Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Among her triumphs are Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood and The Writing Life. I have all three in a compiled volume.
“For writing a first draft requires from 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 along with a hundred other Zulu warriors, you might be able to prepare yourself to write. If you were an Aztec maiden who knew months in advance that on a certain morning the priests were going to throw you into a hot volcano, and if you spent those months undergoing a series of purification rituals and drinking dubious liquids, you might, when the time came, be ready to write. But 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?”
Good question. Well put. From The Writing Life. My answer would be: put pen to paper and begin, full of faith and relentless innocence, naive aspiration, blindly flinging words from some remote location, see where it goes, see what you got. Also music. Music gets me revved up. start Mal Waldron Trio - Ten Shades Of Blue (Full Album) mistral breeze on camtasia
That and the cafe life. I can usually pick up a trail. Writing is about what we don’t see. The unnoticed. Like this gentleman in a button down shirt, slacks, proper shoes and an aging belly who walks over to the trash receptacle and drops his empty coffee cup in, kind of throws it in. He doesn’t see me watching him and he’s not watching himself. I can tell. He’s just throwing away his cup. It’s empty. Useless.
“What if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine, . . . the man becoming, in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal; . . . would that be a life to disregard? That’s what Plato had to say. “No one suspects the days to be gods.” That’s what Emerson had to say. Both quotes are from The Writing Life. Chapter headings. How much we don’t see. That’s God. That’s what writing is. Otherwise why would you bother?
What is visible to the writer must be invisible to others in order for the writing to be interesting. It’s the same for the painter and the musician, obviously. The ding of the bell of recognition that we all hear, we all recognize and then we see. Isn’t it so?
Sometimes I just sit under the sky in God’s great light and write. The back porch features a fish pond and Bob the feral cat who lives under the house. Actually he’s not so feral anymore. He begs for pets, bumps my foot and reaches up and snags my sleeve imploring me in his most meowy voice for more rubs behind the ears. But this is a different light alright and a different voice. The mute gestures of the fish as they circle waiting for dinner. The gentle swaying of the willow as it leans over the pond. The cold north wind has lost its vigor. It’s just a whisper.
Oh yeah, I’m supposed to be reviewing Annie’s book. I found it a bit tedious, actually, and overblown but I did gain a fair amount of inspiration from the quotes. “Another day, another dollar; fourteen hours on snowshoes and wish I had pie.” from a Maine trapper’s diary opens chapter three. That’s brilliant. Succinct and evocative. I wish I had a pie. Who doesn’t? Especially after tromping around in snowshoes for fourteen hours. A pie and some hot coffee. A lonely trapper’s life in the snowy Maine woods and no pie. What a crumby deal.
Sometimes I cue off of movies. like the one I’m watching right now: Mammals. On Amazon Prime. The guy’s wife is cheating on him so he tracks down the guy and breaks into his house or flat as they say in England and waits for him to come home. But wait, is that the guy or is he in the wrong house? Surprises and disasters amid lovely scenes at the beach in Plymouth where they go for vacation, the guy and his wife. She has a miscarriage, a whale cavorts off shore, they drink champagne in a hot tub. Lot’s happening. Not much of it makes sense in a logical narrative kind of way. You just don’t know where it’s going next. Kind of like Mal Waldron’s piano. Kind of like this post.
The jazz is riffing in my brain and I’m feeling good. I am a big admirer of Annie Dillard. I read all the personal narrative parts of The Writing Life and skipped all the other junk. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood are quite excellent though. I should have reviewed them.
music :: Mal Waldron Trio - Ten Shades of Blue
The Writing Life