EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS

Here's the question that has been lately on my mind: Am I done with writing?

It popped up again this morning in meditation and I mulled it over without coming to any clear conclusion. It's a deeply troubling question because it's how I have defined myself since... well, since the age of 12, when I decided that I wanted to be a writer. When people ask me, noting the indisputable evidence of my now advanced years, whether I'm retired, I have always responded--and not solely in jest--that writers never retire.

And yet... and yet... The part of me that's missing these days is the part the feels the urgent drive to write. It's something that every artist, every creative person will recognize, that feeling that if I'm not doing it, something is not right. It's not guilt so much as a sense of incompletion, an un-ease, a sense that I have not done today what I was meant to do. But in recent days it has begun to feel more like guilt--and guilt, in my view (along with near its cousin, self-pity), is one of those negative emotions that need some serious internal debate.

A contributing factor, surely, is my recent experience with an essay I agreed to write that turned out to be a great deal more demanding than I had expected--and, eventually, deeply unsatisfying. My initial mistake was to jump to a conclusion as to what was being asked of me, and to work long and hard toward that goal; a misjudgment that was compounded by my obsession--especially over the holiday season--with a deadline and my impatience to get ahead with the project before receiving all the information that I'd need.

I have had a similar experience only a couple of times over a long professional career, when what I have written in response to a commission has disappointed the expectations of the person who requested it. It's the worst of feelings, and in this instance I was left with the determination never again to accept a commission unless it was clearly defined in advance as something I myself felt driven to do, and certainly, least of all, for the promised fee--even though that was not the motivation in this case. I need to pay more attention to the hunger of my ego, which has been perhaps too easily seduced by the flattery implied such requests.

But I'm still left with the bigger question. Am I done with writing altogether? In the past, there has always been something that sets me off--an art show, a book, a movie, a political event, or merely something in my personal life that needs to be addressed. Demands it. Those who know me well are familiar with--perhaps even tired of hearing--the adage that I cite on every possible occasion: How do I know what I think 'til I see what I say? Writing has always been my way of coming to understand myself and the world around me. It's not just a matter of "self-expression", but rather a much more existential challenge to define experience, to find out who and where I am in the world at any given moment.

This essay is evidence, of course, that this impulse has not totally abandoned me. But I have been noticing that it requires a greater effort to find it--and a still greater effort to respond. I could, for example, have perfectly well spared myself the review I posted a few days ago about the book by Michelle Obama. Few people in the world--well, actually, no one other than myself!--would have noticed its absence. I was much moved yesterday at Disney Hall by the Phillip Glass symphony, "Lodger," conducted by the composer John Adams with an extraordinary performance by the African singer Angélique Kidjo--but I can live without feeling the compulsion to write about it, as I might have done in the past, in order to "know what I think."

It seems, then, that I no longer feel the pressing need to process my experience in the act of writing. Or am I simply being lazy, I ask myself? (If it were just laziness, I respond, then surely the guilt would be kicking in--but I don't feel it...) And the next existential question, as yet unanswered is this: If it's true that I'm done writing, then... what's next?