Little Voice

Oh little voice that guides my way,
you tiny shining light,
will you but lead my feet to Day
and save me from the Night?

You quiet voice of unknown source,
that speaks from every wind:
will you, my compass, point my course,
or drown me in the end?

You speak so soft in simple words,
but set me only riddles.
I've thought you might be for the birds,
and doubted you a little.

And yet you won't shut up, you voice,
won't give me any peace!
Why talk to me? Explain your choice!
Or guide me home, at least.

You mocking voice, why so annoy
this silly mortal soul?
Where would you drag this little boy,
to North or nether pole?

But still I beg you, please don't leave,
you tiny blinding light.
I'd more than final cause to grieve
if you did flee my sight.

You little voice, I'll follow you.
Please lead me to the good.
Although I'm blind I'll strive to do
what's hardest, as I should.

The Tree I Saw Today

You wonder grown of seed and fed with Time,
encased in bark that separates entire,
I pray to learn the craft, that with my rhyme
I'll trace in bark the song that you require.
In emerald sweet sway leaves not yet gone cold
'neath autumn's blast, harsh winds that shake the frame.
See to the left high summer's health unrolled,
while rightward wave veined flags of scarlet flame.
You trunk, you limbs that stretch in every way,
lie hid beneath the vision eye receives.
These may outlast the flags that waved today;
but know that naught remains, no flesh but leaves.
Oh noble tree, for catching light designed,
you form the image of my inmost mind!

Thinking and Speaking

            Well, hello to you reader. How are things? Now today I want to continue along the lines of what I was talking about yesterday, where I got into this idea that thinking might be something that’s only really possible between individuals, that thinking can only really take place as a kind of conversation. When we’re thinking to ourselves, even with the best intentions, we often end up following our own inherent biases, our own personal style of thinking, far too strongly. We can overlook the most basic flaws and absurdities in our thoughts because we’re looking at them from the inside, and we often need someone else to point out the mistakes in our thinking. Real conversation, real debate, requires an awful lot of all parties involved.

            Say you and I were debating some issue of moment, maybe trying to puzzle out just why that chicken over there decided to traverse the road. Now, if I was convinced that the chicken crossed the road because it was headed over to the avian convention on the other side, the interests of clear thinking and good debate would demand that I say so. But if you, with your extensive knowledge of the lie of the land, happen to know that the avian convention is in fact in the opposite direction, it would be incumbent on you to point this out. And once you tell me this, in the interests of the pursuit of truth I would be obliged to either alter my stance on the chicken’s destination, or else provide some alternate account that explains why the chicken may be approaching the avian convention by such indirect paths. Now, remember that all these rules also apply when the shoe’s on the other foot, and we’ve at least got the beginnings of an idea of what the two of us would have to expect of one another in the course of a debate.

            If this sounds ridiculous, even obvious, it’s important to keep in mind that the chicken is a trivial case. Certainly, it’s no great matter to either of us just why the chicken is crossing the road, and reasoned debate is easiest when it comes to matters that we don’t actually care about. This sort of attitude becomes much harder, and in a way much more important, when it comes to questions that we care very much about. Say, for example, in questions of politics or of religion, we very often find that it’s horribly easy to demonize anyone who disagrees with us. How often do we paint the other side as a bunch of self-congratulatory groupthinkers, and then proceed to surround ourselves with people who agree with us? There’s a kind of hesitancy I’ve noticed in myself, where I tend to think the best way to arrive at peace of mind is by closing myself off from what initially seems different or threatening—in short, from what challenges me. But I wonder sometimes if it would be better to surround myself with people who disagree with me very strongly. I’m afraid that we sometimes confuse disagreement with hostility.

Now, of course, there are times when disagreement and hostility coincide.

            Well, there’s a few thoughts on thinking, reader. I’m also writing up this post to let you know that I’ll be altering the format of this blog, starting tomorrow. Up to this point I’ve been writing this blog more or less in order to get a writing habit established, and I think I’ve managed that. But in the last few days I’ve become more and more dissatisfied with the essayistic form most of these posts have taken; I’m no great lover of essays, for a number of reasons. First off, it seems like it’s almost a defining feature of an essay that it never goes anywhere. An essay can trace a line of thought, suggest a realm of possibility, but it never gets to draw conclusions, it never gets to complete a line of thought. An essay really amounts to an author’s trying out a few thoughts, winding them up and seeing what comes of them. And while that’s all good and well, the thing I really dislike about essays, or at least the thing that’s getting under my skin at the moment, is that an essay is always written in the author’s voice. When you really want to write poems and stories, this talking in your own voice all the time can get very tiresome!

