The beginning of James Wood’s essay on Melville (The Broken Estate, 26) got me thinking about what my ambition is as a writer. This is what Wood wrote:
When it comes to language, all writers want to be be billionaires. All long to possess so many words that using them is a fat charity. To be utterly free in language, to be absolute commander of what you do not own—this is the greatest desire of any writer. (26)
I read that and I thought, “Really?” It feels more like what someone who is not a writer would think about writers than what a writer would say about her or his own desire. What resonates more with me is the idea of fully inhabiting the language, and I wonder now if that is something poets say more than prose writers. Certainly I feel like I have read that exact wording or something like that wording in the prose of poets writing about the craft, but even though I intuit what the word inhabit means there, I have a hard time articulating it precisely.
Still, I do not experience myself as wanting to command the language. Somehow, whenever I consciously try to do that, whatever it is that I am writing fails. I suppose my ambition as a writer feels more like a desire to be open to language, to find a current I can swim in and then swim, and this is true even in revision. Though maybe path/road is the better metaphor here, because revisions, when I make then, when they are substantial/substantive often feel like I am either correcting a wrong turn or bushwhacking a clear path through a thicket.
Wood’s metaphor is very obviously capitalist and very much about power, and I just don’t buy it.