Abelard and Writer's Block

I think the biggest cause of writer’s block is too much to say, not too little to say. We hear of writers facing a blank page and nothing to say. When I am blocked, it is not that I feel blankness inside, or openness, or silence – it’s that I feel clamor, stuffiness, a scramble of voices all blocked and mired in each others’ push. There’s too much wanting to say . . . therefore I just walk away. Go feed the birds. Check the emails. Wash some clothes . . . much like leaving a noisy billiard parlor.

And this comes from not writing something every day, from ignoring the little things that seem unimportant and unworthy of the paper or the time – saying to myself, this is unimportant – this is just complaining – this has already been said – worst of all, who cares anyway? Letting things build up and get blocked.

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I think of a book I’ve been reading, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, the twelfth century monk and nun who left a trove of love letters behind when they died. You see, they had had a torrid love affair while he was studying for the priesthood – and she was his precocious student, 21 years his junior, who never intended to take vows herself but just loved learning (from him; he was quite handsome they say). Abelard had been hired by her rich Uncle Fulbert to teach her the scripture in their original languages, Greek and Hebrew. But once the uncle found out about the goings-on under his own roof, he had his henchmen castrate Abelard in his sleep. After much pain and remorse and a lot of secrecy, Abelard took his final vows, but not before ensuring that Heloise would do the same – so they should “forever be together in spirit” – that is to say, so she would be unavailable to any other man (my opinion).

 Then, after each had taken their vows and was embedded in separate monasteries, I suppose the hormonal changes began to set in from the castration.  Abelard ignored her, took a more fatherly tone in his letters, and made little attempt to see her.  That’s when she writes one of her most straightforward, insightful, and beautiful letters to him:

“Tell me one thing, if you can. Why, after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have neither a word from you when you are here to give me strength nor the consolation of a letter in absence? Tell me, I say, if you can –“

Did you not love my soul? Was it the flame of lust rather than love that bound you to me? I took the veil for you! Those are her very words, though I’m taking license to extract and scramble them together from several pages of text – a letter that rankles even 900 years later.  She details all her young school girl passion and hope in him.  She reminds him that she even bore his child in secret at age 17 and gave up the baby just so it wouldn’t taint his reputation or stand in the way of his career (vows).  Yet after she took the veil, forever marrying herself to God, as she puts it, he neglected her! “In truth I have done none of this for God but everything for you,” she laments. “Tell me, I say, if you can.”

His reply is a 20-page discourse on female complaining, “. . . a recital of your misery over the wrongs you suffer,” and “your old perpetual complaint against God concerning the manner of our entry into religious life and the cruelty of the act of treachery performed on me.”  This one pivotal letter seems to be the turning point in their relationship.  I know I think differently of Abelard forevermore after reading this letter.

The way I see it, his 20-page letter is nothing but fancy rhetoric meant to act like mirrors that deflect light into crazy patterns on the ceiling. I hope she saw it that way. He never answers the question of ‘why have I been so neglected and forgotten by you.’ Instead, he performs a sleight of hand – he angles the mirrors to cast shadows on Heloise.

After that game-changing letter, she stopped the complaining – but she also stopped writing heartfelt letters. Maybe she got her answer, maybe she believed she was wrong to complain, maybe she just gave up. The female in her was vanquished, just as the male in him had been. “I have set the bridle of your injunction on the words which issue from my unbounded grief,” she writes in reply. That’s it – her letters become short and to the point, mostly questions about how the nuns ought to conduct themselves under the Rule of Saint Benedict which was written for men – the cowls, for example, she writes, “What are we to do about the cowls?”

And then he answers her about the cowls. That becomes their relationship after he had secured her in the convent and told her to stop complaining.

It is difficult to finish the book now that Heloise has been shushed – a shushing which endured even through the two decades she lived after his death at age 63.  I wish she had written something in the privacy of her monastic cell about all that she really felt. We will never know – not because there was nothing to say, but because there was so much – and who would care? she must have thought – and so she walked away from saying it.