WHY I WRITE

         Having posted those thoughts about "country" yesterday, I was pleased to hear back from two readers who found something there that warranted their response. It's one of my reasons for writing--to connect.

        An old friend—I can scarcely call him a friend; I know him so little—and colleague, an art critic far better known that I ever was, wrote a note to me in a comment to something I posted the other day on social media to ask why I wrote. He himself, he explained, writes for three reasons: professionally, to publish "in a reasonable venue" and make a living this way; in a journal, in the form what he calls “auto-therapy”; and for pure entertainment, as a gadfly, on social media. (He is my frequent gadfly, most often challenging my logic, which is notoriously unreliable). Which of those three, he wanted to know, was my reason for writing?

        Fair question. I responded as I usually do when I’m asked why I write, with a quotation from E.M. Forster, (incidentally, the author whose words I’ve chosen as the epitaph for the new project I’m currently engaged in): How do I know what I think till I see what I say? Writing, for me, is a process of learning what it is that I think, what I need to know, whether about art, about books, about politics, any subject, really, that calls to me, for whatever reason. Even in the days when I wrote, as my friend does, professionally, this adage was my guide. It’s a matter of infinite curiosity, to know what’s in the mind where I spend all of my conscious life and, of course, all my unconscious life too. Perhaps that’s it, that’s what writing is about. It’s a medium for bringing to consciousness what otherwise might remain buried in the unconscious, a way of expanding my horizons.

        But it also pleases me to know that my words reach the ears of readers. No, it’s not simply the pleasure. That is rewarding, for sure. Rather, it’s an essential part of what I do. I do not write “for myself”—a fallacy, to my mind, a refuge for artists of all kinds who choose not to accept full responsibility for their work; I write to be heard. Writing is an act of communication that makes no sense without the other half of the equation, the other significant participant in the act, the reader. While I do not write for some particular audience, some imagined reader, I’d be a fool if I did all this work for myself. I write because I have an abiding need to know what I think, and this is the way I’ve been given to do it.