Streams

wild generalization

I have a completely unverified theory about why people become writers, which is that when they were kids they all spent some pivotal period being painfully bad at verbal speech. Maybe it isn’t necessary for them to have actually been bad—maybe it’s enough to have felt like they were bad, or that getting it right was really important. I suspect that reading a lot contributes to this. It trains you to pay extra close attention to the way language is constructed, and gets you into seeing talking as a serial and mainly mental operation, rather than a full-body dance that merely incorporates words. A set of simultaneous sensorimotor streams gets collapsed down into mostly just one, a channel too slender to hold a fraction of the unbundled emotionality you only just were.

It feels like being underwater. Kids around you chatter like birds while you sit in an office inside yourself composing careful instructions to your vocal cords, which still find ways to sabotage you. You start rehearsing sentences ahead of time, under your breath, and then repeating them back afterwards, to test their weight. This does not go entirely unnoticed. You’re a kid who mutters now, a faulty robot trying to reprogram itself. The harder you try to control your speaking apparati—the more desperately you separate the pieces from each other in pursuit of the problem—the worse your condition becomes. The real problem, you come to feel, must be time—there’s never enough of it to say a single thing correctly.

Writing comes along and offers a solution to this problem it created. Writing, in the new notebook in the quiet room at home, gives you a sense of having all the time in the world to say anything about anything, one word following another, steadily, forever. At this self-set speed, in this endless duration, even a monkey hitting keys at random would eventually learn how not to betray itself.