THE MIND OF THE WRITER

I had been writing ten years before I discovered the amazing capacity even the ordinary mind has for creating from experience and memory, and that its powers of production are limited only by one’s courage to think, and by the amount of physical strength and endurance one can afford to spend on the performance. After the ‘Circuit Rider’s Wife’ was written I was in the gravest state of anxiety lest I should never muster the material for another book.

About this time I met an old friend who now holds the chair of metaphysics in one of our great universities. I may have given some intimation of my despairing state. In any case, he instructed me in the laws governing mind. He drew a diagram of my mind on a piece of paper and showed me how it worked. I had only one consolation as I studied this thing--that he did not know or suspect the thoughts I was thinking about him at that moment. They were not complimentary.

I rejected his theory, but I could not get the picture of his infernal diagram out of my mind. Every time I sat down to work at my desk, I could see the lines and segments of my mind on that piece of paper and the dot where a thought would probably appear. The result was a hysteria of self-consciousness mentally which made thinking impossible. Quite by accident that great student hit upon the method of obstructing thought. The mind turned like a worm on itself!

In my opinion it is wiser not to fumble with this delicate piece of machinery, no matter how much you may find out by tearing it to pieces. What I know is that he who peeps at his mind will never have the use of it. It is wiser to leave not only your mind but your gender severely alone if you hope to do good spirit-level thinking. It would not surprise me at all if these were not the bonds which do somehow bind us to God, to be accepted, but not understood.

After all is said and done and taught that we can possibly learn from others, every man faces his own problems and solves them the best way he can. The lawyer learns law, then he practices law according to the bias of his own mind and character. Maybe he is a shyster. Maybe he has an honest legal sense. It all depends on the kind of man he is. The same thing is true about the physician. After a while he gets his own mental habits of diagnosing our complaints and diseases. If his mind catches and holds some fixed idea about neurasthenic tendencies, apt as not he will diagnose your case accordingly, although you may be having fits on account of an ulcer in the stomach. In any case, he finally works out a system of favorite prescriptions. Then he fits us to his medicines, and his methods as he grows older, no matter how new our disease may be. He cannot help it. His mind has made him and it is too old, inelastic, to add another cubit to his wisdom or courage as a physician. If you are about to become a patient, the risks are six of one and half a dozen of the other whether you choose a young doctor in the experimental stage of his practice or this old one who has settled down in his methods, because they are reasonably successful and rarely ever result in your death.

Preachers are the same way. They see God according to their lights, make sermons until they exhaust their vision. Then they go on preaching this same body of thought as long as they live under various texts from the Scriptures.

I am wondering how a literary critic would go about reviewing the mind of an author instead of his book. He would probably decline the assignment. He is a judge of the material, the copy a writer produces, but he is no mental mechanic to pass judgment upon the amazing motor of our faculties. The best he could do would be to write an illuminating essay upon the times in which an author lived; the effect, by inference, of that particular period of civilization upon his work; whether he was well and in good circumstances, or wrote under the pressure of ill-health and poverty.

But none of these circumstances would account for the main fact that he became an author instead of, say, a fishmonger or a banker. The great majority of poor people or sick people never take it out on the world by writing books. Neither does their state of health determine their literary style or their choice of material to convert into copy. Robert Louis Stevenson was an invalid, suffering from an incurable malady. By all the laws governing such a life he was due to die early without accomplishing anything. But he sat up in bed and wrote the healthiest, most entrancing stories of his times, and died later.

The mind is something else, not us. It is an instrument set up in us, controlled by spiritual forces which reach it through the medium of our emotions. It can be well and powerful when we are weak and ill. ‘By my spirit,’ thus also sayeth such a man. On the other hand, the mind is frequently ill to the point of dissolution when we are enjoying perfect health. Witness the sickly slime copy produced by a decadent writer who may be an athlete physically. ‘By my spirit,’ also says such a man who has adopted his powers and principalities of darkness. My notion is that it is a choice between spirits which determines the quality of your thinking, but not the power with which you can do it. That, I suppose, is the personal equation in the whole phenomenon and would depend upon the strength of your emotions and the capacity of your mental motor.

It is not for me to venture into the realm of metaphysics with my cheerful, flat-footed ignorance of this subject, but I am now writing the record of my own mind in relation to my work as an author merely from experience. The conclusions I have reached in this manner may be erroneous from the standpoint of the professional students. But I have frequently erred with the happiest practical results in my own living and achieving.

I remember being very much upset upon learning that poetry, religion, and sex animation were all products of the same emotional reactions. This was a serious matter. If I could not dispose of it in a manner satisfying to my mental and moral platform in living, it would take the luster off my thoughts and render me some sort of automaton in spiritual consciousness. You are not really the author of a thought which splashes up like spray from a wave of emotion which has its origin in sex. This information was too diminishing. Also, I prefer to believe in God, not because of my sex, even if I was of the other sex, but because I have a spiritual consciousness which only the idea of Providence can satisfy.

Still, I had a squeamish feeling that we probably were made precisely by this economical pattern, one emotion carrying all our sensations; thrift in expenses being one of the axioms in creation as I have observed it.

Any sensible person must have reached the same conclusion I reached, provided he did not consult too many learned authorities, but stuck like a leech to his Scriptures, which was something like this: By nature, delicacy, and decency, by all prayers, every hope and noble ambition, the sensations of sex are so mixed in us with the highest emotions of religion, eloquence, and every sublime imagination that we have been for ages the parents of spiritually minded beings instead of brutes.

I suppose this was the only way to insure such a phenomenon in an apparently physical and carnal world. We are thus born convinced of immortality by that admirable device of the Almighty. I am ready to stretch a neck ahead of the current animal propaganda concerning sex and contend that it is probably the basic principle of the instinct we have of immortality. How else does the lowest type of savage also arrive at faith in God and keep company with ghosts and spirits? Superstition is the name we apply to that, when it may be a much sounder, though more elemental, faith than we have ourselves. In any case, how do you account for the character of his superstitions or for his ability to produce them at all? He has no Bible, no literature, neither theologians nor scholars to direct his mental processes. But he has his emotions. He is some kind of stick-in-the-mud poet, and he arrives at the idea of God because he is a man. A dog cannot do it, though he has the same procreating instinct, but is not informed with the spiritual sense.

These conclusions have given me great satisfaction as a writer. I am never embarrassed if a particularly entrancing thought comes to me. I do not attribute it to the inspirations of my gender, but to the spiritual quality of the mind produced by gender in general, if you will have it so, not that I am personally disposed to dig down to the rudiments of my thoughts. Some mysteries are sacred so long as they are hidden, but shocking when they are exposed. It seems to me that the tendency of our times is to suspect sex of something which is really good, but that we are inclined to make something bad of what we suspect.