The Writing Life

I love not being in the literary game. I watch people play it, and watched them sign up for twitter and tweet things, and watched them sign up for instagram and post pictures of their books, and I'm watching them write little articles for substack. I can't imagine it's anything other than maddening. Who'd want to create content all the time? But it's like this. If we don't do something, we don't exist. We're so constantly trying to prove our existence. That proof can be aggressive, in the form of being a pushy person, or it can be really needy, needing attention, or it can be really arrogant, believing you should get your ideas out there. I'm so tired of ideas, of hearing people explain the world. It seems to me that I'd only like to relate to my own pain in order to learn how to better relate to the pain of other people. This begins in myself, extends out within my family, then with my friends, then with the people where I teach. I once believed that there was somewhere to go with all this, but I don't think there's anywhere to go, with writing or anything else, though the material world makes you believe there's somewhere to go. But there's not. There's just the constant work of relating to the razor's edge of pain, sadness or aggression or arrogance and ego, all versions of pain, of projecting. And this big game of making sure to constantly put oneself out there, so exhausting, and just a gloss or a kind of lubrication over dissatisfaction and pain, which is also a lubrication over joy and delight. Which of course means a distance from life itself. My worry, of course, is that because I don't platform and play the game, and because my books don't sell, that in the future new ones won't be published. But even this is an ego-driven worry. It's an illusion in the same way all the stuff on social media is an illusion. It's surprising to see that the literary world is just as susceptible to delusion and illusion as everyone else - there's just a higher intelligence quotient, a more intellectual way of contextualizing all the same stuff. I read books, but I don't really talk to anyone about what I read. I sit zazen, but I never speak about that. I write, and whether that writing ever gets published is not something I can know, and at some point, there's nothing to say about writing either. I can't imagine calling oneself a writer or an artist in any serious way. I can't imagine offering advice to anyone about "the writing life." Writing is a way to examine confusion - the basic samsaric ground of our lives - that's all writing is, and in that examination, one hopes to touch basic sanity or goodness, the earth itself, but it's all just shadows. It's only within direct experience that contact can be made.