Pico Iyer on writing

Last night I heard Pico Iyer speak about his latest book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. This morning, still musing on his words, I read through some of his writings that I found readily available online. His piece “Writing Undoes Me” struck a deep chord. As I’m spending several hours each day writing my dissertation, I feel the elusiveness of language. It’s so frustrating, to find that each time I craft an argument I’m a bit less convinced of its veracity. Iyer writes:

The deeper I’ve entered into this process, in short, the harder it’s become for me to believe in it. Writing is the practice I maintain going to my little space (at a schoolgirl’s desk decorated with Hello Kitty images and pictures of Brad Pitt), and stilling myself and my monkey mind to see what remains when everything burns away. It feels, often, like a journey into and through the jungle, each day providing some new revelation, often contradictory of the previous ones, till finally I’m out on the other side, and see that the revelations of impermanence were impermanent too. The more I practice writing, therefore, the less I believe in it. The more I get down what I believe, the less I really have faith in it. All the words, the hours at the desk, are just gestures, it comes to seem, to the emptiness that lies behind the curtain at the back of the stage, unseen by spectators and even actors. I write and write and write and what I come up with is a sense of the arbitrariness of everything that’s written; I know I’ll believe something else tomorrow. It’s no more to be relied upon than that play of light through the trees.

Writing is a form of meditation, I sometimes tell myself (though no doubt I could say the opposite the next day). But it’s a form that deconstructs itself, so finally you come to feel that writing is just the convulsive exercise you do to get to the place where all writing ceases. You can take a notebook into your retreat, I can imagine a wise man saying, but when you emerge, you’ll only want to throw away everything you’ve scribbled.