Some time a few weeks ago, a phrase popped into my head and I haven’t been able to dislodge it. When this happens to me, it makes me feel particularly prophetic and mentally ill. Walking home one early evening, on a Saturday or a Sunday, through the trees on my street in Brooklyn, this is the phrase some cosmic force dropped into me:
please don’t piss on my parade
The explanation for this phrase was deposited into my brain just moments later — this is how writing feels, sometimes. Writing feels like begging, please, please don’t piss on my parade! And the dog I am speaking to, the dog I am pleading with, pisses anyway, and I am washed away, and there goes my beautiful hat, too, both of us carried away in a steamy, yellow river. I forgot to tell you that within the context of this phrase, I was, obviously, tiny — a sort of Who of Whoville — and the thing threatening to piss on my parade was a comparatively huge dog.
This is what writing feels like sometimes. And then whatever parade I was constructing is gone. We all have to go home and clean ourselves up. Maybe we will do the parade another time, but I don’t know, it might be cancelled forever.
Other times writing feels like answering a prayer.
Other times writing feels like building a boat, urging everyone to board, and promising all these passengers we will not capsize, which I mostly believe.
Other times writing feels indulgent and escapist. Like I am the boy in Matilda eating the chocolate cake, but I’m even worse because I chose to eat it. I am engorging myself so that I don’t have to look at the world, burning, collapsing in on itself; I choose to eat and eat my stupid saccharine stories instead.
I write because it helps me stay on earth but also I write because it removes me from this earth. I am an archaeologist and an astronaut; either way, I am studying.
In high school, I remember we had these guiding questions, whatever the fuck that means, that the principal or other teachers would bring up at assemblies or other communal gatherings. Those questions were:
Are we connecting?
Does it matter?
I remember turning to Kayla or Georgia or Naomi and exclaiming, with feigned urgency, are we connecting?! and following it up with the equally preposterous: does it matter?!
When my friends and I made fun of those teachers for urging us to consider the import of our shared humanity, we connected. When we looked at each other and laughed, and didn’t understand the questions, it mattered.
To be a writer is to be a student, which is to be constantly, continuously learning. This is painful and delicious. Writing feels like learning, learning, learning, expanding, expanding. This expansion hurts and it fulfills. Writing feels like stretching: pleasure, pain, pliability.
When I write, I am asking: are we connecting? does it matter?
Writing feels like not knowing how to end this and feeling self-conscious about that. Writing feels like ending it anyway; it’s not the end, anyway; writing feels like locating endlessness within a series of things that end.
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