Writing is a meditative act; writing is an act of devotion. Why else do writers tremble before a blank page? Why do writers retreat to silence and reverence as they sit before a manuscript of one of their favorite writers in a special collections section of a library? Of course, writing serves a utilitarian purpose, and not all writers shake before a blank page. (Think of songwriters who go into an office from 9-5 to write for a living, or medical writers who write pediatric manuals, or those engineers who write manuals that explain the assembly and operation of a refrigerator.) Yet, even so, there is a moment when a writer occupies a space between the Muse and the blankness of that white paper. She’s filled with awe as she sits in front of it, knowing in some inchoate way that she’ll be channeling words that anger, that confront, that love, that divide, that instruct, that please, that heal whoever reads them. The awe-ful character of writing — occupying that solitary space and being a scribe — is the moral burden it lays on the writer, but it’s also the desire to please aesthetically, and seldom can those two elements of writing be separated.
In her evocative new book, Devotion (Yale), Patti Smith explores the act and art of writing so elegantly and eloquently that it’s almost worth reading this entire book out loud instead of writing about it. Like Susan Sontag, like Rimbaud, Smith illustrates that writing is breathing: “Why do I write? My finger, as a stylus, traces the question in the blank air. A familiar riddle posed since youth, withdrawing from play, comrades and the valley of love, girded with words, a beat outside.” A finger as a stylus: the physical act imbued with the spiritual craving of the I-can’t-get-away-from-my-need-to-write.
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