A Sense of Doubt blog post #3237 - Some Thoughts on Writing at the End of the Year
Musical accompaniment: Listen while reading.
Tosca - Suzuki - Full Album
TOSCA - BAND - WIKI
I have been trying to jump start my writing practice; it's not easy.
Warren Ellis wrote about this recently and called it staring at the wall time.
FROM WARREN ELLIS
To have the staring at the wall time, I need the story content to burble, bubble, and squeak.
And so, preserving bandwidth and devoting mental focus to contemplation of writing projects, primarily fiction, is priority number one.
In sum, the lessons are:
I could write that I mean it this time, but I have written that before.
Let's see if I can stay the course.
I had considered writing about some of my projects here as part of my resolution to set my focus on one main project at a time but make some progress on multiple writing projects.
So, that's it.
In addition to my own remarks, I have added two posts from others.
Photo of a sculpture by Dale Dunning Retrieved from http://oenogallery.com/assets/Artists/dale-dunning/palimpsest-17-1.jpg
He opened his eyes and was struck.
-St. Augustine’s Confession
It is spring and the oppressive grey of the woods surrounding my home has given way to a vibrant and dizzying green. I have only lived in this place for six months and the majority of that time has been spent under the dark skies that define a Pacific Northwest winter. Now the Sun pulls me from the womb of my room and I spend hours walking the feral and overgrown streets of my neighborhood. Everything feels transformed, reborn through the magical process of photosynthesis.
These walks are meditative but it is not the quiet meditation of the sitting monk. My brain is so overloaded with the sensory information that tells the story of this place, that I have no space left to think of anything else. My boots scuff the gravel at the roadside causing the pleasant sound of locomotion. I carry a small pink Moleskine notebook and Pilot pen in my pocket so that I can remember that which is worth remembering.
***
Language is a wild and living thing. Speaking gives breath to thought; writing makes thought concrete. Thinking and writing are both sensual pastimes. We take information in through our bodies, we smell, taste, touch hear and see, and from this information we construct a narrative which in turn leads to the construction of a life. Thinking can exist without writing but writing should never exist without thought. When we write we hold in our hand a tool made of wood and graphite or fossil fuels and carbon. With these tools we litter pages made from the pulped remains of dead trees with the symbols of language recognized by the culture to which we belong. In essence, this is not so different from the animals painted on cave walls all around the world by our way back ancestors. Writing is a place where reality and dreams can merge, where the conscious mind is allowed to dance with the subconscious mind. Mythos and logos all rolled up in one tight bundle of deerskin and dried flowers.
***
The air is so thick with the scent of blossoming plant life that I can taste them, as if I am smelling with my tongue. I list the names of the plants that I am acquainted with: self-heal, Indian plum, stinging nettle, salmonberry, licorice fern, salal. All these plants are native to this place, this is where they belong.
I listen as unknown birds call from tree to tree and try to imagine the conversation that is taking place. I wonder what information they are sharing with one another. The chickadee is calling out its own name, chick-a-dee-dee and then chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee, each extra dee a sign of increasing danger. I hear the telltale buzzing of hummingbird wings. I do not actually see the tiny bird as it whizzes by but just the same, I know it is there. As I take notes on these birds, I notice a small insect crawling across my left hand, too light to be felt. It pauses a moment, leaps from my hand and is gone.
***
In her essay Learning the Grammar of Animacy, Robin Kimmerer writes, “But to become native to this place,if we are to survive here and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home.” To be at home in a place, wherever that may be, is to acknowledge that you are an animal existing in this place and that the thinking you do is shaped by the sensual stimuli provided by that place. Later in her essay, Kimmerer discusses the ways in which Native American languages address what we in the West think of as inanimate objects, with verbs rather than nouns. What does it mean “to be a bay”, “to be a hill”, to be a tree or to be a bird? For that matter, what does it mean to be a human?
When we separate the act of being from the act of thinking, we are further separating ourselves from the living world around us. When a person is deep in thought, is it not possible that the wind blowing through their hair might influence their thinking or the blazing red of the setting sun might add a new dimension to a thought?
If writing cannot be separated from thinking, what would it mean if we considered our surroundings while we were writing? What if we allowed setting to constantly influence our thinking? Perhaps it already does and we simply do not take the time to notice. Surely as I sit here in the library, typing these words on my computer, my thinking is different than what I write while walking outside. Surely the fluorescent light influences my mind differently than the light of the sun. In the library there is a certain sterile sort of silence, punctuated with the occasional sniffle and cough. Outside I hear the singing of birds and the buzzing of insects. As David Abrams writes in his book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, “Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.”
