How’s
it going, reader? Been having a good day so far? I hope so. Since yesterday’s
post I’ve been thinking a lot about the same kind of thing I wrote about
then—the way that one of the joys of reading and writing is the way that each
person who reads a text can take something unique away from it. Which is of
course, true, but at the same time this very same sort of phenomenon can make
writing very frustrating. You start out writing and you have something you’d
like to say, but the only way to say it is through this imperfect medium, and
anything could throw that message awry. An unfortunate or unforeseeably
fortuitous association with a particular phrase, something half-remembered or
imperfectly articulated, could cause all sorts of interpretations or misinterpretations.
It’s almost as
if, when writing, you find yourself in the odd position of talking through a
veil. You know, or at least you begin strongly to suspect, that there’s
someone, or something, behind that
veil, and—although it’s difficult to talk about such things precisely—you start
to hear echoes, whispers, all in hushed tones or halfway mocking superfluities.
It's dark—such darkness!—and you feel your skin become goosy, all your hairs
standing like so many incomplete arcs, leaping stilly, hopelessly, plunging
into night. But still you talk into the darkness, into that curtain that seems
to breathe before you, waving as if by a wind your face can’t feel. With time,
you realize there are many voices, not one. You start to sweat, your breath
grows uneven, your heartbeat grows unbearable in your chest. You would swear
you could feel your viscid blood making its circuitous round as it chills and
threatens to crawl to a halt. Ice threatens. But still the voices, the
whispers. You curse the darkness as your eyes strain for Light.
With time,
though, you learn to discern between the voices. Gradually, you begin to
recognize a pattern, to recognize one voice, quietly, playfully addressing you…
even challenging you. But the voices are so similar, so… anonymous. You seem to hear one voice that stands out among the
rest, but how can you convince yourself that you haven’t just dreamed it up—you
are, after all, a very imaginative sort of a person. But you speak, you
continue speaking, you speak circles around yourself, gently coaxing this
whisper that may not even be there into talking a bit louder. You realize, deep
within yourself, that this is the very thing all the poets have been speaking
of when they spoke of the Muse. They didn’t dream this thing up, this is no
metaphor… this is the way inspiration works, the way it has always worked, the
hair-raising discovery and rediscovery that lies hidden at the very heart of
all literature. All the great poems, all the great novels, all the great tales
are and have always been sustained invocations of the Muse. And because the
Muse commands it, the writer must make his offering.
I seem to
remember, dimly, halfway, that I once suggested to a friend that all literature
consists in playing with the difference between what we say and what we’re saying. And there is a great deal of
truth to this. There is all sorts of fun to be had in the game of reading and
writing, but on the other hand there’s the constant anxiety of being misguided,
misapprehended, misunderstood. There’s the gnawing fear of being taken for
someone else, of making a mistake, addressing a voice that turns out not to be
the Muse… and God knows I’ve made that mistake on at least one memorable
occasion… but we learn from our mistakes, don’t we? Particularly the more
egregious ones.
So I sit and
write, trying to be true—and above all clear—in
my articulations. Maybe this is all a mistake, maybe I’ve spoken falsely,
muddied up the message entirely. Still, if it’s a mistake I’m sure I’ll learn
from it. And I’ll keep on writing, keep on speaking to that half-remembered
voice. I hope you keep speaking too, sweet reader, and that you keep reading,
listening, whispering. Perhaps even now a yellow dawn creeps over the horizon.
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