Some Days Are Harder Than Others.

Yesterday I was sitting here trying to read stuff on my computer screen—black text on white is the hardest—with the lines of text sort of floating up and down at the ends, and I tried to relax my eyes, to bring the double image together, to get used to this new prescription, which is much better than before but still, my ability to see depends on how tired, or not, I am, in other words how well I slept the night before. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t do it. I walked into the living room and sat on the couch and cried. Will I ever be able to really see, just open my eyes and look at the world, again? The things I love most, reading and writing, are more and more difficult, stressful, exhausting, and slow.

Why am I writing a book? I’ve been working on this book forever. Why did I choose seemingly the most challenging thing to do, to do? What keeps me going is that I know it’s very good. The writing I’ve done so far, which is a lot, is very good. And I see the whole thing, I feel the whole thing in me, and know how good it is. Or will be when it’s done.

I’m going to be 64 in a few weeks. I could be writing songs. I’m good at that. Not that songwriting is easy, in fact it’s gotten harder, because I expect more of myself than I did when I was younger, but I’ve been doing it for a while and I am skilled and confident. Songs are shorter; the energy they take, the focus, is less sustained. It’s easier to see the end of a song from the beginning, to keep the whole thing in one’s head at once. But I decide to write a fucking book when I’ve never written a book, which is not only challenging technically, I’m not just writing a book but learning how to write a book.

I keep doing this to myself. In the last 45 years, I’ve been a painter, an actor, a director, a filmmaker, an essayist, author, songwriter, and a raft of things that don’t fit neatly into any category, with varying levels of success at each (artistic, not financial which, for better or worse, I’ve never considered when deciding what to do). I follow my nose, but my nose doesn’t usually lead me to the next story; more often than not it leads me to an entirely different craft. What is my fucking problem? 

Even when I was like 5 years old I couldn’t choose between drawing pictures or singing or making up stories or dressing up like a girl and pretending I was someone else. By about 20, when I dropped out of a theater program and came to New York to study painting, I have believed that the medium doesn’t matter so much because everything informs everything else, that being a better painter makes you a better director makes you a better playwright makes you a better actor makes you a better filmmaker makes you a better songwriter makes you a better novelist makes you a better painter. (Or maybe I just have no discipline and a short attention span.)

Not to romanticize suffering, but the other thing I believe, and this knowledge came much later, is that if it isn’t hard it’s not going to be good. I mean that the work is hard. My bad eyes are just what I’ve got to work with. So I sat on the couch and cried for 20 minutes or so, then I remembered that there are writers who type with their toes because they have no hands, and the job is to just sit down and do it, which is what I did, after I took a nap.