Struggle to Speak

For years now, I have been struggling to say something meaningful about my life.  I have hundreds of pages of written notes, paragraphs, musings, and frustrations.  Since I usually write about my war experiences in jerky spurts, I often forget what I wrote.  I am too lazy or afraid or ambivalent to go back to the words already written and to shape them into something, which might in the end resemble a book, or even a story.  Heck, I would even settle for a clear and concise and deep paragraph.  This appears to be a willful and perversely proud refusal to read through what has already been written and my thin skinned narcissism of a “budding artist” can’t take the obvious linguistic imperfections.  I begin over and over again. 

A writer, they say, does not need a reason to write.  If you are a writer in your soul, then you will be a writer.  Well, there is some truth to that.  One is creating something essentially “useless,” whose non-existent “applicability” is always present.  I struggle with that notion. 

There are many instances when you begin to write something, and you truly have no idea where it came from.  The proverbial muse has visited you and you are glad it did.  For a brief moment, you also enjoyed putting letters together. 

But a writer still needs a reason.  The reason should not be practical, in my opinion, as in “making money.”  A writer still has to have a goal.  The vision has to incorporate small strands that connect the project, which has a clear beginning, middle, and end.  These don’t necessarily have to come in that order.  A writer should be open to different styles and voices which emerge through writing.  But, it seems to me (as I struggle to write) that there has to be something (even if it’s elusive) that keeps you going, otherwise you will give up though the process.  Not an ideology or a cause or even something as good as faith or peace or love, but an open curiosity about what it means to be a human being.  In all its honesty and authenticity, sacredness and profanity.

For example, writing about war, since that has been constantly on my mind.  I have to ask myself why should I write about it?  Is there something I am trying to say?  Through my encounters with people, I have always received a question or a statement: “you are writing about what you have lived through, right?” 

I remember sitting in an office of professor Richard Strier at the University of Chicago who was my academic advisor.  After he stated this non-question question, I looked at him like a small child who has to give the right answer to a teacher.  “Yes, yes,” I said.  But my look betrayed me.  The cover, I am sure was blown because my face clearly said, “No, no.” 

What I am trying to say is that encouragements are needed and welcomed but if I don’t make some kind of resolution in myself and act, no amount of support will move the engine of mind and heart.  In other words, I have to do my part.  I certainly have been trying but something is not working out.   

I think that it is far better to remain in silence than write something, which clearly does not come from the place that is distinctly you.  I am suddenly reminded of Wittgenstein’s analytic mysticism when he wrote in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “What we cannot speak of we must pass in silence.”  It is better, it seems to me, to be patient in the waiting. 

Writing about the war and genocide and remembering the dead whose faces I see every day must be taken seriously.  It is an act of sacred memory.  The inexpressible nature of evil can be expressed only partially.  Given the fact that today we live in a world, which employs and believes in a dangerous fantasy of non-existence of evil, there is even a bigger pull to speak the unspeakable.  But it cannot be rushed.  Just like falling in love and knowing that, without a doubt, this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.

In his essay, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Joseph Solovietchik states that the reason for writing that essay is not to solve existential problems.  He knows the limitations of man, particularly in expressing the unexpressible.  What he wants, he says is “to follow the advice given by Elihu, the son of Berachel of old, who said, ‘I will speak that I may find relief’; for there is a redemptive quality for an agitated mind in the spoken word, and a tormented soul finds peace in confessing.”

I hope for such a thing.  I read these words, and I understand them, but I do not know them. Yet.