Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer known for her acclaimed novels How Should a Person Be?, Alphabetical Diaries and Motherhood. In this essay for Port, she explores the parallels between art and love, considering how writing and living alike depend on discovery, patience and the mysteries that emerge in darkness
I was having a conversation the other day with a writer about the need to be a little dumb about certain things. When it comes to writing a novel, you can’t know everything. You have to remain a bit unconscious. You can’t have the whole thing planned. Something else has to be given room to move – the part of the book you don’t yet know, but that already exists in its ideal future form somewhere in your subconscious. It’s hard to move forward while not completely knowing where you’re going. I remember a scholar of Jung, the English writer Ann Yeoman, saying to me about making art: “You have to learn how to enjoy walking in the darkness.” You have to like not being able to see exactly where you’re going. This is not an original idea. Probably every artist thinks it.
The other day I saw on Reddit someone quoting George Saunders’ writing, “If you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you got a poem about two dogs fucking.” The poster added the comment, “Could never quite figure out what it means but I think about it a lot.” Then another poster helpfully added that it probably meant “accepting what the work is offering, like meditation – just being in the moment with it. So I imagine his point here is that if you force art to be one thing, it’ll be the one thing, in this case, a poem about two dogs fucking, which is probably a shit poem. His point being that true art is found – and transformed – in the creation process.”
Part of why anyone makes art – I think I can say this – is the pleasure of discovery: that even though you are the one making it (the book, the painting, the song) you are more precisely the one discovering it. The reader (of the novel, say) discovers it, too: page by page. But the writer was the one who discovered it first. It’s a bit like being an explorer who is trying to see if the world is round, after they’ve been told it is flat. You write a page in a moment of inspiration. Is that all there is, the single page, that flatness? Or might there be more, might it be round and just the beginning of an entire world? Can you open the document, that single page, and somehow get your ship inside it, and begin to sail past the last sentence, the horizon?
I think the excitement of discovery that one feels when one is truly filled by the spirit of writing has something in common with the discovery of a new person who, at first sight, tugs on one’s innermost self and says “this is a person to love”.
Like the first page of a novel, suddenly written – the feeling that a gift has been given to you – is the surprise appearance of this person on the far side of the party, of the wedding reception, of the hotel lobby. You have the feeling that they had to be there, in that time and place; that they were put there to be seen by you now. It may not become love. It may become nothing more than an inner trembling, lasting only a few minutes until they walk out the door and into the street. But that seeing feels somehow destined, out of time, to belong to an eternal moment. The Colombian writer Andrés Felipe Solano told me and some others over dinner the other day about a woman he’d seen on a bus 30 years ago. She was only on that bus for four minutes. It seems he only saw the back of her head. But he never forgot the sight of her. Even now, he felt compelled to speak of her.
With all the men whom I have fallen in love with and gone on to be with – or never to be with, but only to circle for years on end – it happened in the very first instance. It is a bit like the book when you first start writing: as if it already exists in some future space. That’s how, retrospectively, I interpret those first moments of being struck. The soul somehow “remembering” the future – “ah, this is where it begins.”
I remember the first time I saw the first man I would love: the first week of 11th grade. He was standing in the hallway with all sorts of papers falling from his book bag. How could his papers be in such a mess, so early in the school year?
I remember the first time I saw the man who would later become my husband (then ex-husband): sitting down on the floor at a music event and zine fair. He was sitting with another woman (I’d later learn she was just a friend) and I felt an almost overwhelming wave of objection to him sitting with her. A wild, unjustifiable jealousy washed right over me.
I remember being 17, and for the first time seeing the man I would come to be with decades later, who I would remain with for the next 15 years (I’m still with him today). We were standing outside a movie theatre, and there he was in a suit and tie, dark wild hair, pale and tall. I had never seen such beauty.
