Turtles, all the way down

Why do you write?

I’m reading The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green and in the introduction, he writes about the time he was diagnosed with labyrinthitis and couldn’t write.

It was a month after his novel Turtles All The Way Down came out. He finished the book tour and spent a month building a path from the house to the kids playhouse and one morning he was just reaching into a drawer for a Chapstick when suddenly the world was spinning, and it wouldn’t stop and he felt like a small boat being tossed around on a very big sea and then he was falling down and vomiting.

He was diagnosed with labyrinthitis, which is a balance disorder and had to spend untold weeks in bed recovering. Doing nothing, absolutely nothing. Couldn’t walk around, couldn’t play with his kids, couldn’t even write. Just lay there recovering.

That Fall and Winter were the longest he’d gone without writing since he was fourteen and he said he missed writing in the way you’d miss someone you used to love.

I stopped and read that line a couple of times.

Words are funny things, the way they get in our head and then go off on a journey of their own that has nothing to do with the words we just read and while I was sitting with his book in my lap I remembered the day mama died, running home and phoning her to hear her voice on voicemail before they disconnected it.

I remembered friends I loved who drifted away because that’s how life is and I could still hear them laughing in bittersweet memories I carry tucked deep in my pockets. Sitting there with that book in my lap, all up in my feels about people I miss.

And as much as I knew that feeling he was talking about, I also knew that’s not how it is for me if I’m not writing. Not even a little bit.

Kafka said a non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity and it doesn’t matter how many years ago he lived and died because some part of my soul knows that part of his because if I don’t write I feel the dark closing in and I can’t breathe.

I write because I can’t not write and the other day I saw someone gently mock that on Notes and it made me a little sad because it was someone I admire but even more so it made me sad because of how easily we humans dismiss each other’s experiences if we don’t feel or experience them ourselves.

But it’s what we do. Because we’re turtles all the way down.

I read a lovely book by a native Canadian writer who opens his book with the story of an elder telling a child the story of the world.

He said the whole world sits on the back of a turtle and the child asks what the turtle is standing on and the elder says another turtle and the child asks what that turtle is standing on and around and around they go with the same question and the same answer until finally the elder explains that it’s all turtles, all the way down.

It’s a story that’s almost as old as time, and it’s not about the universe it’s about us.

It’s the story of humans and the story of infinite regress, which is the theory that our thoughts and beliefs are like those turtles stacked one on the other. Why do you believe A? Because you believe B. Why do you believe B? Because you believe C.

Writing works exactly that way.

Sometimes people tell me writing is their dream. For me, it’s not a dream, it’s air.

It’s not a thing I long to have time for or dream of doing one day when there’s enough time, it’s a thing I do almost every day because that’s how I’m made.

For me, the dream is making a living at it. Earning enough writing to make writing the thing I wake up to do every day, not something I squeeze in before the client calls and the copywriting and the invoicing and the same old same old workaday life.

Not everyone shares my dream of course. Because we all have our own turtles, which is to say our beliefs stacked one on top of the other.

Some people write because they’re lonely or isolated, like Roger Ebert after the career, after the jaw cancer, after the tracheostomy that stole his voice and he’d sit at his computer tap, tap, tapping like the raven at Poe’s door. It saved him, he said.

Some people write because they want to leave something behind in the same way others have children to know that some day in the not so distant future when they’re long gone, some small part of them is still alive and breathing in the world. Some write to change the world and others write to change themselves.

Some people write because they are filled with so much pain or anger that bleeding it onto the page is preferable to letting it consume them.

Some people write because they were born in the wrong family or the wrong town or the wrong century and they write to find their people, to find people who share some of their atoms and their experience and outlook. People steeled in the same fire.

Some write to share a love or obsession whether it’s vintage cars or knitting, rescue dogs or the twelve thousand types of moss in the world. Some write because they have something to sell, and because they have bills to pay and a family to feed.

But underneath it all? I think there is one underlying reason that all writers write and I think Emily Dickenson said it best when she said we are all out with lanterns, looking for ourselves. The rest is all just turtles. All the way down…

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