The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. […] If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I'm an old‐fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world.
—James Baldwin, interview with the New York Times
this is an attempt at explaining the thing that has kept me from writing for almost three years.
if you follow me on tumblr, you might recognize this title as a semi-frequent tag on my blog. perhaps someone is canny enough to string together its themes, or perhaps this weird phrasing rings true to someone, even if they don’t understand why. it’s something i first described to a teacher my senior year of high school, and it’s something i keep returning to, over and over in my head. over time, it’s become something of a metaphor for how i want to approach art. here’s what it means:
imagine a meteor. imagine its lumps and craters, imagine its mysterious, alien shape. imagine it so huge and dense it dwarfs the room it is held in. imagine the meteor is strange, foreboding, unnatural, awesome. imagine the meteor.
now imagine you, and you alone, had access to this meteor. this meteor, it intimidates. it crags. no one else can understand it but you. there is no way to take it out, no way to bring someone in, no way to break down the meteor and present your scientific findings with the world. and it’s painful, this meteor, this loneliness with it. because how else are you meant to make people understand that you have access to a fucking METEOR? you can tell them you do, and maybe they’ll believe you, and maybe they’ll smile and nod and ask questions, but you can never make them understand the meteor you see.
so: you have a meteor. how does one bring out the meteor?
i want you to imagine a roll of aluminum foil.
well—now we begin to answer the question. see, aluminum may not be the best material for the job. it might be silver, or tin, or even gold. but aluminum is what you have, and it’s what you know. if you press a sheet of aluminum foil up against the meteor, it will take on those crags, those intimidations, those lumps and craters. rub real hard, and you will begin to feel a mirror of the texture you know. take off the foil, piece by piece, and you bring the meteor back to life.
of course, it’s fragmentary. of course, it’s incomplete. the meteor might be meters, even miles across, and the average size of a roll of foil is only a foot wide. a framed piece of thin metal is not a meteor. press hard enough, and the aluminum begins to tear. there are spots and stones you can never fully capture with the foil. no matter what, the meteor can never be brought outside.
but: it’s what you have.
the meteor is a metaphor, as everything is. the meteor can be lots of things: it can be a fictional world that lives inside your head, a philosophical truth you feel you must express, an insurmountable task that leads to world peace. it can be all of those things at once, if you feel it necessary.
to me, the aluminum, the meteor, the coverage of it: it is at the heart of what compels me to write. if i ignore it, it doesn’t go away—i have lived with a meteor at the center of my mind for as long as i have known i wanted to write. and it grows! the meteor i had when i was twelve is different from the one i had in high school is different from the one i have now. the meteor is a presence that enraptures me in an inexplicable way. i cannot keep it hidden no matter how hard i try.
but it is also what keeps me from writing. because how can i, in my mere human existence, even begin to convey my meteor? this alien thing, which i don’t even fully understand, how do i get people to get it? how can i? perhaps my meteor is the same as someone else’s, has the same textures as another, bolder meteor. perhaps my pressings of foil will just seem like flimsy to those who have seen the pressings of copper, of steel. perhaps it is all useless. perhaps the meteor is silly. perhaps—
but perhaps this is all there is to it. me, and the meteor, and the aluminum foil.
here is the foil.