A Plea for Eros

and reedited those thirty pages into a prose poem. It was the best thing I had ever done.
    After that, I never wrote anything in lines again. It would all be prose, and the best prose would always come in a flood. Where does the need to write come from? What is it? It is a need, not a choice. It’s a giving way and a giving up. I remember finding a reference to hypergraphia in a book on the nervous system. The obsessive need to write for hours and hours every day, the author said, was sometimes a symptom of epilepsy, linked to a pathological condition in the brain’s left temporal lobe. Auras. Fits. Writing. Dostoyevsky had it. Saint Theresa probably had it. My husband has often said, “Writing is a sickness.” But many people who aren’t epileptics have the need to write for hours and hours every day. Could my need to write be connected to my neurological sensitivity? Maybe, but not
what
I write. Content is what few neurologists discuss.
    I am afraid of writing, too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where the walls don’t hold. I don’t know what’s there, but I’m pulled toward it. Is the wounded self the writing self? Is the writing self an answer to the wounded self? Perhaps that is more accurate. The wound is static, a given. The writing self is multiple and elastic, and it circles the wound. Over time, I have become more aware of the fact that I must try not to cover that speechless, hurt core, that 1 must fight my dread of the mess and violence that are also there. I have to write the fear. The writing self is restless and searching, and it listens for voices. Where do they come from, these chatterers who talk to me before I fall asleep? My characters. I am making them and not making them, like people in my dreams. They discuss, fight, laugh, yell, and weep. I was very young when I first heard the story of the exorcism Jesus performs on a possessed man. When Jesus talks to the demon inside the man and asks for his name, the words he cries out both scared and thrilled me. The demon says: “My name is Legion.” That is my name, too.
    2004

ALSO BY SIRI HUSTVEDT
    NOVELS
    The Blindfold
    The Enchantment of Lily Dahl
    What I Loved
    NONFICTION
    Yonder
    Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting
    POETRY
    Reading to You