(On two themes)

(A)

As I sat down to write this piece (again and again attempting to begin and failing, taking each failure to heart so that the next time I sat to write it was harder to even think of writing and instead I wasted time reading articles on the internet or just used my time otherwise, but built and built toward a feeling that I could not write at all and in particular could not write this thing that I wanted to write, about community and continuity and fear and writing, that it was useless to have begun and futile to think of going on—), still reading Virginia Woolf’s diary, I found myself tearing up at insignificant things. Mostly to do with the sense of accompaniment there. Whatever else, there is rarely a day in her recording that doesn’t contain a visit (made or received). People—family, friends, acquaintances of her husband, public figures, other writers—are always coming and going.

There is a sense of continuity about these visits that seems tied both to the dailiness of keeping a diary (of course) but also to writing itself, which for me requires some sort of continuity: of the writing itself, as well as a continuity of surroundings. What do I mean? It’s a major problem for me as a writer at this moment, being detached from continuity. The people I have known longest no longer live near me (or even near one another). The conversations I’ve carried on longest no longer happen in rooms where we all sit; they take place online, on the phone, or with gaps of months or years in between. This includes my companion writers, who are spread all over, from the West Coast of the US to a farm in southeastern Minnesota to maritime France to the Midlands of England to Berlin. I don’t feel the need for continuity of my (physical) environment so much as I do for a continuity of accompaniment. The sense that company is not a precious thing, to be doled out in tiny increments over the course of a long time, but is abundant and ongoing, a huge space in which material can be generated—into which I can write without sensing a limit.

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(B)

This (i.e. talking about limits I sense for the writing) all has to do with fear as well, although it’s easier to talk with some bravado about patterns and Working and Being Productive and guilt and good practice. But what I really mean most of the time, when I’m not writing (not writing when I want to be writing, that is, as opposed to not writing when I want to be doing other things), is that I’m afraid of what might happen if I write, or I’m afraid to go where the writing might want to go if I begin.

Fear of not having anything important to say/interesting/fear that my story is dull/that I have done nothing/that my story, worse than dull, is ignorant/hurtful/can be read that way…fear of the reader, fear of being public/being visible.

Also the fear of doing this alone, in the face of my own mortality, which becomes more present and real day by day. (Woolf, 13 November, 1917: “people wont [sic] write to me”; and the next day “Again a day of no letters”. Notable enough, the days without company, to write them in the book.)

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(A)

Accompaniment eases fear. We set out into the woods together and although it was no longer bright (and would be evening soon) we were together and therefore we were less afraid. That’s a fairy-tale premise, that together we can strike on into new territory. But it’s true for me, that writing with others (I don’t mean in the same room, although I enjoy being in rooms with other writers, quietly working—and this is why, here, in a city where I don’t know any other writers, I often work in the public library) makes the writing seem more possible by dint of others’ doing it. It’s like a statement of faith: here we are together, and we believe the road is there. So we’re walking down it.

Working-together in rooms, but also in the same city, in the same time (in the same time-zone!), in the same language, in conversation, in solidarity with one another, in the same country, with occasional pauses for talk, receiving your visit after a day of writing, working-together with the possibility of walking home together after writing…

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(B)

Of course also the fear that the work is simply not very good, that it will fail the trust of working-together. Or that in the face of death it is pointless to make art. Ordinary, inescapable. Easier for me to disregard or set aside when in the presence of a visitor, easier to walk through it accompanied by another writer.

(27 January 1915: “We talked about my novel [which everyone, so I predict will assure me is the most brilliant thing they’ve ever read; & privately condemn, as indeed it deserves to be condemned]”.)

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(A)

Therefore I am reading this diary—with its resolute dailiness and ordinariness*, its routine into which the work of writing and the importance of company (so important each visit is noted, rendering these visits [if fundamental] also commonplace). I’ve said it before but the accretion of the daily reassures me (about what ‘can be written‘—also about a way in which the writing itself creates continuity and company).

• (Sunday 26 August, 1917: “This is the first bad day we have had; even so, the morning was fine. The high wind of the last few days has broken leaves off, although only a few of the trees have begun to turn. Swallows flying in great numbers very low & swift in the field. The wind has brought down some walnuts, but they are unripe; the wasps eat holes in the plums, so we shall have to pick them. My watch stopped.” Observation of the ordinary accumulates and becomes something more than ordinary, and the non-pastoral interjection at the end just adds to the sense of precise observation—the continuity of the world encompassing this here, not just that out there.)