What about all the other humans on earth? They are the victims of other people’s noticing. And some are maybe not noticed at all. Why is this man, for me, like a boulder thrown down from the sky, arresting me on the pavement, and not even as significant as a tiny pebble, ground into the concrete, for someone else? I wish I knew why, at first sight, we love the ones we do.
There is a wonderful idea that the writer Kurt Vonnegut put into his novel, Cat’s Cradle. It’s the idea of the karass. The karass is a group of people who, all together, are completing some corner of God’s work. There may be 10 or five or 100 people in that karass, and they never learn for sure that they’re connected by this thread; this thread which connects all of their actions so that some collective result might come about (something big, like a war, or small like a screw). Are these people who appear to oneself with such terrible suddenness, who distinguish themselves from the crowds of people, part of your karass? What will you and that man from the dinner together make that is part of God’s greater vision? It’s not always a love story, or a baby. Maybe he’s an editor. Maybe you’re a writer. Maybe the thing God wanted you to make, the reason you were put in a karass together, was just an article in a magazine. This article will fit into the millions and billions of things that must be made out of the trillions of connections among the world’s people for the universe to resolve into the final shape that God has in mind for it. God is like a single writer crafting their book: they can see its final shape already.
If some people are in our karass, then are there people in our anti-karass, who we should not be creating things with, or falling in love with? Does the invisible silver thread that connects us to some people, have in some way an opposite: threads that God doesn’t want in the book, connections that make bad things happen, like assaults or deprivations or guns or bad books? If so, how can we tell the difference between the lightning strike that signals “this person is in your life for the purposes of God writing the book they have in mind” versus “this person is in your life and together you will create a scene that God wishes they didn’t write”?
And yet – just as sadness, pain, suffering, jealousy and misery cannot be avoided – perhaps God should not (does not!) hope to avoid writing scenes that eventually will be deleted. This is all just part of the way that God discovers what the final book will be: the final book being the total vision of the world that God eternally carries around in their head.
But just because God will in time forget it, doesn’t mean we can’t still live it. It doesn’t mean that we won’t.
Recently I got some startling news, and my first impulse was to call my boyfriend and tell him, in a state of shock – to sort of transfer the shock that I was feeling onto him. It felt imperative that he know about the shocking thing as close to the instant when I found out. But the idea of calling him right away and transferring my shock onto him caused in me a terrible anxiety. It seemed that, for the first time in my life, I was able to slow down and say to myself, “Why don’t you wait until tomorrow to tell him? Maybe there’s a better way of conveying to him this information than calling him up right away and transferring – performing – your shock.” It felt taboo and uncomfortable to think about doing this – to wait until the feeling subsided; to slow down and wait until the moment arose in which the news could be delivered in a mild way, in a way that would not shock him.
The next day it seemed to me that I could deliver the news in a calm and offhanded sort of way, and that actually the news was not as shocking as I had first felt it to be. He received the news without any anxiety or feeling shocked, and this whole incident was something quite new for me. It was a bit like the George Saunders parable about the one who writes a story about two dogs fucking. If I had told my boyfriend the story about two dogs fucking, the moment I heard it, it would have been exactly that. But overnight the story transformed, new meanings unfurled and I was able to tell him – to discover for myself – a different tone, a different set of meanings, and the story I told him was something unexpected. It was like a story of two dogs eating strawberry shortcake. A story does not always mean only what it originally seems.
Rest and waiting are part of what makes a story, what makes the whole world, what makes any creation. Most of my life I have not known that rest and waiting are actually part of any recipe. You can’t put a strawberry cake in the oven and then pull it right out.
I had a conversation with Sally Rooney the other day, in which we realised, with surprise, that neither of us used the word “block” to describe the times when we were not writing, or when a book was stalled and could not progress, sometimes for months on end.
These were periods, too, of waiting.
The Jungian scholar I mentioned earlier in this article once described moments of non-creation this way: “It’s like breathing. Sometimes you’re breathing in, and sometimes you’re breathing out, and you can’t always be breathing out.” You can’t always be creating.
