A Joyful Terror: Meditations on Writing

By Jarred Thompson

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1.

There is a joyful terror to writing, to scratching an itch that doesn’t want to be scratched but must be if any comfort is to be sort.  Writing is an abject feeling that, before the act, leaves one hollow-mouthed and begging.

2.

 What lies in the undergrowth of our lives can be felt without words, in emotions that appear more like atmospheres superimposed upon the world than anything factual or real.

3.

Words have a pleasure that’s hard to deny. A putting down that solidifies on one side while opening up on the other. And what’s on the other side but endless interpretation, a hinterland of fragments and dreams left up to readers to stitch together with the resources of their minds.

4.

What is so terrifying is the fact that one’s words may appear faulty, lack-luster, or clichéd; that your innermost world is riddled with soap-opera fantasies whose presence on the page expose one’s own faulty mechanisms of imagination. But is it really originality that we seek in our writing?

5.

The terror of being original—of saying things that haven’t been said before— this is the terror of the ego, an ego that must come face to face with its own production and reproduction. As an individual, one is nothing special or out of the ordinary. But in exploring and elucidating traditions of thought, this is where the idea of individuality fades into a porous conception of the self that is an instant of a spatial-temporal event.

6.

How then does the marriage of joy and terror affect the ways the ego may view itself, its goals and lofty aspirations for itself? Such a marriage seems consummated within the abject, with a displacement of the ego that is at once terrifying yet pleasurable. When faced with a blank page the ego is compelled to give up its dreams, fears, inhibitions and memories, as if the bedrock of itself lies in an endless confession and re-confession of self.

7.

What we as writers seek then maybe is not so much originality as a displacement, a shifting presence of voice that is able to sneak past our psychological defenses into a wider vision of ourselves submersed in a world of conscious thought and action. Consciousness itself appears to be an endless running river with multiple tributaries flowing in and out, all flowing into a collective unconscious ocean embodied in death, orgasm and dreams.

8.

What writing becomes—in this mix of joy and terror— is a sieve of perception, an amplification of the mind upon an object of experience, much like the way psychedelic drugs work on the brain. When psychedelic drugs take effect they bind to receptors in the brain that open up sensory resources, neural pathways and connections that may not have existed before but that, under the influence, shine as clear as day. When writing is both terror and joy, it forms part of this category of psychedelic drugs because it marries both joy and terror, forcing one’s consciousness to take stock of itself, its world, and its place in the world. It is writing’s inherent awareness of the spatial-temporal moment that alerts us to an ever-passing present; a present whose possibilities are at once tremendous and terrifying. It’s here at this junction where the finite grasps the infinite, if only in short bursts of illumination.

9.

Where does the joy come in?

A creative act nonetheless requires the merger of multiple systems (biological, psychological, imaginative, technical, scientific, linguistic etc.) into an emergent voice that is composed of everything that consciousness is and the undiscovered negatives of what consciousness could be. An author’s voice is indeed never truly their own until they acknowledge the countless voices lay buried in their single voice. The joy arrives when the corpses of oneself and the others that one has honored in their writing are unearthed and seated at the table of communion, which is always the table of language and writing.

10.

When the hearts aches for its own untarnished voice I think it really aches for that transient present moment of joyful terror, that abyss over which we walk between what can be said and what cannot be said just yet. The joy in writing comes from bending language to fit the holes in our arguments, ideas, conceptions of self, memory, place. The terror comes when the words moan and wail, themselves afraid of the path they’re being provoked to tread on.

Writing, therefore, is the terror of walking down a dark deserted alley, and the joy of arriving at a quaint rooftop bar with a view of the city.

Jarred Thompson