Free Silences by Shelly Fisher Fishkin Page A

two, was “trying to get to that table, to that typewriter, away from my jobs of teaching and trooping this country and of keeping house.” “Your subconscious needed that time to grow the layers of pearl,” she was told. Perhaps, perhaps, but I doubt it. Subterranean forces can make youwait, but they are very finicky about the kind of waiting it has to be. Before they will feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to be worked on. “We hold up our desire as one places a magnet over a composite dust fromwhich the particle of iron will suddenly jump up,” says Paul Valéry. A receptive waiting, that means, not demands which prevent “an undistracted centerof being.” And when the response comes, availability to work must be immediate. If not used at once, all may vanish as a dream; worse, future creation be endangered—for only the removal and development of the material frees the forces for further work.
    There is a life in which all this is documented: Franz Kafka’s. For every one entry from his diaries here, there are fifty others that testifyas unbearably to the driven stratagems for time, the work lost (to us), the damage to the creative powers (and the body) of having to deny, interrupt, postpone, put aside, let work die.
    “I cannot devote myself completely to my writing,” Kafka explains (in 1911). “I could not live by literature if only, to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.” So he workedas an official in a state insurance agency, and wrote when he could.
                 These two can never be reconciled. . . . If I have written something one evening, I am afire the next day in the office and can bring nothing to completion. Outwardly I fulfill my office duties satisfactorily, not my inner duties however, and every unfulfilled inner duty becomes a misfortune that never leaves. Whatstrength it will necessarily drain me of.
    1911
                 No matter how little the time or how badly I write, I feel approaching the imminent possibility of great moments which could make me capable of anything. But my being does not have sufficient strength to hold this to the next writing time. During the day the visible world helps me; during the night it cuts me to pieces unhindered. .. . In the evening and in the morning, my consciousness of the creative abilities in me then I can encompass. I feel shaken to the core of my being. Calling forth such powers which are then not permitted to function.
    . . . which are then not permitted to function . . .
    1911
                 I finish nothing, because I have no time, and it presses so within me.
    1912
                 When I begin towrite after such a long interval, I draw the words as if out of the empty air. If I capture one, then I have just this one alone, and all the toil must begin anew.
    1914
                 Yesterday for the first time in months, an indisputable ability to do good work. And yet wrote only the first page. Again I realize that everything written down bit by bit rather than all at once in the course ofthe larger part is inferior, and that the circumstances of my life condemn me to this inferiority.
    1915
                 My constant attempt by sleeping before dinner to make it possible to continue working [writing] late into the night, senseless. Then at one o’clock can no longer fall asleep at all, the next day at work insupportable, and so I destroy myself.
    1917
                 Distractedness,weak memory, stupidity. Days passed in futility, powers wasted away in waiting. . . . Always this one principal anguish—if I had gone away in 1911 in full possession of all my powers. Not eaten by the strain of keeping down living forces.
    Eaten into tuberculosis. By the time he won through to himself and time for writing, his body could live no more. He was forty-one.
    I think of Rilke who said,“If I have any