            So for the time being I’ll be switching over to posting poems daily, or very nearly daily—forcing poetry out never works out well. But I’m making it my goal to find an occasion for poetry every day, and I’ll post the results here. I hope you’ll enjoy it, reader.

Some Thoughts

            Well, here we are again, you reader, you. What are we, reader? What are you? What am I? How do you answer a question like that? Well, as a first pass I for one could answer that question by saying that I’m Geofrey Crow. But that’s a pretty empty answer, now isn’t it? It’s something like being asked what a car is and being told it’s a Ford: in a grammatical sense it answers the question, but in a deeper sense it doesn’t answer the question at all, because it only invites the question of what a Ford is.

            Now, common sense tells us it’s better not to ask this kind of question. What possible good could come from looking too deeply into what we are? After all, we know what we are, we’re people who do things and go places and have experiences in the world. Isn’t that enough? What good could come of convincing ourselves that we don’t know what we are?

            Like most questions, this is an extremely dangerous one if you take it seriously. Thinking is an infinitely dangerous process, which is one reason that so many of us—naturally, myself included—spend such inordinate amounts of time trying to avoid it. There’s a very real possibility that if we think too hard, we might think ourselves up into a cloud and never know how to get ourselves down, or we’ll think ourselves down into the midnight valley with sharp rocks and howling wolves. Thinking, real thinking, is full of the most inviting little snares and traps, unmapped minefields of the mind, incredible temptations, boxes that spring shut, boxes only death can pry open.

            In short, thinking, like anything else in life, is a mistake. But thinking, like all the other mistakes, can be turned into a good if it’s pursued stupidly enough, unthinkingly enough.

            But what should we think about? But what is thinking in the first place? But don’t we all already do plenty of thinking without learning how?

            Certainly we all have thoughts. Certainly we are all constantly bombarded by thoughts, usually incoherent, fragmentary, and self-contradictory. We all have the raw material for thinking in plenty; but how many of us actually think? Any activity, any habit, any sustained practice or exercise, gradually seeps or grows to affect every other aspect of our lives; no matter how hard we try to break ourselves into pieces, to distract ourselves from the bad (or good) in us, we can never succeed at keeping the pieces separate. There’s an inescapable, tendentious flow at the very heart of us, some disappearing point from which the whole pageant of life arises and into which it returns. We can’t escape thinking, just as we can’t escape breathing. But the fact that we all think no more makes us all thinkers than the fact that we breathe makes us all marathon runners.

            Let’s try this, reader: do you think it’s possible that the conviction that we already know what thinking is could actually prevent us from learning how to think? Someone who’s never run a mile could certainly convince themselves that they could easily run a marathon; and if they were certain enough that it was all that easy, they’d never be proven wrong.

            So what I’m trying to suggest is this: what if thinking were just another muscle, another human capacity to be exercised, with the added oddity that those of us who are most convinced we can do it well are the ones who are least capable of doing it at all? Without a doubt, thinking wouldn’t be the only human activity to suffer from this sort of self-camouflage.

            For one thing, it seems possible that we usually think of thinking as something that we do alone, in the quiet of our own minds. But what if the only way to really think were to engage in debate, or at least some kind of discourse, with other people? Don’t we learn so much more about what we really think when someone else is there to challenge us, to point out the flaws in our thoughts and suggest ways that they could possibly be refined? What if thinking wasn’t something that’s present so much in any one thought as in the continual effort of teasing out our thoughts and beliefs, the discipline of unravelling what we already believe and helping others to do the same? Well, what do you think, reader? Is thinking all in your head, or is it something that occurs between us?

Intersections

            Evening to you, reader. Autumn seems to finally be setting in around here. Maybe it’s just the heavy cloudy veil in the sky and the drizzle that keeps prickling the ground, but to this point at least there’s not much in the way of classic fall crispness in the air. The air is damp like a pneumonia patient’s lung, the grass is damp and cloying, and the leaves that have begun to clutter on the ground seem somehow flat, desiccated, even embalmed. There’s a feeling of decay in the autumn this year, a chthonic, degenerate vector in the air, the cloying, nauseous tang of something gone bad. I usually love the autumn; something’s gone amiss, this year.

            Now, of course, if you talked to my neighbors, anyone on the street, in the city, anyone in the entire breadth of the fine Commonwealth of Kentucky—well, they’d say the weather’s gotten noticeably cooler of late and it’s been pretty cloudy and wet for a few days… but on the balance it’s not too bad. The long and the short of it, reader, is that it’s all in my head. The mind is its own place, you know. Maybe it was something I ate? Maybe I get stir-crazy every time I go a few days without seeing the sun? Who knows?

