The Point of Writing

I sometimes sincerely ask myself, why bother to write? I've moved past the point of feeling like I have something new to say, and have tried to be at ease with simply finding a slightly new way to say some things that have been said and observed before. As the Prophet said, "there is nothing new under the sun." At one point in my life I thought that getting successfully published would be a deep life-changing event. That is still only a distant and remote possibility on my horizon, but more and more I begin to believe there is no real transcendence there. I'm no longer in a position where anyone is paying me to write, so I am forced to look within for purpose, and that cupboard sometimes seems a bit bare.

Having said that, I know my truth. I write because, once I begin writing, I get absorbed in it, and I find I do have things to say. More importantly, I find some deep unexpected connection with what, for want of a better phrase, I will call my subconscious. Perhaps the word "my" is wrong there, because I sense that the subconscious is really a communal thing underlying us all, the way some mushrooms on the surface are really simply the above-ground manifestations of a huge underlying organism. When we communicate we are simply acknowledging a shared truth.

But that is not to understate the simple and pleasant sense of fulfillment I get from the writing process, watching my fingers tap a keyboard and capture my words that surround my thoughts. There's something there that fills a need I never know I have until I begin the writing.

Sometimes I think about my autistic son in this context. Twenty-three, almost 24 years old, he lives with us and since the pandemic he has nowhere to go during the day, his part-time filing jobs being on indefinite hold. Which is all right with him, since he always regarded the jobs (and school until he graduated) as unavoidable and mostly boring nuisances. The pandemic also ended the semi-daily trips to the library, which he does miss.

These days he spends most of his time in what was once the "home office" (back in the days of a desktop computer), a room that has now become "his office." He sits there with his Chromebook open, an I-pad open, and his phone open, each to its own site; often the Chromebook is playing You-tube videos of the elements of the periodic table or various languages, or mathematics, kind of in the background. In the foreground he has a stack of blank paper, and on each page he writes out either lists of numbers or alphabets or the various elements with their atomic number and weight, and perhaps a slight commentary.

He does the same thing almost every day, emerging out for meals and sometimes surfacing for a semi-social visit, morning to dusk. From time to time he takes a stack of papers to a "his" desk in the family room and stashes them in a drawer. He calls them "his papers" and he seems to know every one of them, something I re-discover each time I try to slip some of them into the recycling bin, lest they overflow the desk. And he can go back there and pull out a specific one when, for reasons only he knows (or perhaps doesn't consciously know) and takes it back to the office.

That seems to me the epitome of both the point and non-point of writing. He finds satisfaction in the writing, but the writing itself communicates nothing new (and is not intended to communicate with others), only reiterates things he already knows, which comforts him. The value, the point, of his writing seems to lie solely in the doing. And it works for him.

And I guess, at bottom, that's what works for me.