Why I Write

“You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.”

--John Dowell, fictional narrator of Ford Maddox Ford's novel The Good Soldier

Early Saturday morning at about 3 a.m., I was sitting at my computer, its glowing screen the only light in the fully dark house, and I was typing away. Some people can't make it through the night without getting up to pee. Lately, I haven't been able to make it through the night without getting up to write. This morning, I woke again at 3, my brain in mad essay-writing mode, but I was stuck in bed: my father, who was here for an overnight visit, was asleep on the futon in the living room, and I didn't want to disturb him. So I lay there composing sentences in my head until 6, when I finally fell back asleep.

I've decided that I'm going to have to finish this essay I'm writing, if only to get the sight of it out of my head.

It also occurs to me that a sure-fire test of whether or not I'm passionate about what I'm writing is whether or not I'm getting up at some ridiculous hour to write whatever it is. I've always been a good sleeper – no, a great sleeper – and it takes a lot to get me out of my regular groove of eight to nine hours of blissful unconsciousness every night.

When I woke the first time this morning, I'd been having a dream in which I'd given birth to quadruplets, two boys and two girls. I have a total of four essays I plan to write in the next six months or so. Coincidence?

When I woke the second time (at 7:30, unfortunately), I'd been dreaming about a cat on a landing. In my dream house, there were two sets of stairs smack in the middle of my living space, both of which led to this landing, where the cat had taken up residence. The cat, sleek and self-satisfied, was licking its lips after having finished a big meal. It stretched and settled down for a nap. “That cat thinks it owns the place,” I thought to myself, but I could see why it was sleeping right in the middle of everything like that: the stairs were carpeted with bedding. A strip of pale blue sheet led like a runner up to the landing, where a blue patterned comforter padded the walls around the cat. I started walking up the stairs on the right, noting that the tree that was growing there was actually in a pot, which alarmed me: I realized I hadn't been watering it. But then I remembered that it had just rained. The tree was surviving just fine; I didn't need to care for it. “Even so,” I thought, “I'll give it a deep watering today, just to make sure.” Coincidence?

Oh yes, I forgot to mention: I have recurring dreams about houseplants and/or pets – usually cats – that I've forgotten about. In my nightmares, whatever I've neglected lives in the basement, down a set of stairs, behind a closed door I'm terrified of opening.

This brings me to another occupational hazard: writers see symbols everywhere. I'm deep into the process of writing a personal essay, which means I'm making all kinds of connections between the mundane and the significant, spinning everyday straw into gold. It's exciting. It's also a little bit scary: it feels like my brain has taken off without me.

One final oh-so-significant story, just to illustrate the extent of the problem:

After my daughter dragged me out of bed, I joined my dad in the living room. He'd pulled out his old high school yearbook (he was visiting us on the way back from his 45^th high school reunion) and the June 7, 1966 issue of Hanford Union High School's newspaper, The Meteor. There was an article on the front page about the top ten seniors (my father was one of them, but there was a black smudge over his face in the picture) and the graduation speakers.

Here's what the article said (I've changed names to initials – my father's are J.C. – but otherwise I've copied the text verbatim):

P.W. and J.C. were selected asthe [sic] senior speakers, following an elimination contest between four seniors who had volunteered to give speeches.

This new system of choosing the senior speakers came into being in an attempt to give equal opportunity to all of the top ten seniors who might choose to be graduation night speakers. The judges were local businessmen, so the outcome was the result of an entirely non-partial selection.

P.W.'s speech is entitled “The Identity Crisis”, and incorporates an awwrd [sic] winning poem by her classmate D.R. “The Gap Between Reality and the Ideal” is the title of J.C.'s speech.

K.G. and G.P. were the two speakers who were eliminated. K.G.'s speech revolved around the idea, “As we approach adulthood let us not lose the keeness [sic] and awareness of childhood.” The basic theme of G.P.'s speech was “Happiness”.

Why is this significant? Well, I'd have to write a whole essay to explain it. But just to give you the merest hint of the riches hidden in this banal passage, I'll leave you with a few pieces of the puzzle (and no, I'm not going to be putting this one together – I've got too many other things to write right now).

P.W., the girl who penned “The Identity Crisis”, grew up in a devout Methodist family, “the kind of folks who were always sending Bibles to Ghana” (this is the way my dad put it), and then, after going off to UCLA, turned on a dime “and started having boys sleep over at her place all the time.” Some time after this, she had a psychotic break. I still remember my dad talking about her after he got back from a reunion he went to when I was a teenager – he was shaken by how she'd changed to become a mere shell of the girl he'd known. She wasn't at this reunion. She's dead.

Of my father, I'll say only this: if there were a title that summed up what he seems to see as his life's struggle, the problem he was put on this planet to solve – we all have one, and adulthood is about putting a name to that face – it would be “The Gap Between Reality and the Ideal.”

And I can't help wondering: were those businessmen really so impartial? Why, when they listened to those four speeches, did they find themselves less moved by the speech about happiness and the speech about keeping the keenness and awareness of childhood? I imagine those men – I think of the lives they might have led – and I wonder if they may have chosen the speeches that correlated with their own experience of adulthood. I think they must have sensed, through that rousing rhetoric, that callow enthusiasm, a shadow of the disappointing truth to come. And this was a shadow they recognized, a truth they knew intimately: whenever they looked down, there it was, dogging their every weary step.

Then again, maybe I'm just crazy.