            I have another guess, reader; do stay if you’d like to hear about it.

            Well, I was out walking the dog this afternoon, thinking about oranges, when I came to the overpass that runs above the train tracks. Now, this is nothing unusual, far from it, this is the very essence of a daily occurrence. It struck me, however, that an overpass (although much like a bridge in many respects) is less like a bridge than like an intersection that… that, well, fails to intersect. This thought somehow troubled me, and so I stood leaning over the railing for a time, scrutinizing the linear streaks of rail, their crossties nearly black with dampness. The puppy, meanwhile, sniffed along the ground, happening to find a bit of pizza crust that she happily chomped down.

            I can’t tell you how long I stood there, reader. I can only say that my eyes seemed to become glass, my feet seemed to strike root in the concrete, and my hair seemed to crumble into sand, scattering like chalk. I looked about me, and time itself took flight. I could say, though it would be absurd, that for every second that passed for me, a thousand years seemed to flash by. I could say, though it would be foolish, that I saw the city around me grow into a great metropolis of millions of millions, that I saw the city grow and shrink like a beating heart. I could say, though it would be ridiculous, that I saw wars and plagues pass like insects in the night, and times of ferment pass like a drunken evening.

            I could say, though it would not be entirely true, that I saw the sun grow old, expand to devour the earth, and shrink to consume itself.

            As I stood there in the darkness, uncertain of the solidity or even of the reality of the ground beneath me, I felt, rather than saw, a deeper darkness behind me. Its presence was cold, yet it burned me throughout. I did not turn to see it, yet I knew its gestures. It did not speak, yet its thoughts were engraved in my vision.

            “Who are you?” I asked. And I knew who it was.

            “What do you want?” I asked. And I knew what it wanted.

            “What will the future bring?” I asked.

            And I knew it would not tell me.

            At that, I stood once again on the overpass, surveying the train tracks yet again. My heart was light, my thoughts were bright, and the happy puppy tugged impatiently at the leash. Without warning, I stumbled and fell over a rock on the sidewalk, unfortunately scraping my knee a bit.

            The sight of my own blood always makes me a little woozy. I think that’s what put me in such a funk, reader.

Spies and Detectives

            Hi there, reader, wherever you are. I really do hope this life, this time, is a flourishing one for you. I wish you every good fortune, reader. This life can be so mysterious, so unfathomable, it can be overrun by the most insubstantial nightmares; but the nightmares can fall away at the mere drop of a curtain. I hope you don’t fall prey to the nightmares, reader, I hope you wake up and find the sun bright with kindness, and find even in the rain a kind of cleaning. I love you, reader; whoever you are, wherever you may be, whatever obstacles you face, I hope you find your way home.

            A few days ago, I wrote about mysteries, about the possibility of viewing life as a kind of supreme mystery. While I was on the subject, I made some passing remark about detective stories, the way detective stories mirror this way of looking at life, and I’ve got a few more thoughts along that line that I’d like to share with you. Now, the first question that comes up is this: just what is a detective story? I’d say all detective stories follow a fairly universal pattern: first off, and often from the very beginning of the story, we find some great evil in the world, some great wrong that’s been committed. Maybe it’s a murder, maybe it’s a kind of fraud, maybe it’s a terrible plague the gods have let loose on the city as punishment for some unthinkable crime. In any case, the engine that drives the plot is the overwhelming need to find out who is responsible, to restore the natural order to the universe, and the hero is the one who assumes—for whatever reason—the responsibility of putting things right.

The Name of the Rose: good movie, great book.

            But who is the detective? Why does the detective need to set things right? Well, let’s take a look at some representative cases and see what we find. In the most primordial detective story I know of, Oedipus takes on the responsibility because it’s his duty as King of Thebes; the people demand that he finds out what could have caused this terrible plague. Sherlock Holmes solves crimes because he’s bored, because he’s a kind of weirdo who requires a puzzle to solve in order to function in the world at all. William of Baskerville tries to solve the murders in The Name of the Rose because of his experience with the Inquisition, and because he is a relative outsider, a Franciscan monk in a Benedictine monastery. Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice is an investigator by trade, but he’s also a disillusioned longhair as the high tide of the sixties is ebbing off Gordita Beach. So it seems like the detective usually has some social position that makes investigating crimes his or her responsibility, but more importantly, the detective is something of an outsider figure, someone whose isolation places them inexorably at the upper or lower fringes of society.

