Shaun Levin

Posts Tagged ‘books’

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Evidence of the Attempt

In Writing on April 18, 2025 at 8:41 am

Writing happens in the grasping for language, the clinging and clawing to find the precise words. At the heart of the attempt is the knowledge that we’ll fail. Writing is translating, is approximation. When that attempt at likeness shows, when we see, but more than see, when we feel that attempt, writing becomes exciting. Evidence of that effort, that endeavour doomed to fail, because most of life does not happen in language, is where the excitement of writing exists, and because of that in the reading, too.

The tunnel of translation runs from the body to the page. You can feel that electric wire, that conductor of the current, evidence of the struggle to put into words. First comes the world, then come language. First the body, then language, first hunger, then language, first love. To write is to get as close as possible to the point before sensation turns into words. There was the visual, there was the sensation. Then language tries to do its work, and we cling to our faith that the right words can be found, the precise words. That’s when it gets exciting, when faith and knowing work side by side. Evidence of the mind in its belief and trying.

Drawing and painting is exciting when it’s not precise, when there’s evidence of the mind at work, evidence of the body free of its learning, its training, when the training has been absorbed and forgotten and all there is is freedom. Language is always a learned thing, never entirely free, grappling to be precise and to forget itself. A tension between going towards the experience where there’s no language and yet relying on language to get there. Just one more step, keep going, and language will disappear and be pure experience, pure sensation, pure colour, pure shape, taste, form.

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Inside a Book

In Writing on September 23, 2020 at 8:17 pm

I met a man many years ago who gave up on writing. At the time, I’d known him for 4 or 5 years and had seen him try to write and succeed in writing and complete a novel. When he gave up he had been writing for many years but with limited success and an overall sense that he was neither enjoying the process nor able to achieve the kind of work he was striving for.

This was many years ago, maybe 15, and I remember being both astonished and awed by his decision, his announcement that he’d no longer be a writer. The struggle was over. He may have said that he wasn’t sure what he would do instead but that he did know that he would never write again. I might be exaggerating about the last bit. I have no idea where he is now nor whether he ever returned to writing. To be honest, I don’t remember his name (although we do have a mutual friend), but I do remember the moment when he said what he said in that large room in Soho at that dining table with the London light coming in through the windows, muted by the general grey of the city. I remember the relief in his voice, in his face: at last he was free from some burden that had clung to him for too long.

Astonished the one could just give up.

I have not always been loyal to writing but then writing has not always met my needs. For many years I relied on writing to fulfill my needs. Maybe we were co-dependent, maybe I asked for too much, maybe writing asked for too little in return. And so I drifted away for a while and found myself doing other things. I played with other art forms – photography, illustration, bookbinding – and because they were not “my” art forms and I was an amateur, there was no pressure, no bar, no history. All there was was now and the joy of the experiment. There was what there was in the beginning of my writing life: only the writing. No expectation, no assumption of an observing eye, a reader. Everything I did was for the writing itself.

And suddenly, colour mattered, colour was available. Composition on a single page mattered. It was possible to put a small image on a large page. Each page was a canvas, is canvas. Take a photograph and put it on a page and it’s possible for the page to be done, complete. You don’t have to fill it with words, the most difficult, demanding, and exacting of mediums.

I think what I’m exploring here is the question of what constitutes a book? Or: What are the options available to us when we’re faced with a blank page, even a single page? And: At what point are words not enough? At what point is the use of words too much? And when they’re too much or not enough, what are the options available to a writer? What are the other performances you can do in a book? What can you do inside a book that will excite you to keep making work?