But, Why Writing Ever?

Once, I was asked: “how would you like your life-journey to end?” I said then: “I would like to die while sitting at my desk, reading and writing.” I still have the same wish and the same imagination, though my wishes are becoming gradually sort-of nice dreams clustering together as a herd of beautiful thoughts one entertains but never eventually owns or achieves.

The question of my relationship with the act of writing haunts me. It has always done! Not because I am a first-rate, perfectly prolific writer, but because I am sort-of addicted to writing. Words and sentences and lines have kind of a spell on my soul. In my poems, I expressed perpetually my wish to be free from writing. On the other hand, failing to publish every written work my fingers and pen produced, especially those which I believed to be publishable, should have, presumably, pushed me away from writing. But, just to the very contrary, the further I fail, the further I write.

It challenges me deeply the fact that Jesus left no written text whatsoever. He seems as cannot care less about writing. And when he faces us with this fact, we force on his story of the stoning of Mary Magdalene a claim that while the crowds were rioting, Jesus was writing with his finger on the floor. Where did we get this image from, when the biblical texts do not state so clearly whatsoever? Jesus was not a writer, though he does seem to show at some occasions that he reads; he has, that is, an interaction with written materials sometime, somewhere. When it comes to writing, Jesus is free, pen-less, paper-less, and even wording-less.

Is this because he himself was ‘the Word’, as Christian Faith proclaims, and words are written by someone; they do not write themselves? But, the eternal Word did not become an incarnate text (opposite to the Islamic view of Qur’an), but an incarnate, infleshed being, a human with ‘Da-sein’. So, Jesus was not even per se written, despite being ‘the Word’. I wish I can hear Jesus’ opinion about writing. I wish I can ask him: “why didn’t you write? What do you think of writing? Have you ever written anything: words, ideas, dairies, poems, letters…anything?”

I wonder if writing is related to love, though. Is it possible that Jesus has no space for personal, private love in his life because he himself became the space for life to redeem itself by means of the love of its Creator? I cannot prove it. Yet, I can say that writing in my case has always been linked with the concept of ‘love’: personal, ideal, general, social, spiritual, etc etc. My act of writing has always been baptized with the truth of love, obsessively immersed with it; it was as such an act of love. By this, I do not mean the content of the writing action/event or the addressee of what I write. By ‘writing is an act of love’ (or even is a Dasein of love) I mean the state of writing as such: I write in love, I write out of love, I write to love, I write love, I write as someone in love. It does not matter anymore whether one writes or not words of love; whether one writes ‘I love you’ or never does. This cross of writing is a fate of love: almost a ‘to be, or not to be’ state of being (yet not necessarily Shakespearian one). So, to be or not to be is not ‘the question’, not any more in fact. It is rather ‘the writing’, ‘the love’ we need to survive. Something Jesus was not in need of, was not per se, because he was not focusing on survival or even on living; leave alone on dying. To write or not to write/ to love or not to love, this is the question.

Writing is my survival. And, when to my friends, who ask me “how are you?” I answer “surviving” I mean actually “I am still writing”, or even worse “I am still loving.”