            This isolation gives the detective an unusual perspective, and in some ways it is the very fact of isolation that allows the detective to see the solutions that those who are enmeshed in the mystery don’t have the detachment to spot. But the detective’s isolation is also a weakness, a source of vulnerability that gives rise to another detective story standby, the femme fatale. It’s an almost inevitable staple of the detective story that the detective can’t help but fall for the femme fatale, who often turns out to be implicated in the crime—and in the most complete form of the story also implicates the detective in the process. At the very least, the femme fatale will break the detective’s heart. But he can never bring himself to regret it.

            Now, there is a variation on the detective story that allows the hero a kind of immunity from the femme fatale: the spy story. Many of the features of the spy and detective genres are the same or similar—except the spy, being a spy, is inevitably an actor by nature. What’s a spy, after all, but the most high-stakes actor of all, the actor who gives up the audience’s applause for the sake of the most demanding performance imaginable? And what is an actor? An actor is someone who can’t be comfortable in their own skin without self-consciously playing a defined role. Actors often have a very limited sense of themselves as real individuals, and so the best actors are the ones who are able to pretend to be anyone, who find living far easier if they are playing their character, putting on a mask. So the spy, as a consummate actor, plays a highly dangerous role—in order to pretend to live like a normal person? No wonder James Bond is immune to the femme fatale—he was only playing the role of the suave man of action! His heart was never in it.

            So, although the detective may be vulnerable as a result of isolation, the spy’s lot—while it may be more glamorous, while it may even be in a way safer—is even worse. Doc Sportello may be vulnerable to Shasta Fay, but Mr. Bond only manages to avoid that vulnerability by alienating himself from himself, to the point that his world becomes one in which it’s impossible even to think of trusting another person.

            There’s probably a moral to this story, but I won’t insult you by drawing out any kind of ultimate meaning from all this mess. I’ll just wish you the best, reader, and hope that you don’t fall prey to too many nightmares during your time here.

Coincidence

            Hi there reader, I hope the wheels are running smoothly for you. Tonight I’ve got an old story on the brain, this old, possibly apocryphal story about Archimedes. Now, old Archimedes had a reputation around town for being a clever sort of a fellow, even if he was a bit of an eccentric, so when the local king (or some tyrant or senator or bourgeois or nobleman or what-have-you) ran into any particularly vexing problem of engineering, he made it a habit to ask Archimedes what his thoughts were on the issue. One day the king summons Archimedes and tells him, “I received this gift, this really wonderful little gold statue, from the ambassador from the next town over. As a sign of good will and friendship between our great cities.”

            Archimedes nods for a moment, looks at the sky, wonders a bit how birds manage to fly, says, “You don’t say.”

            “Right, but the thing is, the ambassador is such a little skinflint, a real ugly fellow too… but that’s not the point. The point is, I want you to tell me if it really is made out of gold. I’d just love a good excuse to kick him out of town. Can you find a way to, you know, test it out like you do?”

            Archimedes tugs on his mustache a bit, decides that birds’ souls must be made of fire, which would account for their upward-motion, says, “Sure.”

            Archimedes wanders home, frowning. He’s realized that the fire theory is no good, since if the birds’ souls were simply made of fire, they’d never manage to get back to earth. You’d just look up at the sky and see those birds floating up and up and up… they’d probably make a mess once they hit the spheres of the heavens, maybe even knock the planets out of their courses. No, no, no, it’s all wrong. Gods, this day’s been a wash, now hasn’t it Archimedes, old boy? Wasn’t I supposed to see the king today? Hmm… maybe it’s the wings that do it.

            So Archimedes gets home, birds on the brain. Within a few weeks he’s worked up a few hypotheses about birds’ wings, which he’s integrated with a few speculations on the possibility that the bird soul could possibly be a kind of synthesis of fire and earth. This, after all, would allow the bird not only to fly in the heavens but to return safely to earth… although he’s run into some theoretical difficulties as to the nature of this interaction. Hmm… maybe the wings have something to do with that, as well.

            But anyways, as he’s working away at all these avian difficulties, poring over a few Farmer’s Almanacs and thumbing through the Encyclopedia Britannica—Wikipedia didn’t exist in those days, you know—his wife (her name immortalized throughout the centuries as “Archimedes’ Wife”) interrupts his reveries, saying, “So, Archie, how’s the king’s gold problem coming along?”

            Archimedes suddenly remembers that the king’s been waiting on him for weeks, plunges into panic and despair, thinks a bit more about birds, goes back to panic and despair, croaks “Just fine, dear,” and promptly faints.

