What is writing?

I don't really read any more. And that isn't because I have a view on the quality of writing these days, or because I have read all the greats, or because I am too busy. I don't read much anymore because of something else. I am going to try and work it out now. I want to read again, though. I want the perspectives.

I just goggled 'writers that committed suicide'. Hemingway, Foster Wallace, Plath, Woolf, Pavese came up. There are writers that see things so clearly for us that we can rest in them a while and get relief. I remember reading Orlando and feeling an excitement between my throat and my heart at the simple act of being alive. I remember preaching about Foster Wallace in a tutorial, running out of superlatives for the shark-toothed precision of his observations. Pavese's La Luna e i Falo, The Moon and the Bonfires, broke my heart somehow. I don't remember how, but only that something happened as I read the book. I am a recovering alcoholic and many books have revived my spirit when I am sick.

But it is as if, in my journey back to the light I need stronger and stronger stuff from words. Or, at least, something more and more specific. I need them to speak directly to me and clearly so that I, too, have a hope of doing something useful with my life. But now, because of the journey I have already taken, I really need the route out of, not just the reflection of the modern mind. I will guess that I will never finish identifying with all the ways a mind can be sick, but there comes a point, for me, now, where you get hungry for joy, no matter what the world looks like. There comes a moment when you become of conscious of all the joy and all the ways we hide it. I want to hear from the alchemists now.

The words don't need to be stylish, they don't have to tell me things about places I don't know, but they need to be true. And if they are true, in the deepest sense of truth, they will be beautiful. And if it doesn't feel true, I slip away from the page because I have come for relief, and I must find it. But it is also a fact that a book that was true for me 20 years ago can no longer be true now. I read Crime and Punishment when I was 19, living in Florence, in my second attempt to run from myself, having already spent a year in India. I remember the self-loathing and alienation captured so perfectly, the sick weight of anxiety spilling across the pages, the obsessive hungry gaze of a writer who made my pain true. I remember lying on the bed in a room and crying in relief that Raskolnikov had been conjured. I have never read the book again.

Dante meant nothing to me at university because I didn't have the patience or the grace to get near to what he was saying. I was vaguely interested in the descent to Hell, I remember people trapped in trees. In January I listened to an an ex-priest turned psychologist explain it canto by canto and I used it like a drug, and when I finished I began listening again because it was feeding me. I have been listening to Paradiso again, because I need to be reminded that, as Dante explains, everything, everything that we are, is 'usable'. That there is no shadow too dark to transform. There is no place for alienation and loathing in a life lived consciously with the highest intention pulsing through.

I see so many words, I offer my brain to so much information, and it is harder and harder to notice when we are being given a meaningful word. In order to become still enough to understand what we must do with our lives, our minds must be offered directions to that stillness. Those directions, when you read them are as recognisable as the back of your hand.

So writing can, at its highest level, be directions to stillness, in a word, a metaphor, a poem, a short story or a novel. People can use their lives to show us the way. Heaney does that for me. If he is writing an essay or a poem, in his hands I let go and I know I will be taken higher. I know people who knew him and spoke about his 'presence'. Writing can mirror us at any moment, and then we pass that moment and we need something different. Perhaps, when you are fully realised you fly up and down the levels in a game of meaning and healing, like an expert mechanic servicing a car.

But now, I am still making my way, trudging doggedly away from the darkness, and to do that, I need people who know where I have been and point out the path ahead, gently, gently so that I barely notice I am taking instruction.