Just as I’m finishing lunch and getting ready to head to the coffee shop with my pen and the little notebook I picked up somewhere in North Carolina (Winston-Salem, I think), a notebook which gets far less use than my laptop… I came across this small gem on Brain Pickings. It’s an short examination of writing by hand… the benefits of showing how we think (without a delete button). I compose almost everything on the computer… and I typically compose straight in to word press – there’s something about hitting the publish button that is oddly motivating. But at least once a week, I try to sit at the coffee shop around the corner, Cafe Keough, and write by hand. I don’t know if it’s just to get out in to the world, or if it’s the familiarity of the baristas, or the actual process of writing by hand, but this newly formed ritual has taken on some importance in my life. From Brain Pickings:
The process of thinking that writing is, made disappearable by the delete button, makes a whole part of the experience of writing, which is the production of a good deal of florid detritus, flotsam and jetsam, all those words that mean what you have written and cannot disappear (the scratch-out its own archive), which is the weird path toward what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is.
Ross Gay
I like the rambling style. I like the process of thinking and trying to get it down. I end so many posts saying I need to come back and clean up, edit. I sometimes do – there are things that should be thrown away, but even in that process, I get to revisit my thinking, challenge myself to write better. I was reading a little bit more of Veronica on my trip (writing on my phone on the plane was tedious). Her writing inspires me to do better – to work in more images, build things that are more concrete, things with heft and grounded in tangible and soaring language. Passages like the following (and also like the Dobyns poem) make me think I should go back through all of my poems and really push myself to bring more of the world in to them… find ways to get them out of the realm of feelings and personal thoughts.
The following months were an oscillating loop of dreams—brilliant and blurred, like a carnival ride at night, lighting up and going dark as its cars toss and churn. From a distance, it is beautiful, even peaceful. From inside, it rattles and roars and roughly yanks you by the neck.
Mary Gaitskill
I imagine being in a hospital bed, holding my dying, unfaithful lover in my arms. I imagine feeling the beat of his heart, thumping with dumb animal purity. Once, when I was working in Spain, I went to a bullfight, where I saw a gored horse run with its intestines spilling out behind it. It was trying to outrun death by doing what it always did, what always gave it joy, safety, and pride. Not understanding that what had always been good was now futile and worthless, and humiliated by its inability to understand. That’s how I imagine Duncan’s heart. Beating like it always had, working as hard as it could. Not understanding why it was no good. This was why Veronica got into the bed—to comfort this debased heart. To say to it, But you are good. I see. I know. You are good. Even if it doesn’t work.
Mary Gaitskill
I wish I could write like that. Time to go practice.