Writing trouble

Reading, writing, and reclaiming the cult of life over the cult of death

I’ve been having trouble writing. I’m not struggling with a lack of things to say, but rather I’m suffering from an excess of things I want to say about basically everything and all at the same time. 

My problem hasn’t been an absence of subject matter, it’s been a problem of editing. It’s also been a problem of opportunity. There are fewer and fewer places to write for, fewer and fewer places taking my ideas (the nerve!), and frankly fewer places I even read regularly because I don’t enjoy yelling at screens.

At the same time, I feel saturated in the firehose of bullshit that defines mainstream approaches to discussing how it feels to be living through the current moment. The ‘good guys’ are asking me to view a vicious war on civilians, aid and health care workers as justified self-defence and the transparently obvious bad guys are launching similar attacks at home on the equally vulnerable: on LGBTQ children, immigrants, and women while shredding public education, public health and any one and any thing else that gets in the way of power and profit.

For me, it is all connected; foreign and domestic policy fusing into one egregious insult on intelligence and humanity.

The pandemic has evolved into an insidious corporate war on the most vulnerable populations and its reach has been destructive across the spectrum of our lives. It is this decline we continually refuse to take the measure of in mainstream media, which has always encouraged us to see the pandemic as a finite thing, an episodic blip for some unlucky folks that got in the way of the super-strain of greed that, like Covid, appears to be an intrinsic feature of our air now.

But the pandemic episode has become a long-running series, with illness and preventable suffering baked into our daily lives, along with reduced access to care. I can’t even conceive of how rapidly our expectations around our collective safety have changed since 2020. At work, in hospitals, at school, on airplanes. It is a dizzying accumulation of risks we are asked to take on for the exclusive value of shareholder reward.

But even if those connections aren’t made publicly, we do feel their terrible compounding effects every single place we go, including on airplanes where pieces can fall off mid-air now and be interpreted as a tough but necessary concession to profit-driven efficiencies. Pity the pundits that wonder why everything, including that booming economy we hear so much about, lands like another disappointment upon the population.

I did write this recently though for the film site Bright Wall Dark Room. It’s an appreciation of the 1999 Mike Judge comedy, Office Space, and the way in which it presents work experience as a psychological phenomenon that Work Culture writ large – which is defined, framed and codified by The Employer mostly — would have us infinitely repress if we want to maintain the increasingly miserable state of employment that most of us depend on to survive.

Being broke and disillusioned and restless is a shortcut to being a drag so I’ve been trying to restore those parts of myself that need to be reenergized, reinvented, and reminded that being this way is no help to anyone, least of all myself. The cheap and cheerful way I’ve always reignited my imagination is through reading so that’s what I’ve been doing.

Over the Christmas holidays, I fell into a Sylvia Plath reading gyre, that expanded and contracted as I found other books about her to read that fed my interest, which has endured since I read The Bell Jar in high school (Esther Greenwood 4 ever).

I started with Plath’s letters and journals, folded in Ted Hughes’ poetry, and jumped into Janet Malcolm’s book, The Silent Woman, about the overall problem of literary biography especially in relation to Plath (I’m still reading it; it’s pretty awesome). 

Volume two of Plath’s letters contain a handful of letters she wrote to her therapist, in the months before she died. And while I find the idea of publishing these intensely private letters to be mostly an unconscionable breach of trust between doctor and patient (it’s not clear to me how the letters came to be sold), I recognize that it is precisely the taboo nature of the contents that makes them such compelling reading.  

These letters are full of anger, and reveal a certain fascinating internal calculation as Plath tries to figure out what to do and how to love herself in her raw uncoupled form. It is an authentic, painful identity crisis and one I must admit to understanding in my own tangential way. There is nothing more cataclysmic than the shattering of one’s self-image and to sit in the ruins of your ego while trying to work and care for children — it’s a monumental ask of a human being. I wanted to time-travel to help her through it.

In these letters Plath recognizes the limited options for women in her position and angrily rejects most of them. My eyes lit up when she declared that one role she would not accept was that of “unfucked wife” just to keep the structure of her marriage together.

Unfucked wife is a helluva phrase. I read that letter more than once.

I re-subscribed to the New York Review of Books just so I could read Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1971 essay on Plath, On Sylvia Plath, which is one of the best essays I’ve read on her (yes, I realize I’m not saying something new here). 

I can’t think of a better compliment for a woman writer or poet than being dubbed never a “nice person” as Hardwick characterizes Plath or to have your work called “mean” and evoking the sensation of a “smash of a fist.” 

“Her work is overwhelming; it is quite literally irresistible,” writes Hardwick. And yet, as Hardwick notes, its power is a feature of her being alive: “I don’t see the death as a necessity for the greatness of the work. Quite the opposite.”

To delineate the furiousness of Plath’s talent, which can reach almost mythological proportions, and sprint past the death cult that’s grown around her to reclaim the living poet – damn, I love this almost 50-year-old essay. I really needed to read such a reclamation of the power of living, even in anger. It’s a fantastic essay.

So that’s what I’ve been doing: reading, rambling and ranting. I will apologize for the ranting but it’s indissoluble from the reading, the rambling and — I hope — some reinvention.

Some other essays that got me back to thinking, feeling and trying to write:

This essay by Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books, which subsequently forced me to pick up Primo Levi’s books, which Mishra references often as he advances his argument. It’s such a brave piece.

And this F1 essay by Kate Wagner. It’s an awesome piece in the vein of David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster but as applied to the grotesqueries of the obscenely wealthy. It’s so good it was taken down by the website, which says so much about its quality. To be too good to publish — now that’s an achievement.