A Quote by Marie Calloway
I don't have much to say about honesty. All that I feel about it that people don't discuss as far as I know is how much effort it is to create truly honest writing, in my opinion. It requires a lot of thinking and effort.
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Years ago, in order to stay sane, I had to really make an effort not to think about how people view us. There's just so much noise, positive and negative, and not much good comes out of thinking about it.
To be quite honest, along with thinking and such when it comes to writing, I'm not into words like "theory." I'm a PhD dropout. No matter how many twenty-five-page papers I wrote, I never felt like I was saying much. I didn't feel like the writer of the book, whose work I was analyzing, would have been impressed. It didn't matter how much time or effort I put in.
I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.
I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.
I guess what bothers me so much about what I now see going on in both Washington and in Texas is an effort to keep people from finding out about the mistakes of lawmakers and then when they're uncovered, an effort to fool people and pretend there was nothing wrong.
So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.
The art is about opening, it is not about prejudice, it is not about contempt prior to investigation. It's about endlessly trying to keep from having contempt by admitting that you don't know. Even if you know a lot compared to some other people, usually, I think, the honest experience would be: "God, how little I know! And how much I need to have compassion for myself and for other people."
People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has, and I hope that REBT teaches them how to do it.
It feels like everything's been decided in advance that I'm following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn't matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It's like my identity's an orbit that I've strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch.
I'm interested in history because it's a discipline that requires a lot of effort from the imagination. You need to put in a lot of imaginative effort to figure out how people lived in an era that is not yours. And in that understanding of people from a different era, I feel, is an important gateway into humanity. Because you understand human behavior. In order to understand humanity, history is important.
There's no doubt about it: fun people are fun. But I finally learned that there is something more important, in the people you know, than whether they are fun. Thinking about those friends who had given me so much pleasure but who had also caused me so much pain, thinking about that bright, cruel world to which they'd introduced me, I saw that there's a better way to value people. Not as fun or not fun, or stylish or not stylish, but as warm or cold, generous or selfish. People who think about others and people who don't. People who know how to listen, and people who only know how to talk.
I am keenly aware that in writing about my mother, I am writing about my aunts' sister, and that in writing about my grandmother, I'm writing about their mother. I know that my honesty about how my view of these people has changed over the years may be painful.
I think there's a danger with any great art, that if you begin to test your ideas on other people, and get their opinions before making decisions, or if you pay too much attention to what other people say about what you create, that it really pollutes your expression. I think that I'm much more about pure art and honesty and expressing exactly what I feel, and not caring so much what anyone says. However, I do respect, and I do pay attention to everyone's comments. And I do take them into consideration. But I don't base my decisions by it
Sometimes we put so much effort into things we're doing, like dating or wedding planning, that we don't stop to think about whether or not we even want the results of that effort.
There's a lot of music nowadays with people singing about how amazing their clothes are and how incredible their shoes are and how much jewelry they might be wearing or how much jewelry they want, how much money they have and the club that they're in and the alcohol that they're drinking. I think that's showing off. I don't think it's necessarily all that honest or all that interesting.
I guess in my own life I don't really think much about manliness too much. I feel like a lot of men that I know don't sit around thinking, "How am I supposed to be a man?" I don't think that I have to prove anything.
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