Poets on Poetry: Mark Doty, Mackerel & Metaphors

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A Display of Mackerel, creativity, Essay, Mark Doty, metaphor, Nature, poetry, Souls on Ice, universe, writing on writing, writing process

One of the things I love most is writing about writing, unraveling the creative process, how the mind at play works.

Mark Doty’s essay Souls on Ice, describing how he came to write a particular poem, is a fascinating example of that. He put into words something I’ve long felt and toyed with–how certain images, feelings, experiences will strike me as singularly important. Somehow they seem deeply relevant to the world at large, as if I pulled hard enough and long enough at one of these loose strands I’d see how it’s all connected and, in the process, unravel one small corner of the mystery that underlies the universe.

Below are parts of the essay that spoke so eloquently to me, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing at the link above.

It begins with Doty “struck by the elegance of the mackerel in the fresh fish display” and how this sighting prompted his poem “A Display of Mackerel.”

“Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do. . . . . I can’t choose what’s going to serve as a compelling image for me. But I’ve learned to trust that part of my imagination that gropes forward, feeling its way toward what it needs; to watch for the signs of fascination, the sense of compelled attention (Look at me, something seems to say, closely) that indicates that there’s something I need to attend to. Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve. . . .

I almost always begin with description, as a way of focusing on that compelling image, the poem’s “given.” I know that what I can see is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg; if I do my work of study and examination, and if I am lucky, the image which I’ve been intrigued by will become a metaphor, will yield depth and meaning, will lead me to insight. The goal here is inquiry, the attempt to get at what it is that’s so interesting about what’s struck me. Because it isn’t just beauty; the world is full of lovely things and that in itself wouldn’t compel me to write. There’s something else, some gravity or charge to this image that makes me need to investigate it.

Exploratory description, then; I’m a scientist trying to measure and record what’s seen.”

The poem follows. See how his plucking at one loose thread leads to the unraveling of a whole universe of ideas.

“A Display of Mackerel”

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

 

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

 

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

 

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

 

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

 

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

 

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

 

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

 

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

 

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

 

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

 

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

 

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

 

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

 

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

 

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

 

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

 

Good Prose and Good Science — Quibbling with the Masters

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book review, books, critique, Richard Dawkins, science writing, Steven Pinker, style manual, The Sense of Style, Unweaving the Rainbow, writing, Writing advice

At first Steven Pinker was my new hero. Within the first few pages of reading his widely acclaimed “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,” he debunks the long-standing myths about the evils of passive voice and killing one’s darlings.

We now know that telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory. A skilled writer should . . . push back against copy editors who, under the influence of grammatically naive style guides, blue-pencil every passive construction they spot into an active one.

Finally! Someone is speaking my language.

And he doesn’t stop there.

The classic manuals . . . try to take all the fun out of writing, grimly adjuring the writer to avoid offbeat words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration. A famous piece of advice from this school crosses the line from the grim to the infanticide: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetuate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” (Though commonly attributed to William Faulkner, the quotation comes from the English professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1916 lectures On the Art of Writing.)

I was thrilled. My top two pet peeves on bad writing advice soundly tromped by the latest style guru.

Pinker goes on to say what most writers would readily agree with, that to be a good writer you need to be a good reader. What’s more, you should acquire “the habit of lingering over good writing wherever you find it and reflecting on what makes it good.”

That’s what he proposes to do in his book, to teach the principles of good style by “reverse-engineering examples of good prose.”

By now, I’m bubbling with enthusiasm, and eagerly turn to his first example, the opening lines of “Unweaving the Rainbow” by Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer.

That’s when my giddy glide toward Pinker fandom comes to a screeching halt, because this paragraph is a ghastly example of good prose.

Shouldn’t, above all, good prose make sense? Failing that, what good is “style”?

But this example is so full of logical inconsistencies and pure nonsense, I’m amazed that a scientist (the supposed epitome of logical and rational thought!) would write it, let alone that a stylist would recommend it. Surely Pinker could have found a better example of good prose.

Don’t take my word for it. Read it for yourself. It’s not so much the style I object to as its substance:

We are going to dies, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Okay, he has an intriguing premise in his opening line. It makes you sit up and take notice. It makes you want to find out more. I’ll give him that.

But the next sentence is clearly nonsense, and rather than intrigue me, it makes me question the author’s intelligence: not a good sign of good prose. He says, “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.” But if “most people” are not born, “they” are not people. His sentence makes no sense. He’s referring to something that doesn’t exist and calling it a person. His terminology is all screwed up. He goes on to call these non-people “potential people,” “unborn ghosts,” and “possible people,” when, in fact, “they” are nothing, non-entities.

What he’s really trying to say, in what he thinks is a clever way, is: “We’re lucky we’re alive.” Because in the bijillion possible ways our DNA could have been strung, it was strung in the way peculiar to us, thus making me “me,” and you “you,” and not someone else.

Fine. I get that. I’m lucky I’m going to die because I’m lucky I was ever born. I’m also lucky I was born a person and not an ant, or algae, or a cancer cell. I’m lucky my daddy’s sperm beat out all the other sperm to penetrate my mother’s egg, and that it was that particular egg, and not another, or I could have a sister I never knew existed because I never would have been born. I’m lucky in a bijillion ways that doesn’t include a specious argument comparing me with “potential people.” Which makes me wonder what caused him to choose that clumsy and rather irrational example?

But let’s move on. Next he claims those potential people (or potential ways of stranding DNA) “will never see the light of day.” Never? Really?

Who is to say that one of those potential people, as he calls them, or possible DNA strandings is not being born as we speak, or will not be born next week, next year, and next century? In fact, aren’t all people pulled from that pool of DNA possibility, including future generations, which will go on peopling our planet onward to eternity, or at least the end of the human race?

If you really think about it, based on his logic, it’s not so much that we “actual people” are luckier than those “potential people,” but that while we are lucky now, at this point in time, they will be lucky later on when our luck has run out.

So, that sentence about “the light of day” makes no sense either. But the next one is even sillier.

He says “certainly” the set of as yet unborn potential people includes poets and scientists greater than the set of already produced people. Certainly?

There’s two things wrong with this sentence.

First he’s presupposing that DNA alone is responsible for poetic and scientific greatness, when certainly our parentage, education, place of birth, economic status, and any number of other criteria is equally important. We could almost certainly say that people who had the potential to be greater than Keats and Newton have already been born, are alive this moment, but sadly for them and us, they were born to a Pygmy tribe in Africa, a female in Afghanistan, or a crack baby in the ghetto. None of which would have had the education or opportunity to reach her or his full potential as poets and scientists.

The second problem with this sentence is that it does not belong in this paragraph. It does not support his topic or strengthen his argument about how lucky we are to be alive. A good editor should have deleted it.

But his most stupefying statement is his last, remarking on the “stupefying odds” that “you and I, in our ordinariness” were ever born. How strange he would come to the conclusion of how “ordinary” we are, for it defies the very point he was making all along. In the terms of his own argument, the very point he is advancing, our very lucky and exceptional birth would qualify us as extraordinary; indeed, far surpassing all those innumerable unlucky, unexceptional, unborn ghosts.

