The Unwritten
Item No. 18
“We used to believe we could write a better story for ourselves… Perhaps we still can.”The Unwritten is the story that we have yet to tell ourselves. It's what hasn’t happened yet, but might. It's what exists in a narrator's mind, the unseen form that arrives later as a thought to translate. Of course, in every unwritten story, possibility plays a strong role. In the unwritten space, anything, anything at all, could happen once we unleash our thought.
With our pen poised above a blank page, the blank slate that everyone references as the place with “no existing constraints,” our pen's only purpose, and our only purpose, is to shape the next form.
Before the pen touches the page, everything is still possible. That is not emptiness. That is the whole point. The blank page is not the absence of constraint. It is the presence of everything that has not yet been decided.
It's our opportunity (with that pen in hand) to create the shape of something in the unwritten space.
With nothing decided, everything begins with what might be possible.
These days, though, we find ourselves amid lots of stories, blasting at us at a positively fantastic speed. We know lots of the potential stories of the way things could go and it's easy to imagine one of those already written stories may be the way things will simply turn out.
The Unwritten lands here in The (Death of a) Thing: The Last Catalog: as we used to believe we could write a better story for ourselves. But now we often seem to take these other stories as if they are the only way forward. It's easy to get caught in the inevitability trap. Which is where a lot of us seem to hang out these days. Inevitability is the quality of something that cannot be avoided, prevented, or altered—no matter what is done, it will happen.
We might believe that our story is simply written already.
That The Unwritten is itself not possible.
But wait: isn’t the agency always ours? Choice, that is. Isn’t choice always on our side?
Our actions are ours to choose.
And isn’t our story unfolding even as we write it. Things haven’t turned out completely, not yet. As I wrote in an earlier piece:
“They’re still turning. As Claire-Louise Bennett’s character surmises in her book Pond, ‘quite often I’m terribly disappointed by how things turn out, but that’s usually my own fault for the simple reason that I’m too quick to conclude things have turned out as fully as it is possible for them to turn, when, in fact, quite often, they are still on the turn and have some way to go before they have turned out completely.’”
So perhaps despite the space The Unwritten now holds in our catalog, it is still on our side. Perhaps we still can write the story of a better us. Perhaps it hasn't quite yet died?
What are the costs to us when The Unwritten dies? Well, we stop trying, don’t we? We throw up our hands and allow the onslaught of everything else to arrive. Possibility withers. Agency, too. We arrive as bystanders, passively observing life—that is, our lives. The lives we ourselves are living. It seems there is an impact on others too, when we believe The Unwritten has died. They may need us to try, and we don’t. Other costs? Our capacity for surprise.
Other specifications:
Of course, there are some things that are inevitable, at least as far as we know, death, for one. (At least so far). And the arrow of time.
“That which exists may be transformed; What is nonexistent has boundless uses.” –LAO-TSE