Excluding the regular production of
scholarly texts—often collaborative, and scheduled in accordance with my
research group’s academic objectives—, my typical writing day is a typical
not-writing day. I rarely manage to encase writing into a routine—like
something I would do around the same places at the same hours of the day, same
specific days of the week or during some periods of the year. Despite being
awfully busy for most of the academic year, I’ve never learned to take
advantage of vacational months. Most of my days are (dis)organized around
teaching and research work and my nights around on- and offline reading, so my
involvement with active “literary writing”—to use a term that I dislike—has
become something akin to that commonplace about teenagers and sex: I think
about it all the time, I try to do it often, but I rarely succeed—and when
done, it’s a quick, messy, and intense blessing. Using sex as metaphor for
writing might seem an outfashioned Freudianism; however, if there’s a single
human activity which could still be properly related to psychoanalysis it must
be writing, for all its baroque dynamics of frustration and joy. In my
experience—and I know many of my writer friends will disagree—, you never
really mature as a writer, the same way that—also expecting some difference of
opinion on this—if you’re a real lover, you never mature as a lover.
For instance, I’ve been thinking
about this text for a couple of weeks and only right now decided to start
working on it, while resting over the living room’s couch with the ipad in my
hands, enjoying my first Saturday morning espresso. But I’ll be leaving home in
a while, which means I’ll probably be trapped in an ambiguous state of
concentration for the rest of the day, thinking about this text, maybe allowing
myself to interrupt whatever I might be doing—wandering, shopping for
groceries, tweeting, sharing a beer with a friend, having lunch somewhere out
of the reach of the zombie-tourism horde...—to key in some additional notes on
my phone. I’m a peripatetic thinker. Ideas arrive frequently on the go, while
walking around or traveling, under the shower or in bed. It’s good that this
text automatically copies itself to the cloud so I can access it from any of my
devices. Before devices, I used to carry a notebook in my pocket, but that was
long ago. Nowadays, everybody is busy with their phones all the time, so my
surreptitious activity goes most often unnoticed...
But, of course, this one is meant to
be a short text... I’ve never figured out how I manage to write full-length
books. I never have a specific plan in advance; only a chaotic, eventually
self-organizing collection of vague ideas going on in my mind for months,
sometimes for years. It’s as if during all this time everything I think-as-writtable
keeps circulating in an undefined space of possibilities (a space that flows
into and out of my devices) which haunts all my other activities, including my
private, social and academic life. I’m rarely writing because I’m always
writing. People often ask me about how my work as a scientist affects my
writing and the only answer I can provide is that my work as a scientist, like
my whole life, gets hacked —and then, somehow repurposed in a haunted form—by
my drive to “think fictionally” which eventually will become materialized later
into written words. So the science infecting my fiction was already fictional
itself; a perverse, degenerate method of dis-organizing reason.
I’ve never identified myself as “a
writer”—and specially I don’t refer to myself that way in a “productive” sense.
I’ve never considered that literature should be useful in any way. I love the
uselessness of things, the evanescence of purpose. Most of my ephemeral
intuitions never make it to the devices, and among those that do, many will be
deleted. I seldomly keep drafts, but some presumably final texts will become
drafts for new ones to come. I recycle. This piece itself will be eventually
recycled one day. Actually, what an outsider would mistake for a “proper”
writing attitude—myself sitting for several hours in front of my laptop, most
often at late night or during teaching breaks—usually corresponds to
recycling/correcting/re-structuring work.
Even when I have the prospective of
some free time to write—like during the forthcoming summer vacation—, my wish
of reading others’ work gets in the way. Borges said the he felt more proud
about the books he’d read than about those written by himself. I’d say that I’m
much more interested in reading what others had written than in writing my own
stuff—interest that has expanded to keeping a well-curated social
network/online community and trying to
keep up with the constant flow of wonderful online texts. I naturally intend my
writing to be as close as possible to “reading” some “other-me” whose cognitive
endeavors I hardly recognize. “Italo
Calvino said that all his books began with problems that he knew he never could
solve”—wrote Harry Mathews— “Plainly,
he is attracted to insoluble problems. Why? They allow him to make discoveries.
Choose your subjects so that you can discover what you didn’t know you knew.”
(1)
Needless to say, I just had to walk
to my library in order to find this quote. Harry Mathews is always at hand but
my library is thoroughly chaotic—I often spend some time searching for the
right books, and this wandering among shelves or online is also part of my
peripatetic working style. I like going from one place to another, even if I
stay the whole day in the same room.
In her short story “Pilgrimage”,
Tomoé Hill describes a woman having an spontaneous orgasm while sitting in a
Paris Métro train : "I sat in the
narrow plastic seat and clenched violently—a last gasp stifled, as were all my
gasps then—spasming as if possessed; another hidden orgasm in a city where I
should have been luxuriating, unabashed, in layers of literary and actual sex.
Instead I was coming alone on the Métro, in a crescendo of solitude. There is a
line in Henry and June: “Writers make love to whatever they need”. Love seemed
like a puzzle piece that did not belong to the rest of me: I do not know if I
was making love to myself in the hope that I might understand my life—the
distant poles of desire and its opposite that I seemed to both inhabit—or
because I wished to be a writer, another impossibility." (2) This text
perfectly summarizes my own relationship with writing—my days-in-writing,
rather than a succession of writing days—: the nomadic wandering of the
embodied language dynamics, the inseparable combination of pleasure and exasperation suddenly performing itself—like
a theater of seizures—in the most awkward opportunity. The alchemical summoning
of a fantasy’s seed that won’t be understood until it’s shared with others.
However, a perverse, precise, and
active dedication will be required to expose that part of my body which is
language, to let the collection of archives which remain undeleted ensemble
themselves into the hallucination of a rhythm. Writing is much more than
letting language creep over my changing perception of reality: writing is
essentially transcribing, which is when the most important findings are bound
to happen. To achieve a transcription mood I must go out again—it would be
useless to stick my nose in the screen where the cursor keeps blinking. I’ve
known of poets who can only write while listening to the repetitive hammering
of industrial machines, others who need to pay attention to their own heartbeat
amplified by the effects of chemical stimulants. The rhythm is first absorbed
by the bodies, and then language sculps itself in their insides. Sometimes,
everything just starts and ends with a nonsensical but well-architected pack of
words.
So there’s a writing cycle after
all, inhaling and exhaling a multitude of micro-universes, the prospect of
laying many eggs so one or two will get an opportunity to survive. At last the
work gets done—it might sound like an effortless game I’ve been playing for a
short while, until I realize it’s almost 4 AM and some emails are still waiting
to be responded. And then I know that I must be exhausted, because I’ve been
unconsciously time-traveling.
Notes:
1. HARRY MATHEWS. Immeasurable Distances. The Lapis Press,
1991. p. 30.
2. TOMOÉ HILL. Pilgrimage. In: Andrew Gallix (Ed) “We Will Never Have Paris.”
Repeater, 2019, p. 113.
—————————————————-
Germán Sierra is a teacher and neuroscientist
living in Spain. He has authored six books of fiction in Spanish, and one in
English—The Artifact, released in
2018 by Inside the Castle.
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