Writing remains an unfulfilled promise. I am searching for it unattended. It is said it can be one’s mission, destiny, or salvation. Writing is all there is in this lonely, empty palace.
I never had an easy relationship with writing. I find it rather boring. Nonetheless, I catch myself persistently drawn to it. It is like sheer magnetism. Music has always been my preferred means of expression. A therapist once suggested that music allows for an opacity that I find comforting. The non-verbal nature of most music protects me from being close to my thoughts. Written words, however, pertain to a zone of intimacy that borders on nudism. A ticket into the always excessively lit room of one’s skull. And these insistent pests don’t go away once muttered. They remain engraved on the page, refusing to follow the author’s mind in time. To return to anything that one has written in the past is always a source of great embarrassment. Like recognizing an old friend you don’t remember the name of. And, some time later, like being recognized by an unpleasant character you don’t remember at all, although they seem to know everything about you. How could you ever let such a nuisance in and share with him all your secrets?
Words are deeply serious and occasionally deeply goofy. I learned to see wordsmiths as severe and humorless. In everyday pictures, everyone smiles. But on books’ back covers, they never do. There is something mournful about putting one’s thoughts into words. Like killing our thoughts and burying them. Books, thus, are graveyards. A dead body never grows, just like the written word. Few are those who dare crack a joke on such occasions.
James Hillman has a strange conception of individuality. He borrows from Plato—like almost everyone. He suggests our birth is not a random event, but rather a choice: our own choice. We (or better yet, our souls) choose everything—our parents, the time, and the place. Everything is determined beforehand because we are set out to complete a mission. To fulfill a purpose. To our aid is something called the daimon. The daimon looks after us and guides us to this fulfillment. When we are born, we forget about our purpose. It is the daimon’s job to remind us.
Perhaps it was then, in that bookstore. It by Stephen King. Voluminous, intriguing. I was hooked by that foreign object, so alien to my book-barren home. I was around nine years old. I begged my parents to have it. They reluctantly agreed. The book, however, remains unfinished. It was not on the horror shelves that I would find it echoing. I only half got the daimon’s message then.
We are on the lookout. Sometimes it is in a rainbow coloring the sky, on a sticker in the back of a car, or on the advertisement break on television. It rushes through us like a lightning bolt. We shiver, taken by surprise. The fuzzy, mumbled montage emerges as a solved puzzle. The daimon whispers in our ear, and we suddenly figure it out. It was there all along; it all made sense. In a fraction of an instant, this cold and indifferent planet suddenly reveals itself to be revolving entirely around us. Only to fall back to orbit the very next minute, with its bashful stars, moon, and sun.
We often try to deny it and even fight back, resisting the urge to surrender. Insisting in the worn-out suits of our identity, we try to dust them off and retain their elegance. We can’t be this gullible. Stubbornly standing up, we don’t allow ourselves to fall. For the critical mind, this is unacceptable. The odds are against us. The numbers don’t match. So we refuse to take the bet.
But how far can we go if we keep ignoring it? We hear it in the back of our heads at night, trying to sleep. It is not verbalized, but we feel it. We dream about it, and forget while brushing our teeth, in an asinine attempt to civilize it. And if the armies of civility triumph, winter befalls on the center of our chest, where a dried-out acorn lies. We start to stare at ourselves in the mirror, but find only a mirage of what could have been. Our true selves steer so far away that we can no longer see them, much less understand them. We become strangers, mingling with other weary faces in public transport, all reflecting one another.
I keep thinking—like humans, words need to be born. And like humans, they are best conceived in acts of love, although sometimes they are the offspring of violence. What if, like humans, they also have a destination, a potential they are meant to fulfill? That would mean that, when given birth to, words also have a harbor they are meant to dock in. Then, it is not us, the writers, who decide what they are to be. Instead, they force themselves out through us. Because they need to be somewhere and reach someone. We feel we own our words. But what if it is the other way around? What if it is us who owe the words their birthright, like daimons who set them out on the path they are destined to trail?
These words I am now typing come out in a painful delivery. My resistance towards breeding them has been persistent. To write openly and publicly requires an immense effort of love, although one of letting go instead of holding on. It is to let go of the struggle and to allow for love, much like gravity, to knock us down. Paradoxically, it is by losing this fight that we can grant ourselves some dignity. And, as stated previously, it is through the means of love that conceptions should ideally take place. It is only fair to follow this intuition.
If we ponder over the overwhelming abundance of words currently produced—especially the empty shells of words by large language models—it is easy to underestimate the effects that writing can still bring about. Our mind is unable to make sense of big numbers. In this billionfold universe of ours—of billions of words and billions of people—what are the odds that we will find our match? That the encounters we are about to have are precisely those set by our daimon so our soul can find its home? By considering only the vastitude of words available, it seems all but pointless to bring new ones into existence. However, it is perhaps in this exact vastitude that its reason to be is found.
If words are so copiously spread so that each person will likely meet in their lifetime only a very private set of words, wouldn’t it be because the soul of particular words was conceived to find the soul of a particular person? What if the union of words and person was meant to be by their own choice, before the words and the person were even born? Thus, any meeting between words and people turns from fortuitous to entirely necessary.
This suspension of rational demands offered by mythology can help us make meaning of our overwhelming everyday existence. If reason is a doctor, mythology is a friend. Sometimes what we need is a friend to take us by hand, not a new blister pack of medicine. Only now, when writing has become almost entirely divorced from utility, do I find myself most comfortable with it. Mostly, because I can finally put to rest all substantiated reason to explain my decision. Ironically, it was the mythological motivation that resulted in the concrete actualization of words coming to be. After all, they were never interested in me. What they were seeking, all along, was you.