No Flame Outs

September 8, 2023

I have small patience for martyrs or ‘writers’

I recently looked over some old writing I found in a cranny of my hard drive. Much of it was from a creative writing course I availed myself of in the last century. I was attending university on a special grant and thought I should improve my writing skills.

It did in fact much improve my writing but there were some aspects to it which concerned me. I found The Professor to be hung up on the idea of writing for the sake of writing. He did not like me very much but finally admitted I could write pretty well.

I have been thinking about one piece I wrote for this course which he definitely would not have liked. I am not sure if I ever handed it in, or perhaps gave him a modified version. My theme was, and is, that I do not like the idea of writing just for the sake of writing, or ‘committing’ ones life to an impractical ideal.

I recall we were required to write a response to an essay he had us read, which seemed to particularly fascinate our professor.

The author described how, during a camping trip on top of a mountain, when she was apparently quite young, a large moth caught itself in her candle and burned up in a second. Then its shell began burning as a wick and went on that way for hours. Candles seem to me strange things to take on a camping trip.

This author, Anne Dillard, wondered whether the moth was female, whether it had mated and laid its eggs, whether it had “done her work.” Oh, I wonder what that’s all about? However, Annie had eventually climbed down off that mountain and gotten herself a life; mated, laid her eggs, and done her work.

In my estimation, Ms. Dillard has laid some very big eggs. When she got to teach classes of writing students, she discussed this story. She asked them how many were willing to “give your lives and become writers.”

She said that all hands went up. Perhaps they all wanted to get their grades. I believe at least some of them really thought the teacher and the rest of the class were slightly whacko.

Immolation Annie went on to discuss what she saw as the true light given off by two flaming critters called Simone Weil and “Rimbaud of Paris.” The former proclaimed, “Literally, it is purity or death.” Since purity only happens in chemistry, that leaves death.

In Wiel’s case, surely the ultimate in pointless self destruction, she starved herself to death out of some angst about French workers under Nazi occupation. And the world is full of people like this Rimbaud, who “damaged his brain with Absinthe and wrote “mad, vivid poetry” before disappearing in Abyssinia while ‘running guns’ for somebody. It seems these two are often read by people who want to live vicariously the process of self-destruction.

Now, consider another work dwelt on by The Professor, on the general theme of self-immolation; James Joyce’s story “The Dead”. I had actually seen the movie some years before and was impressed by it. I have never got around to finishing the story, but the video sits in my little library of movies.

I often play this video over Christmas holidays, a good time to think about the point of life. The underlying topic of the story is the conflict between living a long and good life or going out in a flame of passion. Or, fading away in mediocrity versus throwing your life away on a cause which may not amount to anything.

The story is set in Dublin, Ireland, about 1910, just before the Irish world got turned upside down by the revolution and a lot of people died for a cause. It was all about some ‘bon vivants’ who gathered over Christmas to enjoy good Irish company and talk over the state of the world. There are hints of the social ferment going on around them; one young woman could only pop in briefly because a big political meeting was going on.

One foolish middle aged woman threw a fit of angst at the end, over a young man called Michael Fury who died that day some years before. He had tuberculosis, was madly in love with her, her parents would not let her see him, he caught pneumonia standing in the rain trying to see her, and died. Her telling of this left her awkward and introverted husband highly perplexed.

I did not find the characters Joyce set up as the living dead to be wholly contemptible. It is not an irredeemable sin to be stupid. They had their livings earned, and they lived. They seemed to do it without depriving others of the means to live. Realistically, what else could they have done with their lives, in that place and in those times?

Yes, there were people around them who were going out to meetings where James Connolly was speaking of freeing Ireland and creating something better in the world. But what was heroic about the character of Michael Fury? People died young of the consequences of tuberculosis in those days, as they did of AIDS when I first wrote this, and COVID now. He might as well have died from pining in the rain for an unattainable erotic obsession, as any other way. Such are the odds of existence.

What I threw at The Professor about martyrdom was another film which impressed me. It came out at about that time. It was about the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins.

I do have a slight fascination with Irish history. It summarizes all of modern history pretty well, especially the revolutionary period of 1918 to 1923. To me the film has something to say about stupid martyrdom behaviour against ruthless suppression, as opposed to going at it to win.

Michael Collins personified the Irish revolution. The gang of assassins he led invented urban guerrilla war and finally forced the British empire to the negotiating table. Meanwhile his nominal superiors in the revolutionary movement sat in the United States, trying to order suicidal attacks on symbolic locations.

He then negotiated what was attainable and of real importance to the Catholics of southern Ireland; the formation of an Irish Free State. Many of his more extreme co-commanders would settle for nothing but the unattainable dream of a united Ireland under a republic and they started a new war over it.

When Collins went out to try to negotiate with them, they killed him in ambush. His role in the events of those times, suppressed for many years, is only now becoming recognized. He died, but he really achieved something, which created new possibilities in life for millions of people.

Those who follow my writing know that I have no patience for self destructive, attention seeking behaviour. Even less, for attempts to encourage it in others. That is why I am so critical of Julian Assange and the cult around him.

Thus, to romanticize self-immolation is contemptible and the mark of an empty spirit. Usually, such people are the children of a materially privileged, but psychically stunted, upbringing. They have the requisites for happiness but they don’t know how to be happy.

I resent such people because I have had to fight so hard for my own life. First it was against abusive and deranged parents, and dangerous and debilitating illness. Then it was against fanatic quasi eugenicist social bureaucrats for my right to live irrespective of whether I can be a profitable worker drone.

I eventually built a pretty good life for myself. I did not give up on myself or get provoked into some suicidal act of rebellion. I want to live life while I am alive and if I fade away with age, that is alright.

One thing I do in my life, especially as I get older, is write. I am done with courses in how to write. I just do it.

I write first of all because I do have a talent for it. Writing is a skill which can be refined with practice. However, a lot of people can write well.

Most of the people who take writing courses are vanity writers; hollow people with even less to say than Anne Dillard, and lacking even her skill in saying it. Doctor Samuel Johnson, who The Professor admired, but who had to scribble for his ale and cakes, said: ” Only a blockhead ever wrote, other than for money.” Only complete fools give their whole lives to being writers, or to any mere craft; life has enough limits already.

To write, you must have something to write about. What I write about is what I think about. I have learned in life that thinking is where my real talent is.

Thinking is also a skill which is refined with study and practice. However, there are not so many people who are really good at it. The real trouble is, they are never very popular.

I concluded my paper for The Prof with a final note on martyrdom and self immolation. Here is the same section, only slightly revised.

Most of the people who have truly illuminated the world did not seek out greatness, but were called to it and rose to the challenge. Martyrs are generally hollow people for whom self immolation was the only way to define their miserable selves.

Usually they are even more fanatical than their persecutors. Who are to be respected are those who were allowed no way out, but who refused to go out like sheep and who made their murderers pay a price for their lives.

All that anyone has the right to expect in this world is to have the space, the means, to make a life that is worth living. This has always been hard to get in this world. So, if The Power will leave you with the space in which to live, then you live.

But if It simply is not going to concede your right to live, there isn’t much to do except to try to exact a price for your life. Perhaps now you understand why I am a proponent of revolution who has a profound distrust of revolutionaries. And that was the end of my writing about flameouts.

So I write in my blog because I am free to do it, I have things to say, and I have a modest audience. I do not write as an end in itself, to ‘be a writer’. I have long ago stopped seeing the need to ‘define myself’ in any way.

I just live and do what I do. With luck I have some life yet to live, and wisdom to gain and pass on, before my flame runs out.