writing

Lately I've been in awe of the act of writing. I regularly ask myself (and nowadays my students) to do something very nearly miraculous. I don't know how it works, but I've developed an almost reckless trust that it does.

So, I've got a blank page and no idea what I'm going to say, but then I start saying something anyway, and sometimes it turns out to be something meaningful and exciting. And sure, it doesn't come out of nowhere -- I draw on lots of past experiences and thoughts to make it happen. But still, the sheer gall of thinking, "I now have no clue where I'm going with this, but 3 hours from now I absolutely am going to have a decent draft of whatever it is" is baffling when you think about it. How do we know it'll work? Yeah, there are deliberate things we can do to foster it -- brainstorming, associations, freewriting, whatever -- but what guarantees that anything will actually come together? Nothing I know of, and yet it happens every time. The quality of my writing definitely varies, but every single time professors have assigned me to write a paper, I've written one. And every time I decide to make myself write, I write something. It's crazy!

I have mixed feelings about how academia forces writing and ideas. When there's pressure to generate material, a lot of it is likely to be inauthentic and written just because we've got a deadline to meet even if we don't care about what we're saying. And the whole reification of ideas is weird -- who thought it was a good plan to assign complex and multidirectional expressions of thought a numeric value? or to use relatively arbitrary writing requirements as a barrier to achieving status? But one thing I'll say in favor of the academic writing situation: It does build faith in whatever miracle we rely on when we write. If I hadn't been required to write regularly, I might not even know that writing can happen on demand. I might be stuck writing only in the conjunction of propitious moods when I felt energetic and thoughtful at the same time. But (largely because of academic writing) I instead know that I can force writing under almost any psychological conditions. And sometimes forced writing can be dang good, too.

Writing is a weird hybrid of hard work and magic. More on that later, perhaps.

Poetic Self-Mockery in Prose

Last summer I started to write a poem about catching fireflies. It was going to be this ambitious double-meaning thing with a metaphor for learning. I was going to say how you can’t catch them if you only look for the light pulses; you’ve got to learn to see them when they just look like bugs, and (just as a matter of fact – this part wasn’t particularly worked into my symbolism yet) to do that you have to angle yourself so the fireflies are between you and something light-colored. Such tactics I remembered from the summer delinquency of my childhood, and seeing a couple of fireflies in the yard brought it to mind. But I thought I ought to catch some fireflies with this strategy before I wrote the poem. Real-life details and writing from experience and all that.

I couldn’t catch any. I don’t know if there was a firefly plague that summer or what. I didn’t see many, despite frequent predatory dusk ventures. When I did see them, they flew over fences and into bushes and too high. I couldn’t reach the fireflies and only slapped bloody mosquitoes, muttering apologies to John Donne. I still maintain that my firefly-catching strategy is sound. It just didn’t work. So I didn’t finish the poem.

And I don’t think I will, because of what it did to me at the end of the summer. After I had striven for authenticity – yea, shed my very blood for this poem – it deliberately betrayed and humiliated me. I’d just about given up on catching fireflies that summer. I’d gone to bed for the night. I came downstairs for a drink of water. And there, on the carpet at the foot of the stairs, I saw a slow, yellow, pulsing glow. It was dying. I picked it up and examined the real-life details: the shiny black legs, squirmy abdomen, and the translucent orange stripes on its back armor where the light came through. It kept lighting slowly, and I carried it to the back door and shook it out of my hand into the grass.

Now I can’t possibly write the poem because of what this has done to the symbolism. It can’t be about the pursuit of knowledge anymore, because I just stumbled on the firefly; it can’t even be about how true knowledge comes best when you don’t pursue it, because the firefly was dying; and it can’t be about the destructive effects of analysis, because my earlier pursuit had nothing to do with this firefly’s tragic demise. In short, the poem annihilated itself. It spontaneously combusted in a puff of irony, leaving me on the back porch in poemless, pajama-clad chagrin.

Ode on a Golden Bundt Spice Cake With Lemon Glaze

So, today I meant to write a midterm essay for American Short Story, but instead I learned how to smoke a brisket and baked an exceptionally beautiful spice cake.

I don't think John Keats had thought about spice cakes when he wrote "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Spice cakes embody transient mortal beauty, more valuable simply because of its impermanence.

Really, Keats should've written an ode on a spice cake to explore this angle of the aesthetic experience. But no, spice cakes aren't romantic enough for him. He has to write about seasons and birdwatching and pottery, when there are beautiful spice cakes in the world unimmortalized by verse.

But wait -- if he immortalized a spice cake, he'd be missing the point of its fleeting beauty, violating the very ephemerality which sharpens its significance.

So. . . maybe Keats actually wrote a poem about spice cakes by not writing a poem about them. His conspicuous silence on the subject actually proves his reverence and appreciation for the evanescent beauty of spice cakes.

(This ramble is indebted to this poem. Also, forgive my ridiculousness; my blog looked lonely and so I posted on it.)