A Letter to Blake Butler

Blake,

For most of our lives we have known the risks of writing, but those risks have changed with age. When we were young the danger came from not pushing ourselves to the edge of our abilities, from complacency; if we didn’t try hard enough, we risked our abilities to live with ourselves. Our desperation drove us towards each other and so we made a community. Then our groups fragmented, the internet got demolished into a surveillance op / shopping mall, the consequences of public speech intensified, and domestic responsibilities spiked for most. It seems to me the big risk rises now from silence, from us letting lapse that shared passion organizing much of our lives and moralities, from treating art as a hobby, or worse, as some soft-walled safehouse for the discharge of thoughts and moods orthogonal to the dominant culture; our danger now is the daily practice of cowardice. But you and I have stoked each other’s artistic flames for decades now, or at least reminded one another of the reality of our fire, and for that I am indescribably grateful.

I wanted to write you about a fear of mine. I know you’re working on your magnum opus, a long book comprised by a series of volumes in which you express all the aesthetic and spiritual ambition available to you now so deep into your life. I know we’ve discussed the silliness, the laziness, and the fearfulness of refusing to try one’s hand at the big game—at writing a masterpiece, at adopting once more that youthful ambition to go to the edge—particularly when one can ground that ambition in decades of life and pain and knowledge whose production can only be lived once and forward and thus can only be accomplished with a good deal of time. But what I fear now is something more practical, more domestic, something we haven’t yet discussed in depth. So I figured I’d write this letter and share it with readers, many of whom are also writers, in hopes the act will help me understand my fear, help others understand their own, and help you better respond to it all.

I have recently started working on the longest and most demanding project of my life, a Big Weird Book that I wildly believe is necessary. I do not fear losing the motivation to go to the edge. I do not fear losing the discipline for regular creative work, a habit I’ve been accustomed to since I was ten and a habit upon whose altar I sacrificed much of the free experimentation of childhood. What I fear now is disappearing.

To write, you have to disappear. Practically this means you have to be absent from those who love you. It is visibly and emotionally obvious to those around writers that they are, at least when the getting’s good, somewhere definitively else. Staring ahead at a project that’ll likely require five to ten years of steady work, I am imagining the potential consequences of that absence for those who love me and for those whom I love.

The years ahead promise degradation. A truism, sure, but a forceful one for me and mine. My dad’s got Alzheimer’s and we don’t know how the disease will worsen or with what pace. My mom’s been living with an ostensibly terminal diagnosis for years now. My wife’s parents, while healthier, are getting up there. You know well the pains ahead of me because you have walked with them before. And then of course there’s the body and the money and the mortgage and the rest of the bullshit breathing down the neck of any time left alone to write, to playfully work, to open our selves to the process by which our lives feel most sensible and aligned and brilliant. What I’m saying is this: I’m afraid I’ll feel irresponsible and even cruel for investing so much of my self—my energy, attention, and dreams—into what others could see as some kind of inexplicable and bottomless pit. Why throw thousands of hours at a thing that might only elicit in our lifetimes the sustained attention of a few hundred people? Or a few dozen? The farcical ideal of connecting financial stability to the production of novels remains a joke, or at least for me, since I know now the breach in my sanity said relation tends to crack open. I have the sickness that says I must shit on money if I am to care. It is what it is. Given the declining cultural value of writing books and the declining level of attention likely to be paid to those books, particularly the challenging ones, how am I to justify throwing so much time into this book-shaped hole? Is working on such a project tantamount to a kind of quietist psychosis?

My wife is the most supportive, generous, and enthusiastic person I know. So I do not know exactly for whom I feel this fear. I have rarely operated from a stance of needing the approval of others to pursue a chosen goal; as you know I am a stubborn fuck, recalcitrant and focused though hopefully still kind, my punk parts pumped hot blood even though the gray hairs keep rolling right in. I guess I worry about the madness of a task of such scope. I have never written a very long book, capping out at around four hundred pages—and for a strict exercise in genre, at that. Will doubling the quantity (and at least tripling the quality) of my past efforts feel so different? More urgently, will the people around me keep loving me even if I take myself away from them for so many hours of our limited lives together? Can I get away with it? And if I do pull it off—if this heist goes down and the loot gets fenced and no authorities real or hallucinated catch wind—what will become of me if the book is met mostly with silence?

We’ve talked for twenty years about how writing, the process itself, is the complex act during which many of our most important moments have occurred. And how receiving your published book in the mail is kind of like staring at a coffin. And how the reception of your book is beyond the point, which is to live and experiment on the edge of your capacities and thus to advance your sense of the spirit of all that is possible. But I still fear that god damned silence. And I still fear the quiet betrayals to which people can subject themselves and each other. Maybe I will always walk with these fears. I still want love and I still want to be understood. The latter is a hard ask when the method by which I most sincerely ask others to know me is to read eight hundred pages or whatever.

Anyway. I know you are careful and wise in the blood of all this, and more importantly, I trust you. Please offer your thoughts whenever you find the time; despite the worry, I’m in no rush.

Love,
Ken