“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
I don’t know if this quote would have resonated for me at any other time as much as it is doing now. Ray Bradbury is, of course, a masterful writer and the gleefully disturbing Something Wicked This Way Comes seems even more appropriate now than it was when I first read it. This decade certainly has the feeling of a dark circus. There isn’t much to indicate it won’t stay like this either.
And so, more than ever before, writing has become an escape to a world that has only just slipped from our grasp. A world that does not yet have COVID-19. A world in which the various empty postures of the more egotistical leaders do not feature. A world that has its own horrors but all of them following rules set by a higher force rather than by fallible institutions. Rules that cannot change at anyone’s whim or through corruption or war. The world in the novels is changing but there is a way to escape…and entering the novel, by writing, reading, editing, rewriting has become my escape too.
I write almost as often as I work now, and I work full time. It’s become an obsession. I feel an urgency, like time is slipping away. Opportunity is slipping away. I am writing for pleasure now. The characters have become friends I like to spend time with. Their stories have become fascinating to me. I see their worlds in my mind’s eye, feel their emotions, dream their dreams with them.
Since the beginning of the lockdown, with all the fear and anxiety, the worry about others, about elderly parents, the tears whenever a friend or online acquaintance, or even an online acquaintance of an online acquaintance, spoke about losing a relative, a friend. Of not being able to attend funerals. Of not being able to stand by the bed when the time came. How wrenching, to lose even our inadequate Western rituals for the dead and dying. We are already so removed from death…to lose that too seems overly extreme.
Throughout this year I have always been lucky enough to turn to writing. To forget, for a while, what is happening to others. What may happen to me and mine. I’m grateful for these moments lost in the spaces between the words. I’m grateful that I can pursue my writing even in such times. I hope others are finding a way to keep reality from destroying them, and that they are getting the help they need or the medical treatment they need. I am staying drunk.