Spring Update: What is writing? A very human attempt
to understand suffering and bring us to our ultimate goodness
In the writing cave this month, the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong has entered. Who wouldn’t want a charming and articulate man named Ocean in their writing cave? He’s lovely.
I’ve been a collector of Ocean Vuong poems and phrases for several years now.
You are a participant in the future of language.
The future is not in your hand, it’s in your mouth. We need to articulate the world we want to live in. - Ocean Vuong
What he says and how he says it has been untangling a strange and very real drive inside me, one that my little brother Adriano knows well because once, in the Tate Modern 20 years ago, I cried in front of him, confessing that I needed to be an artist but didn’t know how.
What exactly did I admit to my brother? I looked at his 19-year-old face (me, I was 25), and said, I feel the art so deeply in this room. It feels like understanding something I’ve been looking for. It holds me steady. I want to stay here.
But I don’t know how to enter into it, like being a doctor or being a lawyer. What is the route into its job-ness? What will allow it to feel respectable, financial, explainable to others?
Right now, I said, it just feels opaque and too hard for my sensibilities.
I tried living without writing.
How can I explain what it felt like? I was shaky, mostly. My friend Melany talks about inputs and outputs. That some people on this planet are more susceptible to soaking in more of what’s around them—all the nuances. Their senses are wider, more sensitive. And thus they require ways to release all that they take in. It’s what makes people into musicians, poets, designers, etc. Their need of output.
And so now I view writing as the electric guitar I wield to pump out all that comes into me ragged, granular and dissonant.
There is a desire, I suppose, in all of us to create harmony from dissonance.
But then Ocean takes it further (of course he do es). Writing possesses a ghostly quality as well, he say. It exists as a portal into the great chain of being.
Ocean:
you make a sentence so new and exacting to your desire that it startles you into a new vision, a new life, one that exists through the presence of elders before you, both here and gone and some nearly forgotten but never lost.
YES. This is the treasure found through hours and hours of needling work—a new vision.
I cannot tell you how many times I unexpectedly land there, but only after hours of doubting I ever will.
The philosopher Adam Phillips said, “When I write, things occur to me.”
Writing is tidal. Writing is excavation work, and comes out of cause and effect. Something happens, or has been always happening, and then language comes along to make it known. And this form of knowingness (hopefully) allows us to handle our happenings more gently.
Ah, writing.
More on Ocean and what writing is….you see, Ocean Vuong is barely 5 feet tall, the son of a Vietnamese immigrant who was illiterate and worked in a nail salon in Connecticut. His mother never could read the award-winning work he wrote but she watched him read to others, watched people applauded him—the same types whose nails she did everyday.
I am pushing 5’4” (for now), and am the daughter of 2 immigrants who were educated, who read the great political and social philosophers of our time and kept notebooks, wrote letters, carried debates with diplomats and other “elites.” My mother is an academic, my father an engineer.
There was what we could discuss—political events, leaders, cultural figures, how to keep successful and focused—and what was more difficult.
Ocean:
I was in a world where anger, rage and violence was a way to control the environment for people who had no control of their lives. A lot of them were hurt and wounded.
Like Ocean, my family came to the US to escape war, violence and oppression.
A memory: my Afghan aunt throwing me into the bathtub and washing my hair as if it were the only thing she could make beautiful and clean, and restful.
Ocean:
The poison of war entered them...they passed it to me.
What is writing to all of this?
Ocean:
I didn’t become an author to have a photo in the back of a book…
the desire to be a writer probably started with the desire to commit myself to understanding suffering…
…and our goodness.
I come back to me and Adriano at the Tate Modern. What does art say? What does art-making facilitate? What is its use?
Ocean:
Writing is about listening to the world.
Writing is compassionate watching and listening of our species.
I leave you with this. Here’s to new visions.
Nadia, love thé sharing if your moment with your brother. It feels very important. And the inspiration from Ocean is so good. Voice the world we want to see. It’s an urgent call. Love this.