June 7, 2021
Write What’s Burning Inside – but Beware of Its Fuel
Today’s post – “Write What’s Burning Inside But Beware Of Its Fuel” – is authored by Igor da Silva Livramento. He’s a fellow academic from UFSC, fellow author, fellow creative-writing advisor, and overall a great fellow. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. Check out his papers on Academia.edu, his music on Bandcamp, and his personal musings on his blog – in Portuguese, Spanish/Castilian, and English. You can also find him on LinkedIn.
Chris mentions this time and again: Write honest to heart, from the fire burning inside. I’d like to add: Indeed, but beware of your flames’ fuel. Not for comedic tone, may I claim.
About Burning Hearts
Aside from the blood-pumping organs, “heart” refers to this innermost sanctum of agitations we call ourselves. In this light, why would it matter what we consume to set it ablaze? If it is so intimate…
But is it really that intimate? I don’t think so. What we call our interior, our intimate, is not a hermetically sealed space, untouchable to the open and given external world. This opposition, of bourgeois origin, is rather stupid and does not correspond to reality. Not even the ancients thought so, but on the contrary they believed that everything participated in one and the same existence, precisely because of the porous nature of bodies, to which should correspond the porousness of souls.
If we are traversed by everything around us, that is to say, what we live with, then our innermost being comes from outside.
A Piece of Origin
The Romans believed in the Genius, the genius of the child at birth, a deity who presided over birth and who named the most intimate of each one’s personality. To each their own.
Could there be something more external to the human than a deity? Neither natural nor spiritual, the deity belongs to a sphere of existence still prior to actual existence itself, for it is what enables both the nature and the supernatural to exist.
The nucleus of our personality, our genius, our core, comes to us from outside, it is given to us from the existence farthest from us. For even if humanity is natural, a bunch of hairless apes, or spiritual, a bunch of thinking organic substrata, none of that pertains to the divine.
If our very essence comes forth from without, why wouldn’t everything else do so too?
To put it in very different, but equally accurate, words: As Hannah Arendt used to question, could taste be of the political realm? I would answer that, it could, it can, and it is.
Flames Are for Experiments
Just as wind and temperature affect our body, so does the cultural climate in which we live to our spirit. This climate, fortunately, is not entirely given to us, like the weather, but is in our hands to choose and appreciate.
The very way we conceive the appreciation of the cultural artifacts we consume already indicates what our development will be like.
Since one wants to be a writer, one must handle language and its uses – texts, speeches; in short, discourses – as objects of study, objects of knowledge, and not as sacred pieces of a religious exhibition.
The stupid approach of making sacred that which is not so is much different to admiring a specific artwork. Wise criticism lies in managing the distances between familiarity, empathy, analysis, and commentary – one must know their favorites by heart, but they must remain strange anew if they want to step up from mere mundane chemistry to otherworldly magical alchemy.
Therefore, not only the material that is read, but also the way reading is exercised are crucial for the writer’s growth.
What Does All This Have to Do with Writing?
Beware: Is your heart commonplace? We are all modern, innovation is inherently a plus for us. Avoid opinion, not at all costs, but please do force your way to avoid clichés.
Writing is no easy task. If we had the formula, we’d sell it for a million dollars… Or something of that sort.
One thing’s for sure: No one likes a beaten text. Triviality bores. Let the innermost flourish outside, back to whence it came, and, chest first against the cold north wind, crash against your incapacity to make ours, public, what’s so intimately yours.
Because, you see, modernity fails, and failure is its hero. Failing is winning, here, now. Thus, if you fail at writing what you dreamed of, it’s not a problem. That’s just how it is. It’s always better in imagination than in reality, but it’s only real if actualized here, now, worse than thought, better than expected.
Stay awake, stay aware. Take care.
2 Comments
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Alas, the warning is about twenty years too late. I needed to be told not to approach the fire back in 2000 when I started the WIP that has consumed what energy I have since then. I just hope it turns out to have been well spent.
To be fair, it has also given me great pleasure, and nothing else has in the same way in my abbreviated lifestyle. Maybe we all crave being extraordinary. I had some potential and not good circumstances for exercising it – and I did what I could anyway. I wonder what it might have been had it been nourished, but a woman invading the halls of physics was something they didn’t dare excise by the time I came along – but they certainly weren’t going to encourage or support it in any way.
Illness took that, but the writing which came after (I always planned to write when I retired anyway – reading gave me so much pleasure) gave me, with my very limited ability to grasp it, CONTROL, and a way to seek again.
We’ll see how it turns out, eventually, but I am honored to have been able to try. And took advantage of everything I could.
I think an important lesson in writing (but also life in general) is to try to have no regrets. After all, we are the people we are because of past experiences, and that includes things we would have done differently today.
Thanks for your comment!