cohosts on The American Age podcast. And to my great shame, I traveled thousands of miles to stand in the kitchen of a good friend and vomit my “public health” frustrations all over his beautiful and well-deserved tenure track life. I was pugnacious and indignant and righteous and unfit for polite society, and I needed help.

Let me quickly add that the essay below has absolutely nothing to do with covid. I don’t want to alienate you. I want you to understand what I was working through outside of the essay. Only now, five years later, do I see how it led me here to Briefly Wild. Covid is a highly toxic epistemological compound. And I’d like to leave it in its place (for now). I have plenty of opinions about the pandemic, none of which involve conspiracies, but all of which put me firmly beyond the ken of the average New York Times reader. But they’re irrelevant here. What matters is that the world I inhabited for two decades was no longer habitable to me.

I was still reading a lot, but I wasn’t writing much. I’d occasionally make a half-assed effort to turn my dissertation into a proper book, but my heart wasn’t in it. I had no project, just plans, endlessly renegotiated. And that’s the setting. Me: upset, alienated, occasionally brutish, and definitely not writing. So, in true dramatic fashion, I was of course invited to contribute to Artists as Writers: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, edited by my friends Seph Rodney and Steven Fullwood.

At the time I was hiding my lack of literary production from myself and my friends. I was always professing to be “working on something,” but really I wasn’t working on anything. I was avoiding writing—assiduously, aggressively, and comprehensively avoiding it. But I wanted to be writing. I needed to be writing. And writing about writing when I wasn't writing was like finding a lifeboat on an empty sea. It wasn’t hanging off the side of some other craft, tucked under the seat of some secret seaworthy ambition. It was bobbing in the dark, untethered to anything but itself, and it wasn’t going anywhere. Its only promise was not drowning.

And not drowning helped me remember that I’m a different person here in this nowhere place than I am out there in the somewhere place we sweat and shower through day-to-day-to-day. And when I spend time here, it affects me out there. I carry some of this place with me, like a pomander around my neck, some portion of my mammalian brain is drawn upward, olfactored towards the sublime.

Fortunately, Intellect Press, distributed in the U.S. by The University of Chicago Press, is kind enough to allow their writers to keep their copyrights, so the essay is reproduced in its entirety below. But if you’re curious to read some (much better and more practical) tips for living as a writer, I’d encourage you to pick up a copy. It was published in April of this year.

I am grateful to my friends Seph and Steven for their facility as editors and project managers. It’s not easy corralling so many people for so long. And I am a better person and writer for the time I have spent with them.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

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The House-Lew

“I sulked. Sulking is a big effort. So is not writing. I only realized that when I did start writing […] Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I’ve ever encountered […] I mean if you’re supposed to be writing.”

—Fran Lebowitz, Paris Review, 1993

If you glossed it, jump back up for a second and spend a moment with what Fran Lebowitz said about writing in her 1993 interview with James Linville and George Plimpton.

I mean, there it is, right? Why you’re here—Lebowitz’s pregnant and inevitable qualification: “If you’re supposed to be writing.”

You’ve picked up this book about living and sustaining a creative life through writing, so presumably you’ve already decided you’re supposed to be writing. Sympatico! I supposedly feel the same way.

Still, it’s worth thinking about for a moment.

There are a lot of other things you could be doing. Going for a walk. Reading. Watching a movie. Masturbating. Curating your social media. Painting your masterpiece. Studying for the LSAT. Getting and spending. Trading up. Trading in. Trading off. Loving your neighbor as yourself. Or much better, yet, researching the perfect pair of inserts for the boots you’re going to wear on that dream trek across the Camino de Santiago.

You know the trip, don’t you? The one where that super-duper, self-actualized version of yourself absolutely, fucking radiates sexual potency, cultural omniscience, and spiritual equanimity in the Spanish sun.

Come on, you know that trip. We all have that trip.

But you’re not doing any of that. You’re here, with me, reading about writing. So, let’s be real about it for a couple thousand words. What are you really doing here?

Seriously. What are you doing here? You’re going to die—like, soon. I know you know that, but do you know it?

