Consumption
“When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.””
According to Google, tuberculosis is called “the consumption” because of its deleterious (in this case) side effect of weight loss—it is a disease that causes the sufferer to consume herself until she’s gone.
I have no mysterious (or intentional) weight loss nor do I have tuberculosis, but I do have the consumption, and it is consuming me.
My consumption is of YouTube videos and books and podcasts and ands—always a little something more. Anything I can take in on planning, productivity, creativity, purposefulness, self-actualization, habits, routines, rituals, manifesting, traditions, relationships, identity, and the rest, etc., et cetera. Of the Great Pie of Betterment, I have taken a bite. Or three.
I eat it and, in return, it eats me.
I stuff myself with more and more learning, but rather than growing healthy and plump on a consistent diet of good ideas, I am diminished.
Rather than using the energy of all I have consumed, I let it...rot.
Natalie Goldberg’s classic work Writing Down the Bones includes a piece on building intellectual fecundity called “Composing.” In it, she says that writing is the product not of immediate inspiration—looking at a vase, or Grecian urn, and writing an insightful and new poem on the occasion of urns—but of connections allowed to grow in the black earth of mentally and physically archived conversations, experiences, and ephemera over time. The poem celebrating the permanence of beauty and the transience of life was not spontaneously generated in the moment of considering the urn, but was the result of a (short) lifetime of burgeoning creation that spilled out through the urn.
Goldberg writes, “Our senses by themselves are dumb.” But I am not sure if she means that senses are too automatic to understand what they do if they have no voice to speak what they know. Or perhaps both.
I am dumb, too.
Because I do have a voice, and I understand what it does, but I am not doing it.
Julia Cameron’s 12-step, I mean 12-week program “The Artist’s Way” contains an exercise called “reading deprivation.”
That’s right: no reading. For most artists, words are like tiny tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our system. Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried.
I used to think this was dumb—not allowing yourself input in order to allow output doesn’t make sense—how can you create without material of creation? So I just skimmed over it.
Which is more ironic: not reading the section about not reading or re-reading the section about not reading? Or perhaps both.
The eponymous protagonist of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient keeps a commonplace book. A copy of Heroditus’s Histories into which he presses “maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books … journal notes in his own small handwriting.” I don’t remember much else of the book—and please don’t suggest I re-read it—but I remember that.
I want a commonplace book: a tattered and weathered trove of ephemera of all associations and anecdotes on any occasion that I can carry in my hands. An eclectic, intentional congregation. A sample of everything. A pastiche of the world.
I collect, but I don’t curate.
I rot, but I don’t compost.
I consume, but I don’t create.
Somehow I feel that if I start pulling the words out of my head and collaging them to the page, they won’t be mine anymore. Or they risk being lost. Or revealed. Or they will come to an end.
So I keep adding.
The final book in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series features a series of letters written by Claire, the main character, who has traveled back in time 200 years. She has left them to her daughter, Brianna, in the present day who reads them throughout the book and we, as reader-observers, get to experience Claire’s timeline and her daughter’s timeline simultaneously. But Brianna refuses to read the last letter her mother left because, even though her mother is definitely dead (the letters are 200 years old), Brianna feels if she leaves the final letter unread, it means her mother is still alive. She doesn’t have to grieve her because she hasn’t seen the last of her. So Brianna locks it away.
Even JK Rowling’s Dumbledore hordes his vast knowledge and experience. Using his pensive, he pulls out his own memories and stores them in jars. He occasionally shares them, but mostly they are decor. And since the knowledge is locked away in jars outside of his head and many of the labels have faded to nothing, can he even remember the memories exist?
I believe that words and ideas come to a person because they can only come to that person—the culmination of a person’s insights, experiences, and mental commonplace book/compost heap—creates a perfect field for the moment of insight falling from the ether to land. The recipient has three options:
ignore the moment
capture and hoard the moment
capture and share the moment
Whatever that person does, the moment is gone from the ether—it can’t present itself to anyone else because no one else can converge with the moment in the same way. And once the moment descends, it can’t go back. Whether it is captured or lost, it has been consumed.
A consummation devoutly to be wished.
I doubt I will read or YouTube or podcast myself to death, but I could ignore-the-moment myself to death. I have two options:
Hesitate, as I often do, just before the start—stir the compost and prepare the field and abandon it before something takes root.
Continue to consume until I can’t consume any more and all that compost returns to the ground or I could use the richness I have and create.
But not both.
I don’t know if Claire knows her last letter is her last as she is writing it, but Brianna knows. And if Brianna never reads the final letter, if she never allows the moment to come to her, it doesn’t mean her mother isn’t dead; it means she never fully lived.
