someone asked me this morning why i write. i didn’t answer them.
maybe it was an example of new knowledge for me. my dissertation supervisor, a very brainy person, told me once that we should treasure those moments when we didn’t know how to answer someone: they were examples of new knowledge.
certainly for ourselves, and then again maybe for others too: a wider humanity. in either case, to be valued above almost any other lived experience. because the experience manifests itself in all our endeavours: a common denominator which is neither low nor common, tbh. in work; in academia; at school; in relationships; in a love at first sight … everything i tell you.
why write? not to be read. never. to write in order to be read is to almost surgically remove the very condition good and faithful writing demands to remain faithful and good.
freedom. that’s why i write. to be free. to remain free. to sustain a wider freedom. to ensure liberty remains a goal of all human beings.
you see … to be read is nice but dangerous. to be read is to enter into a dialogue. and in such dialogue we inevitably compromise, fudge, lose our trails of thought, forget the purpose of reflection — and, then, indeed, its power.
that’s not me. and after sixty years of trying to be a writer who is read, i realise it mustn’t be me. because my virtue is that i don’t enter into dialogue before i have my ideas.
actually, that’s not true. by writing, i speak to myself. and this, for me, is key: because it’s truer than true that without this mode of speaking with my being i never am able to know, until i follow the described procedure, what that being thinks.
so if i have to enter into a dialogue with the person who asked me this morning about why i write … well … i write to be free and find out what it is to be me.
is all.
enough?
i give no more.
except a video i just made and then a poem i just wrote this morning at breakfast in stockholm city, sweden.
♥️ 🇸🇪
“a poem on the sound of silent friendship” by mil
it’s not a condition
it’s not a redemption
it’s not a transaction of sexual reward:
i met you and saw you
and sensed kindred soul
beyond the blood that tied us down
and bound us with violence
as if sworn to some crown
it’s not anything like this
anything at all
it’s just that i found myself
that evening enthralled
by a person who was fun
after all was said and done:
a person whose brain
matched a beautiful way
of moving her body
without insistent degree
but just in that measure
i found recently to be good
in this place i am now:
a lagom of life and how
where we aim to deliver
on more than a brutish noise
the sound of silent friendship
between you and me
has become my go-to manner
of being a man on this rock
and i find in its steadiness
i need nothing more
than to know before i go
i was a good friend in the end
mil's page 