Pinker claims that Dawkins’ purpose, as an “uncompromising atheist and tireless advocate of science,” is to explain how “his world view does not, as the romantic and religious fear, extinguish a sense of wonder or an appreciation of life.”

If that was his purpose, then he failed miserably. For all he did in that opening was to irritate this reader with all his non-logical arguments. The only “wonder” of it for me was how a scientist could write it, and how a stylist could praise him for it.

If I could rewrite his paragraph to remove the logical inconsistencies and yet retain what Pinker claims was Dawkins’ purpose–to move the reader to marvel at the wonder of existence–here is how I would do so:

We are lucky to be alive. That joyous fact should far outweigh any grief in the knowledge of our eventual death. We are lucky because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people containing you and me. Our birth is an exceptional and extraordinary accident. Out of all the innumerable sand grains among the sand dunes of time, the winds of chance happened to pick up the ones producing you and me and spun us into being. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, you and I, in all our uncommon glory, won the mother of all lotteries.

Lucky indeed.

The Light-Craving Stories of George Saunders

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George Saunders, literary fiction, short stories, Tenth of December, writing

What is it that I love about the wildly weird, dark and dorky stories of George Saunders?

Ever since reading his collection “The Tenth of December,” I’ve been trying to figure this out.

His stories are not easy reading. People are tortured, puppies drowned, nefarious things are happening behind a guise of bureaucratic goodness. Often the stories start in confusing, abrupt ways, and are written so lean it’s hard to see what’s holding them together.

His characters are usually bizarre or just plain sad: pathetic morons, smug hypocrites, nerdy adolescents, clueless housewives, loser dads, lame do-gooders.

At first you think Saunders is making fun of them, judging them, exposing their hypocrisy, their meanness, their arrogance, their stupidity. You think: this satire. It’s ironic. It’s absurdist.

Much of what he writes has a hard comic edge. Some of it is laugh-out-loud hilarious.

But then you realize he’s not laughing at these characters. He’s not laughing with them either. Most are too naïve, too serious, too un-self-aware to have the capacity to laugh at themselves. They have no idea how comical they are, although they may be painfully aware of how they are made the butt of others’ jokes.

The stories aren’t about the characters at all. They are about us—the readers. How he moves us from A to Z.

“I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters,” Saunders wrote in an essay on Vonnegut (and quoted in a NY Times interview).

“He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to ‘real life’ — he can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. . . . The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it.”

Saunders is taking us on a hilarious, diabolical, fun-house tour, and at the end, we realize how all these crazy, ridiculous, pathetic losers we meet along the way are us in disguise. Me, in a different life—my son, my daughter, my mother, my poor dear deranged grandpa. Beneath the pathetic veneer is someone we love, or someone worth loving.

In the same interview, Saunders talks about how his family has influenced his writing:

“My life with them has been everything to me. And loving them the way I do—I think that was a very major development in my artistic life. Suddenly everything mattered. What helped them was good, what hurt them was bad. And then that feeling got writ large. I became aware . . . of the fact that cruelty or even just mere thoughtlessness had an object: someone was getting bruised. And someone must have (or should have) loved that bruised party as much as I love my family. So the world became morally charged. . . . People were precious and not just my people.”

But these kinds of revelations in his stories do not come easily, without struggle. Or without a cost. They come like The Misfit in Flannery O’Conner’s short story. He stands over the silly and self-absorbed Grandmother with a gun held to her head. And then, just before he kills her, he holds up her heart, the heart she never knew she had until that very moment.

They come with regret, with a deep, gut-wrenching sadness. And sometimes, at the very end, with a heart-searing and heart-soaring softness.

The first story in Saunders collection, “Victory Lap”, opens with a young teenage girl floating down a marble staircase imaging all her secret admirers below. It’s written in a 3rd person stream-of-consciousness point of view, in the vernacular of the blissfully naïve and hopelessly romantic. She gushes about how lovely everyone is, all the girls at school, all the boys:

“Actually, she loved her whole town. That adorable grocer, spraying his lettuce! Pastor Carol with her large comfortable butt! The chubby postman, gesticulating with his padded envelope! It had once been a mill town. Wasn’t that crazy? What does that even mean?

There is so much she doesn’t know. Like how to change the oil. Or even check the oil. How to open the hood. How to bake brownies. That was embarrassing, actually, being a girl and all. And what about a mortgage? Did it come with the house? When you breast-feed, did you have to like push the milk out?”

When she’s happy like this, she tells us, as she pirouettes around the house practicing ballet, she imagines a conversation with a baby deer trembling in the woods. She admonishes the hunter who slays the deer’s mother.

“Her guts were completely splayed. Jeez, that was nice! Don’t you have anything better to do, dank hunter, than kill this baby’s mom? You seem like a nice enough guy.”

She believes in niceness. “In a straw poll at school, she had voted for people being good and life being fun.”

While she’s practicing ballet, alone in the house, a meter-man who’s not a meter-man knocks at her back door. “Something told her to step back in, slam the door. But that seemed rude.” So she smiled and asked, “How may I help you?”

Next we meet Allison’s nerdy teenage neighbor, Kyle, who she calls a “poor goof.”

He’s just come home from school to see a note his father leaves him about placing their new expensive geode out on the back deck.

“Gar, Dad, do you honestly feel it fair that I should have to slave in the yard until dark after a rigorous cross-country practice . . . ?

Shoes off, mister.

Yoinks, too late. He was already at the TV. And had left an incriminating trail of microclods. Way verboten. Could the microclods be hand-plucked? Although: problem. If he went back to hand-pluck the microclods, he’d leave an incriminating new trail of microclods”

He has imaginary conversations with his Dad, who calls him Scout, and his mother who calls him Beloved Only. He imagines them watching his every move with disapproval, and him explaining away his failures at meeting their strict standards, even though they both send “weekly braggy emails to both sets of grandparents” about him.

While he’s out on the back deck ready to set the geode he sees Allison with the meter-man who is dragging her toward his van. When she resists, he punches her in the stomach. The man sees Kyle and warns him to stay away: “Move a muscle and I’ll knife her in the heart. Swear to God. Got it?”

“Kyle’s mouth was so spotless all he could do was make his mouth do the shape it normally did when saying Yes.

He was just a kid. There was nothing he could do.”

He imagines going inside, pretending he never saw anything. Imagines how he’ll look and what he’ll say when eventually he learns that Allison was raped and murdered while he was innocently sitting inside playing with his railroad cars. He imagines how pleased his parents will be that he hadn’t put himself in harm’s way. “Super job, Scout.” “We are well please, Beloved Only.”

Then he was running.

“Oh God! What was he doing, what was he doing? Jesus, shit, the directives he was violating! Running in the yard (bad for the sod); transporting a geode without its protective wrapping: hopping the fence, which stressed the fence, which had cost a pretty penny; leaving the yard; leaving the yard barefoot.”

He throws the geode at the head of the man who falls, his head a bloody mess. Allison crab-crawls into the house and calls 911.

