What makes someone a writer? Is it a keen awareness of those people and events around you, and the extraneous cosmic influences that put them in their place? Is it an unrelenting hostility towards traditional ideals that governs an individual, directing them to change the way people perceive in a holistic sense, thereby separating themselves from the shoals of conventional disciples of other bygone writers? Is it simply having a talent for words?
What Cheever's son says about his father being a writer before anything else is irrefutably true from the point of view of someone whose eyes have seen life through Cheever's in his journal entries: "To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness...to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world." Cheever was destined to be a writer, this was his reason for existing.
I dip in and out of doctrines, but one constant stream I swim in is the notion of predestination, that a person's purpose is understood by forces alien to our consciousness before life has even been realised. Writing is the only act, besides those I find to be involuntary (breathing, thinking, dreaming etc.), that offers me a sense of empowerment. The power that finds a path to my thoughts and channels its way into my work is comparable to when a fledgling bird asserts the gift of flight on its maiden voyage; nothing but the power inherent in the very moment of the fall could be responsible for the saving grace of flight.
Writing was Cheever's predestined source of power and I don't deny that it is mine also - now if I could just learn to control the bloody thing!
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