In Common Light

An empty line in a song, one that says “Tryna to find the right words,” one that admits doing singing not quite right, one that says things not typically found in a song, one that defies the actual definitions of a song, like metacognition, that is thinking about thinking, in this case writing about writing, declares something. It shows something special.

“I don’t quite know how to say how I feel,” (Lightbody et al., 2006).

When sitting down to do the thing called writing, you are embedded in a space, one that has expectations and an end goal to it. When you are “in the zone,” with words flowing across the page, you imagine scholars using their vintage brown-covered notebooks wearing their round glasses. You are imagining what you would need to do to produce “good writing,” which is imagining what the authors that came before you would do.

Even though you know the expectations and the end goal, based on the actions of those that came before you, you are not forced to do solely what is in line with that. You can stop your pen’s movement during your writing session to, for example, get some water. You can rest, you can look away. You can do something more, too. You can take a step back, a true step back. You can take space, saying “I don’t know what to write” or “I don’t know what words to say.” 

You are doing everything right, you are embodying all of those that have come before you. You are in this space, you know the goals and expectations of this session. So, how can you not know what to write?

All you know is the work. You do not know for sure the entirely of the zone. Can you correctly define the “zone” if all that you know is the work? You are not necessarily like the writers before you, so your “zone” is very different from their “zone.”

You are trying to know “the zone” from studying the work. Why focus on the work to figure out the zone? There is no certainty in this realm that we call the zone. There is no one right way. You are a writer, not a scientist. You have a pen and a blank paper, and you aim to touch upon the human condition. They have pipettes and microscopes, and they wish to discover the laws of things except what makes us distinctly human. A writer does not make a scientist, a writer works with human laws. 

That distinct feature, surely, is the human consciousness. You should not aim to reproduce a work that’s been done because that wouldn’t add much value. 

Replication and reciprocity is valuable in the sciences. Matters of the human consciousness need no reciprocity because we need not prove its existence. We need only describe its existence. We need only connect the facets of this distinct quality of being human to the hearts of others, and use this to improve the human condition. We need not prove human consciousness, but expand upon it. 

How can an observation be “incorrect”? When you are drawing upon (or expressing from) something that surely exists, there can be no right or wrong. There can only be what it is.

Declaring “I don’t know what to write” takes a step back from the goals or expectations of something under the definition of a scientific idea of writing — one of certainty and clear cut answers. We are not proving or falsifying. All we are doing is describing. All we are doing is illuminating light onto what exists.

References

Lightbody, G., Connolly, N., Quinn, P., Simpson, J., & Wilson, J. (2006). Chasing cars [Song]. On Eyes open [Album]. Polydor; A&M.