I spent Thanksgiving alone; carved an organic Honeycrisp apple instead of a turkey; wandered a graveyard, profoundly grateful to be alive.
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E. L. Doctorow writes:
A novel or a play has its origins in the peculiar excitements of the writer’s mind. These are powerfully felt, even inspired, responses to what may be the faintest or most fleeting of stimuli—an image, the sound of a voice, a kind of light, a word or phrase, a bar of music. Or there may be an idea for which the writer has a strong sense of recognition, so strong that it becomes his to deal with as his domain.
Of course, not all—in fact very few—of the writer’s states of arousal are resolved as finished works. Most are put aside for some mercurial reason: they are tried and found wanting in a page or so, or stashed away, or forgotten completely. But I imagine them as a kind of groundsong, these excitements, as constant and available as the sensation of life itself.
Wherever fiction begins, whether in the music of words or an impelling anger, in a historic event or the importunate hope of a justly rendered composition of one’s own life, the work itself is hard and slow and the writer’s illumination becomes a taskmaster, a ruling discipline, jealously guarding the mind from all other and necessarily errant private excitements until the book is done, the script is finished. You live enslaved in the piece’s language, its diction, its universe of imagery, and there is no way out except through the last sentence.
Underlying everything—the evocative flashes, the dogged working of language—is the writer’s belief in the story as a system of knowledge. This belief is akin to the scientist’s faith in the scientific method as a way to truth.
Stories, whether written as novels or scripted as plays, are revelatory structures of facts. They connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something of moral consequence. They distribute suffering so that it can be born. To the skeptic who would not consider the story a reputable means of knowledge, the writer could point out that there was a time when there would have been nothing but stories, and no sharper distinction between what was fact and what was invented than between what was spoken and what was sung. Religion, science, simple urgent communication, and poetry were fused in the intense perception of a metaphor. Stories were the first repositories of human knowledge. They were as important to survival as a spear or a hoe. The storyteller practices the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies of modern intelligence . . .
. . . why compose fiction when you could be devoting your life to your appetites? Why wrestle with a book when you could be amassing a fortune? Why write when you could be out shooting someone?
True storytellers ply their imaginations with a kind of self-questioning arrogance. They would reassert the authority of the single mind to render the world. They may not realize when they commit to the practice of fiction that they are ordained to contest the aggregate fictions of their societies. That, of course, is their redeeming value, but also an indication of the risk they take …
Finally, the enterprise of writing gives no warrants. The few monumental works that change our thinking, our seeing, rise from the chatter of what is temporal, imitative, foolish, and easily forgettable. The writer will never know if his work will flash forth from his own time and place across borders and through the ages. His own time and place clutching and pulling at his feet of clay every day of his working life, he will know only how faint a light it is, and how easily doused.
And so, all in all, a degree of courage is involved in the practice even if the writer, as he flourishes in the realization of his first book, may not be aware of it. He will be taught about courage in any case. All creationists are mortal.
(From the Introduction of Creationists)
...the authority of the single mind to render the world...
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I've been reading Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress, by Michael Drury:
"Reality always lies beyond the loss of inherited forms, and between emerging from the latter and into the former is a trackless desert that frightens and dissuades many people from trying on themselves. To be afraid is sensible; this is dangerous territory. What is not so sensible is to fancy that shutting one's eyes shall have made the desert go away."
The past five months... I've been in that "trackless desert". At times--frightened and unsure of myself. "...beyond the loss of inherited forms..." But my eyes are open, and I'm starting to see/feel a new 'reality'.
There is a school of thought among physicists and biologists which holds that form is dead. One of these scientists told me that all one can see of another human being is dead and in the process of being sloughed off--the hair, the skin, the entire exterior covering. According to this school, life is striving toward form, or perfection if you will, but the moment that is accomplished, it becomes static. To save itself, the principle or reality of life must destroy its forms and begin anew. This could explain even that which in our anguish and ignorance we mistake for an archfoe: death itself. Death may be merely the total dissolution of form and reestablishment of the asymmetry necessary to perpetuate the creativity we know as life.
Yes. To save myself, I had to destroy the "form". (wife, wedding photographer) Beginning anew...
Only the picayune personality is terrified of being overwhelmed, while the larger spirit longs for it. The paltry soul fears that its ramshackle building will be blown away in the storms of living; the bold nature shouts in the teeth of the gale, glad to be hammered into shape and purpose, that it may discover what it is made of. The cautious hedge themselves about with customs and plans and prefabricated diversions, and appeal to the experts to certify that what they do is genuine living. But life is a deeper process, filled with the highly charged winds of paradox and truth and transfiguration, a willingness for tears, a sense of ending. Don't pretend you want love if what you truly want is safety...
Amen.
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