In fact, from a certain point of view, say that of general relativity, you’re already dead, and so am I. We just happen to be in the same inertial frame so it looks to us like we’re both alive. Although, depending on when you find this book, I might not be.

But let’s just imagine for a moment we are alive to one another. You and I—all of us—even at the apex of our powers are always already on our way to that somewhere else we’ll never actually be. We don’t know how many trips around the sun it’ll take to get there, but the destination is inexorable. Like eggs in an ovary, the number of days you have in that carton of years you call a lifetime was set long before you were old enough to read or understand that what you’re reading might not literally be about the thing you think you’re reading about at all.

So, look, when you pick up a book about creating and sustaining a creative life through writing the first thing you need to come to terms with is the “life” part. Keep at least one eye on the possibility that there are other things you could be doing with it.

The “creative” part kind of takes care of itself. Look around you. The whole damned world is an artifice. It’s all “creative.” It’s not just the museums, the writing workshops, the poetry readings, or the Banksy-ed apartment buildings. If you think for one second that the Verizon customer service rep you just argued with for 20 minutes isn’t a bonafide Picasso in some aspect of his, her, hir life you’re probably an asshole.

Is he, she, xe a transcendental genius? Probably not. But neither are you (probably), so let’s just call it even. Any primate who can successfully make the transition from a toothless, diaper-wearing, milk siphon to an adult who believes that Donald Trump can MAGA, or that AOC is so woke she can turn the Rust Belt Green, deserves our admiration for their creativity.

Our respective capacities to shamelessly summon fantasy before the merciless banshees of history is one of the few canonical miracles I can get behind. And although it does occasionally commit a genocide, circumcise a 12-year-old girl, and turn melanin into a metaphysical proposition on value, I’d say on balance I’m a fan of our boundless creativity.

That covers the living and the creating, so let’s get to the writing. What does it mean to be a “writer”? I consider myself an expert on this subject because I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life not doing it, so I can personally attest to Lebowitz’s observation that it is mentally and spiritually exhausting to avoid it. The way, I would imagine, being homeless is exhausting.

As a writer, I confess a sense of entitlement to the bounty of human achievement, and regretfully but unreluctantly claim my own awful portion of the persecution, suffering, and injustice that shapes our collective history.

If I can extend my sympathies to the fifteenth-century Harrapan shepherd who stood in terror on the Gangetic floodplain as horse-riding marauders descended on his farm and he wondered if his wife and daughter would be raped and murdered or only raped while he and his sons lay dying in the mud, then I will claim a cultural kinship with Harriet Tubman without apology even as I acknowledge that some not-so-distant “23andMe” cousin was a member of the Klan in Arkansas and let his weird little Euro-American pecker rub up against the negress his family saved up to own until he convinced himself she wanted to be raped.

The world is gruesome and delightful, even if the proportions are askew, and I’ll stretch my sentences as far as they’ll go to spelunk for the shiny bits. I’d encourage the same for you.

In return, I promise to use my little lies to tell the biggest truths I can manage. I hope you’ll do the same.

We’ve got to look out for one another. It’s easy for our self-conscious gyrations to lead us astray when we’ve been yoked with the feeling that we’re supposed to be writing. It is, as Lebowitz said, exhausting when we refuse its call. But it can also be exhausting when we heed the call only to become overly preoccupied with other people’s pursuit of the same calling.

Let’s be honest, though. We’re talking about a certain kind of writing, aren’t we? You wouldn’t be reading this essay if you were just wondering how to slam out an app review for Wired. Not that there’s anything wrong with that kind of writing. That’s most of what humans read, and I appreciate an elegant turn of phrase about the evolution of skeuomorphic design in mobile apps as much as I appreciate it in a Samuel Johnson essay about character. Dexterity with words is to be admired where it’s found. But we’re talking about something else. We’re talking about how to live as a writer, which is presumably very different from living as a fireman or an engineer, which should also not be confused with making a living from writing.

So here it is. Here’s my advice for becoming the kind of writer who writes because they feel exhausted when they don’t. You need to build two homes. One home is not enough for the kind of writing we’re talking about. You’ll need two.

