Writing No Matter What
Resistance often begins in art
As we sit here the week before the US elections and to my mind, the most important election in my lifetime, I wonder as I often have in the past, what’s the point of continuing to write in the face of all that worries the world. I felt this way after 911 and during the pandemic and the feeling is coming back again. I’ve been doing lots of political work which has lifted my spirits because, for me, action is the only cure for despair. But I’ve developed a powerful case of what I call “creative anxiety.” It’s happened to me before and I’m sure it will again. I’ve been away from the novel I’m working on for over two weeks. My characters are calling to me from where I left them, mounted on horses, hiding in a thick forest, searching for a young woman who has fled a convent.
A writing friend sent me this wonderful video of Ursula Le Guin speaking about freedom and writing and it restored my sense of balance.
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
You can watch her speaking here
about how we will need writers who can remember freedom, writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. She has inspired me to go back to the practice of my art no matter what the days and the weeks ahead hold for all of us.
So go vote, early if you can, work in whatever way you choose to get out the vote, to affect the change you want to see….but take time for your art.
Go back to those characters in the forest or that line in the poem or that color on the canvas or the next dancing step or the tune on your instrument, be it a saxophone, a fiddle or your voice.
The art you practice might not feel like it will change the world but it will comfort you and inspire you in the days and weeks to come… and who knows? It might also prove one day to be an act of resistance.
Goodbye for now. I’m headed back to the 14th Century.
`The Conquest of Naples by Charles of Durazzo
We were there. That was the evening Evan won the National Book Award. Have to say....a pretty good night.
I am heartened to hear you are back to your real work. I will enjoy reading what your lost nun reveals to you about the secrets in the roots of the trees of the forest.
I am guessing you may have been influenced by Joseph Campbell and by Jung’s idea that artists sometime reincarnate, from the inherited collective unconscious, spirits needed in the collective consciousness.
We would be poorer if Le Guin had not brought us Odo climbing her last steps; more cowardly if Solzhenitsyn had not showed imprisoned Ivan Shukov smuggling in a useful piece of metal; more seducible by Big Brother if Orwell had not let us live the story of Winston Smith; weaker if Maya Angelou had not modeled phenomenal women rising.
Bring us the nun.
Jock, of 112 South Hemlock Lane