MY WRITING

by Hugh M. Lewis

Writing is the crowbar of the mind, prying open the problems of the world, letting in the light of knowledge and letting out the hidden elements of understanding.

I use my words more like a crowbar in the world than a sword or a foil. My writing lacks the skilled refinement and finesse that is the mark of a good writer. I must depend upon the brute strength and basis vocabulary to move, bit by bit, inch by inch, the mountains of the world. Because words do not usually flow easily from my mind, my writing is labored, typically difficult, strained and consuming of much time and energy. I must count the rewards for my writing not in terms of money earned, but only in terms of the number of mounds of meaning that've been moved.

I would trade off my whole compendium of poetry for a single simple poem that’s profound enough to be published and read in the world. I must content myself with quantity rather than quality.

Better a single word to summarize a thousand pages than a thousand pages to summarize a single word.

Excessive verbosity, verbiage, loquaciousness and ‘logorrhea’ are the mark of mediocrity in writing—the sign of uncertainty and the lack of credibility, that the writer does not really know what she/he is talking about, and it is talking more around the point than to the point.

Written words must be more like deeds than mere words. They must act upon the imagination of the reader rather than just communicate intentions or meanings. Words must get things done with the least amount of excessive effort. Only in this way will an author be taken seriously enough to be read with any interest.

Words written for mere self-expression go out but do not ever come back to close the hermeneutic circle. Such words may communicate, but seldom do much more than this in the world.

Written words must move mountains, not make mountains out of molehills.

The world is so replete and inundated with written words and printed trivia that few people can afford to take the extra time required to sort through the junk to find the jewels of literature. People can hardly be blamed from editing from their existence so many mixed up messages which assault their minds and insult their intellects. Our world suffers as much from the word pollution of the collective mind as it does from any other kind of ecological contamination.

It is wise to wonder whether the vast majority of printed or published material is worth the paper it is printed upon, especially when the few remaining trees of the world’s forests are becoming so precious.

There is little intrinsic about my own growing mound of printed paper that represents the compendium of my writing which should set it apart from this mountain of mental verbiage. Because of this, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify my writing purely in its own terms, especially when its investment grows more onerous and less rewarding with each additional page.

Making paper mountains may only be biographical and historical compulsion. But even so, it remains a very human preoccupation, and what but history and biography itself would pass judgment upon what will soon pass away and what might long remain. My small mound grows daily because too soon in my tedium I can find nothing better to do with my time.

My poetry is closely like my painting, so close as to lead me to believe they have a common connection in my creative and active imagination, and fulfill a common normative need in the expression and external production of my human beingness in the world.

The purpose of both poetry and painting is not to persuade the human mind, but to induce the human imagination to experience new states of being and new possibilities of becoming in the world. Poems and paintings enrich our experience of the world much more they cost to produce. Poetry and painting is not merely intellectually interesting, but imaginative intriguing and even spiritually stimulating in life. The power of the poet and painter is to convey the same experience and sense of fascination and wonderment of the world to the reader or viewer.

If I can with my words just open one other mind, jarring it loose from its prejudices and preconceptions to let in the light of the wider world view, like a crowbar that pries loose a bent and rusty nail, then my paper mountain will have been worth the waiting.

The air is free and printed words are relatively cheap—perhaps this is way so little money is to be made in writing.

Better one word of truth than a thousand of deceit.

The true meaning of a text can never be read directly from the words, but must be found somewhere between the lines, between the pages, between the covers, and between the shelves. To live entirely in a world of words is to live in a stuffy, interior world of illusion without a window to open to let in fresh air and sunlight and without a door through which to pass onto the wider pathways of the world. One must learn to read with one eye upon the word, and one eye upon the world, and with one’s head in the clouds but one’s feet upon the ground.

Better to be completely illiterate than to lead a life of boredom stringing together trite clichés. Words can imprison the mind as much as they can liberate it.

There are no words that do not reveal as much as they conceal, which do not tell lies as they speak truth. Words are always half true and half-false. They are always the vessels of ignorance and prejudice as much as they are the vehicles if wisdom and enlightenment. This is their paradox and their power.

I started writing because I felt I had something important to say when nobody else was listening to me. It was my method for dealing with the madness of my loneliness in the world and became my madness for methodically treating that loneliness. Now, thirteen years and twenty odd manuscripts later, I’m still writing and people are still not paying much attention to me. I guess its time to try to publish something.

What I would give for the volume of poems that I have dreamed of only to awaken and arise to suffer a loss of words, or that I have put away for a later date only to become forgotten and irretrievably lost. One must learn to ‘grasp the moment’ of inspiration, or else relinquish the preoccupation of plying poems composed on the fly.

If talking it all out is therapy for the soul, writing it all out is therapeutic for the mind—relieving it of the mental morass of confused conceptions, contradictory notions, and nonsensical meanings. Writing clarifies and sharpens the intellect, exercising the brain’s analytical and imaginative powers, jogging the memory and one’s power of reason. It is little wonder that writing can often be frustrating and difficult experience.

Writing mediates the gap between the word and the deed. Writing may either prove to be a precursor to action or a substitute for it and an excuse for inaction.

One person’s fact may be another’s fiction, and there is nothing in writing it in words that doesn’t make it seem so.

If I had a quarter for every page I’ve written, I would have enough to at least put a down upon a small house. As it is I must content myself with feeling at home with my typewriter. It is better if one’s words dwell in the world than to have one’s world dwell in words. Better to live in the words of the world than in the worlds of the words.

I prescribe heavy doses of writing for anyone who feels the least bit foolish, ill at ease, or confused with the world. There is no quicker or more complete remedy for the inanities of the world.

