Room for Something New

While making resolutions can be inspiring and enlivening, this year I seem to be interested in the opposite. Instead of resolving, dissolving. Opening to possibilities that I’m only dimly aware of, if at all. I don’t want to be constrained by ideas and conceptions of the past year, using them to shape what is to come. If the new year is to be truly new, it will hold experiences I’ve never had, feelings and thoughts I’ve never entertained. From one moment to the next, there may surface in me an impulse or feeling that is unfamiliar. Instead of ignoring it because I haven’t seen it before and don’t know what it means, I will allow it to take over. Maybe I don’t usually act that way. Maybe it’s not who I am or how other people see me. But what if who we are is huge and open-ended? This new year really does feel new, and I want to keep reveling in the newness.
 
It’s why writing means so much to me. I get to situate myself on a threshold of sheer ignorance and feel closer to life as a whole, that vast and mysterious, ongoing flow. The creative process, of writing as well as living, brings us into direct contact with what is beyond us and deep within us. We cultivate surrender, not knowing what will come through us, or how we will be inspired by the experience of someone else, encountering the world in a way that is unique to them and just as unprecedented. As we put down one word and then the next, new paths of understanding, perhaps amazement will unfold. Or we may come to stillness in a place of profound ignorance. Maybe something I’m sure of now will dissolve in a moment. And there will be room for something new.

Taking Language Away

Language can eclipse reality. The names we give things are useful as labels, but they also generalize and standardize till we no longer see the thing before us. Here is a horse, we think, and having identified it, we stop looking, stop seeing. We may as well have become blind. This is why we turn to literature. We’re hungry for the reality that has been obscured, and we know that language can be manipulated creatively to bring it back into being. Jane Hirshfield’s poem “After Work” shows us what happens when language is liberated in this way.

I stop the car along the pasture edge,
gather up bags of corncobs from the back,
and get out.
Two whistles, one for each,
and familiar sounds draw close in darkness—
cadence of hoof on hardened bottomland,
twinned blowing of air through nostrils curious, flared.
They come, deepened and muscular movements
conjured out of sleep: each small noise and scent
heavy with earth, simple beyond communion,
beyond the stretched out hand from which they calmly
take corncobs, pulling away as I hold
until the mid-points snap.
They are careful of my finger,
offering that animal-knowledge,
the respect which is due to strangers;
and in the night, their mares’ eyes shine, reflecting stars,
the entire, outer light of the world here.

Notice how the mares are not named till the very end. Sounds and scents move towards us out of the darkness, emerging as from the depths of sleep—the cadence of hooves, the blowing of air, nostrils flaring. We get to see and hear and put together the raw sensations, but the horse is never named. Instead, she appears. The poet uses words, not to define her, but to conjure her into being. 

An underlying impulse of creative writers is, ironically enough, to deprive us of language. They seek to lay the world bare, unveiling its presence. When the mares appear, they are not “mares” but a wondrous emanation of the universe. What if we were to set this challenge for ourselves as writers when we set out to describe the life before us—that we lose ourselves in what we see so completely, we forget its name and see the entire cosmos revealed. The “entire, outer light of the world here.”

The Weight of Sweetness

Our experiences and our emotions can seem so complicated and contradictory as to be impossible to express. This is why writers, such as Li-Young Lee, turn to images. In a poem which starts, “No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness,” he asks us to

See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
in your palm.
And, so, there is the weight of memory:

Windblown, a rain-soaked
bough shakes, showering
the man and the boy.
They shiver in delight,
and the father lifts from his son’s cheek
one green leaf
fallen like a kiss.

Soon enough, father and son are separated. Even as the son is carrying one of the bags home,

… his father moves 
faster and farther ahead, while his own steps 
flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors 
under the weight of peaches.

It all happens so fast. The peach, itself the symbol of nothing in particular, becomes laden with meaning as Lee surrounds it with feelings of love and loss, relating them to the fruit’s sugar, the weight that makes it fall, the snap and break as gravity has its way. The various emotions in their intensity feel irreconcilable—until we see them embodied in a single luscious, living substance. This is life, we think. To hold it all inside us can be unbearable, but we get to see it before us, and outside us, to hold it like a peach in our palms. This open space of contemplation, which simultaneously separates and connects us with life, is so often what we crave when we turn to art.

