Portrait of the Artist

From Helen Vendler's review of the essays of German poet Durs Grunbein, in The New Republic:

Of the titles of these essays, my favorite is "Why Live Without Writing." (It is more compact in German, Warum schriftlos leben: the word schriftlos suggests a desolation that "without writing" does not). When this essay was recently published in the journal Poetry, it attracted the hostility of a reader who took umbrage at Grunbein's respones to the three questions inevitably (says Grunbein) put to poets: "Can you really live off it?"; "How long have you been writing for?"; and ("the trickiest one") "Why do you write?" The reader of Poetry thought that Grunbein was patronizing his audience; but in fact he was exploring why these questions--seemingly so simple--are impossible to answer as the listener might wish. Grunbein wittily turns the question around, offering as a response to "Why write?" the answer "Why not?"

"I don't want to frighten you," he sharply remarks, "but have you thought about what happens to people who aren't artists?" He quotes E. E. Cummings, in The enormous Room, who, when a reader asks, "What do you think people who aren't artists become?" shoots back, "I feel they don't become: I feel nothing happens to them; I feel negation becomes of them." Grunbein points out that the non-artists among us are "always terribly busy but finally disappear...without a trace." The living voice of the artist, in the long run, trumps the transient nvoices of the non-artists of the world.

Grunbein offers three reasons of his own for writing: self-assertion, self-extension, and self-exploration:

In writing, it is one's innermost being that tries to assert itself, paradoxically, by self-exposure...You write...[because without writing], trammeled up in your own limited lifespan, you would always remain incomplete, half a man, so to speak...From which it follows, third and last: you write because the brain is an endless wilderness, whose roughest terrain can be traveled only with a pencil.

(That "endless wilderness" bit is wonderful, to be traveled with a pencil, with a keystroke, with a dialogue).

The Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

Hamlet

Another axiom--That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Keats


Arthur Krystal, in a Times article, writes rightly about the difficulties some writers seem to have with the spoken word. Personally I can say that when I open my mouth, it seems as though my available vocabulary drops by half, and my verbal IQ by nearly as much; it is like a microcosm of aphasia, than which I cannot personally imagine a more awful affliction.

When writing, whether on the keyboard or even longhand, it is as if words and ideas come rushing via broadband, whereas while speaking it is as if I am rustling through a sprawling card catalog, a clock ticking loudly in the background. But it is not merely a matter of a certain leisure of writing, for I write quickly. I suppose it is mainly an issue of overlearning a certain mode.

While the literature of medical documentation carries very little general wisdom, one dictum meant to keep the lawsuits at bay--"If it wasn't documented, it didn't happen"--does reflect at attitude one can acquire toward text. The spoken word is usually evanescent, the textual word potentially forever. The spoken word is all about supporting a relationship--whether personal, professional, civic, or legal--whereas the written word can be about instantiating a reality.