Dear _______,
Thank you for your invitation to assist you with your book project. It’s flattering to be viewed as expert by a friend. That my answer is NO – in thunder – I regret. I’d prefer to be the sort of friend who says yes. My reason for saying no reeks with self-importance: I am not proud of my pride. But no it is and must be whoever’s asking – a response so obnoxious I’m writing to explain.
Appearances notwithstanding, I am a cadet, in service to an insatiable and insufferable superior. His name is fanciful – call him God, for convenience – but His thrall is absolute. He demands all my waking strength and invades my dreams to inspect. His penalties for delinquency are severe: excruciating self-loathing tending toward desolation. A whipping would sting less – at least I’d get my punishment over with. He orders me to write (I gender Him, also for convenience) – write not just anything but what He decrees. I am His scribe. He reproaches me for tardiness answering His summons – the nerve, when I knew better! – but He has let me live to make up for lost time.
If the foregoing sounds crazy, it does to me too: whacky, ludicrous, nuts! To imagine myself destined – really now! Next thing you know I’ll be calling myself Shakespeare or Fred Astaire. The world does not need my spillage – we are awash with worthless verbiage – but I need to spill. Don’t ask me what I must say – I won’t know myself till I’ve tried – but the urgency of the command can’t be gainsaid. And thank God. For this craziness is my true north, my star guiding me across rocky roads to the place of incarnation: my purpose, sanity, ache and joy.
Shakespeare understood such absurdity from his earliest attempts. “Lovers and madmen,” he wrote in that youthful marvel, A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name
What infuses life with zest are beliefs that make no sense. The cleverest of creatures, humans are also the balmiest. We envision wonders, horrors, splendors, and pant and pine to win them. My grail is a word so perfect it cannot be unsaid. That vision keeps me trudging. The least diversion from my purpose I rate apostasy.
Not all writers feel this. Many write for a living; I to live – and love. Writing’s my gift to my hour. That the gift’s modest does not make it less sincere. We cannot give more than our all. We honor our time by not wasting it.
I blush to confess this insanity. But without an explanation, my refusal might be mistaken for selfishness, indifference, even misanthropy. Writers must slam their doors and post No Trespassing signs to do their work. To befriend we must unfriend – for a time – even a long time. Concentration is not convivial.
I mentioned God above as if I believed in Him. I do. He is our indwelling certainty about right and wrong, good and evil. Sometimes His voice is drowned out by greed, lust, indolence, but He is always there.