Truth and Monkey Shrieks

I am exactly 44 pages into Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and it is already, by far, the best book about writing I’ve ever encountered. I haven’t read any of her novels, but I plan to, I almost have to, because how could someone who knows so much about her craft — who really really fundamentally gets it — not produce wonderful novels?

Here’s what I’m talking about:

You sit down. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every other morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again … There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you may have meningitis.

Or this:

Very few writers really know what they’re doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do — you can either type or kill yourself.”

All of this stuff is gold, in the advice department, but the book’s got so much more than that going for it; it’s beautifully written, spare and taut and wise and funny as hell. It’s always seemed to me that books about writing need to be the best written books there are, just as priests need to be the most moral, upright people there are, or chemistry teachers need to be able to recite the periodic table backwards and forwards and whip up vials of nitro-glycerin without breaking a sweat. Otherwise they’re just not credible.

But there’s one assertion Lamott makes, and keeps making, that I find a little troubling. Not just because I don’t agree with it, but because I can’t agree with it, and I so much want to agree with everything this woman is saying.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand what we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

The problem with this, in my opinion, is that every quest after truth is bound to fail; and not because Truth doesn’t exist, but because it exists everywhere, in so many motley and divergent permutations that, if you examine it for any length of time, the whole concept becomes meaningless. There are a few baselines truths, of course: killing people is bad, George W. Bush has the intellect of pizza crust, my dog was sent to me by God to punish me for not believing in Him. But even these baselines don’t hold up to scrutiny, there are always exceptions. Truth isn’t solid and monolithic, it’s a series of subjective compromises, a plague of Gray Areas mixed together and stained white or black to appear Absolute.

And besides, who wants to get at the truth, especially about yourself? It always seemed to me that people who spend an excessive amount of time trying to understand themselves are just asking for trouble; it’s like digging through quicksand, looking for landmines. The stuff I don’t know about myself I don’t know about myself for a reason, probably a good one. People should let sleeping incendiary devices lie.

Case in point: I recently stopped reading a book called Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Gutterson. It’s a beautiful novel, beautifully written, funny and fascinating and so bone-jarringly sad that I literally cannot bring myself to read another page. Books don’t usually make me sad, so I made the mistake of wondering why this one did, and then of linking it to my own life, which led to all sorts of unpleasant revelations that just made me sadder. It was a pointless exercise in self-depression, and would likely have continued indefinitely — or until I found whatever land mine was at the core of all this, and blown myself to bits — had I not had the foresight to pull out, put the book down, fire up the XBox and play Halo for five straight hours. I must have killed a thousand of those vile evil alien bastards, and by the time I was done my hands were shaking, my eyes were bleary, my legs were useless, and Snow Falling on Cedars was gone.

Anyway. My point here, as best as I can tell, is that you shouldn’t seek after the Truth about yourself, because the Truth doesn’t just Hurt, it Really Really Really Hurts. If you stabbed yourself with a knife, and noticed that there was blood gushing out of the wound, and that you were wracked with pain, and that it was quite likely that you would soon die unless you sought medical attention, would you (a) stab yourself again or (b) stop stabbing yourself? I would choose (b).

Reading over what I’ve just written, I find that most of it (except maybe the part about my dog being a punishment) is complete bullshit, and that I should probably just delete it. But I won’t, because it is also, in some sense (granted, a very narrow sense)true, my contribution to the vast untidy multifarious universe of Truth: a universe that rejects nothing, ultimately, and so, taken as a whole, means nothing. So maybe the key is not to take it as a whole. Pick some corner of Truth, some reasonably non-self-contradictory corner of a somewhat inoffensive galaxy, and stay there, and ward off all those other Truths with sticks and chest-pounding and monkey shrieks; whatever it takes, whatever you need to do to stay happy, and reasonably sane, without hurting anyone else. It seems to me that this would be a pretty nice way to live.