In Keep Going, I have a
chapter called, "Forget the noun, do the
verb," and after seeing it on the poster,
a reader asked if it was inspired by Stephen Fry. I had no
idea what she was talking about, so I did a little
googling.
In 2010, Fry
was interviewed by "14-year-old Eden Parris in an
interview for a Radio Times feature that enabled
young readers to meet their TV heroes." During the course of
the interview, he "warned Parris that language could shape
and limit people's ambitions":
Oscar Wilde said that if you know
what you want to be, then you inevitably become it - that
is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be
anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we
are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a
person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know
what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned
if you think of yourself as a noun.
Of course, this would've been
perfect for the book, but that is one of the
universal laws of writing books: once you finish them, you
find all the stuff you should've included but left out based
on your ignorance.
The quote I did put in is
from R. Buckminster Fuller's classic, I Seem To Be
A Verb:
Back in 2013, The New
Statesman ran a piece called "What
Atheists Can Learn from Believers," in which the writer
Karen Armstrong emphasized religion as a verb.
"Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard
work." She pointed out that in the modern west, there's this
idea that you have to believe first, and then
do. But no, "we have turned faith into a head-trip,"
when, originally, the English word "belief" meant something
like, "commitment."
"Credo ut intellegam - I
commit myself in order that I may understand," said Saint
Anselm (1033-1109). In the late 17th century, the English
word "belief" changed its meaning and became the
intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition.
Religious people now think that they have to "believe" a
set of incomprehensible doctrines before embarking on a
religious way of life. This makes no sense. On the
contrary, faith demands a disciplined and practical
transcendence of egotism, a "stepping outside" the self
which brings intimations of transcendent meaning that makes
sense of our flawed and tragic world.
It's remarkable to me how much you
could apply what Armstrong is saying to creativity or making
art. "If you don't do religion, you don't get it," Armstrong
says. Religion is something we do, a "practical
discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and
heart."
"It's a practice," Mary Karr says of
her own faith. "It's not something you believe. It's not
doctrine. Doctrine has nothing to do with it. It's a set of
actions." I remember once, when asked to make a case for
religion, she replied, "Why don't you just pray for 30 days
and see if your life gets better?
So many people think you have to
first call yourself an artist, know who you are and what
you're about, and then you can start making art. No, no, no.
You do the stuff first, then you can worry about what it is,
who you are. The important thing is the practice.
The doing. The verb.
We aren't nouns, we are verbs.
Forget the nouns, do the verbs.
