digestion & creation
This is my digestive model for writing in pursuit of health, an insight springing from my study of Thomas DeQuincey. (I haven’t reached his shelf yet…so I’m getting ahead of my project, but the frame is meant simply to keep me moving steadily along, not to restrict my liberty). DeQuincey: now here’s a man who not only got to P, but went right past R and on to V, or perhaps to W, or beyond. In his chapter on “The Pains of Opium,” DeQuincey describes his grandiose plans for books that he was never able to finish writing (De Emendatione Humani Intellectus–amusingly enough, and a Prolegomena to all Future Systems of Political Economy).
His projects fail, “lying locked up as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or acqueduct begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect,” due to what some might familiarly term “writer’s block.” He writes: “But for misery and suffering, I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom could prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words, to any that I received, was the utmost that I could accomplish; and often that not until the letter had lain for weeks, or even months, on my writing-table.” DeQuincey attributes his “dormant state,” this blockage, to opium.
Constipation…and here is my insight (DeQuincey doesn’t address the matter anywhere)…is, as I understand it (not from personal experience), a common complaint among opium users. Hence, my digestive model for writing, or indeed creative play in any form: those of us who find that we are creative, because Nature has made us this way, must produce to avoid “misery and suffering” and because digesting experience and allowing it to pass into words and paragraphs, into colors and frames, tastes and textures, choreographies and arabesques, is simply what we must do to keep our systems all running in good order.