The story could have ended here. It would have been a good story. But Saunders takes it further. He pushes the narrative into something beyond a would-be rape gone bad, a skinny scared kid saving the beautiful princess next door. He pushes the story past mere good into sublime. He takes the reader to that state of grace, where we feel that heart-searing, heart-soaring softness.

Allison watches from the window while Kyle does a wild, crazy “Who’s the man!” dance on the hood of the car.

“You still moving, freak? Got a plan, stroke-dick? Want a skull gash on top of your existing skull gash, big man? You think I won’t?”

He lifts the geode again. Ready to bring it down on the injured man’s head once more.

“Kyle, don’t,” she whispers.

She has nightmares about that day, about Kyle murdering the man. About his bloody head dissolving. And Kyle looking at her with that look: My life is ruined. I’m a murderer. Until her parents remind her, over and over again. It didn’t happen like that. You stopped him. You saved Kyle.

“You did so good, Mom said.

Did beautiful, Dad said.”

The final story in the collection does the same thing. Pushes the story to a satisfying conclusion, and then takes it further, into the sublime.

In Saunders’ title story, “The Tenth of December,”(which you can read online) a boy with “unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerism” walks with his pellet gun out into the snowy woods. Here he will confront the wily “Netherworlders” who live under rocks, and today seem intent on capturing the new girl from Montreal in his homeroom class.

“He just loved the way she talked. So apparently did the Nethers, who planned to use her to repopulate their depleted numbers and bake various things they did not know how to bake.”

In the middle of this fantasy, he sees a coat left lying on the snow, and off in the distance a half-naked man leaning against a tree.

“What kind of person leaves his coat behind on a day like this? The mental kind, that was who. This guy looked sort of mental. Like an Auschwitz dude or sad confused grandpa.”

Despite fears and misgivings, he sets racing off across the frozen duck pond with the coat to rescue the old man, for “had not Jesus said, Blessed are those who help those who cannot help themselves but are too mental, doddering, or have a disability?”

The old man, who is dying, and who wants to spare himself and his family the indignity of a slow, painful, humiliating death, has come out here to end his life. He has just sat down to wait peacefully for what he hopes will be a quick and relatively painless death, when:

“Oh, for shitsake.

On for crying out loud.

Some kid was on the pond.

Chubby kid in white. With a gun. Carrying Eber’s coat.

You little fart, put that coat down, get your ass home, mind your own—

Damn. Damn it.”

The boy falls through the ice and the dying man must try to gather enough strength to get up, get down the hill and save him. Painstakingly, cursing the whole way, he does. He manages to pull him out, get him dried off the best he can, and then forces the boy to get up and moving, so he can run home before he freezes to death. Then Eber sits back to finish what he had started.

The story could have finished here, but it doesn’t. He sits there, thinking about what he’s doing. Two weeks before Christmas. Before Molly’s favorite holiday. He’s “offing” himself. Too late, he has second thoughts.

“He tried to send some last thoughts to Molly. Sweetie, forgive me. Biggest fuckup ever. Forget this part. Forget I ended thisly. You know me. You know I didn’t mean this.”

I won’t tell you how the story ends—you really need to read this. My little summary here doesn’t do it justice. But I will share what Eber comes to realize, which is at the heart of nearly every Saunders story I’ve read so far. That moment of grace.

“He saw it now, was starting to see it—if some guy at the end, fell apart, and said or did bad things, or had to be helped, helped to quite a considerable extent? So what? What of it? Why should he not do or say weird things or look strange or disgusting? Why should the shit not run down his legs? Why should those he loved not lift and bend and feed and wipe him, when he would gladly do the same for them? He’d been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, he now saw that there could still be many—many drops of goodness, is how it came to him—many drops of happy—of good fellowship—ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not—-had never been—-his to withheld. Withhold”

This last shows his dying brain misfiring.

At the end of another story called “ComCom,” not found in this collection, the narrator and a man called Giff are murdered. Afterward, they rise together above the world:

“Snow passes through us, gulls pass through us. Tens of towns, hundreds of towns stream by below and we hear their prayer, grievances, their million signals of loss . . . . All this time we grow in size, in love, the distinction between Giff and me diminishing, and my last thought before we join something I can only describe as Nothing-Is-Excluded is, Giff, Giff, please explain, what made you come back for me?”

He learns:

“This is why I came back. I was wrong in life, limited, shrank everything down to my size, and yet, in the end, there was something light-craving within me, which sent me back, and saved me.”

That’s what I love about his stories. He shows us that in the end, when all the superficialities and fears and meanness are flayed from us, beneath that, we are light-craving creatures: people who are starving for the want of goodness, the want of grace in our lives. And like Eber, we realize those “drops of goodness” that we experience at each other’s hands, though few and far between, are worth all the other absurd humilities and indignities that life may heap upon us.

One drop of grace is all it takes to save us from each other and ourselves.

More on “The Writing Life” with Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard, books, creativity, Deborah Brasket, inspiration, The Writing Life, writers, writing

Annie Dillard, July 1987, Getty Images

One of the things I love about Annie Dillard’s book “The Writing Life” is how it addresses both the drudgery and the ecstasy of writing, the torment and bliss, the good days and the bad.

It is both a comfort and an encouragement that other writers–esteemed writers, prolific writers–have felt at one time or another all the highs and lows of my own experience in pursuing the writer’s life.

Preparing to Write

Writing is both craft and art, but to move it from craft to art requires a certain kind of mental preparation that many writers refer to, sometimes as ritual, sometimes as muse. For Dillard, that preparation is particularly intense:

Writing a first draft requires for the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. If you were a Zulu warrior banging on your shield with your spear for a couple of hours . . . you might be able to prepare yourself to write. If you were an Aztec maiden who knew months in advance . . . the priests were going to throw you into a hot volcano, and if you spent those months undergoing a series of purification rituals . . . you might be ready to write. By how, if you are neither Zulu warrior nor Aztec maiden, do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?

How set yourself spinning? Where is an edge—a dangerous edge—and where is the trail to the edge and the strength to climb it?

How to set yourself spinning? That’s the question, isn’t it? What lights the spark within that catches fire and sends us breathless to the page to capture that flame before it dies. What brings us back there, again and again, each day, to complete the work? How to ignite it again? Sometimes it does seem that we have to enter that extraordinary state of mind that the Zulu warrior or Aztec maiden prepares for with such zeal and passion.

For me it often comes when reading poetry, or philosophy, or other writers I admire, and something catches–a phrase, a thought, an image, a rhythm in the way the words flow. I’m snagged, and I feel I am being carried to a new place, and I see things in a new light. This new seeing, this discovery, is so exciting, it looses something in me and I run to grab a pen so I can capture it before it disappears.

It’s returning to that, that “felt sense” of things, that spark of discovery, that brings me back into the state of mind where I can re-enter the work, and keep writing, keep unspooling what’s there, discovering as I go where I’m going.

“A dangerous edge” – yes. It is an edge, a precipice, beyond which “not-knowing” lies. We have to be willing to throw ourselves over that edge, enter the “not-knowing,” submit to it, let it take us where it will, and trusting it will take us where we need to go.

