“Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still / Even among these rocks”

(T. S. Eliot, from “Although I do not hope to turn again” in Ash-Wednesday.)

The poet once again doesn’t know what he wants.

He wants to care and not to care.

He can’t sit still.

He is dissatisfied with the rocks.

Is there any pleasing T. S. Eliot?

Kathy Acker wrote about the difference between communication and expression. The latter is what most people seem to think creative writing is about: you find that feeling or impression and you express it in the work as best you can, as clearly and powerfully as you can, so that the reader will have for themselves something like the feeling or impression you are trying to express. This is what made Stephen King say (if I remember correctly) that writing is a form of telepathy: I’m trying to get my thoughts from my brain into yours.

But Acker suggests (again if I’m remembering correctly) that writing might in fact be about communication: I’m not trying to make you feel as I feel, or think as I think, or see as I see; I just want someone to talk to. I send off a piece of writing as I would an email to a friend.

If writing is expression, then we might say: Eliot’s gift is an almost paradoxical one, because what he does is powerfully express feelings of ambivalence, vagueness, and indecision.

If writing is communication then things might appear less contradictory: Eliot wanted to set his ideas down and straighten them out by talking about them. If we feel his indecision it is because he has earnestly communicated with us; he has entrusted us with it.

I’m not at all confident that I’ve delineated the difference between communication and expression correctly as Acker, or Eliot, or anyone else, would understand these concepts. But this is the point (as I see it) of communication in writing: a text is not the final statement of an author, or an authority whose word is to be taken as from one who knows; it is the beginning of a conversation.