            When Archimedes comes to, he admits that his work for the king has been a bit lacking lately, “Although I have been doing some important work on the secret of flight.” Phantoms of exile, humiliation, and a still deeper, unthinkable loss flash before his eyes. What if (and he nearly faints once more at this thought) the king’s family stops sitting next to the Archimedeses at the Temple of Hermes? What will the apophants say?

            In a small voice he asks his wife, “What do I do now?”

            Shaking her head with an amused air, she tells him, “Go take a bath, for now. Clear your mind. You’ll figure it out, Archie.”

            So Archimedes draws a bath… and the rest is history. The bath is just a little too full as he’s getting in, so some of the nice, hot water spills out onto the floor. In a flash, he realizes that by submerging the golden statue in water it becomes possible to measure its volume precisely, so that after weighing it we can tell the difference between true and false gold by its density. Archimedes is so excited by this realization that he creates a bit of a scandal by immediately running out into the streets, wet, naked, and dripping, shouting “Eureka!” in a voice that would melt fire.

            Now, there are plenty of lessons we could take from this story, but the reason it’s been on my mind so much lately is because it really shows us the incredibly powerful role that coincidence plays in our lives. Archimedes’ wife just happened to tell him to take a bath, the bath just happened to run over, and because Archimedes just happened to be in a state of nervous anxiety he was able to make a great discovery. If someone would have made up the story, we would say it stretches credulity because there’s too great a dependence on coincidence. Surely, surely, there was something arranging these pieces, some guiding hand that, when it shows itself, shows itself through the mask of coincidence.

            Or take a more “mundane” case of coincidence: I just happened to write this, and you, reader, just happened to read it. What could be more simple, what could be more miraculous, what could be more coincidental than the very fact that daily life happens—and it’s even got a pattern to it, here and there a flourish, a wink, something shiny. Hmm… maybe it’s the wings that do it.

            Whatever it is, I wish you a marvelous day, reader.

Mystery

            Good evening there, dear reader, sweet reader. I hope the daylight has been kind to you, the wind gentle, the rain soft and the clouds bright. Reader, I think you must know that the clouds trouble me… I look up, day after day, and they are never the same. Sometimes they hang, still and mute as a pair of trousers set out to dry; on days like these, the silence in the heavens puts a chill in my spine and the coldness of the blue sky sets my teeth chattering. But at other times the clouds seem to weave together in the most baroque and fathomless designs, twisting together and apart with all the multivalent yet terrifyingly unifying inevitability of an enigma. These days are ciphers, open to interpretation and yet closed from unequivocal understanding. When these days arrive, as they cannot fail to do, our minds are set racing and we find ourselves wishing that we could pluck our eyes out in exchange for an undeniable sign, a pointer that says “Do this,” or “Be this.” Memory reels, and even the past itself seems to change sometimes.

            On days like these, you get the feeling that your mind is a radio that’s getting very poor reception while you’re trying to listen to a song in a language you don’t know very well. Cracks begin to appear along the lineaments of the world, and a light begins to shine through, a light unlike anything that your eyes have ever shown you. It’s something you’ve begun to suspect, yet the sudden exposure to it is both exhilarating and horrifying—surely the world doesn’t allow for things like this! You tell yourself this, you tell yourself it’s just your imagination… and perhaps you’re right. But then it happens again, and again, with greater frequency. With time, life without this—this, well, let’s call it this music of the spheres—becomes quite unthinkable, quite literally unimaginable. You steadily realize that, without ever precisely intending it, you’ve stumbled into something you’ve almost consciously kept just out of your field of vision all your life, something like a headlong leap into an immense ocean, like a blind desperate swim to a hidden island.

            The world has always presented itself to you as a puzzle, a riddle, or better yet a mystery. You always desired, far over and above anything else, knowledge, certainty, comprehension. Where others saw only blithe certainties you were assailed by incredible doubts, by a gnawing, wrenching, crushing hankering for knowledge. What is this world? What is the meaning of this world? Your search has been one of restless, ceaseless interrogation. Just like so many detectives in so many stories, you’ve been warned time and again that too many questions can lead to uncomfortable, even dangerous answers. There’s no accident in the fact that some of the most profound thinkers this world has produced have been writers of detective stories.

            And yet you press on, working puzzle after puzzle, peeling layer after layer… surely, surely an answer to this question will finally complete the system! You dig and dig without ceasing, every day with less and less of hope, less of sunlight. You dig until you can no longer remember why you started digging in the first place… and then, there in the darkness, clank! You’ve found something. And you get the feeling that your mind is a radio that’s getting very poor reception while you’re trying to listen to a song in a language you don’t know very well.