E. L. Doctorow once famously said, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Writing Through the Flow

In that almost hypnotic, expectant, trustful state of mind, the writing is joyous, thrilling. We’re “in the zone.” As Dillard writes:

The line of words is heading out past Jupiter this morning . . . The line of words speeds past Jupiter and its cumbrous, dizzying orbit; it looks neither to the right nor to the left. It will be leaving the solar system soon, single –minded, rapt, rushing heaven like a soul . . . . Right now, you are flying. Right now, your job is to hold your breath.

Elsewhere she elaborates:

The sensations of writing a book are the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

The sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you.

Writing Through the Resistance

But sometimes it’s not handed to us. Sometimes we search and break our heart and break our back only to find—nothing. Sometimes the work does not speak to us.

Sometimes the “not knowing” feels like a brick wall, huge, monstrous, holding us back, walling us out, keeping us stumped. We feel dumb, tongue-tied, speechless, like a brute trying to talk. We choke on our own words, the words that will not come, the words that weigh us down, the words that feel dry and brittle and useless in our mouths.

We’re stuck. Blocked. We hit that wall and would rather do anything but write.

At one point in her book, frustrated by her writing, Dillard exclaims: “I hate to write. I would rather do anything else.” She tells us:

I avoided writing, and mostly what I did by way of work was fool around.

One day, full of such thoughts, I tried to work and failed. After eight hours of watching helplessly while my own inane, manneristic doodles over stepped their margins and covered the pages I was supposed to be writing, I gave up. I decided to hate myself, to make popcorn and read.

Pacing the Writing

So how do we negotiate that space that lies between inspiration and resistance, between “not-knowing” as a precipice from which we gladly leap, flying, and “not-knowing” as a wall around which we cannot reach?

Pacing. Pacing is the answer. Slow and methodical, or brisk and determined, or steady and sure. Whatever. Just keep one foot moving forward at all times.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. These truths comfort the anguished. They do not mean, by any means, that faster-written books are worse books. They just mean that most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace.

I was working hard, although of course it did not seem hard enough at the time—a finished chapter every few weeks. I castigated myself daily for writing too slowly. Even when passages seemed to come easily, as though I were copying from a folio held open by smiling angels, the manuscript revealed the usual signs of struggle—bloodstains, teethmarks, gashes, and burns.

This revelation was particularly encouraging to me—how slow Annie writes. Doing so can be discouraging, but doing so still gets the work done.

You are writing a book. . . . you do not hurry and do not rest. You climb steadily, doing your job in the dark. When you reach the end, there is nothing more to climb. The sun hits you; the bright wideness surprises you; you had forgotten there was an end.

You do not hurry, you do not rest. My mantra now.

Pacing is key: Fast, slow, in-between. Doesn’t matter. Moving forward, steadily, one word after another, is all that does matter.

Pacing – II, Tending and Taming

Sometimes another kind of pacing is needed, knowing when to patiently nurse the writing, and knowing when to beat it into submission. Both are sometimes required, as Dillard will tell you.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight . . . . As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.

Pacing – III, Emotional Distance

A third kind of pacing, or maybe “spacing,” emotional distance, is also needed: The ability to regard our work from a “Goldilocks” zone: Not too close, not too distant.

[A writer] must be sufficiently excited to rouse himself to the task at hand, and not so excited he cannot sit down to it. He must have faith sufficient to impel and renew the work, yet not so much faith he fancies he is writing well when he is not.

Finding the right balance in our relationship to the writing is important when it comes to evaluating and revising our work. The failure to do so can either distort or block the writing. Another hindrance, another kind of wall that can block the writing, or distort it, is our own evaluation of the work.

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its action quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

I’ve been snagged by this before, so much so that I could write a whole blog post about this, and probably will. So I’ll reserve that for later. The thing is, when we get too close to the writing, when it thrills us, we may think it’s magnificent, and forget, as Dillard writes below, that the reader, who is not sitting at the top of that roller coaster ride with you, may find our writing not quite so thrilling as we do. Dillard warns:

The writing that you do, that so thrills you, that rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. The reader’s ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can’t yet hear a thing: it will take half an hour to pick up the writing’s modulations, its ups and downs and sounds and softs.

On the other hand, in trying to distance ourselves from our own words so we can read them “objectively,” sometimes moves us so far away from our writing that we view it not as a living thing with breath and a beating heart, but as a cold-blooded stalker bent on murder might: as a thing, an object: cold and dead. Do not trust these kinds of reading, neither the cold-blooded kind, nor the thrilling roller-coaster kind. Step back, but not too far. Regard your writing kindly, and kindly look for ways to improve it, not destroy or abandon it.

Too many of us thin-skinned writers, I believe, are too eager to either kiss our darlings passionately to death, or to dispassionately murder them instead. I’ve never bought into the “murder your darlings” advice. Regard them kindly, wisely. Cut the fat, trim the ribbons, make sure she’s buttoned up nicely, and let her work her magic, if she can, upon the readers who, like me, eagerly look for and highlight “the darlings” we encounter.

Whatever you do, for the reader’s sake, don’t cut the heart out of your writing:

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer . . . will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.

The Heart of Writing

For many of us, writers as well as readers, what we’re searching for when we write, when we read, is the heart of the beast—that bloody, bleeding, throbbing heart. The place where you know you are holding something live and tender and immensely precious is in your hands and you hold it with reverence. Because you recognize it. It’s your heart. Yours. You are holding it in your hands. You are seeing it for the first time. And it’s beautiful.

Finding it, cutting it out, laying it on paper, as the writer does, is not easy. As Dillard knows.

The line of words fingers your own heart. It invades arteries, and enters the heart on a flood of breath; it presses the moving rims of thick valves; it palpates the dark muscle strong as horses, feeling for something, it knows not what . . . . [S]ome film of feeling, some song forgotten.

[T]hese fragments are heavy with meaning. The line of words peels them back, dissects them out. Will the bared tissue burn? Do you want to expose these scenes to the light? You may locate them and leave them, or poke the spot hard till the sore bleeds on your finger, and write with that blood. If the sore spot is not fatal . . . you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it.

Writing as Dying

It is not easy, digging into the heart of things. But it’s what we live for, many of us, to reach the beating heart of existence. To hold it in our hands.

Perhaps this is why Dillard urges us to:

Write as if you were dying . . . write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. What would you begin writing if you knew you should die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.

Who but an artist fierce to know—not fierce to seem to know—would suppose that a live image possessed a secret? The artist is willing to give all his or her strength and life to probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe in any way but with those instruments’ faint tracks.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.

Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.

The Aim of Writing

There’s another succinct piece of writing advice that Dillard gives, that if she said nothing else about the art of writing would suffice. She compares writing with chopping wood and tells us:

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood, aim for the chopping block.

So what is the chopping block in this metaphor?

Call it the heart of the matter. Call it the “deepest mystery,” as Dillard does, that which lies beneath all things and upon which all things lay. But whatever we call it, when we write, we must aim past the words, past the writing itself, toward that “deeper penetration into the universe.”