And afterwards? We’re ready to once again be immersed. In the very next poem, Lee writes:

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

(“The Weight of Sweetness” and “From Blossoms” can be found in Lee’s collection entitled Rose)

The Energy of Character

“We’ll just have to sell him,” I remember my mother saying with finality. “It will be a long winter and I will be alone here with only these children to help me. Besides, he eats too much and we will not have enough feed for the cattle as it is”…

My mother is speaking as she energetically pokes at the wood and coal within her stove. The smoke escapes, billows upward and flattens itself out against the ceiling. Whenever she speaks she does something with her hands. It is as if the private voice within her can only be liberated by some kind of physical action. She is tall and dark with high cheekbones and brown eyes. Her hair, which is very long and very black, is pulled back severely and coiled in a bun at the base of her neck, where it is kept in place by combs of coral.

This character from Alistair MacLeod’s story The Fall is extraordinarily vivid because the writer focuses above all on capturing her energy—through her clipped speech, the smoke’s billowing, the severe pulling back of her hair by combs. And this energy reflects the intensity of her need—to ensure the survival of her children. What if we see our own characters, not as a miscellaneous collection of traits, but in terms of their fundamental life force—what they are driven to do and the energy with which they do it? As writers we are more likely to connect with them on a visceral level, and so is our reader because everything we imagine about them—how they speak, move, dress—will become powerfully expressive of this fundamental force.

Whether you’re creating a new character or working with an existing one, whether this person is real or fictional, ask yourself what does this person want, and what is the quality of energy associated with their goal or desire? We’re not used to talking about characters in terms of energy, but try thinking of them—experiencing them—in this way. Each character will become that much more of a living presence—even while confined to the page. This is the magic of language, of craft. Alistair MacLeod’s output was small compared to many, but each of his stories is a translucent gem, filled with passages that make me wonder at how he could convey so much with so little.

The Power of Metaphor

Cut Flowers
 
Because I want the blooms to last,
I scald the stems
of roses, hold an orange poppy to a match
until the milk burns in the flame.
It’s an art they call conditioning.
I crush the base of a chrysanthemum—
the heads keep blooming, rootless,
like the flower heads that float
on Chinese screens.
 
I add sugar to the vase, a tablespoon
to ease the shock.
Who knows how a cut stem enters water?
Seen through glass, this green stalk
seems to shift as it hits
the line between one element
and the next: it’s a trick of light, sometimes
I’ll walk into a windowed room
and can’t remember why.

                               Mary Cornish
                               from Red Studio

I’ve quoted this poem out of context. It comes from a collection of poems that revolve around the death of a spouse. When you read the poem with this in mind, the poem as whole, starting with the image of a blossom being held to the flame, becomes a metaphor for searing pain. Besides the art of conditioning, there are other arts to be studied and practiced—the art of surviving and that in turn includes the art of using language to convey the experience. How difficult to speak of the grief directly, but metaphor allows a poet to evoke it. From the beginning of the poem, imagery of being cut, rootless, shocked accumulates till we get to the final image when we see the stalk shift as it hits the water. That’s when the heart of the reader feels the shock, and into that opened heart we receive the longing and aimless grief of the woman who has wandered into a windowed room, seeking that which can no longer be seen or held. Through the glass, we see her standing solitary at the center. The chamber of our heart becomes the open chamber of hers.

So much grief is kept invisible because we feel we must hide it, or because there is no adequate means of expressing it. We busy ourselves with mundane tasks, creating an illusion of order and continuity. This poem shows us a woman arranging flowers, but its methodical calm belies what is to come. By the end, the cut flowers are associated with excruciating loss, the poem a testament to the power of metaphor not just to connect one situation with another but to merge, for a moment, the hearts of strangers. Perhaps it’s a trick of the light. It’s a feat we can’t quite explain. 

Tasting Words

English Flavors

            I love to lick English the way I licked the hard
round licorice sticks the Belgian nuns gave me for six
good conduct points on Sundays after mass.

            Love it when ‘plethora’, ‘indolence’, ‘damask,’
or my new word: ‘lasciviousness,’ stain my tongue,
thicken my saliva, sweet as those sticks—black

           and slick with every lick it took to make daggers
out of them:  sticky spikes I brandished straight up
to the ebony crucifix in the dorm, with the pride

            of a child more often punished than praised.
‘Amuck,’ ‘awkward,’ or ‘knuckles,’ have jaw-
breaker flavors; there’s honey in ‘hunter’s moon,’

            hot pepper in ‘hunk,’ and ‘mellifluous’ has aromas
of almonds and milk.  Those tastes of recompense
still bittersweet today as I roll, bend and shape

            English in my mouth, repeating its syllables
like acts of contrition, then sticking out my new tongue—
flavored and sharp—to the ambiguities of meaning.