            I think it was one of those writers of detective stories who once wrote that there are two ways of getting home… and the first is never to leave. Some of us can’t help ourselves: we like to stretch our legs first. I hope you get home safely, reader.

Hide and Seek

            Good evening to you, reader. I hope you’re enjoying this little game of smoke and mirrors, this jaunty little bit of hide and seek. Tell me this reader, is there anything in this life that isn’t some more or less arcane variation of that old child’s game? We do it every day, we’re always hiding ourselves away because we’re looking to be found, we’re always putting on masks so we can have a jolly laugh at the incongruity of it all. We sometimes get so far lost out there, we sometimes hide ourselves so skillfully that we even hide from ourselves the very fact that we’re hiding. And that’s also part of the fun of the game—when we’re children, after all, we’re pretty well satisfied with a straightforward chase, but as we get older we find that complicating the game somehow enhances the enjoyment of it all. The point of any game is that it’s fun.

            But you know, reader, now that I think about it I’m beginning to see a few faint gestures at complexity in the “simple” game of hide and seek—just look at the boys and girls out there, standing under the tree they’ve all agreed is Base. There’s a bit of a scuffle here at the beginning, before the game even starts. Why, you ask? Well, naturally, because they just can’t decide who’s going to be “it” (which, incidentally, becomes a marvelously complicated game in its own right later in life, a very lucrative game in which the person who becomes “it” is immediately punished by being forced to move to Washington DC and live on Pennsylvania Avenue). After some pretty furious backbiting and name-calling in which the word “butthead” figures prominently, little Alex is eventually chosen. Of course, he had to promise to crack down on spitballs and issue a “No new homework” pledge to manage it, but at least now the game can proceed in earnest.

            He covers his eyes, leans against the tree, and begins to count as the boys and girls scatter. “One.” Take a moment, reader, and observe the ornate ritual of this child’s game: the symbolic gesture of covering the eyes with the hands, the count, the hierophantic declaration: “Ready or not, here I come!” “Two.” As adults, we employ this very same sort of count before we launch rockets roaring into the heavens… and for much the same reason. “Three.” We don’t do it because we actually want to know in advance the precise moment that the chase will begin, that the new year will begin, that the pillar of fire will light and begin its ascent—not at all! “Four.” We simply do it to increase the anticipation of the thing, to warm the blood a bit, to set our hair all prickly and the heart pumping just a little bit faster. “Five.” A thing is a thing, an event is an event, a chase is a chase, but the real fun of the thing is always the way we dramatize it, the way we strive to make it fresh and ever new. “Six.”

The children know this intuitively, because they haven’t forgotten it yet. “Seven.” They whisper amongst themselves, one of them shushes the others loudly, and a shouting match breaks out between two of them as the rest run off their separate ways. “Eight.” The offending parties grin mischievously, with an innocent guilt. “Nine.” This one hides under a car, another in the bushes, yet another in the shadow of the jungle gym. “Ten.” As always, there’s at least one quivering creature there who can’t decide where to hide, rushing about and searching all directions anxiously—perhaps this one doesn’t have too clear an idea of the game’s rules. “Eleven.” Waved along silently by a helping hand, the wide-eyed kid finds a hiding place just in time. “Twelve.”

This is the game we were born into, reader, the game we’ve spent countless eternities practicing, developing, perfecting. “Thirteen.” This is the game of writing, of hiding within and around words and phrases, the game of drawing in even while we’re drawing out. “Fourteen.” This is the game of reading, of hiding in front of a black and white screen, of seeking signs and meanings in endless rows of dark figures, listening all the while, listening to the count. “Fifteen.” Do you remember the game, reader, do you remember how much fun it can be? “Sixteen.” Would you like to play the game again? “Seventeen.” I do so hope you’d like to play. “Eighteen.” All we’ve got to decide is who’s going to be “it.” “Nineteen.” Come and play, reader… as long as you promise not to play too rough. “Twenty… Ready or not, here I come!”

The Mapmaker

            Hi there, reader. I hope it’s been a day full of sunshine and rainbows for you. Now, I’ll be honest with you, reader: I’m starting to get the feeling that writing about writing is a bit of a nasty habit, something that you aren’t necessarily proud of but you do anyways because it gives you a little transgressive thrill. Now, of course if you’re going to have writing in the first place you’re pretty much bound to end up writing about writing here and there… after all, writing is a way that human beings act in the world, just like breathing and sailing and cartography.

