Revelation

One of the frightening things about growing up is how much easier it gets to make other people believe the stories you tell about yourself.  I remember how, when I was a teenager, if someone asked me a simple question such as, “How are you?” or “What are you studying in school?” or “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I would become paralyzed with fear.  I remember feeling as though any answer I could possibly give would be laughed at, rejected, not taken seriously.  Back then, I would have given anything to be able to look my questioner in the eye and answer with confidence, “I’m fine.  I’m interested in philosophy.  I plan on becoming a teacher.”

Yet, now that I am grown, I have discovered another sort of frightening predicament:  the number of people who can — or, at least, will — challenge my stories about myself has shrunk drastically.  It’s not that I am especially untruthful or that I only associate with cowards.  It’s that the ways of the world are such that, all day long, we trade in stories whose truth is usually besides the point.  If I want the answer to your question to be, “Paul is a happy person and he’s doing really well these days,” there’s nothing you can really say to the contrary.  You may well think I’m full of shit, but I may well decide that you think that only because you’re jealous or full of shit yourself.  And so on and so on.  This is why the Buddha described the stories we tell about ourselves as a “thicket” or a “bramble”: if you try to get the bottom of one story, you generally end up in another.  And the weeds only get thicker as you get older.

When I was a teenager, I wrote poetry constantly.  I kept my poems in plain notebooks at the bottom of one of my desk-drawers  One day, my father, a poet himself, found one of my notebooks and began to read from it out loud.  He meant well (he was surprised and elated that his son was writing,) but I was thoroughly traumatized to have my words exposed in that way.  I decided I would hide my words better in the future, but unfortunately, I hid them too well: within a few years, I started writing less and less, until I stopped all together, strangled by writer’s block.  It wasn’t that day alone that caused my block.  It was the gradual strengthening of the idea that my words weren’t my own, that they depend on others’ approval.  For years, I struggled with writer’s block, and my only thought was how to conquer it.

But then something happened: I did learn how to conquer writer’s block, but the more I conquered it — the more I learned how to get my words out at all costs — the more I began to realize that what I was actually doing was becoming more skilled at pleasing  all the people I imagined would read what I was writing.  Rather than learning how to “express myself,” I realized, I was learning how to avoid anything others might find objectionable or dumb, and it was only this tacit people-pleasing that gave me the courage to finish projects and share my writing with the world.  This realization filled me with a new horror.

There is a great prejudice in our culture against writer’s block.  This prejudice is part of our American obsession with productivity.  The point, our culture tells us, is not to ask why you’re producing; the point is to produce.  People joke about the archetype of the disorganized artist, but if you look at the artists, writers, and musicians who actually succeed in America, you will see that it is the hyper-organized, hyper-productive ones, regardless of whether these individuals have anything interesting or valuable to say.  Surrounded by these paragons of prolificness, we forget that writer’s block, though it is sometimes painful and rarely helpful for forging a career in the arts, is often an important expression of dissatisfaction with the cheap and disposable way we usually use words.  Sometimes we can’t write because all the words we have at our disposal are false, and the fact that we recognize this is a good thing.  Writer’s block, in other words, is sometimes writer’s conscience, the awareness that not everything we think is true, valuable, or deserving of being written down.  This doesn’t mean we should stop trying and decide that we aren’t “real writers.”  That’s just laziness, which is actually the opposite of conscience.  Conscience is making more effort to find one’s true voice, not less.

How does one get in touch with this sort of conscience?  The best advice I ever heard given to a writer is, “Write only what you hear in your head.  Treat any other thoughts or words as something you would be ashamed to put down on paper.”  When I first heard this, it sounded strange to me.  What’s the difference between having a thought and hearing one?  All the difference in the world, I’ve since discovered.  When we actually hear our thoughts as voices in our heads (close your eyes, try it, and you will know what I mean) we enter a receptive state in which we are actually discovering something new.  What we hear might not be Shakespeare or valuable at all in and of itself, but the act of listening makes all the difference in the world, for it allows us the possibility of escaping from our habitual patterns of thought.  Another way of saying this is that truth (what all writing is based on, whether writers admit it or not) is not a statement or a proposition; it is a way of being open to what is there before we have the chance to tamper with it.  Most of the time, writers are so concerned with making sense or being sophisticated that they don’t see that sense and nonsense are equally far from truth, for sense and nonsense are based on our self-conscious agreements with the world, not on what is actually there inside us.  This is, again, the scary thing about getting older: you learn how to make nonsense sensible and how to make sensible nonsense without any of it meaning a thing.

“Treat any word or thought that you don’t actually hear as something you’d be ashamed to put down on paper.”  This is the spirit of revelation, actually, the attitude religious people have recognized in their prophets for thousands of years.  In the West, though, we’re weary of people hearing voices, and with good reason.  We have a candidate who’s sure God wants him to be president, terrorists sure they’re meant to put bombs in airplanes — and so we naturally associate this type of inner listening with folly and destruction.  But in many ways, we’ve missed the point in the way we criticize such behavior, for it isn’t listening to the voices in your head that gets you in trouble, it’s believing them.  In fact, not being aware of the thoughts taking place inside your head leaves you more vulnerable to acting on them without reflection.  The spirit of revelation is actually a very cautious one.  It says, “Take down everything you hear exactly as you hear it … and then study its meaning very carefully.”  These two movements of mind — listening and interpretation — are both necessary in order to find wisdom, for if we listen without interpretation, we are at the mercy of delusion, but if we interpret without listening, we are at the mercy of our egos.

In many ways, the process of truly knowing oneself can be thought of as a type of dictation.  Dictation is not very popular any more in our educational system.  We think it’s a passive activity that doesn’t encourage the imagination, and we’ve largely replaced it with group discussion and debate.  There are serious drawbacks to this, though.  For one thing, our memories suffer when we stop listening to the exact way others talk and replace this listening with only a vague sense of what someone else has said.  For another, our emphasis on debate trains our egos instead of our receptive faculties.  Every year I teach, I’m more aware of students’ total inabilities to repeat back to me what I’ve just said.  This is very troubling, not because I’m some sort of genius whose every word they should be hanging on, but because their inability to hear external words exactly implies an inability to listen to themselves.  With our American, democratic emphasis on discussion and argument, it’s possible that we’ve trained a nation of people who really have no idea what they think at all.

Someone asked me recently what my long-term goals as a musician were.  I got a little embarrassed, because to quote Wilco, I’m always a bit short on long-term goals.  I hemmed and hawed, but if I had the chance to answer that question again, I know what I’d say.  I’d say, “I want one day to write only what I hear.”  I’ve had moments of this — beautiful moments — but I’ve never been able to fully sustain this state of pure receptivity, pure dictation, for any length of time.  But what an ideal to aspire to!  To stand in one’s own presence and express it exactly as it is, without modification, without changing a thing.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Garden in Flames (October, 2011,) is available for free download at http://tamlin.bandcamp.com/