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For the first time in my life, in my adult life, my twenties, I have a comfortable, if still difficult life; which is to say: I have managed to free myself of onerous roommates, stupid superiors at work, the most poisonous of false friends — if I want to, I can get up, go to work, come back home, have a beer, go to sleep comfortably, without much trouble. It’s troubling to be so troubleless — potentially. It feels risky to be close to settling in. In my early twenties, I could always demand of myself that I write a novel — but as I get older, it gets harder and harder to trick myself into doing so much work for so little reward; into naively plunging into heroic literary projects. Oddly, now close to thirty, I feel more powerful, more assured as a writer and artist than I have ever been, and yet, more aware than ever how ineffectual that innerpower is when projected externally: to, and for, other people. It’s not so much exhaustion, that kills creative action, as knowledge. My working assumption as a young man was that willing myself to become a serious (and even talented) writer would mean that I would be noticed; vaunted; respected — but this is not so; not really. If anything, the more you sharpen your gift, the more you become an object of suspicion to others.
I try to write my subway diary entries at the highpoint of my caffeine uptake; if I don’t, then I don’t write at all — I just close my eyes and hope that I know to happen them at the right stop. It seems to me that we are constantly trying to trick ourselves into ‘producing’ — that the heroic struggle of the modern person is with their own bodies and brains, which stubbornly resist being shoehorned into the relentless 24/7 schedule of awareness and information-flow. So be it.