            But let’s say there’s a mapmaker. Let’s even go so far as to say that she’s a pretty good mapmaker at that, let’s say she’s got a gift for the thing… it’s her art, after all, it’s her work and she loves her work, she is her work. Say she makes a map, a beautiful map, the kind that calls to mind those old medieval charts where you see the outlines of empty continents, dark rivers with unknown sources, and here and there the inscription Terra Incognita enwreathed with serpents and all the monsters of the imagination. Say she makes such a map, perhaps on some sun drenched morning in May, caught in an inexplicable frenzy of inspiration, full of a giddy, giggling enthusiasm. Say she creates this map, but some days after the fact she realizes that there was a flaw in the heart of it—maybe not so much a fault in the map itself as in the way she thought of it. Now that the map’s been created, after all, she’s not got any power over it. The map is an independent entity now, just as real as she is. The map knows itself, she realizes, far better than she knew the winding paths she tried to weave into it, to indicate in it.

            She pores over the map, eyeing the streets and rivers, the roads and highways that enfold endlessly into and out of themselves, winding like telephone lines, enlacing and intertwining like wires loaded with electronic infinities, pulsing silently with messages on all levels. She makes a phone call to a neighbor and is assaulted by a wave of white noise, and the voice insisting, “The number you have reached has been disconnected or is temporarily out of service…” She finds herself awake at all the silent hours of the night, trembling from coffee and a nameless anxiety. She tries to distract herself by working on other maps, or by reading over the maps of others. There is no relief. When sleep does come, the map waits for her in her dreams. Always the same map, yet somehow different every time… yet always somehow staring, always the insistent heartstopping stare of a thing without eyes.

            She knows, she feels, she can’t escape the profound conviction that the map carries a message she meant to send to herself… but how could she ever have misread her own map? What’s the territory she tried so hard to chart, anyways? She wonders if she inadvertently made a photographic negative, a reversal of what she thought she’d meant… what if every mountain was a lake, every forest a garbage dump? What if—terrible thought!—she’s forgotten what maps are? She can’t deny the creative ecstasy she’d felt when making that map… it seemed to grow itself, to build itself up out of the air—there was something essential about it, something terrifically true. In a life of short circuits, of misconnections and missed connections, for once she’d felt the current of some electricity outside of time running through every inch of her body. She can’t bring herself to doubt that the map was something true, something like a gift from the gods. But what does it show? But where does it show? And how to read it?

            The mapmaker can’t help herself. She must understand the map, and so she does what she knows: she starts to make maps of the original map. She charts out its wrinkles, its borders and edges. She makes a map of the paper, a map of the ink. She maps out the corners, mapping and remapping the very same territory over and over again, weaving charts of her memory. She makes maps of her own readings of the map. And as the maps pile up, she’s increasingly haunted by a disagreeable feeling, a feeling that she’s known all along, intuitively, what was staring out at her from behind the map. Then silent sounds, a whisper, thrown voices and images. She senses that the accumulating maps are drawing something out… she sees the dawn about to break on the horizon, and gradually realizes that she’s slipped from making maps to draw out the truth. She’s sunk, somehow, to using her maps as shades to guard her against the growing light. She has been sunburned before, naturally.

            For a long time she’s loved the moonlight. But she can’t deny much longer that the moon’s light is only a reflection of something greater.

            She’s grown used to not getting used to things. She’s very comfortable in being uncomfortable. She realizes she’s gone at things from the wrong angle, that she’s all the while been a sort of bird that obstinately insists on walking. She’s learned to read the map, and it says, “Jump.”

            I hope she jumps, reader. She needs to. And above all, I hope I can get out of this nasty little habit of writing about writing. For your sake, reader.

What is It?

            Hi reader, I hope you’re doing better than you’ve ever done in your life this evening. Tonight I’ve got a bit of psychology on the brain, so I’ll be jawing about the way that naiveté feeds into creativity. Now, the interesting thing about being naïve is that it doesn’t necessarily involve anything like a lack of knowledge or understanding, or even a lack of experience… after all, the only thing that it takes for us to call someone naïve is that we get the distinct feeling that they don’t know any better than to act in the silly ways they act. Often enough, when we meet someone who immediately strikes us as naïve, we get the feeling that they must know better. After all, surely there’s no way that a tolerably intelligent human being could ever wear their heart on their sleeve to such an extent! There’s no way that anyone could ever possibly be so trusting without being cheated at every turn. Guilelessness is a weakness that can’t fail but invite others to betray us… isn’t it?

            But then again, what if? What if…

            What if being naïve, far from being the route of a silly little simpleton, were the token of a wide and deep experience? What if it were possible for someone to become utterly naïve… out of an excess of cynicism? What if there were some nasty little sticking point way out there in the depths of our minds, some point where we discover that of all things honesty is the most disarming of all ways of dealing with our fellow human beings?