It is this sensual way of thinking that allows a poet like John Haines to write the way he has written in his poem Horns.
I went to the edge of the wood
in the color of evening,
and rubbed with a piece of horn
against a tree,
believing the great, dark moose
would come, his eyes
on fire with the moon.
I fell asleep in an old white tent.
The October moon rose,
and down a wide, frozen stream
the moose came roaring,
hoarse with rage and desire.
I awoke and stood in the cold
as he slowly circled the camp.
His horns exploded in the brush
with dry trees cracking
and falling; his nostrils flared
as swollen-necked, smelling
of challenge, he stalked by me.
I called him back, and he came
and stood in the shadow
not far away, and gently rubbed
his horns against the icy willows.
I heard him breathing softly.
Then with a faint sight of warning
soundlessly he walked away.
I stood there in the moonlight,
and the darkness and silence
surged back, flowing around me,
full of a wild enchantment,
as though a god had spoken.
***
Further up the road my presence is noted by the barking of yard dogs. In one yard two huge Great Pyrenees leap at the fence. On the other side of the road a rottweiler and pitbull join the chaotic chorus. I turn a corner and a yellow labrador also seems offended by my existence. He is chained up next to a four wheeler that is parked below an American flag. The flag is snapping in the same breeze that is causing the trees to rustle and sway. A yellow sign nailed to a tree reads, “Drive carefully. Our squirrels can’t tell one nut from another.” Across the street two mallards burst from unseen water in a ditch, startling me.
The calling of the birds increases as the light fades and the evening gives way to the night. I turn and head towards home. The bullfrogs have begun to chirp, welcoming the darkness. They are joined by an echoing and repetitive ping which is followed by a pop. I turn to look, my eyes seeking out the source of the sound. I see the black silhouette of a man splitting wood in the deepening night.
Octavia Butler on Creativity, the Generative Power of Our Obsessions, and How We Become Who We Are
BY MARIA POPOVA
After the glorious accident of having been born at all, there are myriad ways any one life could be lived. The lives we do live are bridges across the immense river of possibility, suspended by two pylons: what we want and what we make. In an ideal life — a life of purpose and deep fulfillment — the gulf of being closes and the pylons converge: We make what we want to see exist.
This interplay is what Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) explores throughout Parable of the Talents (public library) — the second part of her oracular Earthseed allegory, which also gave us Butler’s acutely timely wisdom on how (not) to choose our leaders.
More than a century after Walt Whitman — another rare seer of truths elemental and eternal, another poetic prophet of the world to come, who made what he wanted to see exist and in making it helped bring that world about — wrote that “there is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal,” Butler writes:
Self is.
Self is body and bodily perception. Self is thought, memory, belief. Self creates. Self destroys. Self learns, discovers, becomes. Self shapes. Self adapts. Self invents its own reasons for being. To shape God, shape Self.
[…]
All prayers are to Self
And, in one way or another,
All prayers are answered.
Pray,
But beware.
Your desires,
Whether or not you achieve them
Will determine who you become.
Butler’s sentiment is only magnified by knowing that the word desire derives from the Latin for “without a star,” radiating a longing for direction. It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming.
To become, of course, is no easy task — to become, that is, what you yourself desire to be, without mistaking your culture’s or your idols’ or your lover’s desires for your own. E.E. Cummings knew this when he wrote half a century before Butler that “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” You win the fight, Butler intimates, by the clarity of your purpose and the perseverance with which you pursue it:
If you want a thing — truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible.
To want what you want so fiercely, to love it so absolutely, is not a personal indulgence in hubris or delusion — it is, Butler affirms, the mightiest antidote to the terrors of being alive and, in consequence, the fuel for your most generous contribution to the world:
Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.
Enlivening as this notion might be, even more enlivening is its manifestation in the shared struggle — for at its best, the art born of these private obsessions in the crucible of the Self goes on to touch other Selves, dissolving the isolating illusion of separateness and aloneness to furnish, in Iris Murdoch’s lovely phrase, “an occasion for unselfing.”
Butler first posited the notion of “positive obsession” in Parable of the Talents (public library) — the first part of her Earthseed allegory — placing it at the heart of genius:
Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
Complement with James Baldwin on the relationship between talent and persistence, Nick Cave on the importance of trusting yourself, and Lucille Clifton on the balance of intellect and intuition in creative work, then revisit Butler’s advice on writing.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2312.29 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3102 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment