Yesterday, while revisiting Paul Valery's notebooks, I returned to the challenge of writing, or existing as a writer, in my own.
There is nothing 'unique' about this particular insecurity that arises from creating a world in words, knowing that a few people may read it, a knowledge that is paralyzing if one studies it, or begins to worry that you will fail the reader, a failure so rich in its potential and scope that you could spend weeks worrying about the nature of this failure—whether the meaning fails to signify, whether the syntax distracts from the event, whether the world you aimed to convey dies prior to its birth, etc. etc.
All such worries, concerns, and anxieties are relational, which is to say, they are shaped by the writer's relationship to the audience and its expectations (as well as the writer's understanding of this audience). And so I began thinking about the difference between wanting to impress someone and wanting to please them . . . for, varying levels of vulnerability are at stake in these ways of imagining, or thinking.
Wanting to impress is in some ways a public act that partakes of sociality, and exists in relation to those conventions and structures which negotiate status. 'To make an impression,' as we say, or to be 'impressive' involves making one's self worthy, evidencing the corresponding traits or skills, some of which may have to do with the feeling of inferiority that is part of the writing life. But the desire to please someone seems different, if only because the audience is private, or the scope of that pleasure is grounded in privacy, in that particular knowing that defines itself intimately. To please, is to gratify and surprise in the same instant, to draw a mind somewhere close to happiness, which is a ridiculous thing for a human to want to do, and therefore, partly because it is so ridiculous, perhaps that is why it is kept private, the other part being a sort of loss that occurs when this desire appears.
To please, is also, quite different from satisfying the obligations of a contract, or meeting those conditions in a way that is satisfactory both to the parties and to the nature of the contract itself.
Paul Cruet, Hand of Rodin Holding a Torso (cast 1917)
The desire to impress others is ego-driven: it is, perhaps, the folly of our vanity, the glissando of our jokes, the protective (and often exciting) thrill of the game. We are vulnerable to hurt feelings, where what is hurt is our self-esteem, our carapace, the exterior edifice.
The desire to please abandons the ego by putting the other first. I cannot argue that one is better or worse, — I am not interested in advancing moral claims or challenging late capitalism’s competitive urges (not here, at least, not in this)—-but I can say, without mincing words, that wanting to please asks us to reckon with emptiness in more visceral and difficult way than wanting to impress.
Yes: We are the first to hear it.
And the first to be abandoned by it—
The first to be hurt, stung by recognition, or repetition. In every writer, there is a child who needs to prove why the path they have chosen is worthwhile, despite the scorn of their parents, adults, and teachers.
In every writer, there is also a child who cannot find words for how intensely and unbearably the world touches them— how it moves them to tears, hollows out their insides, leaves them mute (and, sometimes, at its worst, numb). And perhaps this child is the one who is hurt when they discover in themselves a desire to please—- if only because this desire assumes an other, and that assumption is specific enough to want the best for that other. In those circumstances, you find yourself not wanting to prove anything—only to share, to delight, to soothe. Being unable to do so becomes a hole, a hyperawareness of distance.
“Literature is the art of language,” wrote Paul Valery, “It is an art concerned with die means of mutual comprehension” — and if I am failing you, it is because there is no way for me to compensate for, or undo, the ways the world failed you, or the grief that attends being failed by words. Finding one’s hands empty. Finding one’s lips parched for verbs. Finding nothing that rouses the spirit from its stupefying sadness.
Yesterday, I recollected squeezing my own hands until they were numb, reminding them, firmly, not to feel things, since feeling too much has always been a problem for me, a problem that my father describes as an “oversensitivity” that “blinds you to reality,” a problem I have spent many years learning to hide or pushing into the problem that is poetry.
Dear human, please do not forget how much language loved you first.