                                                Laure-Anne Bosselaar
                                                The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

This poem has always inspired me with its sensuousness, but this time rereading it, I’m struck with a minor revelation. I’ve always thought that the sensuousness of language had to do with its music—the exquisite patterns of sound that reach our ears, shaping our emotions in subtle but powerful ways. What I’ve never been fully conscious of (even as I’ve enjoyed it fully!) is the sensuous movement of mouth and tongue.

Sounds exist not just at the point of reception but the point of creation. Language begins as a physical act. What the poem above celebrates is the pleasure of giving shape to sounds with our mouths and, in the moment before release, holding them there. We sense this pleasure even if we are just listening to the poem or reading it silently. We don’t have to literally speak it, just as we don’t have to literally plunge into a cold vat of water to feel somewhere inside of us the sensation of cold.

Still, reading the poem aloud does heighten the pleasure. I love to read aloud in general and, as Laure-Anne Bosselaar says, “roll, bend and shape” language in my mouth. When I speak the line 

            ‘mellifluous’ has aromas of almonds and milk

which has an m in every other word, I feel my lips meet and then seal to create a continuity of sound—mmmm—causing the sensation to linger on my lips and bringing to mind all the times I have ever savored something.

The deliberate repetition of vowels and consonants (known as alliteration, assonance and consonance) has powerful musical effects, even more so because we get to feel the resonance physically, in the flesh. Unlike most other musical instruments, the voice is one we all have learned to use so when we hear or read a word, we immediately know, whether consciously or unconsciously, what it feels like to give it voice. When the sweet flavors of words are heightened, we are tempted to take them not just into our ears but into our mouths, causing the music to resonate within us that much more fully. 

Perhaps because English is not her first language, and not even her second or third, Bosselaar is very aware of its flavors. Every one of her poems is a rich feast of sound, inspiring us as writers to revel in our own writing, tasting as we go.

Why We Read

So often writers sacrifice their characters so that we, the readers, may experience a different outcome. In David Jauss’ story Glossolalia, the protagonist is consumed by regret.

“Perhaps if I had said yes, we might have talked about that terrible day… and I could have told him what I had since grown to realize—that I loved him. That I had always loved him, though behind his back, without letting him know it. And, in a way, behind my back, too. But I didn’t say yes…”

I think of E.M. Forster’s urgent plea, “Only connect.” Again and again, writers show characters missing their chance and make us experience the depths of their pain. They sacrifice their characters so that we may learn and do differently. Connecting often takes courage. It requires awareness. So many of the stories we read and the poems we hear teach us this lesson. And I learn and relearn it.

Jauss’ story keeps going, and the ending is complex, heartbreakingly so. The son turns from the grief and regret of his relationship with his father towards some sort of redemption through his son. And yet this was the very problem which caused the heartbreak in the first place. He does not realize it, but as the reader, I see his blindness, and I find myself wondering, How may I be doing the same? How much do I think I am doing things differently even as I pass on what I received from my parents, that which was passed to them…

I have a discomfiting awareness of my blind spots. I sense them without being able to see into them. What do I know of their size or location? This is another reason I read—to remain in touch with what eludes me, surpasses me. The young father in Jauss’s story sits on the edge of the bed beside his sleeping son in the wan glow of a nightlight…. What about the light of my awareness? How far does it reach? And what lies beyond?

And what about my need for salvation? Where will it take me? And where does it take any of us? We can never know what we don’t know, but we can feel how immersed we are in a world made complex by need, grief, and love. I came away from Jauss’ story suffused with a sense of this complexity, humbled by it, softened…

On Tone

Have you ever wondered how many ways there are of saying Oh… The following poem give us an exquisite lesson on the subtleties of tone.