What Are We Here For?

Toward the end of her book, Annie asks: “What are we here for?” I’m not sure if she is asking us that as writers, or as human beings. But her answer could be applied to either.

She replies: “Propter chorum, the monks say: for the sake of the choir.”

Our one small voice is essential to the whole.

“The Writing Life” ends with the following quote, and so too shall I end on this high, clear note:

“Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe,” Teilhard de Chardin wrote. “The world is filled, and filled with the Absolute. To see this is to be made free.”

* * *

If you missed part one of my dialogue with Dillard, you can read it HERE.

More on Dillard’s book can be found at Brain Pickings, which includes a link to a free public library e-book.

On Herds, Husbands & Riffing on Writing

Tags

Blogging, Creative Nonfiction, husbands, Julia Shipley, Marriage, poetic essay, riffing, riffing on writing, The Toast, Willa Cather, writing

Serendipity, it’s sometimes called. Those happy coincidences that lead to some unexpected pleasure or insight. Or synchronicity. Those meaningful encounters that, touching tangentially upon something you’ve been musing upon, spark a new way of thinking about it. Then off you go, riffing on the topic the way jamming jazz musicians will do.

Here’s how it happened recently. I was grazing on Twitter and found a link to an essay that sounded interesting, taking me to new site called The Toast. The essay that drew me there did not pan out, but I found a link to something else that sparked my interest: “Some: Poetic Essay” by Julia Shipley. So I went there.

Now the essay starts out talking about horses and cows and the poets who write about them. Normally I’m not much interested in barnyard animals, but once when I was looking for a particular poem by Hayden Carruth, I came across his “Cows at Night” which I loved so much I blogged about it. (Another example of serendipity.)

Hoping that Shipley’s essay on cows might provide a similar unexpected pleasure, I continued reading. That’s when I came across these lovely lines and immediately tweeted my pleasure to others.

“The names of the herd tell a story, the way a group of stars makes a constellation.”

As I continued reading, the essay took an interesting turn, morphing from a mediation on cows, to a mediation on men, or on prospective husbands, to be exact.

A line about how some couples “pull together” in a marriage “like a pair of horses working in a synchronized pace” caught my attention. I’d been musing a lot lately about marriage, how it goes through different stages, and how while my husband and I still pull together in the same direction from time to time, more often than not we wander off in different directions. It’s becoming apparent how little we have in common.

While we both took early retirements, and we’re both home bodies, we seldom see each other and do little together. We eat at different times mostly, take walks at different times, swim at different times. We watch different shows on TV and pursue separate hobbies. Our paths cross only intermittently throughout the day, and while those crossings are pleasant enough, they are usually unplanned.

Sometimes I worry about us. Our marriage. Do we spend too much time alone? Is this healthy? Should we try to find ways to spend more time together? But then I realize: I’m quite content this way. As a writer, I like having time to myself. I like knowing he doesn’t need me or feel neglected when I’m off by myself. We’re alone, but not lonely.

I’m coming to think of us like the lines in a sparse drawing. We rarely touch, but we cross now and then, and our crossings shape our days and our lives and fills up the space that surrounds us in meaningful and comforting ways. Spare lines and plenty of white space, but pleasantly so.

Shipley writes about all the men she met over the years and cultivated relationships with, but who never turned out to be the husband she was looking for. She thought perhaps she was in love with the idea of love more than in wanting any particular man.

I wonder that myself sometimes. I like having a husband, I love him deeply, but I’m not “in love” with him. I am, however, “in love.” It’s just not with a man, or perhaps, more truthfully, it’s with so much more than the man. It’s the man and the life and the kids and the cows at night and names like constellations. And the walking and swimming and writing. Just this, right here, right now. Riffing about the things I love.

Her essay ends with something similar:

“Once I approached another heroine, former dairy farmer Gertrude Lepine, who never married or had children, but farmed with her sisters in a Vermont hinterland called, Mud City. I asked if she missed her cows. Her herd was famous, her registered Jerseys attracted buyers from as far away as California when she retired. Sure there were some favorite cows, she told me, But it’s The Land that I love the most.

The Land.”

Yes, I’m in love with The Land too. The Land, and all it holds.

Just before her essay ends Shipley quotes a passage in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers :

The passage describes Alexandra, who took over her father’s Nebraska farm and coaxed it to glorious success, and who is now a single middle aged woman.

“ . . . she lay late abed . . . luxuriously idle, her eyes closed, she used to have the illusion of being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by someone very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew; he was much stronger and swifter, and he carried her easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat.”

What held her lightly “as if she were a sheaf of wheat” was something so much more than mere man. I feel that way too sometimes. Like I’m being tenderly picked up and carried away. By life. The joy of living. These unexpected, serendipitous pleasures. By the act of writing–taking chance encounters and spinning them into something else, tossing them out into the universe, watching them drop down into a poem, a painting, a song. A blog post perhaps.

Here’s wishing you today many serendipitous pleasures that pick you up lightly and carry you away.

Writing on Writing – A Writing Process Blog Hop

Tags

Blogging, writing, writing process, writing process blog hop, writing process blog tour

Writers love to write about writing. It’s not surprising. It’s our passion.

So when I was invited to participate in a blog-hopping writing process tour, I jumped at the chance to talk about one of the great loves of my life—writing.

The first to invite me was the lovely Rebecca Koonst, a new blogger at Mom’s So-Called Life. She writes about the pleasures and struggles of being a mom, a woman, and a wife, in a light-hearted, heartfelt way.

Author Kelly Hand also tagged me. Or maybe I tagged her. Let’s just say we got caught up in a game of tag, and we’re featuring each other in our Writing Tour posts. She wrote the Au Pair Report, a novel I loved about childcare and politics in Washington DC.

In turn, I’ve invited three other blogger-writers that I admire to join the tour on June 23: a novelist from Australia, a poet from Canada, and a fellow blogger who writes about the creative process. I hope you will hop over to their blogs next Monday. There’s more about them and links to their blogs below.

So, first question, what am I working on?

Well, it’s a bit of a jumble. I have four writing projects in various stages of completion.

From the Far Ends of the Earth, a novel: I’m in the final stages of editing this, which has gone through several sets of beta readers. It’s about what happens when the mother who has been holding together a hopelessly dysfunctional family mysteriously disappears. It’s told through the perspectives of the three family members left behind—a cranky graduate student, a heroin addict, and their emotionally distant father. How they cope with the mother’s disappearance, learn to reconnect with each other, and forge new relationships in her absence, create the heart of this novel. I wrote more about this book in a blog post celebrating the completion of my first draft, and also in the post When Things Go Missing, which includes a link to a short story based upon one of the chapters.

A Play of Dark and Light: a short story collection. I’m also working on a collection of short stories, many that I wrote long ago—getting them dusted and polished and out to literary journals. Four have been published so far. You can read more about them, with links to the stories here:
13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before and the Moment After; Us, Ancient; When Things Go Missing, and Looking for Bobby.

