[Many of us are caught in the following predicament: we have tremendous pent-up wanderlust, but we don’t feel that it’s quite safe enough to travel yet. So, let me present you with some excerpts from my book A Writer’s Paris to help slake some of that wanderlust, while at the same time providing you with lessons of values to writers and all creatives. These essays also connect to my recent book Redesign Your Mind, as they present new ways of thinking about the creative process and the writing life.]
Say that you’re a painter who can’t afford to buy expensive pigments. Grudgingly you settle for cheap ones. Then what happens? If you are to stay mentally balanced, you must rationalize. You might reframe the matter as a test of your artistic abilities or as an opportunity for heroism. You might say These cheap pigments have certain virtues which I intend to understand. You might say This will make me strong. Whatever precise rationalization you use, your goal is to create the adaptive illusion that you are doing just fine.
Consider Van Gogh. Among his many problems was this exact one, the cost of pigments. He couldn’t afford the pigments he wanted and turned the lemons of poverty into lemonade by adding the sugar of precedent. He wrote to his brother Theo, who paid for his supplies, “In case you should be a bit hard up, I could manage perfectly without the expensive blues and the carmine. One tube of Prussian blue yields as much as six of ultramarine or cobalt and costs six times less. Delacroix swore by that vulgar blue and used it often.” This is a prayer to Maya, the Hindu goddess whose name translates as illusion.
Maya is a necessary god. We must maintain illusions. We must maintain the illusion that what we create matters and that we are not pointless, discardable energy packets but creatures every bit as valuable as our best sentences seduce us into believing that we are. We must create these adaptive illusions and then believe them, even though we know that we ourselves have created them. If you want to know why Existentialists call life absurd, this is why.
I once made this point in a book I was writing, and my editor wrote me a caustic e-mail. “Is this the solution you’re proposing? That we maintain adaptive illusions even though we can see right through them? That’s not very helpful!” Unfortunately, there’s isn’t a better answer available. We have become too smart not to know that our cherished beliefs are illusory. Now we must grow into this terrible knowledge and learn how to live in a world that has meaning only if and when we contrive that meaning. This is not an easy job, but at least we, as writers, have the rhetorical skills to create the best-sounding illusions.
Every honest, intelligent person will see through her adaptive illusions often enough. That isn’t the main problem. Suddenly writing poetry or stage plays may seem meaningless and ridiculous to you. All right. That realization isn’t the danger. The danger is that you will forget that you must maintain your illusions by force of will and that this moment must be met with a hearty Of course! I always knew that about poetry! Nothing new here! You must quickly argue yourself back into the belief that poetry matters—at least to you—or face a meaning crisis in proportions you do not want to contemplate.
When you are struck by the thought My novel serves no ultimate purpose, you must train yourself to reply Yes. of course, but I endow it with purpose enough! There will be moments in Paris when you see that you are not a novelist at the top of her game, but a beginner plodding along on an ugly first draft. Do not let that thought linger uncontested for longer than an instant. Say A first novel is part of my journey. Say I am sure I will be able to salvage the good bits. Make some kind of lemonade. Otherwise despair will overcome you. Learning how to chat convincingly with yourself about your meaning-making obligations is the largest part of your education as a creative person.
Nobody comes to the table prepared for these conversations or knowledgeable about their subtleties. We learn by living and by periodically losing meaning. Some of us come to the brink of suicide; most of us regularly despair; all of us know the smell of meaninglessness. Honor Maya by darning the rents in the fabric of meaning that is yours to weave.
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