INTERLUDE: Dialogue Across the Void
An Open Letter on the Isolation of the Writer
An open letter to writer, thinker, YouTuber and future academician Robin Waldun, the author of . You can find him on YouTube here, where he lectures brilliantly on literature, philosophy and the life of the eternal student.
Edit: Robin’s return letter is now available to read on his Substack! You can find it here:
Dear Robin,
In beginning this letter I cannot help but think of a quote from John Barth’s foreword to his experimental collection, Lost in the Funhouse. In fact, it is not so much the quote that interests me (although as a novelist I do relate to it) but more a fragment of it, an idea, a small gathering of meaning which has squatted stubbornly in my mind ever since I read it. Barth writes, “Your congenital novelist prefers to dream up a world once every few years; to plant and people it and dwell therein for maybe a whole presidential term—or the time it takes a new college freshman to complete the baccalaureate—before reconfronting the interterrestrial Void” (emphasis added).
The interterrestrial Void. One imagines it as a cold and lifeless space, dark and endless like the desert at night. It is, as Barth means it, that dead and undecided spacetime between narrative worlds, between the end of one project and the start of another, when the writer is set adrift on the currents of Real Life, searching for a literary shore upon which to plant their feet.
But the void, also, is that gap between the expressed, where the horror of the infinite unexpressed crowds in. I think of Beckett’s silences. I think of the blank page. I think of the spaces between words and the darkness between the stars. Wherever something is not, the infinite void rears its dreadful head.
Robin, when we messaged you spoke of the loneliness of the writer, how the exchange of correspondence provides a path to connection while “they’re bleeding for their craft” (a beautiful phrase). So much of our existence as writers is constrained to the laptop, the pen, the book, the mind. I admit I feel this isolation keenly. The writer is always in dialogue, but that dialogue, more often than not, is with the dead or the distant. When reading someone like Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, and responding in thought or word to his work, I am admitted into the illusion of a relationship: here, in this book which sits on my desk, he has spoken to me; and I, in my writing, have spoken back. But Borges, being Borges, will never receive my response, just as I will never know his. There is a fundamental distance, an abyss of space and time which grows between us (indeed, which grows with every passing moment) and all he or I or any of us can do is throw words into the depths of that untraversable void. We don't know where we’re sending them or if they’ll ever hit something resembling a shore, but we send our words anyway, urged onwards by a senseless hope that one day, if we’re lucky, a word might become a patch of something solid—and a sentence might turn into a bridge.
The void is here and now. The void is the gap between you and I, between family and friend, between one’s mind and the minds of all others. If there is one binary in this world we can be sure of it is this: everything in the universe is either oneself, or not oneself. We can strike out, strive to build connections, to foster love and intimacy; we can send our words over those dark waters and believe they have touched land (for we can never be certain); but we will never escape the isolation of the mind.
Writers and thinkers are, I believe, more conscious of the void than others. For us the unsaid looms everywhere: in books, in conversation, in the great human drama playing on a loop in the street. Why else would we write if not to fill a silence? A writer is born when a word goes unspoken, when an idea goes unexpressed, when an opinion goes un-championed. Wherever we see a writer there is also an absence they are trying to block with their words and their name and their body, an abyss they will devote their lives to filling so that it doesn’t wash them out to sea.
The question then becomes: how do we live with the void at our backs? How do we keep ourselves grounded when the infinite unexpressed is washing in around our feet?
Robin, for many months and years I have thought on the loneliness of the artist. The time one spends in empty rooms. The days where one’s only conversation is with oneself. As writers we live outside of the world. We do our best to be immersed in it but nevertheless we find our minds washing again and again to the edges of the conversation, the room, the globe. It is our talent for observation which excludes us from absolute participation. We dive into experience, hungry for life, and wind up back in our own brains, taking notes.
“I must quit,” Annie Dillard writes in The Writing Life. “I was too young to be living at a desk. Many fine people were out there living, people whose consciences permitted them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever.”
Dillard again: “Much has been written about the life of the mind. I find the phrase itself markedly dreamy. The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.”
I wrote something on this last year. It has since idled uselessly in a folder like so much other literary debris, but I will use it here and now to fill a silence. “To be a writer,” I wrote, “is to exist in that liminal space between the inside and outside of life. In one moment you are within it, an active participant; the next you are pushed from the scene, relegated to a mere observer. Our minds straddle this divide, skipping back and forth. It is akin to slipping in and out of being. When I am on the outside of life, I am not myself. When I’m on the inside, I am myself in the way an animal is itself: blindly, thoughtlessly. Creation happens on the outside, it’s true, but the inside is where we gather our materials. Like hunter-gatherers, we spend a lifetime dipping in and out of the world, collecting whatever we can carry in our two arms. It is such a patient, lonely activity. The rest of humanity gets to live in that wondrous world 24/7, but the writer, for whatever reason, cannot keep themselves within it—like old Velcro, they come unstuck again and again—and must content themselves with these tiny visits, a lifetime of amateur sight-seeing, at the end of which they proudly present their little pile of words—the sum of what they’ve learnt—and discover that the rest of the world already knows it, has always known it—or perhaps simply doesn’t care.”
I am in the business of plugging holes, you see. I fear the empty spaces. I want so badly for connection, for bridges, for solid ground. In realising that I am at sea, I have turned the sea into just one more blank page in need of filling. Meanwhile the landmarks of my day-to-day life have all changed around me, and I have realised that the activity which was meant to bring me closer to life has estranged me from it instead.
I asked how we’re meant to stay grounded when the void is all around us, begging to be paved. Maybe it is simply this. To write a letter. To sit down and talk with a friend. Letters are, for the writer, a beautiful compromise—with the letter one can simultaneously fill a silence and narrow the distance between minds. Thoughts and thinking can be wonderful diversions but they have no value in isolation. We don’t exist in a vacuum and our words aren’t meant for the folder or the box or the diary in a locked draw. Share them with the world if you’re brave, but firstly (and most importantly) we should share them with the people we know, friends and family and writers-in-arms. The best hope for one’s words, after all, is that they’ll enrich someone else’s life.
Robin, I am writing you from a small room at night. In the evenings I turn on my lamp only. The ceiling light is too bright, too overwhelming; it admits too little. If I am to think properly I need to be able to sense the shadows around me, all those dark spaces where the imagination can grow a world untempered. Even so, it can be lonely here. I am fulfilled most days but I am also very conscious of the life I am not living, the friends I am not making. In writing this letter, I feel I have crept a little closer to the world.
Annie Dillard, once more, for luck: “I had forgotten all of wide space and all of historical time. I opened the blinds a crack like eyelids, and it all came exploding in on me at once—oh yes, the world.”
Warm Regards,
Shaye
Brilliant and poignant as always, Shaye!! You astound me