Air and Light and Time and Space: How to Build Our Writing House
What a Charles Bukowski poem reveals about the balance between joy and productivity in developing a body of work.
The poet Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920–March 9, 1994) published a poem in 1992 called “Air and Light and Time and Space.” The poem’s audience is for writers who think that if they can just find the perfect environment for productive writing, the words will flow effortlessly. The poem starts like this:
– you know, I’ve either had a family, a job, something has always been in the way but now I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this place, a large studio, you should see the space and the light. for the first time in my life I’m going to have a place and the time to create.
Helen Sword, a Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland, begins her homonymously titled book about “how successful academics write” with Bukowski’s poem. I highly recommend Sword’s book. Both for its fascinating interview-based approach with writers about the craft, but also how it provides a new vantage point on the good and not-so-good writing habits we feed.
Riffing off of Bukowski’s poem, Sword offers the metaphor of a house to visualize the writing process. ‘The House of Writing’, she says, is a metaphor for the conditions under which many writers imagine they’ll find “that sweet spot where productivity and pleasure meet.”
Unfortunately, Sword says, for many writers the House of Writing comes to feel more like a House of Cards:
“We long for “air and light and time and space,” an architecture of possibilities and pleasure; instead, we find ourselves crushed under the weight of expectations and the rubble of our fractured workdays.”
In interviews with writers, many with highly experienced writers at the pinnacle of their carrers, the imagery of endless struggle they attributed to writing is probably familiar. Writing is like…
- “…experiencing a sandstorm in the desert”
- “…climbing a mountain”
- “…parachuting into new territory”
- “…wading through a valley of sh*t”
These were the metaphors that resonated with me, but her interviewees had other metaphors for the writing process too: engineering metaphors, aquatic metaphors, cooking metaphors, sports metaphors, relationship metaphors, and my personal favorites, animal metaphors, like this gem: “being asked to make multiple revisions is like being ‘nibbled to death by ducks’”
If you’re going to create…
The writer, philosopher and photographer Susan Sontag (January 1933 — December 28, 2004) famously wrote advice for writers struggling to develop a body of work. She says, “There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.”
One meaning I take from this advice is this: successfully building a body of work as a writer is not about adding the perfect space, time, techniques to your life, hoping they’ll kindle inspiration. Instead, building a body of work involves reminding oneself daily to subtract one’s closely held assumptions and dogmas about what the ideal writing situation should look like.
A few years before she wrote the above, Sontag also jotted down: “Writing means converting one’s liabilities (limitations) into advantages. For example, I don’t love what I’m writing. Okay, then — that’s also a way to write, a way that can produce interesting results.”
Turning obstacles into opportunities is a common way this idea gets worded. Ryan Holiday, in his stoic-fueled self-help book The Obstacle is The Way writes “Failure shows us the way — by showing us what isn’t the way.” And also, “Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”
This makes sense, until I think of Sontag and Bukowski and Helen Sword, and I think: maybe not. Maybe it’s the reverse. Maybe the head more often follows the body; maybe right perspective more often follows right action. Bukowski’s poem goes on:
no baby, if you’re going to create you’re going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children while you’re on welfare, you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you’re going to create blind crippled demented, you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood and fire.
The Haunted House of Writing
You’re going to create…no matter what. So if you start with a commitment and discipline to create under any and all circumstances, maybe it’s not ideal, but “Okay, then — that’s also a way to write, a way that can produce interesting results.”
Or as Isabel Allende puts it, “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”
After working through her architectural metaphor – ‘The House of Writing’ – over the course of her book, Air and Light and Time and Space, Helen Sword questions her house metaphor. It’s not expansive enough, she feels, because it leaves out all the other metaphorical dwelling-spaces we might craft to house and nurture our writing practice: yurts, boathouses, cottages, tents, or just a sleeping bag on the dirt: “In the end, the size, splendor, and exterior trappings of our individual homes matter less than the sense of well-being we feel when we are inside them. The grandest mansion can be cold and sterile; the smallest cottage can be intimate and inspiring; even a makeshift tent can house a party.”
Sword’s point is that our perfectly constructed ‘writing house,’ with the perfect balance of “air and light and time and space” — the circumstances under which we’ll find the ideal balance between joy and productivity ––can too easily morph into a haunted house: a house ideal for the ghosts and demons of self-doubt bedeviling our writing progress.
This is the conclusion Bukowski seems to find too, at the end of his poem:
baby, air and light and time and space have nothing to do with it and don’t create anything except maybe a longer life to find new excuses for.