One for living. And one for dying.

And this home here, this writing-home that you’re so drawn to, is your dying-home. The further this home is built from your living-home, the more space you’ll have for it and the less space you’ll need for the other.

No offense to your living-home. We all belong to some nation, some class, some ethnicity, some profession, some culture, some gender. Even if you reject these things, embrace your universal humanity or pan-sexuality, someone else will assign them for you. You might not like it, but that’s the game. Get ready to duke it out, start a revolution, burn a flag, or dress in drag. Everyone is ready to kick Descartes around until it comes time to admit they’re not autonomous minds reasoning their way into their own freely chosen identity—then they’re all for Cartesian dualism. You’re the pro-socialisty of the prosocial primates, so other primates get a say in who and what you are. As the cliché goes, they brought you into this world, so they’re happy to take you out.

Like I said, you can fight over your identity, if you want to—and, honestly, maybe you should. Some of us really are standing in the way of what you want. And it’s not always ignorance, or education, or fear. Some people just don’t like you. Or maybe they do like you, so they want you to dress like they do. Or maybe they really, really like you and don’t want you to burn in hell. I probably wouldn’t want you to burn in hell either if I went in for such things. Maybe I’ll join you in fighting these people because as fate would have it, my thinking evolved like yours and it’s the neighborly thing to do, but don’t believe your own progressive propaganda. It’s gonna be a war.

But in your dying-home, there is no war, just you surrounded by nobodies and no ones out in the vast emptiness that is everyone’s native land—a place that has never been colonized by any idea or liberated from any oppressor. The more time you spend here, the more garish your living-home becomes. With all its social coordinates, performances, and manners, when you return to your living-home it will sometimes feel oppressive, humorless, and rigid. But because your dying-place is empty and limned with words, you can really open up and love your guts out.

I mean, my god, there’s just so much space out here! You can even bring some of it back. It won’t be missed by anyone. I promise. Try it. A scintilla of that nothing is like a metric ton of love. Even the largest vanities vanish inside of its unconditional event horizon.

Unfortunately, a lot of people who write build their houses too close together, and their living gets all tangled up and grown over. They become heavily invested in the sum of their social relations. This happens especially when writers are paid to write. It doesn’t have to happen, of course, so if you get paid well enough to cover your rent by doing this kind of writing, propitiate whichever cosmic entity will secure its future and keep right on doing what you need to do—but remember to revisit your dying as often as possible. Consider putting some daylight between your two homes to remind yourself that you share kinship with every other thing that is, was, or will be. Even your ancient cousin, the rock, was there once and will join you there again.

Or, if I might make one last suggestion, if you accidentally built your homes too close together, go ahead and tear down the dying-place you’ve got going and start over further out there.

It might take you forever to find the perfect nowhere, but you’ve got forever for this place.

Time isn’t the same out here. Forever is a nothing.

Don’t worry—you can leave your living alone. It’ll take care of itself. Just go along with some crowd and keep things from getting too out of hand.

But when you’re alone, seek out your cabin in the dark, just you and your emptiness trekking into the night’s wild indifference with all the courage that you can muster and all the words that you can carry.

You might get lost, lose some things along the way, or this place might swallow you up whole. But if you’re lucky it will break you open, make a stranger of your mother, turn all your convictions to dust, and leave you scattered across the hills.

1. Habitus is a shorthand for oral culture, as I’ve spoken about in my earlier essays. In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Bourdieu describes habitus this way : “[W]hen habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a “fish in water”: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted […], to explicate Pascal's formula: the world encompasses me (me comprend) but I comprehend it (je le comprends) precisely because it comprises me. It is because this world has produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that I apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident” (127). I part company with Bourdieu on the constraints he places on “reflexivity,” his term for examining one’s own social conditioning. There are no effective limits. Stand at some river and marvel at your own luminous improbability before you disappear into the night. No schema can finally, fully tame you because no social universe can fully encompass (comprend) the nothing out of which it emerged.