Sportswriter Red Smith said, "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
One of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace found it necessary to hang himself last week. I admired his insight and ability to express his view of the world, but I found his writing somewhat verbose and dense. While I would read his essays and mentally edit some of his paragraph-length sentences, I still savored each word--until the weight of the words (and of the book itself) would tip out of my sleepy hands. In fact, I don't think I ever finished one of his books. He was one of those writers I read not necessarily for the pleasure of reading but for the pleasure of his writing. I think he was often drunk on his own swirling thoughts and swam self-indulgently in his philosophical musings. I can identify with that, but it's really too deep for me. I prefer shallow.
The news called his death "an apparent suicide." Usually hangings are, I guess. Unless he was strangled to death, then someone hoisted his limp, heavy corpse up into a noose. It could happen. I could see it in a dark comedy. Maybe I have. Funny stuff.
Why do so many writers and artists kill themselves? Is it creativity overload that drives them to death? Some sort of tortured genius that the body can't sustain? I think most writers struggle with a sense of apartness. A heightened self-consciousness. Trying to answer Why am I me? Good writers are observers who can choose words well, even effortlessly, and put them in a certain order such that readers respond with emotion, thought, adrenalin, comfort, or connection. Creative people can take in too much. More than the mind can manage. A sensory burden. They carry so many sights and sounds that simmer and stew until they boil over onto scraps of paper, or a computer screen, and into a book if they make the cut.
How can artists who have such skill at relating life let life kill them? It must be the unwritten words, the ones they hold inside. The words that stick in the throat and strangle, the words that cut off blood to the heavy head. Words left hanging.
How do you like my morose side? Not pretty, I know.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Carrying the Weight of the Word
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Dear Sylvia Plath,
it’s bleak and cold today. gusting wind cries with drops of dirty rain lashing the windows like human tears borne in the recent storm and deposited far afield. i step off the porch, turn to the withered lot, and face the sky. as i stand now on barren furrows of earth the spatters on my face form rivulets running down from the corners of my closed eyes. i spread my arms open and accept the torment falling on me out of ashen and torn clouds…
Jean Améry, Austrian writer. holocaust survivor. “a slight pressure by the tool-wielding hand is enough to turn the other--along with his head, in which are perhaps stored Kant and Hegel, and all nine symphonies, and the World as Will and Representation--into a shrill squealing piglet at slaughter.” suicide by barbituates
Hubert Aquin, Canadian writer. left a suicide note claiming his death was a free and positive choice, stating, "I have lived intensely, and now it is over." the self-destructive thoughts of his novel's narrator foreshadow its author’s own death: Aquin shot himself in the head
Vachel Lindsay, American Poet.
“It is portentous, and a thing of state
That here at midnight, in our little town
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest...”
Lindsay committed suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol
John Kennedy Toole, American writer, posthumous Pulitzer for “A Confederacy of Dunces”. breathed carbon monoxide through a hose attached to his car exhaust- the suicide note he left on the dashboard was torn up by his mother.
Spalding Gray. American writer. the night before his death he had seen Tim Burton's film Big Fish, which ends with the line "A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal". Gray's widow, Kathie Russo, has said “You know, Spalding cried after he saw that movie. I just think it gave him permission. I think it gave him permission to die.” he jumped over the rail of the staten island ferry
Hunter S. Thompson, American writer. his friend says “…he told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment…. I think that the truth of what rings through all his writing is that he meant what he said.” from his suicide note: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt"- shot himself in the head
Virginia Woolf, English writer. wrote to her husband “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do...You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read… If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer…” then she weighted her pockets down with stones and walked into a river
Dear Wikipedia Showoff:
Once again you provide an educational, well-written, yet highly intrusive and obnoxious comment. Well done, my friend.
Wouldn't it be ironic for someone to die from an overdose of anti-depressants?
first, i can't believe i left out Ernest Hemingway- author of the Greatest (American) Book Ever Written- "A Moveable Feast"- and suicide by shotgun. sorry.
second, he wasn't a writer, but the best suicide has to be that of Lawrence Oates, an explorer with the doomed Scott South Pole expedition. when it became clear that he could continue no further and that his rations might help the others survive longer, he said to them, "I am just going outside, and may be some time". whereupon he walked out of the tent to his death in an Antarctic blizzard.
(in a cruel twist that you'll enjoy most, his sacrifice was for naught, as within 2 weeks, malnutrition and frostbite still wound up killing his colleagues!)
anyways, i maintain that the source doesn't matter if the material is good, and all i saw in your comment was "******, well-written, ********".
so now i can die happy
I never cared for Hemingway's writing really, except for that beautiful little gem.
I just realized something--and I'm ashamed to admit I thought of it yesterday when I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about it. Sometimes hangings are "apparent" suicides because they are actually the result of AEA (autoerotic asphyxiation) like what killed INXS's Michael Hutchence. What an embarrassing way to die, right? If anyone doesn't know what it is, Google it. Unless Chris would be kind enough to provide a treatise on it here.
Post a Comment