Writing has always been for me something of a transformational experience. I emerge from the wilderness of a new manuscript somewhat altered in character than how I entered the forest. It is something like a journey in which there is never any returning. It is never a journey without some cost or trade off in terms of one’s time, energy, flexibility, and alternative opportunity in the world, and too much such transformation inevitably leads to burn out of one’s resourcefulness and involvement.

Words are the trees of the forest of the world, and books are like maps, which chart the pathways in small sections of the wilderness. The wilderness of the world is vast and its trees are too many—writers are but helpless wanderers of the woods, marking out different trails between its many regions.

It is fitting that my stormy creativity should at last come to rest upon the rock of writing. More than in any other form of creative expression, writing provides an anchor to the restless world.

My first manuscript was written on the top of a wooden footlocker in an open squad bay. It was a very difficult and frustrating process at first, but soon became an obsession that consumed all my extra energies and spare time. No one during that year bothered to ask me what I was writing about. It must have seemed to the lifers such an incredible absurdity that they could not but doubt its values. For me it was a separate reality, an escape from the intolerable stresses and strains of the moment.

Now I can complete a manuscript in several weeks and though it consumes the main part of my time and energy, I have extra to spend on other things. Writing does not come now as hard as it used to be. But few still bother to ask me what I’m writing about, and I think most must still not believe in it. It remains a separate reality from which I can regularly escape from the vicissitudes and problems of everyday life.

Writing creates a world in which I have supreme mastery. The author always has the final word, and it is this absolute authority which is both the corruption and the power of writing.

Ours has long been an age of literacy. We are creatures of the written and printed word. Our signatures carry the legal authority of our whole life, and is the basis for all legal transactions, the possession of property and public authority and identity in the world. Whatever the many implications of literacy for the transformation of the human mind and world, we cannot now easily escape the consequences of these historical transformations.

As long as humans remain human, there will always be interesting books to be written and read.

Books and words have been the building blocks of human civilization and the flagstones of the way of human history. Without them we would have neither history, civilization not humanity in the same sense that we know them.

My will to write, and my many unpublished manuscripts and collections of poetry, have always symbolically represented a kind of intellectual and spiritual declaration of independence in the world.

My writing has been a way of silently but positively asserting my will and my own way in the world—speaking our silently without fear or recrimination or retribution or persecution for my words and thoughts.

If we value the freedom of speech as the guarantee of the freedom of thought, then we must value equally the freedom of the press as the only guarantee of the freedom of speech and thought.

Politicians will always depend upon the publication and dissemination of propaganda by which to persuade and warp the will of the people to the politician’s own ends and against the people’s own best interests.

People may burn books but their fires can never be destroy the truths which the words represent, nor take away the freedom of mind such books symbolize and which led to their creation in the first place.

Though there are copyright laws and patents pending, no human being or corporate group has a monopoly or a corner on the market of the human mind. The idea that ideas and thought can be a privilege of private ownership the same way that material possessions are is inherently antithetical and destructive to the very freedom of mind upon which the creation of new ideas depends. Such practices can only be regarded as fascist and anti-intellectual in the final analysis.

The virtue of the human mind is that it is ultimately and necessarily free from social control, and the written word is both the primary instrument and expression of that freedom.

I had a kind of writer’s block for a few years. I felt as though I couldn’t write well what I wanted to say, and whenever I actually started to write, I felt as if I had nothing at all to say. Neither the thoughts nor the words to express them by were available when I needed them, though I had off moments of literary inspiration. This was a maddening, frustrating, stultifying and ultimately deadening experience, but I continued to force myself to write as much as I could stand, in spite of many interruptions and existential interims in my life, and though finishing a piece frequently proved even more difficult than starting them, and many things were left unfinished, I eventually broke free of this bloke and gradually loosened up enough to feel at ease with my writing and only then did writing begin to be a genuinely enjoyable experience for me.

Looking back upon this period, I am not sure what the sources of this block really were. One important factor seemed to be a susceptibility to a kind of authoritative criticism and influence in my writing as well as in many other areas of my life, by people I then regarded to be my ‘significant others’, but who proved in the long run to be my ‘fair weather friends’ and acquaintances of circumstance and convenience. I could call them, in hindsight, more like Minotaurs of the academic labyrinth than real intellectual mentors. Needless to say, these people are no longer a part of my life, nor are the kinds of intellectual-emotional-social interdependencies which our relationships represented. Breaking free of my writer’s block had something to do with breaking free of the kinds of social bonds in the world kept my sense of self identity in the world as a writer bound to other people’s petty prejudices and preconceptions. It is unfortunate that in Academic arenas of authorship, such dependencies seem to be the norm rather than the exceptions to the rule. My best writing has never been academic.

My writing over the years has only improved by small increments and has moved only gradually in some directions while in others it has changed only slightly if at all. I sometimes read some of my earliest stuff and am struck by its freshness, directness, its unsophisticated strength and vitality of style. I must admit that a great deal of my writing has been roughshod and only first draft, and often not written with the view of the readership in mind. My writing has represented for me more of a personal, psychological odyssey through my life than any kind of social trip in the world.

Birds of a feather flock together….different strokes for different folks….the pen is mightier than the sword….between the cup and the lip there is many a slip….etc. etc.

Books are just like tools. Everybody wants to borrow them but no one likes returning them. I have lost many books and a few tools this way.

It is necessary that a writer be well read. A person who always writes but rarely reads is one who remains unable to read her/his writing in the way that others will read it. It is like a person who believes she/he is experiencing the world by sitting in front of the television set. I've learned my lessons the hard way. Reading remains the only counter balance a writer has to keep from going too far. There are so few good writers in the world because there are so few good readers.