Writing as Alchemy
There is a mistake we relatively unknown, online writers make if we're not careful. We tell ourselves we write for the love of it, for the craft, for the truth of the thing – and then we check our stats to see how many people have read, liked, or followed us. The mistake is not in the checking, but in the gap between what we say we are doing and what we subliminally aspire to. And it is in that gap the suffering lives.
Things have always been this way, but online writing has rendered the phenomenon almost inescapable. The platforms on which we publish shape the terms of engagement. We provide the labour and the content, original and often free of charge, while they own the means of presentation. It can begin to feel, at times, like a feudal arrangement: the writer as a kind of medieval peasant with literary pretensions, labouring in the hope of one day owning the farm.
But this is rarely about money. What the writer wants is recognition – not fame, exactly, but more a feeling of wanting our work to come back to us, reflected in another's eyes. This is not vanity. It is more simply the need to have one's existence substantiated by another consciousness. The online economy is tuned to exploit this need, offering us breadcrumbs of recognition – likes, shares, follower counts – while delivering very little of the actual psychological connection we imagine we require.
So the crisis, when it arrives, is not: "I didn't get rich." It is closer to: "I poured myself out, and nothing came back."
This is about soul-hunger, and it requires soul-level thinking if we are to explore it properly.
I have often described the act of writing as alchemical. The essay, the poem, the story – though we seek an audience – are works whose real product is the psychological transformation of the writer. If a reader is moved as well, then all the better, but the inner transformation is the point. It's not that any particular piece alone is going to provide a Eureka moment – it's more a gradual process, over years or decades.
Yet there is a difference between discovering this through experience and adopting it as a consolation in the face of disappointment. The idea can be true, and still be used defensively to cover up our suffering.
The writer craves recognition and then constructs elaborate justifications for writing. Yet these too can become another form of craving. And yet the dissolution of this craving self does not feel like the right answer either. Archetypal psychology would also refuse such a settling out of the personality — it has no interest in curing us of our complexes or delivering us into some imagined untroubled Nirvana. Instead, it suggests that it is not vanity to ask what a life means, provided we understand that the question arises from the soul. What does this experience of life – these dreams, these obsessions, this body of work – mean?
The materialist answer is that it means nothing unless you have become a name and earned at least a living by it. But that is only a materialist response to a non-material question. For meaning to exist at all, the question must be lived internally. And the psyche, in my experience, then offers its own enigmatic confirmations.
I've been circling this question again recently, as I periodically do, and in response I dreamed I boarded an old British coaster – an unglamorous working vessel that stays close to shore and knows particular coastlines intimately. The ship had held its departure for me, by name. The captain assigned me a role: journalist, world-facing. That image has stayed with me because it is so precisely not the Romantic version of the writing vocation. Not the poet on the mountaintop, not the mystic in the cave, but a journalist on a working vessel, calling into familiar ports, witnessing and recording as the ship goes about its business. The journalist files his copy and moves on.
Then, in a later dream, a mercurial figure – Mercury as psychopomp – made me promise never to go to Russia. In the logic of the dream, this was not meant in a literal way. Russia represented a seductive elsewhere, a place imagined as more authentic and more aligned with deeper values than the life one has actually been assigned.
The moment the writer decides the world as it is cannot recognise what he is doing – and that true recognition exists elsewhere among some imagined audience of the spiritually attuned – he has, metaphorically, gone to Russia. He has abandoned ship. And the real work stops.
My promise to Mercury then feels like a psychological injunction: that value must be internally generated. Our orientation remains outward – world-facing, audience-facing – but without expectation. The abiding fantasy of a truer "elsewhere" is the danger.
Finally, a third dream completed the sequence, and with a note of dry humour. I was pushing a rail-trolley from a platform around a circular track, labouring unseen while others enjoyed the ride. The image was unusually explicit: a track leading nowhere but back to its starting point, my efforts benefiting only those who owned the platform. Then came an awards ceremony, with dignitaries distributing praise they did not seem worthy to give.
Then came a shift in perception: I realised I was not performing for them at all.
My mother was in the audience – perhaps as a symbol of ancestry and tradition, the long line of those who have written and dreamed, attempting to articulate something true. It was for her that I had put on a decent suit and done my best. Not for the dignitaries, not for the platform, not for the apparatus surrounding the work.
This was the dream's resolution – or at least my reading of it. Not the dissolution of the desire to be recognised (for the suit still matters), but a reorientation of who the recognition is for. The craft must be honoured. The presentation must be tidy. But the real audience is not external, contemporary, and fleeting. It is interior, ancestral, and enduring.
The commission on the coaster, the promise to Mercury, the track to nowhere, and the figure of my mother – each image addresses, in its own way, the same question: who, in truth, are we working or writing or even living for?
We dress well. We do the work properly. We honour the craft – for the work itself, for the tradition, for the ancestral witness that persists whether or not the world responds to it. And the alchemy, if it occurs, occurs there.
Writing as alchemy, then, is not a consolation we construct to manage disappointment. It is a description of something that happens when the work is done faithfully, and the demand for something in return is held, however imperfectly, at bay.
I remain grateful for the connections I have made over the years of writing online. But I am also reminded how long it can take for anything resembling even modest traction to take hold.
But perhaps that's the point. The writing that survives the silences, the work done in the small hours that no one reads, that nevertheless changes something in us – that is the only part that can be relied upon to remain true. We all know those moments and we should hold them gently, as the only parts that can be protected.