April 30, 2007
Sloth
It is said that sloth in writers is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict, especially that kind of laziness which renders us incapable of doing the thing to which we are most looking forward. Not only are perfectionists notoriously lazy, but probably all artistic indolence is deeply neurotic, more a pain than a pleasure, or something of both.
If I heard “promise” once when I set sail for life, I heard it a zillion times. And glory me, I believed it all. Then its two close companions sloth and perfectionism frequently sidled up and said, “Promise? We’ll show you promise. Just you watch.”
Sloth comes from the Greek for negligence and indifference. After that, it came to convey sadness and spiritual torpor. It even made it to the Vatican’s Bottom Seven in late antiquity and the middle ages and was classically described as a state of restlessness and the inability to pray. Restless, I am, and, of course, never all that exemplary at prayer. But sadness at the corner of spiritual torpor? Now there’s a familiar intersect.
The writer Cynthia Ozick implies in her collection of essays, “Metaphors and Memory,” that writers write letters to avoid writing. “Letters (are) vessels of calculated permanence,” she says. I rather imagine letters that way. Writing has always come more fluidly for me when there’s somebody “out there” to receive — and read — them. Maybe I don’t need a response, just so that my imagination can imagine a somebody. I haven’t much of an idea what Ozick means by “calculated permanence,” but there is a kind of permanence in a reader’s mind once something is read, if memory can be thought to be all that enduring.
Torpor reminds me of the “permanent care” cemeteries claim to offer. If that’s the case with writing letters, then one might expect them to accumulate their own metaphorical versions of weeds and toppled concrete urns and generally just to suffer the wear and tear of time’s seasons all the while watching their original ground sink slightly and irregularly over their decomposing and prosaic remains.
Anyhow, whether one writes about it or not, there’s always Yogi Berra, who said you can observe a lot just by watching.
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