Write Hear

Letter to a writer who asked: "Why does one write?"

     Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me: the world of my parents, the world of Henry Miller, the world of Gonzalo, or the world of wars. I  had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materilization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.
     We also write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don't write I feel my world shrinking, I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 5: 1947-1955, pp. 149-150.

     The mind turns and works
     In accordance with ten thousand situations.
     Wherever it may turn,
     It is mysteriously serene.

     I raise my hand, and the sun and moon lose their light under my hand. I lift my foot, and the vastness of the earth is altogether gone under my foot. There is no room at all here for intellect.
— from Zenkei's Teisho on Mumon's Poem to Koan #8, in Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Zenkei Shibayama, p. 75.

     The top of a pole one hundred feet high is the summit of the highest mountain; which signifies the purest spirituality in which no thought has started to move. To be at the top means that he has opened his spiritual eye. If he settles down there, however, it turns out to be a cave. He has to go into the defiled world, hiding his brilliance. With his face covered with sweat and his head with dust, he has to live and work on the busy and crowed street. A Zen man of real attainment and capability is one who has cast off the holy smack of satori. If you have any satori at all, cast away every bit of it! This is why humble attitudes and compassionate working are to be developed. To talk about such a Zen life may be easy, but to live up to it in actuality is not easy at all, and that is why Master Mumon stresses this point in the koan.
— from Zenkei's Teisho on Mumon's Koan #46, in Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Zenkei Shibayama, p. 312

"A hundred men scrambling to fetch a gourd by cart will accomplish less than one man holding it in his hand and walking purposefully. For if the hundred actually manage to get it aboard their wagon you may be quite sure that the gourd would be split asunder when it arrived....
— from Intrigues of the Warring States, I (c. 200 B.C.), J. I. Crump, (tr.), in Anthology of Chinese Literature, Cyril Birch (ed.), p. 39.