The Adventures of La Gitana, a series for middle graders. I have the first book completed in what I envision as a series for middle-graders about a family that sails around the world, based loosely on our own family’s experience. I’ve put this on hold until I get the literary novel out to agents. You can read more about this adventure series on my writing website at www.djbrasket.com

Living on the Edge of the Wild, my blog. When I began blogging, I saw this as something I needed to do to be a serious writer, as a means toward an end. Now it’s become an end in itself, as important to me as the other writing. It’s a way to explore ideas and share them with others. It’s part memoir, part reverie, part reflection, and partly a way to share my love of art and literature with others, as well as things I’ve written and am writing (like today’s post!).

How does my work differ from others in its genres?

If From the Far Ends of the Earth differs from other literary novels, it may be in that one of the main characters, the mother at the center of the story, is absent. Apart from the prologue, which is written from her perspective, the reader only comes to know her through the eyes of the people she leaves behind. And through the photographs she mails her son, and the messages she leaves on her daughter’s answering machine. Otherwise, she remains an enigma, as I believe we all remain in the end to a large extent. This is one of the main themes of the book, how we see each other subjectively, filtered through our own desires and fears, memories and misconceptions. While the “truth” about each other remains largely a mystery.

My short stories may be unique in how they explore psychological states of mind. While they have plots—things happen–what’s of interest to me, and I hope the reader, is what’s going on inside their heads and hearts, what makes them tick, or not tick. There are some elements of magical realism:

Fine and Shimmering tells the story of a young woman in a bad marriage who feels she’s not quite real, but lightly tethered to earth by a fine and shimmering cord.
In Tamara in Her Garden, the daughter of a Jeffry Dahmer-type mass murderer recognizes traits of her father in herself and retreats from her lover and analyst to her garden which becomes a metaphor for the beauty and brutality she sees rolled up together in the world and others.
The Man in the Attic is about a woman who has become so hyper self-conscious she believes she is being constantly watched by a romantic admirer who eventually takes up residence in her attic.
On the lighter side is Joshua’s Tea Cup, the story of a young autistic man who sees galaxies floating among his tea leaves.
And Petite Marmite is love story about an habitual liar and his gullible wife with an O’Henry style ending.

These are just a few of the stories in my collection so far.

The middle-grade series may be unique in that I’ve yet to encounter a book written for that age group about children growing up while sailing around the world.

I’m not sure if my blog is unique. My readers will have to answer that question.

Why do I write what I do?

As I’ve written here about my blog, I like exploring the edges of things, the borderlands between states of consciousness, and states of reality—the social and psychological, the human and more-than-human, the physical and spiritual, the known and unknown, the world we know outside ourselves and within our own minds–and how they overlap and re-create each other. I see the creative arts as existing on that fringe, the thing that helps us negotiate the borderlands and translate one to the other. Writing is my point of entry.

All this is true for my novel and short stories and blog. But for the sailing adventure, I’m writing that to preserve for myself and my family, what it was like to live at sea, and to share that adventure and my love of the wild with others, especially children.

I could say much more on the topic of why I write, and have. But I will spare you here and refer you to the following posts if you want to know more about why I write and how: Writing, A Leap of Faith; Wabi Sabi Writing.

How does my writing process work?

A lot of my writing springs from my reading. Stories and poems and other blog posts trigger a new line of thought, and off I go off in that direction, allowing it to take me where it will. I think of it as “riffing” on other’s works, as jazz musicians will do when they jam together. The same happens when I engage with nature, go for walks or hikes, or merely sit on the patio taking in all the sights and sounds around me. Thoughts and images will spring to mind, and I’ll grab a notebook and start writing.

I usually start writing in the morning, sometimes in long hand while sitting in bed with my coffee. Then I’ll go to my office and type what I’ve been writing into a word document, revising as I go. Most of my revising is done on the computer. But I’ve printed out my novel to revise as I read it, as well.

I keep a writing log, setting weekly goals, and tracking my hours. This has helped a lot, because I can get pretty scattered and off-track otherwise.

Who’s Up Next?

Don’t miss the next installments of the Writing Process Tour on June 23. The following bloggers will be sharing their writing process.

Author Nikki Tulk, Shadow, Wings & Other Things – Niki loves” to write, dream, read, learn and make art in many different media from theatre and music, to making up her family’s next weekend breakfast menu.” She is also the author of the lovely and lyrical book Shadows and Wings, which I highly recommend.

Poet, Jeremy Nathan Marks, The Sand County – Jeremy’s blog is “an exploration of the natural world, our relationship with it and the necessities that govern life on Earth. Here you will find a little bit of everything that brings us to that interface of human dreams, desire, repose and the wisdom, austerity and sublime power that the natural world offers.” Jeremy also writes some amazing poetry that he shares on his blog.

Writer, Kim Hass, The Art of Practice, The Practice of Art – Kim blogs about “Creating Mindful, Joyful, Compassionate Moments of Being.” She writes about the creative process and “what makes a Writer with a capital W–no credentials needed.” I love that!

Selling My Babies. Where’s the Joy?

Tags

fiction, Humor, literary journals, publication, rejection, short story, submission process, writing, writing for publication, writing process

It’s never the full-blown joy I expect when a short story is accepted for publication.

Even when the acceptance letter exceeds my wildest hope, like this last one:

“I’m stunned into dumbstruck awe by your piece, which I finished mere minutes ago. That’s how much time it took me to accept this, in the fervent hope that it has not been taken by another journal.”

“Stunned!” “Dumbstruck!” “Awe!”

I should be feasting on those words for weeks. I should be doing cartwheels down the hall. I should be. But I’m not.

I’m so used to opening my emails and finding a “thanks, no thanks” response to my submissions that acceptance and praise come with a jolt. Disbelief, even: Is this a joke?

Then a flood of conflicting emotions descend. Gratitude comes first, with relief tripping at her heels.

“Finally!” I think, gazing sternly at this wayward child of mine: “Took your sweet time getting that proposal, didn’t you girl? I thought you might be a spinster forever. I was ready to banish you to the dark corner of a bottom drawer. Boy, did you luck out!”

Eventually a giddy glee and an I-told-you-so sense of vindication take hold as I rush to tell my husband. Genuine happiness beams when I call my daughter, text my son. Bashful pride sneaks in when I post the event on Facebook or Twitter.

But I do all this in a hurry, because I know it won’t last. If I don’t grab it on the fly, I’ll lose it altogether. For the elation is rapidly deteriorating into an edgy uneasiness. A prick of panic. And gut-wrenching remorse when I realize: She’s gone! Out of my control. What have I done?

This is how the submission process works for me:

Rejection, rejection, rejection (repeat, ad nauseam)
Then whammy! Acceptance! Giddy glee! (Yay me!)
Followed by panic. Deflation. Despair.

So what’s wrong with me? Where’s the joy?

Well, I’ve given it some thought and think I’ve figured it out. It’s such a cliché, I almost hate to tell you, but here it is: She’s my baby. She’s leaving the nest.

Ready or not, she’s out there. Like it or not, I’m responsible for her.

