Writing With Water

A spiritual practice of Buddhist monks is to write calligraphy with water. That is, they dip their pen in water, instead of ink. This is done as a reminder of impermanence. No matter how beautiful the strokes are, they begin fading as soon as they’re formed.

As writers, we want to think our words will last. If my pen is filled with water instead of ink, or if the file on my computer deletes at the end of every working session, would I even want to write?

There is a special type of melancholy I get when I see books that will never again be read. I felt this especially strongly once in a musty used bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. It was dimly lit and the stock on the shelves looked like it hadn’t turned over in years, one of those stores whose very existence seems to defy the laws of supply and demand. I was the only customer in there and – book nut that I am – even I couldn’t find something to interest me. There were memoirs of long-forgotten public figures, paperback bestsellers that had cracked the NY Times list back in the 80’s, commentary that didn’t exactly qualify as history, more like bygone opinions on events whose relevance had faded. The cover designs and fonts were outdated, the pages yellow-brown.

Bookstores usually energize me, but this one bummed me out. I thought about how much work had gone into these books, and how they were now sitting here forgotten. I thought about my own book, which I was hard at work on, which I had great hopes for. If I was lucky enough to get published, would it one day suffer the same fate? (The answer: of course it would.)

We revere authors whose writing outlives themselves. We even have a special word for them – immortal. Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf died decades ago, but they have yet to go out of print. Mark Twain and Jane Austen died even further back and we’re still reading them. Or if we want to consider the Mount Rushmore of immortality – Shakespeare’s plays are still being performed, Marcus Aurelius’ journal entries still provide inspiration, King David’s psalms are still being read (and sung), the Apostle Paul’s letters are studied as closely today as when they were written 2,000 years ago.

Nobody with a healthy sense of perspective would dream of that level of immortality, but it’s nice to know that at least some humans can achieve it.

But can they?

Even works that seem fixed in the firmament of human consciousness are not. They too will one day fade, just like some forgotten commentator’s take on the Iran-Contra scandal, moldering on a bookshelf in Wisconsin. There will come a time – 500 years in the future or 5,000 – when the last Shakespeare play is performed and the last copy of Hamlet decomposes into organic material. And as hard as it is to believe, there will come a day when people no longer read David’s Psalms or Paul’s letters. If you think this unlikely, consider the scrolls of a lost religion of Babylon or the forgotten rituals of a mighty Aztec priest. These once seemed just as permanent. They held sway over the lives and minds of entire civilizations, and now they’re gone. The holy books of today will succumb to the same fate.

Marcus Aurelius knew this. He was emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world, and yet he constantly reflected on how one day he too would be forgotten. In Meditations, he gives a list of prominent people who have come before, then writes:

Where have they gone, the brilliant, the insightful ones, the proud? … Short-lived creatures, long dead.         

Well, goddamn. What’s the point of all our work then?

I ask myself that sometimes. What’s the point? Then I remember it’s a stupid question, as stupid as saying, “Why eat if you’re just going to get hungry again?”

The meaning is found in the process. The process nourishes you. Scribbling in your notebook, tapping on your keyboard, marking up your printed draft. Or even better, marking up someone else’s draft, and having them mark up yours, two creative minds meeting and hashing out the best way to organize words and images.

What we write isn’t significant because it will last. It won’t last, but it’s still significant. It matters in the same way that a single wave on the beach in the middle of the night matters. Or a smile from the baby in front of you at the grocery store. Or a stiff breeze that wakes you up on a December morning. Or the cavernous ambiance of an old-growth forest.

All that stuff is impermanent, and it all matters.

So, back to the monk…

His brush is wet on the parchment, his strokes are smooth and deliberate. He’s not forcing it because he feels no pressure. After all, he’s just writing with water, like the rest of us.