The creative act is endlessly complex and mysterious, at
least to me. I think I understand what I
do, but not what others do. A great
string quartet does not create music, but interpret it, which is surely
different. But I suspect jazz
aficionados, of whom I am not one, would say that great jazz combos do in fact
create collectively, and on occasion do so on the fly, as it were.
One aspect of my own creative act that has puzzled me for a
long time is my tendency, once I have written an essay or a book, to feel that
I am now finished with the subject of the writing and so turn to something
quite different. It is as though, by
transforming a problem or a text or a theory into my story – since all my
writing is the telling of stories – I have transmuted it into a permanent form
that I must then leave alone.
After writing my first book, an explication of the central
argument of the Critique of Pure Reason,
it would have seemed to me de trop
then to write a second or a third book on the Critique. I had wrestled
with Kant until I had, I believed, forced him to yield up his argument to me, and
that was that. My second book on Kant
dealt with his ethical theory, and in that case I emerged from the struggle
unsatisfied. Hence, many years later, I
returned to the task I had been unable to complete and wrote “The Completion of
Kant’s Ethical Theory in the Tenets of the Rechtslehre,
whose title says that I have now finished that story.
This sense that my writing transforms raw material into a
finished story is present even with relatively trifling pieces. For example, almost exactly a year ago, on July
13, 2013, I wrote a short explication de
texte of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I am nobody/Who are You?” This is a poem that speaks very directly to
me, and which I chose as the epigraph of my Autobiography. I had obviously been thinking about the poem,
off and on, for many years, but once I had captured it in the little story I
wrote, I was done with it, and I could not imagine returning to it to discuss
it further.
I wonder whether other writers experience their act of
writing in a similar manner.
5 comments:
Please forgive me for being off topic, but I just finished reading your In Defence of Anarchism, and I can understand why it was a hit. It explicates concisely why no state can come into being given a robust conception of personal autonomy.
Sometimes, it is more important to say something simple and basic clearly than to say something deep and penetrating in an obscure manner.
PS: Kant did the latter.
Thank you, Bjorn. I think it is the one thing I have written that will live on. Sort of like Thales' injunction "Shun beans." :)
By coincidence, Alexandra Socarides recently published this discussion of Emily Dickinson's "I am nobody" poem in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/poems-think-know-emily-dickinson
I read the Socarides discussion of the Dickinson poem, and I am going to just say it straight out: I think my reading is much better. It is also much shorter and better written, and has the virtue of saying what the poem is actually about.
Of course, in literary criticism, as in philosophy, there are no definitive answers to even the simplest questions [What do you suppose Dickinson meant by that?]p
Bob Nozick told me that he viewed his writing in a similar way. When he finished writing a book, it was time to move on to something else.
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