The Hard Light Of Religion, The Shadows Of Art

A long time ago, I loved a sincerely religious woman. "I don't believe," she told me, "I know."

She had also studied mathematics in university, and once told me that she loved equations because "they have a correct answer." For her, a religious concept, like an equation, could be a form of proof.

For me, religious feelings arise from the same mental connections and spontaneous associations that give us art, poetry, music. I tried to convey this to her during one of our long night-time discussions that often lingered after we had made love, hours that I treasured then and hold close in memory now.

I went on to say that many religious "visions" and "insights" are perhaps as real, subjectively, as the connections that give rise to art, and that people who experience these events are faced with a challenge similar to one that artists usually take for granted: mental signals like these are often ambiguous, often more suggestive than definite, often hard to pin down, but all the more powerful because of this elusive nature.

Yet artists and poets have a great advantage: they have no compulsion to "believe" the signals from within their skulls; they feel compelled merely to explore and to convey these things. They can remain at ease with ambiguity, with uncertainty, with not knowing exactly what the signals "mean."

An acceptance of ambiguity, of confusion, might also be found in sincerely religious mystics who try to express what the signals from their heads have told them, but how often is it found in priests, or in church committees, or in televangelists? Unlike artists or poets, church people want mental signals to be real, with implications and consequences in the real world.

I love art, poetry, and music for many reasons, but especially because art, poetry, and music tend to recognize and accept the unreality of their essence. Religions (and those arts associated with religions) want, instead, to be real, and this drives me away from them -- far away.

This woman I loved had been steeped in religious doctrine, but she had no great feeling for poetic writing or poetic methods. She wanted the mental signals of her favoured religious writers to be true; she wanted to "know." She was not at all comfortable with my comfortable acceptance of "not knowing," and perhaps worst of all, of "not caring."

Eventually, she went away and left me on my own. I miss her terribly, but I recognize that not even long discussions in her welcoming bed, in the lingering after-warmth of love, could have reconciled this fundamental difference between us -- a difference between the hard light of religion, and the playful, powerful, poetic shadows of art.

When Does Writing Matter?

For me, the steep challenge of writing is to allow myself to spend effort and time on work that will never be seen by anyone.

Between the end of high school and the approach of my thirties, I wrote invisibly. I was ashamed of my weak skills and determined to get better, even if I had no idea of what better might mean in my circumstances. All I could see was the pallour of my style when compared to the stories and poems of actual writers, and so I kept it all hidden.

Still, I wrote almost every day, if only because I needed maps to roads that I could never see and could hardly define. This drive to improve kept me going.

Since then, I have written stories and even verses that seem good to me. I have learned to enjoy the process of writing and the meticulous fun of revision, yet now something holds me back, something makes me deny myself this pleasure. Is it a lack of confidence in my skill? No. A feeling that I have nothing left to say? Never. Then what is it?

For all of the years that I spent in secret study and practice, I could justify this effort by promising myself the eventual prize of readers. Now that I no longer need to prove my skills to myself, I still have no readers, and I have no hope of gaining them. No matter what I do, no matter how capably I do it, I remain unread.

This condition of crippling invisibility would seem typical for most writers of our illiterate day, and we must all find our own reasons to go on. Yes, I love to write, yes, I still have much to say, but are these, in the hard light of morning, reasons enough?

I can think of only one reply.

Write to explore within your own skull or to step outside of yourself, write for the challenge of new techniques, write for the secret pleasure of words and clauses at play. Discover what you need to keep on working, but remember this:

Writing matters when we make it matter.