The Power of ‘Why?’

I’m reading Time Travel: A History by science historian James Gleick, and early on, he quotes American writer Donald Barthelme:

Donald Barthelme suggests we see the writer as “the work’s way of getting itself written, a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances, a St. Sebastian absorbing in his tattered breast the arrows of the Zeitgeist.

In my Kindle edition of Gleick’s book, 49 people have highlighted that passage. Let’s make it 50. That idea is epic. It’s so good, I have to write it again:

…the writer is “the work’s way of getting itself written.”

When I was in grad school making sculpture, this idea of the artist as conduit or witness to the act of creation, rather than instigator or originator, was something my studio mate and I bought into.

We’d go around preaching it to others — our classmates, professors, undergrads, the checkout lady at the Stop-n-Shop. They’d all push back (maybe not the checkout lady.) I think they thought we were freaks.

It probably didn’t help that the professor who turned us onto the idea was weird and effeminate. (No room for sissies when it comes to sculpture. As a more “manly” professor put it, it’s not sculpture unless you throw it down the stairs, and it doesn’t break.) But maybe our classmates resisted because they knew we were right…and it scared them.

To accept the idea that the artist is merely an inert channel through which the work flows means you also have to accept that you’re not the super genius you thought you were. And worse…you’re not in control.

Warning! Ego undermined! Value displaced! Yep, that’s scary.

To quote a former president who got a little testy when someone questioned his decision-making authority, “I’m the decider, goddamnit!” (I added the swear.) But our classmates were looking at it all wrong, and as a consequence, missing out…bigly (as our current president likes to say.)

So many writers and artists in general get tripped up at the idea stage of creativity, myself included. It’s the pressure. Pressure to come up with an idea that’s “same, but different.” Pressure to find something new but so obvious that people smack their heads and say, “Of course.” Pressure to locate something so basic to the understanding of the human condition that it turns people inside out and causes them to question the underlying truth of their existence. Phew, that’s a lot of pressure.

And all this pressure leads, not just to writer’s block, but something far worse — the abandonment of a calling, and that’s no good. But there’s a way through it. Just ask, “Why?”

Why?

Think about the five year old who keeps asking you, “Why?” About anything and everything, stuff you have no clue about, stuff you know you can’t answer. How do you answer? You make it up. At least I do. I’m so compelled to supply an answer that I invent one, no matter how strange, inaccurate, fantastical or wrong.

And the kid usually gets that I’m faking it, and then the whole endeavor turns into a silly game of oneupmanship as we try to outdo each other’s wrongness. And before you know it, we’re creating. I guess this is why so many idea-generation exercises start with the question “Why?”

Because if you approach your work this way, as if you’re the five-year-old child asking your work “Why?” and you listen to the answers, no matter how strange, inaccurate, fantastical or wrong, at the very least, you’ll start having a dialog with your work, and conversation is creation.

Then, answer by answer, the work comes into being. It‘s how the work gets written…by you. The witness. The writer.