The problem is: She’s never been well-behaved. I tried, but I couldn’t tame her completely. She was a “darling” that wouldn’t be killed. Now she’s on the loose. And O My God! What will people think when they get a good gander at her!

Did I push her out the door too soon? Should I have given her another rewrite? Or, did I sell her too cheap? Did she deserve more than what she got?

Should I have waited for a more prestigious, more adoring, more (fill in the blank) suitor?

How will she fare in his hands? Will he show her off? Twirl her around? Tell her she’s pretty?

Will anyone other than he actually read her? Or will he hide her away in some dusty warehouse, or send her to some virtual outpost where she’ll fade away in utter obscurity and ignominy?

Would she have been better off left in the drawer?

It’s about this time that I pull up her up on my computer screen and give her another read.

Yikes! This is awful! She’s a complete mess! What can I do? Withdraw her? Demand a divorce? Use a pseudonym?

Can I spruce her up in a hurry? Fresh lipstick, maybe? A new dress? At least straighten her hem, for God’s sake! She’s not ready for this. And neither am I, it appears.

The really sad thing is: She’s just a short story!

What will I do when my pride and joy, my novel, goes? Is this why I labor so long? Revise so endlessly? To keep her at home where she’s safe and warm and well-loved? Why strive to make her perfect only to lose her in the end?

It’s not like I can’t take rejection. I’ve become numb to rejection: “Oh, you again. What else is new?”

I read through a standard reject and taste a mild bitterness, a dash of sadness, sometimes a whiff of distain—what’s wrong with these idiots!

If there’s a bit of encouragement in the rejection letter, the taste is bittersweet.

If the encouragement is profuse or specific, I’m delighted. I call my daughter: “They really liked my story! The one they rejected. Isn’t that wonderful?”

So why am I not overblown with joy by high praise and acceptance?

Isn’t this what it’s all about? Publication? Praise? Recognition by my peers? The juried consensus that this story deserves to be read? Otherwise, why write?

But all I feel after the initial sugar high wears off is: Loss. Remorse. Resignation.

So back to work I go.

Butt in seat, open a new vein, let the words flow out.

I immerse myself in the writing. Let it wash over me. Carry me away.

And that’s when I find it. What I’ve been seeking all along.

Full-blown joy!

It’s right where I left it: In the writing.

 

 

 

A Poet’s “Sense Sublime” – Part III, “Some Tragic Falling Off”

Tags

human development, Jacques Lacan, Language, literary criticism, Philosophy, poetry, sense sublime, The philosophic mind, Wordsworth, writing process

Language is that which gives rise to difference, to the desire for difference, and, at the same time, the desire to dissolve those differences.

We saw that in Part II of this series with Lacan’s explanation of the infant’s development in the “Mirror Stage,” and its “quest for wholeness.” Our psychic journey from the womb to maturity is a kind of “becoming” where our quest to return to the undivided bliss of infancy leads us through a world of difference, loss, and desire, to a point of ecstatic expectancy of “something more.”

This “process of becoming” and the desire for “something more” is the turf of poets as well as psychoanalysts. And no poet writes more upon this subject or with such longing, perhaps, than William Wordsworth, who explores our journey from unknowing childhood innocence to the development of the philosophic, or poetic, mind.

This journey from unconscious bliss to the conscious sublime can be traced in “Tintern Abbey,” “The Ode to Immortality,” and “The Prelude.”

In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth recalls his childhood experience of undifferentiated bliss when Nature “was all in all.” He describes the “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” as:

An appetite, a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied

Yet as he grows into a man, his journey into language and difference has given him “abundant recompense.” He has “learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth,” but from within the thoughtfulness of the mature philosophic mind.

By recollecting the original experience of undifferentiated wholeness from within a state of differentiation, he has felt:

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And tolls through all things.

Here we see a clear distinction between the thoughtlessness of the original experience and the thoughtfulness of the second recollected experience. The memory of the undifferentiated wholeness recollected from within a state of differentiation (words, language, thought, and poetry) transcends the original state. It reaches a state of sublimity which far surpasses the original state.

Yet this sublimity, this joy, is mixed with the “still, sad music of humanity”—a futile desire for the unmixed bliss which can be “recollected” but may never be regained.

Wordsworth continues exploring this problem in his “Ode to Immortality.” He states that although “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” of our original home in God, yet we come from that state of wholeness “trailing clouds of glory,” memories of that bliss.

The “prison-house” which closes upon the growing child, dividing him from God (wholeness, undifferentiated bliss), cannot squelch his memory of, nor quench his thirst for, that which once was.

Yet it is not for this, for what was lost, that Wordsworth raises his “song of thanks and praise”:

But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings:
Blank misgivings . . . .

In other words, he gives thanks for those futile and fleeting things, the desire that accompanies loss, the desire to recollect and recreate. In this he finds “strength in what remains behind.” This is the desire which does not disdain difference and loss, “human suffering” and ”death” but looks through them toward “faith” and the “philosophic mind,” rather than past them toward any final fulfillment.

This is the insatiable desire with finds in the “meanest flower / thoughts too deep for tears.” It is desire expressed as poetry. It is the desire of which Wallace Stevens later writes in “Of Modern Poetry,” desire which:

Like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With mediation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear . . . (italics mine)

It is desire speaking poetry and poetry speaking desire. Perhaps it is not so strange that Wordsworth, the poet for whom “the mind of man” was the main “haunt” and “region” of his “song” should be the first to write “the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice” (Stevens)

For Wordsworth, the fleeting bliss hat he fails to sustain as a child in experience, he re-experiences at a more elevated level as a man and poet in the act of recollection—in the imagination.

He explains in “The Prelude” how this new bliss, or sense of sublimity, in which he “recognizes grandeur in the beatings of the heart,” does not shy away from difference, from “pain and fear”, but is founded in “such discipline.”

This sublimity is not a return to unity, an end of desire, but desire which recreates itself as poetry. It is a sense of intense identification with nature which does not erase difference, but thrives on it.

The central problem he explores in all his poetry is:

How does one get back to a sense of unity and undifferentiated bliss in spite of the fact that difference, pain and loss, remain?

The answer he provides is:

One does not return to what was, but moves through what is, on the way to something else, something higher (poetry, the imagination, the sense sublime).

One doesn’t get there in spite of difference, but because of it. The desire which feeds upon difference never quite reaches its destination because there is always, already, that something more, beyond representation, to hope for.

Wordsworth tells us in “Tintern Abbey”:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home
Is with infinitude, and only there:
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
and something evermore about to be.

For Wordsworth, as well as Lacan, desire attenuated into a state of ecstatic expectancy is “a sense sublime.”

It is a state of intense identification with the Other—not as it was or is, but as it becomes within the act of interpenetration, or re-interpretation within the act of creation.

What Wordsworth experiences is a becoming—a transitory and fleeting thing which, nonetheless, becomes the essence of his poetry. This “something evermore about to be” is sublime expectation.

It is Emily Dickenson writing: “Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the sky.”

It is Wallace Stevens’ “black water breaking into reality.”

