avatarRyan Frawley

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This Article Is a Soul Jar

To create something, you need to leave a piece of yourself behind.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

It’s in here somewhere.

Tucked under the long tail of a semi-colon; lurking in the deep well of a period. In the airy void between paragraphs or the tight gap of two letters. It doesn’t matter whether you find it or not. What matters is whether it finds you.

Timothy Key puts it eloquently in this article. There are times when a writer leaves something of themselves in their work. Timothy’s imagery is fluid; ideas flood and spill, ooze and drip, swirl and splash. But for me, they appear as tiny shards, fragments of glinting glass stuck in the open wound of the story. Or else it’s the bee’s barbed sting, still throbbing with poison as it works its way deeper into the flesh.

But then, the things we’ve done shape the way we see the world. Timothy used to put out fires. I used to kill things for a living.

We leave parts of ourselves in the things we create.

Not just as writers, pompous braggarts that we are, but all artists. When Diego Velazquez painted his famous Las Meninas, he made sure to paint himself painting the painting. Caravaggio used his own face as a model for a decapitated and hungover Goliath, dangling by the hair from the fist of his young lover.

In Cougnac cave in France, among the 15,000-year-old paintings of animals, the unknown artists left a series of black and red fingerprints on the walls.

It sounds exhausting because it is.

If you keep breaking off pieces of yourself, what will you be left with? You are a finite resource. There’s only so much of you to go around. You have other obligations, duties, demands, outside the strange and deeply personal world of your creation. The more of you that drips and dribbles and oozes into your work, the quicker you’ll become an empty vessel.

But there are other ways to think about this phenomenon.

I instinctively distrust any talk of souls or spirits or chakras, hearing under every fuzzy word the sly knocking of the charlatan’s hidden hand on the underside of the table where the bereaved and bewildered gasp. Instead, we can think about something else that can’t be seen, but can most certainly be felt. A virus.

We usually focus on the harmful effects of viruses. Lately, it seems to be all we talk about. But the strange and creepy world of the virus is wilder and grander than any imagined afterlife.

Viruses aren’t even technically alive.

A bundle of genetic material inside an organic particle, a virus can only reproduce inside a living being. Maybe us. Maybe a bat. Maybe a bacterium. But because viruses introduce their DNA into the cells of the host, they become, quite literally, part of what we are.

Half of all human DNA originated from viruses. And while so many bacteria live on and in your body that 90% of your cells are bacterial rather than human, the viruses you carry around everywhere you go dwarf your already impressive bacterial ecosystem. Something like 380 trillion viruses make you what you are.

But viruses are tiny things that cannot even stand. They don’t move unless we move them. They can’t reproduce unless we absorb them. In these lines and symbols, among the hard points of punctuation, I encode whatever part of myself needs you to absorb it.

No one lives forever. Not even a virus. Not even a writer. But by spreading ourselves out, maybe we hope to last a little longer. Voldemort, I’m told, couldn’t be killed until all of his horcruxes were found and destroyed. But he didn’t come up with the idea.

Sauron did the same thing with his Ring. And in Irish legend, Cu Roi Mac Daire’s soul was hidden inside a salmon that only surfaced once every seven years. And in Russian myth, archetypal wife-kidnapper Koschei the Deathless hid his soul in a needle inside an egg inside a duck inside a hare inside a buried iron chest.

It’s the philosophy of a weed. The tiny seeds that become airborne with the first breath of wind and scatter themselves across the thousand lawns of suburbia. Ideas live by spreading, and in doing so, outlive their authors. Only the most unimaginative of egomaniacs could see eternal life as anything other than torture. But words don’t weary of the world the way we do.

In Tolkien’s mythology, Sauron’s spirit would keep coming back no matter how often he was cut down until the Ring he poured himself into was destroyed. But any true Tolkien nerd knows that Sauron was ultimately just an emissary, the latest servant of a greater darkness.

Sauron learned everything he knew about evil from Morgoth. And Morgoth, as an evil god, dispersed his power into every atom of the universe. We’re all living in Morgoth’s soul jar.

Who wants to think of themselves as the bad guy?

So far, I’ve likened writers to weeds and viruses and demons. Our methods of survival are much the same. But there’s more at play here than reproduction or a clumsy grab for the grey ghost of immortality.

The works of art that truly live are those that feel like they have taken on the red blood of their creators. Those that contain some trace of the artist’s spirit. Those that cost something to produce.

Because without that, all these words are just simple symbols to make you imagine arbitrary sounds in your head. Pleasing patterns for cultured apes. It’s only when a work of art contains something of its creator that it truly lives.

It’s that which an audience ultimately relates to, the syncopal kick in the base of your brain as one mind connects to another through the medium of words or music or paint or a pile of polished rocks.

If I could plug my brain directly into yours, I wouldn’t. Sometimes, like Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. And while we may sometimes feel otherwise, none of us is mainlining the secret truth of the universe.

The real art doesn’t happen in the lonely studio of the artist. It happens in the mind of the audience. But before the miracle can occur, you need to see that glittering shard of personality between the black bars.

More on magic.

Only children write to express themselves, and purely confessional writing always has a faint whiff of the childish about it. Writing isn’t therapy for the writer — at least, good writing isn’t.

But that’s not to say it can’t function that way. My first novel was a deeply personal passion project that dredged up rotten corpses of monsters I barely knew existed. Surely every writer is aware of the eerie sensation that comes from feeling as though the story is writing you?

I emerged at the other end of eight years of writing a completely different person. What was broken and dark and jagged in me had passed, by some strange alchemy, onto my protagonist and left me alone at last.

And since we’re talking about magic, there’s one last trick left.

The best art contains fragments of the artist, whether they want it to or not. But to read King Lear to find out what Shakespeare thought about family, or to listen to the St. Matthew Passion to better understand Bach’s political views, is worse than a waste of time. It’s a misunderstanding of what art is.

Still, those fragments are still there, glittering darkly and giving life to the work. But the more an artist shares themselves with their public, the more there is to share. The virus spreads by being absorbed. Ideas become stronger the more widely they are scattered.

This art of losing pieces of yourself to the work is one of addition, not subtraction. Every atom I’ve given away has made me stronger.

So be careful as you pick through the undergrowth of these words. Somewhere in this tangle of black and white, some sharp-edged shard of a man you’ll never meet sits waiting to be discovered.

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