Why Write?

The origin of the gesture of writing is linked to the experience of a disappearance, to the feeling of having lost the key to the world, to have been thrown outside. To have acquired all of a sudden the feeling of something precious, rare, mortal. To have to find again, urgently, an entrance, breath, to keep the trace. We have to make the apprenticeship of Mortality.                                                                             -- Hélène Cixous

It was Tuesday morning. I moved through rote motions, Cheerio’s in the bowl, bagel in the toaster, coffee in the grinder, in the coffee maker, milk on the Cheerio’s. I went to the living room, turned on the computer and then the radio. Amy Goodman was on the air. It was too early. Had I slept that late? She was saying something about the building peeling away. Something was weird. I spent the rest of the day drop jawed, staring at the television, the radio on, turning to the computer to search for information again and again.

As the year moves on it becomes a moment in history, a demarcation point on which public policy pivots.

I was in the first semester of my MFA in writing program. Why write indeed. Sentences formed and reformed and none seemed good enough. In a time of horror, what is worthy of a thinking feeling person? What isn’t rhetoric when everything is bifurcated and positioned? But, really, when hasn’t it been a time of horror?

I love good writing. Sometimes I love bad writing. I love the human attempt to put life on a page. And I was comforted, informed, frustrated, and shocked by the writing I read in the aftermath of September 11th.

It seems almost puerile to call upon this moment in a consideration of why to write. No one in my family died. I did not lose a job. In some ways it is not mine.

I’ve struggled with depression for most of my life. I have a plethora of psychological processes to call upon. I know how to navigate the terrain of my own rage, sorrow, and fear. But I am too often silenced by it all.

I wake up in the morning. I move though the day beginning rituals. And I try to engage the page. I must not allow myself to disappear.

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