OH 

As if she were to bump her shin in the night
and utter a small, audible oh,
the doctor says, “Oh,”
as in:  things don’t look good, or
the baby that’s growing
there inside
is no longer the baby
there, growing.  Like Whitman’s O,
O gossamer thread, O filament, filament, filament….
Or the Oh that comes into a room
after the wind has filled the curtains
and emptied them again.  Just
Oh.  What causes it?  Causes
what is, not to be?  Whichever O
in theology you prefer, the same way
“Sweetheart, I love the sex
but I don’t love you”: equals:  Oh.
Or maybe the Oh in Oh what the hell—
it’s nothing dramatic,
not the Oh of a funeral
but of a year later
when you simply look up from your work
and remember that she’s gone….Oh,
like omission.  It’s nothing
I can put my finger on, nothing
that can be grieved for or raged against—
to miscarry, to put the lame collie down,
and how many years now
since your friend passed away?  So
I lose my wallet or the tip
of my index finger. With everyone else,
I’m standing on this continuum
of fairly average losses, all
supportable, shrewd blows,
O’s, zeros, noughts.  An absence
of something so profound
it bears down on the soul,
                        as if I were to take some nails
                        and hammer them into the water—
                        just small nails,
                        driven deeply. 

                                       from Wind Somewhere, and Shade by Kate Knapp Johnson
                                       permission to reprint, Miami University Press and The Sun

Oh. It is hardly a word, more a tone. Each time it appears, we don’t so much read it as hear it sound within us. Oh. With its halo of silence.  Johnson takes us through a range of intonations, covering a range of losses, each profoundly unique even as they converge. The beauty is in the precision; it is what gives those small nails their painfully sharp points. I’m reminded that one of the tasks of writers is to instruct us how to read what they write, never to leave it neutral or indeterminate.

Tone can seem secondary, even dispensable, but for fellow poet Tim Seibles, it is fundamental. He says that before he can start a poem, he must first establish its tone.  The tone precedes the words; it dictates them.

Finding the tone is really a way of rooting oneself in the essential emotion. After all, tone is vibration, the voice shaped by the body and the emotions it contains. I’ll never forget the instruction I got in a theater improv class:  we were advised to connect, before we stepped out onto the stage, with a specific state of mind or emotion so that, from the first instant, our words and movements would have a clear source; they’d have an impetus, like water rising from a spring. The alternative is to step onto the stage as a blank and flounder… I know what that felt like!

It can be useful, before you enter a poem or scene to hover in the wings. I love that moment before a choir bursts into song, when the director sounds a tone into the silence, that moment of listening and attunement. When we take a moment to tune in, our character or persona, instead of appearing as something amorphous that only gradually finds its shape, will be fully present from the first note; the very first utterance will be vibrant with life, even it’s hardly a word but more a sound, a zero, a word as simple as “oh.”

The Syntax of Cats

Every move a cat makes is elegant, deliberate. The moments of awkwardness are so rare, and the cat appears so discomfited when they occur, that I have to laugh, unkind as it is. What if we as writers, in the pacing of our own writing, mimicked the cat’s exquisite self-control? What if the syntax of our sentences were just as aligned with our intentions?

   Dogs don’t notice when they put their paws in the quiche. Dogs don’t know where they begin and end.
  

   Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship.    

                                                                         Ursula LeGuin, The Wave in the Mind

How vividly the cat appears in this short passage by LeGuin. Even the way her sentences move–or rather, stop moving–gives us the cats’ intentions. Her language starts to get repetitive: “They know it,” she says. “They know you have to keep holding the door open.” “That is why their tail is there,” she explains, then adds, “It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship.” For a moment, you wonder about these statements, sounding so abrupt, almost awkward, after the elegance of the initial sentence, but then you realize it’s not what the sentences say so much as how they land, stopping the flow–it’s the pause at the end of each that starts to become insistent. A stillness is being enforced, and for as long as the graceful cat decides to linger, maintaining her connection, the door must be held ajar.

As LeGuin moves us along and keeps us reading, I can’t help but feel that she herself is the cat, intent on maintaining a relationship, as all of us are when we write, standing before the open door of our reader’s mind. With all our passion and our art, we look for the sentences that will keep that door open, from one moment to the next. And the next.

And syntax can help. It never ceases to fascinate me:  the power of form. The syntax we choose—the way we arrange information into clauses and phrases, creating sentences that are simple or complex, long or short—is itself communicative.  Our sentences are malleable as clay, and there’s no reason not to make them as expressive as possible, shaping their contours to fit our message. Sentences can pirouette. They can soar. Or they can point straight up like the tail of a cat, hovering in the doorway, creating a point of focus, a moment of shared understanding.

Virginia Tufte’s The Artful Sentence is the best book out there if you want to get intimate with the English sentence and all that it can do (and the book is chock-full of examples). Even if you find yourself skimming certain sections, make sure you get to the final section on mimesis.