And I Write: A Very Short Origin Story

“I mean, I am always writing in this journal … I mean, I feel like I am always writing. I do it so much, I never even thought about it as being a talent. It’s just something I do all the time, like breathing.”

Meg Cabot, The Princess Diaries: Mia Goes Forth (2003)

Hey, a typewriter! We used to have one of those when I was a kid (because we were a bit eccentrically backward, not because I’m secretly that old, just to be clear).

Sometimes people ask me why I started blogging. I’ve thought about it, and my best answer is that, in the months before I started blogging, I kept thinking to myself, if I had a blog, I could write about such-and-such; I could articulate this idea; I could make that case; I could indulge in a thorough exposition of this pet fan-theory of mine; I could turn that suspicion I’ve been entertaining about the way people deal with the scriptures into an actual robust argument – and, you know, after a few months of thinking wistfully, if I had a blog, one eventually hits on the radical possibility that maybe it might be a good idea to start a blog.

I remember that one time in my first year of university, over a year before I started blogging, I came home from a campus cinema screening in a state of such mental overspill that I felt little short of compelled to sit down and draft something awfully close to what is now my usual post format: I compared an idea found in the film with an aspect of Christian thought.¹ I did it on paper, and I have no idea where the relevant bit of paper is now, and I doubt I’ll ever try to turn that particular concept into a real post, but it was arguably the beginning of something.

I write because raw thoughts only become proper things that I can actually deal with once they’re put into words. I write because the only real way I know to tame an interesting idea that’s bouncing around my brain and stop it distracting me from almost everything else, is to pin it down and articulate it. I write to make sense of things; it’s an expression of my endless longing to wrest order from chaos.

Don’t take the bit of poetry below too seriously, though. Imagine me saying it with a grin and a general sense of the futility of all endeavours and strivings by which human beings try to define themselves; I do know where my identity really lies, and it’s not, thank God, in any deed or activity or achievement of mine.² (Actually, that’s, rather paradoxically, another aspect of why I write: because it enables me to tell myself truths like that in a way that’s vigorous enough to make them actually take some sort of root in me.)

So I sit and I write and I write and I write.

It’s just something to do with the chaos inside.

Nothing scares me so much once defined and described.

Words are weapons with which I turn darkness to light.

So I sit and I write and I write and I write.

It’s just something to do with this noise all the time.

Noise is noise only ’cause it’s so disorganised:

Impose order, and music is born … well, I try.

So I sit and I write and I write and I write.

It’s just something to do with the mess of my mind,

Some imagined control in this crazy old life.

It’s just bailing the water, not quelling the tide.

Still I sit and I write and I write and I write.

It’s just something to do; it’s just somewhere to hide.

Says my soul to itself: Are you yet satisfied?

And it’s not, and it’s never, and (would that it rhymed!)

No, I’m not – but it’s better than nothing. All right?

Footnotes

¹ The film I’d seen was From Up on Poppy Hill, which is one of my favourite Studio Ghibli projects, and that’s saying something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-rhgSCAqDU.

² As for where it is, check out, say, Ephesians 1, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+1&version=ESVUK, which I’ve been inflicting on a little extra-curricular Greek reading group I’ve started running this academic year.