This elemental theme of difference, loss, desire, and “something more” to come, is also explored in Milton’s great work on the fall and redemption of humanity, “Paradise Lost.”

I’ll explore more of that in my next post in this series. If you missed the first two posts in this series, you can read them here:

“Some Tragic Falling Off” Into Difference and Desire

Our Quest for Wholeness – Part II, “Some Tragic Falling Off”

Our Quest for Wholeness – Part II of “Some Tragic Falling Off”

Tags

identity, Jacques Lacan, Philosophy, Psychology, Wholeness, writing, writing process

“Duality, difference, and desire presuppose “some tragic falling off” from an original (mythical or otherwise) world of undivided wholeness.”

So I wrote in my last post. Here I explore that further, looking at how narrative fiction mirrors the psychic quest for wholeness, for becoming fully human.

Writers of fiction know that to create a compelling story that keeps readers turning pages we must:

1. Create a protagonist with an overarching need or desire (derived from some sense of loss, of being wounded, or incomplete)
2. beset by constant conflict that intensifies and delays achievement of that desire (to gain what was lost, find healing or wholeness)
3. until that need or desire is eventually realized (or not), but either way,
4. leaving the protagonist in a better place (happier, wiser, more whole) than where she had been before the story began, having learned something important or significant about herself, the world she lives in, or what it means to be human.

What drives the story and develops the character is a quest to return to wholeness, to regain what was lost. But what is regained is never simply what was lost, but “something more.” Some new realization– wisdom chiseled from the hard knocks and setbacks of a difficult journey, insights into human nature that will light her path moving forward.

Perhaps we find these stories so compelling because they parallel our own psychic development from the womb to maturity and beyond.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describes the earliest part of this development as the Mirror Stage. This is where an infant first becomes aware of itself as a self, and where the division between I and Other, subject and object, consciousness and the unconscious takes place.

Lacan explains how an infant cannot differentiate itself from the world around it. Lying on a blanket beneath the trees, it waves its hands and sees no difference between its waving hands and the trees blowing in the wind and its mother’s face as she bends over the child and takes it into her arms. The infant is one with its world, which it experiences as undivided bliss and wholeness.

But this cannot last. As the child grows it becomes more and more aware of difference. It has control over some parts of itself (its hands and feet) while it has limited control over its mother and none whatsoever over the trees. Eventually, the child comes to identify itself with its body and to distinguish itself from other parts of its world, and the individual is born.

Lacan sees this development as a succession of splits or gaps, a sense of separation between I and Other, the knower and what is known. The child experiences this growing awareness and individuation, however, as a sense of anxiety–of separation and loss–and desire, to reclaim what was lost.

This is what the Robert Hass referred to in his poem as “some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light.” But out of that differentiation between I from Other, painful as it may be, comes a growing awareness of the Other, experienced in all its exquisite particularity.

Out of that “world of undivided light” appears “the clown-faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk.” Without difference, the split between I and Other, the infinite variety and particular beauties that we now experience with such pleasure would be unknown.

Here’s what’s interesting though: We cannot “know” something without first acknowledging its difference from the knower. Yet, paradoxically, to “know” something, to become aware of its difference, is to “take it in” and make it one’s own–a part of one’s experience or store of knowledge, for instance.

Having suffered the painful split of separation from a world of undivided wholeness, we are now filled with a desire to reunite with what was lost, and the only way we can do this is by “taking in the whole world”—by naming it and knowing it through language, by exploring the world around us, and the world of ideas, and by seeking ever new experiences, insights, and knowledge.

For Lacan, this turning back toward “reunion” is ever present and woven into the fabric of the psychic existence. The gap between I and Other, subject and object, the conscious and unconscious creates, of its own necessity, out of its own “vacuum,” the desire to close the gap.

While this effort to reunite with what was originally lost appears futile in and of itself, it does create some interesting correlations. For “I” defines itself not in itself but through its relationship with Others and the desire to satisfy Others’ desires. There is a kind of overlapping or embrication of identities, which constitutes an intersubjectivity. A sense of “doubleness,” if you will–standing always within ourselves and outside ourselves at the same time.

This sense of “doubleness” can be seen when we examine our consciousness in relation to the unconscious. What exists prior to individuality or consciousness is the unconscious. The entrance of the subject into a conscious state immediately renders it double. The unconscious both surrounds and grounds the conscious self, but never comes fully within the locus of being—that is, being fully identified.

The content of the unconscious remains, perhaps, a kind of “becoming,” Lacan writes, in that it can potentially become, but once solidified consciously into an identity, ceases to be what it was: unconscious.

Lacan tells us that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Like language, its function is “not to inform but to evoke responses in the other,” in consciousness. It does this through language, but always inadequately, for language can never fully represent unconscious desire. Always it says both less than what it wants to say and more than what we can understand.

How well this parallels the human dilemma: We are at almost every point less than what we want to be and more than what we can understand. Hence our desire for, our striving toward, that “something more” which we do not fully understand, and cannot articulate.  It is something we first glimpsed in our distant past which is no more, and which we seek in a future which has yet to be.  We ourselves stand in that gap of now, which is itself a kind of becoming.

Lacan explains the difficulty of our dilemma this way:

“I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”

This “process of becoming” is the turf of poets as well as psychoanalysts. And no poet writes more upon this subject or with such longing, perhaps, than William Wordsworth, who wrote in “Tintern Abby”:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home
Is with infinitude, and only there:
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

More from the poets on this topic in my next post.

You can read Part I of this series here:

“Some Tragic Falling Off” Into Difference and Desire

Cultivating “a mind of winter”

Tags

Philosophy, poetry, subjective and objective experience, The Idea of Order at Key West, The Snow Man, Wallace Stevens, Winter, writing

I fell in love with Wallace Stevens’ poetry when I first read “The Idea of Order at Key West” in a freshman literature class so long ago. I think that’s when I knew for certain I was a writer, whether I ever wrote a word or not, because I was, we all are, that woman:

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. . . .
. . .there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

What we experience in the world, the world as we know it, is always to some degree a creation of our own imaginations, the objective world (reality) filtered through our subjective experience of it. And there’s beauty and mystery and grace it that.

And yet, and yet . . . . There is too that “mind of winter” that Stevens also writes about. The sense that we can get at the thing in itself, without the cloud of imagination, the subjective, standing between it and us, as he writes about here in “The Snow Man”:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

There’s a sense that if we cultivate “a mind of winter,” a mind stripped down, bare and essential; pristine, without artifice; the mind that is and is not at the same time; that can hold equally two opposing thoughts at the same time and rest in the still center; that “beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” then we may see things as they truly are and not as we create them to be.

But to do that, you have to become it. Become the snow man, literally, no-mind, no-thought. Leave “I” behind and become the frosted junipers. Become the night sky. Become the sea. To truly behold things as they are, we have to “behold” it—-be it and hold it at the same time.

That’s what I’m trying to do, in my life and in my writing, in whatever meager way I can. Cultivate a mind of winter, be what I behold. Be it and hold it—-all at once. And by doing that, coming to know it, for the first time.