"None but a Blockhead”
a few reflections on the somewhat well-worn topic "why write?"
Substack is largely writers writing for other writers. In that perhaps beleaguered spirit, I present a few reflections of the “why write” variety. Original, original, I know. But I was trying to get something clear for myself…
Samuel Johnson wrote, “None but a blockhead wrote but for money.” If the great sage was right—and we’re talking about the guy who wrote the dictionary here, people—then almost all of us are blockheads, myself wholly included.
The adage probably held a great deal of truth in Johnson’s time. A good quill wasn’t easy to find, and the price of a little tub of ink? Forget about it.
Yet the tables have turned so dramatically that the reverse is probably true: you’d have to be a blockhead or insane to write primarily or specifically for money, given how sparse and minimal the rewards tend to be—and not just the pecuniary rewards. The rewards in terms of social status are meager too. Being a scenester is a better pastime for the non-writing writer anyway. You can focus on cultivating a pose (perhaps the truest 2020s form of art) and let the mere manipulation of symbols fall to the wayside.
Many people want to ape the supposedly Bohemian lifestyle characteristic of writers (or, at least, of the Beats) minus the actual creation of literature. They’ll produce one piece of 80 word flash fiction a year or so just to keep a little skin hypothetically in the game. And you know what? That’s fine. The world is a gigantic wish-granting machine, and as the Bible says—Verily, they have their reward.
But what if you want to make a serious go of it? What if you’re really pursuing the White Whale? What if you want to pull out all the stops, go for broke, hellbent for leather? I think the Bhagavad Gita provides the best advice with which to approach the writer’s solitary task: “You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work.”
“But, but”—you splutter—“that’s like Communism! It’s the universe devouring the products of our labor without due compensation or regard for the quality of the work!” Yes, this is absolutely true. But it is the communism of Heaven, of Tian, so take it up with him or it or whatever.
Admittedly, this is a bitter pill. But it’s one you need to swallow, due to its salutary, sanity-inducing effects. I find that thinking about the astronomically improbable rewards of writing—a seven figure book deal here, a National Book Critics Circle nomination there—to be a comically touching impediment to the work of getting on with it.
You, a writer, have to recognize the precarity of your own situation. You’re like the person in the old Zen parable, dangling from a vine hanging off the side of a cliff. Two mice, one white and one black, begin to nibble on the vine from above, while a tiger waits to devour you below. Your situation is hopeless. Yet a single strawberry dangles on the vine near you. With your free hand, you pluck it and put it in your mouth. How sweet it tastes!
That strawberry is poetry itself—the poetry that all inspired writing contains, not just literal poetry. Its seemingly fleeting sweetness somehow savors of eternity. But it can only have this magical effect if you practice the most severe asceticism of the spirit, focusing purely on the taste of the strawberry and not on the mice or the tiger. You might think this is unfortunate, but it’s not. If you really think about it, it’s the only way it possibly could be.