Dear Living Dark reader,
What are you really, principally about as a writer? And not only that, but what are you principally about as a reader?
These paired questions have become more important to me over the years. And they should be important to you, too. Because the two roles are not separate. Your core orientation in each role, that of writer and that of reader, has significant implications for both your relationship to the books and writers you cherish and your relationship to the things you write and the people who read them.
For me, figuring this out over a span of many years has been a slow discipline of self-understanding. It has become evident over time that my authorial role, first in the form of the horror stories that I wrote and published from 1998 until a few years ago, and then in my writings on creativity and spiritual awakening, has been to articulate and reinforce what my readers already, on some deep level, know. To restate the primal intuitions about writing, art, self, society, and reality that they already feel. Accompanied, yes, by a modicum of practical advice when it comes to the latter type of writing (on creativity and spirituality). But that’s not my principal métier. The role I’m called to take in this writer-reader relationship is a more pointedly inspirational one, an approach more of articulating and confirming than of providing concrete, practical instruction. A role of inciting and communicating a warm-electric glow of affirmation, of “Yes, that’s how it is!” and “I’m so glad someone finally said this.”
Unsurprisingly, I am personally acquainted with the powerful pleasure of reading such writing myself, of reading words that state what I have long been incubating as my own firsthand insights. From Lovecraft and Ligotti to Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle, and from Ray Bradbury and Natalie Goldberg to Victoria Nelson and Shunryu Suzuki, I have always been riveted by the experience of reading or hearing the words of someone else who clearly, cogently, and sensitively states things that I have already known, or that I have deeply, murkily intuited within the privacy of my inner world. Encounters with these external reflections of my own most private thoughts, feelings, and understandings have been among the most powerfully moving and magnetic experiences in my life.
And beyond even that, becoming self-aware of this phenomenon, and letting it motivate and orient not only my reading but my writing—a shift that occurred over the past couple of decades as my understanding of nondual self-realization and the muse/daimon/daemon/inner genius deepened—has been nothing less than transformative.
What are you reaching for and aiming at in your reading and writing? What are you aching to find, understand, achieve, accomplish, or realize? How are they both, in the end—your daimon of the pen and daimon of the page—one and the same?
Knowing what you are truly, deeply, centrally about as a reader/writer, two roles or identities that are inextricably paired, and bringing this core tone and purpose to bear on your actions in both areas in a way that simultaneously illuminates them and preserves their inherent mystery—this is a goal and an ideal devoutly to be desired.
I encourage you to take some time to tap into your own principal motivations, both when you read and when you write, by reflecting on them gently over time and letting an understanding of what you’re really after on both fronts grow organically.
You are seeking something when you read. There is a general theme that underlies your motivation when you’re drawn to read some particular thing, some specific book, author, essay, article, poem, blog post, or play. Can you see it? Can you state it?
You are also seeking something when you write, both as a general habit, practice, or calling and as the act of working on a specific text on a given day. Some consistent purpose lies behind each individual piece or project. Can you intuit it? Can you taste it?
What is it? What motivates you? What are you reaching for and aiming at? What are you aching to find, understand, achieve, accomplish, or realize? And how are the two arenas where this motive emerges, the readerly and the writerly, related? What do they share? How does this common core, this mutually infusing urge and desire, shape your approach to each separately and the two together? How are they both, in the end—your daimon of the pen and daimon of the page—one and the same?
Even more deeply: What lies beyond and stands before both? And how is it that interrogating these things at this level becomes an exercise in triangulating the very source of your being?
Warm regards,
Yes! This! We are what we read and write… or is it that we write and read what we are?
I too am attracted to writings that mirror what I feel and think and help me to become more clearly conscious of what passes through me. At the same time I look for voices capable of busting all my presuppositions, opening up unimagined perspectives. In my attempts at creative writing I similarly try to start from the core of what I feel and then to let it take me to conclusions I had not expected. Could these two so different experiences actually emanate from the same spiritual process, a struggle like a serpent's molting?