Inner Butterfly

21st November 2014

Yesterday I was in the dentist's chair. I only have to walk through the door of a dentist's office, breathe in that clove smell, see the people waiting in chairs next to a rack of magazines, and my shoulders go up around my ears. Don't get me wrong - on a daily basis I thank god for dentists. A recurring anxiety of mine is that if our world fell apart for whatever reason, if we ended up walking among the ashes of our civilisation like on a Mad Max set, what would happen if my tooth began to ache? I want to say to the dentists of the earth, long may you live (especially in my neighbourhood and especially if there is a holocaust!) That said, the dentist's chair is only one of the few places in the western world where we succumb to ritual torture (ritual only because we are wiling accomplices); and to delusion  - for the few seconds between me spying that six inch needle lurking at the back of my dentist's thigh, I really really believe that it's not an instrument of torture and is not going to hurt at all! Just like they say.
I think too often we get into a space like this with our writing, where walking into our office brings on a bout of tension, where trying to pull an astounding array of words out of ourselves feels like lying back in the dentist's chair and steeling ourselves for pain.

It is advisable, of course, to have a routine with your writing. Turning up each morning or at whatever appointed time you have set, not waiting until the spirit or the muse moves us, is just good writing habit. Still, I often find myself neurotically bound to that habit. There's a magazine on the table with an article I'm dying to read, but I feel too guilty to just go ahead and read it. I have an appointment with my creative self, and so the inner dialogue kicks in insisting that I show up. I actually catch myself shaming myself.
One thing people often congratulate me on is my persistence. I keep writing. I never give up. Every morning sees me in my office, and no invitation will distract me away from it.  I don't go on hikes until after my work is done. I don't go out for coffee and chat. Well and good. But it's a fine line. Your creative space is not going to be productive if your rules become jailers.
What you are aiming for is freedom. But the best kind of freedom is not the kind that has no structure at all. The demise of many young artist in the sixties and seventies is proof of that. But freedom cannot thrive either if your creative life becomes restrictive.
I am going away in a few days. The novel I have been working hard on these past months is about 100 pages from being finished. But I am distracted right now. I have been standing myself up these mornings. And I have to let it go. I wouldn't make a habit of this, but for now it is okay. I'm giving myself a little space. I'm doing what I want, which is to fuss about for now doing things that need to get done before I go. And sometimes, I should just let myself read that magazine article. Sometimes I do. What we are aiming at is what feeds the creative soul. Attendance at the desk is one thing, letting your imagination flit around where it wants is another.

So you decide where this line is. It's such a tiny little border between discipline and creativity. I don't know how to put my finger on it to show you where it lies - I only know that it is somewhere. Perhaps you can find it. And if you do, then let me know. And then let your inner butterfly soar.

Sullen Art

28th June 2013

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among the wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

Here is the definition of "Touchstone," from the Oxford English Dictionary: A thing which serves to test the genuineness or value of anything.
The above lines from Dylan Thomas's poem "Fern Hill," are like a touchstone to me, because they distill everything down to that point of immersion, which is what art is about. It doesn't matter how you get there, but it matters that you go deep. It matters that you go down to the heart of the matter. From there you can move forward.
Something Paul Harding told our class last week has kept after me: when he was showing "Tinkers," to agents and publishers, the response he got was consistently, "No one wants to read such plotless, description laden, prose in this day and age." His answer? "Well, I do." He put his manuscript away, but never wavered, never felt the need to insert a car chase or a love scene for the sake of it. He didn't compromise his art, and he was rewarded for that.
I knew the truth of that already, but I needed to be reminded. When he signed my copy of Tinkers, he wrote among other things, "Go art!" a strangely unpoetic exhortation from such a poetic writer. But he is right: the art of writing is what we are about; we are the keepers of the mirror. In our craft or sullen art, exercised in the still night when only the moon rages.... another line from Dylan Thomas, but I can't keep my hands off that bloody stone:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Poetry is the neat single malt whisky; prose is the wine we drink with a meal. The key is the  intoxication, and without it there is no art. (A footnote to the tradition among American writers which has confounded intoxication of the heart with intoxication of the body. Even Dylan Thomas fell prey to this.) The craft lies in creating the same intoxication in the viewer; the struggle is in trying to gauge what effect our mumblings in the night might invoke.
Being at a writer's conference brings home, too, the paradox facing the modern writer who is plunged willy nilly into what has become the industry of book marketing.  The writer may no longer be sullen, for he is now the salesman, too. (Steinbeck and Faulkner, both winners of the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes, but both sullen, met once and sat in awkward silence. It wasn't that they weren't interested, just that conversation wasn't their medium.) But for every class about the craft of writing, there is a panel of publishers and agents offering advice for the hawking of their wares.
So you buy and sell, just as Harding eventually did, but you have to keep going back to that stone you fondled in order to create it. When all is said and done, when the trumpets have fallen quiet and the fanfare ceased, you go back to your desk within the same four walls and you stare off into a middle distance where your art exists and asks to be given voice.

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.