WHY?

Why do I do it? Why do I choose to publish things that are so personal and private in this public forum? It’s a question that has come at me from various directions in recent days—and not exclusively on Facebook. It’s a question I sometimes ask myself.

The simple answer is that it’s what I’m given to do. I love that construction, one that I came across for the first time many, many years ago in a poem by Robert Creeley. I have not been able to find it again. Perhaps it was not a poem. Perhaps I simply heard him say it once, in my teaching days, when he came to read to one of my classes, and the words stuck: What I am given to do. Call it a mission. A mission of service. You may think it fanciful, but I believe we all have a reason for our time here on Earth. A purpose. 

It's not because I feel special in some way, especially skilled or gifted, especially wise or knowledgeable or compassionate. Not at all. Quite the opposite. It’s because I’m convinced that I’m common. Ordinary. That there is something in my experience as a human being that I share with every other human being. Not everything, obviously. I am unique in many ways, not least in my physical appearance. But there is a core part of me, I believe, that is shared by other human beings. 

I don’t know what to call it. Call it heart. Call it mind. I think of it as the irreducible core of being human and it lives somewhere in the relationship between self and other, the bridge we all need to cross as best we can in our daily lives. Call it connection. It’s what I have wanted to explore in everything I’ve ever written. Even at those times in my life when I was publishing “art reviews” in national magazines, it was that connection I felt driven to explore. I refused to be a “critic” in the sense of one who can distinguish between good art and bad. The greatest compliment I could receive was something like: “You really got me. You really heard me.”

In the sense that I was writing about connection, then, my “self” was a necessary part of that connection—the other end of the bridge, the receiving end. What I do now is much the same, but—to stick with the analogy—from the giving end of the bridge. I started out as a poet, and I think that this is what poets do. They give out of themselves. They reach in first, then they reach out and touch. It’s what Robert Creeley did, “For Love.” I write in prose but in some strange way the result feels more like poetry. It’s from the heart.

Autotherapy? Am I trying to heal myself by confession? No. I’m trying to communicate some part of my way of looking at the world with words that may resonate with others and touch them in a way that feels, well… right. It’s like when I look at a painting and just say, Yes! With all my heart and mind. No questions. No doubts. Just Yes! With an unapologetic capital and an exclamation mark. So am I trying to make an example of myself, to be the model of humanity? No. I’m just on my mission as a writer, doing what I’m given to do, communicating with my fellow human beings. And in so doing trying to find out more about what it is to be a human being and, just perhaps, become a better one.