What was so good about not turning something that felt like an emergency to me into an emergency also for my boyfriend, was the realisation (which I attribute to maturity) that I didn’t have to let myself be thrown into his path like a boulder, even if I felt that I was being thrown like a boulder through the air. I guess what I understood was that just because you feel you are being thrown through the air, that doesn’t mean you can’t determine where exactly on the earth you land, or how loudly or lightly.
Rooney told me the other day that while we, in our culture, learn to visualise the future in front of us and the past behind us, there are parts of the world where it is the opposite: the past is imagined to be in front of you (where you can see it, because it’s already happened) and the future is approaching from behind you, pressing up against your back (because you can’t see it, it’s a mystery, unknown to you).
How different, we agreed, it had to be to see the future as approaching from the back. The future is a surprise! You don’t see it coming! How arrogant of us to imagine the future out in front of us, already foreseen and planned for; that we imagine we can see what it will be.
When I started this essay, I didn’t know what it was going to be about. This, for me, is always the way with writing. I’m sure it’s like that for many people.
And even though this not-knowing makes perfect sense – we are humans who exist in time, and so everything (essays, novels and relationships) naturally happens in the unfolding of time – it continues to surprise me. It sometimes makes me feel bad, that when I set off on the course of some new project, I don’t know everything about it, all at once. I feel like I should know everything at the beginning. After all: isn’t it coming from me? I grow impatient for the unfolding. I don’t want to welcome in the slowing down, or the waiting, that of course some part of me always knows is an inescapable part of the recipe. That man by the stairwell – who shines brighter than the others – I want to know right now the meaning of this noticing: what sort of future will we unfold? I don’t want to write the scenes for my novel that I’m going to end up deleting!
But when I look more closely at this impatience of mine, I sometimes wonder what I’m after: the end of life already, when everything has been unfurled to its outermost limit? And yet the effect of a person’s life continues beyond the limit of their deaths – in the lives of their friends and their family and other people who they’ve touched. So what is this faraway vision that I feel a longing to resolve into a picture that I can see, both from a distance and close-up with all the details apparent? The entire picture of the universe? With all the good things humans have ever done fitting together like a zillion-piece puzzle, on the floor, or on the dark rug, of eternity?
I know it’s like my Jungian friend said, “You have to learn to enjoy walking in the dark.” This is true not only of writing, but also of living. But how is it enjoyable? Doesn’t one always yearn, a little bit, to – for a flash – just turn the lights on? These flashes do make the darkened discovery a little more possible. Sometimes when working on a novel, you can see the whole thing in a flash – the object off in the distance that you’re going to create.
But these flashes do not always happen. Often you discover the lamp in the corner of the room by knocking into it and crashing it to the floor. Why did I have to wonder who “my person” would be, from the ages of 17 until 32, when the beautiful boy from my past, from in front of the movie theatre, finally became mine? Why did I have to stumble for so many years through the darkness, knocking down my ex-husband (in the dark) and other men (in a similar darkness), knocking into them (as they stumbled through the dark) and being knocked over?
Why must discovery always happen in the dark, and why must it involve so much slowness? Why is the fact of allowing time to pass, and the necessity of traversing rooms in darkness, two of the most important elements on the road to discovery? Thank goodness for those rare flashes of light which give us little clues.
It’s almost like the horizon of the sea, or the horizon of the present, or the horizon that is the most recent line you added to a piece of writing, really do importantly demarcate what can be grasped from what must remain, for now, unknown. It is not given to you to see beyond it – yet. So there will always be unknowns from wherever you’re standing.
What defines life and all kinds of creation are all those tantalising horizons. If you can remember to feel them as tantalising – the feeling of being tantalised is one of the greater feelings leading us forward through life.
Illustration Emi Ueoka
This article is taken from Port issue 37. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe head here