            After all, what do we mean when we call someone naïve? Do we only mean that they are honest when it doesn’t necessarily serve them well to be honest? Or is it possible that we mean that they are so honest that they are willing to sacrifice what they want the most… for the sake of hiding nothing? In the last analysis, is there really any reliable way to tell the difference?

            Or to put it another way: of all the vices that tempt our humanity, is it possible that the worst vice, the most typically human vice, is the one that leads us to overuse that which makes us most human? The most human thing to do when faced with adversity, I think, is to think about it… but what if the very act of thinking could be so destructive, so needlessly complicating, that thinking itself creates more problems than it solves?

            In that case, wouldn’t naiveté, rather than seeming to be a foolish lack of consideration, appear to be an almost superhumanly wise way of being? The refusal to look too deeply into things may undoubtedly lead us into a number of grave mistakes in the short term… but what if it was the only way to find the most preferable ways of acting in the long term? As usual, this leads us to some rather profound ways of considering just what we consider this world to be… do we think that it’s a rational system that takes kindly to optimization problems… or do we think that reality is essentially unmathematical? In a sense, it’s a question of conviction… but it’s a question of just how much we think our convictions mean!

            The most rational thing for us to do, of course, is to trust the mathematicians and the scientists… after all, they’ve got the mathematics and the scientific rigor on their side. That’s certainly nothing that we should cast aside without reason… isn’t it?

            Mathematics is the best way of figuring out what’s going on in the universe… what the universe is in the end… isn’t it?

            But what if? What if rationality were only a diversion? What if being a reasonable being were only a temptation dreamed up for beings who would like to think of themselves as primarily rational? Is there any irrational, obviously unrealistic reason we shouldn’t think that this is the way things are? What if there were some very good, very profound reason that we ought to think of ourselves irrationally?

            Now, let’s look at this rationally, as men are of course supposed to be. If men are primarily, pretty much axiomatically supposed to be thought of as rational beings… then why shouldn’t we think of that as being a systemic predisposition, an almost inevitable mistake? Why shouldn’t we, indeed? But if that’s the case… well, we certainly know ourselves well enough to know that we’re not entirely rational… we know ourselves well enough to know that we find this or that attractive and that unattractive for no reason at all… we know that we’ve turned the tables in some sense. Or is that really what’s happened?  In the end, does being naïve mean anything more or less than knowing that it’s impossible to turn the tables? I hope you know, reader. All I know is that I don’t.

Plots and Characters

            Hiya reader! I hope life’s treating you kindly today. I’m doing pretty well, myself. For one reason or another, I’ve been feeling a bit more optimistic lately… I’m starting to get into a nice little groove with this blog, although I must admit that most of my other writing’s fallen by the wayside, at least temporarily. But enough about me, enough, enough, enough… let’s talk about something else, let’s talk about creating characters in our writing. After all, a narrative is nothing at all if it’s not happening to anybody! And while characters may not exactly be people, they’re a lot like people in a lot of respects.

            Although of course you could get a few philosophers in the room, wind them up and get ‘em going on about what it means to be a person, and there’s bound to be a decent handful that says that a person is nothing more or less than the collection of all the possible things that can be said about them. Say what you will about the idea, there’s more than a few philosophers that have managed to convince themselves that that’s the way it be—philosophers really like to convince themselves of the strangest things, you know. Now in the case of a character in a book, say Achilles for example, whatever else he is I don’t think you can possibly deny that he’s the collection of all the things that are said about Achilles in all of the books that mention him. We can say that he was the son of Thetis and Peleus, we can say that he served under that idiot Agamemnon under the walls of Ilium, we can say that he was the friend of Patroclus, that he was the killer of Hector, and that in the end he was killed by Paris.

            But what’s going on here? We’ve got this character, and as we try to form an idea of who he is we find ourselves describing him in relation to other people. Oddly enough, it seems as though the only way we can understand any character in any work is by watching them in relation to others. Put it this way: if Achilles was taken at birth and locked in a room with no human contact, and Hermione Granger was also taken at birth and locked in a room with no human contact, why, what exactly would stop us from saying that the two of them are in some sense the same person? What becomes of Achilles’ status as the greatest warrior of all the Achaeans if he’s locked up in a room and never presented with the opportunity to show his valor? What becomes of Hermione’s vaunted cleverness if she never has to stop Harry and Ron from going and getting themselves killed? But the point here is that we can never know the characters as themselves without seeing them in relation to the other characters; we know them by who their enemies are, by who they love and what they do in the world of the story. Just as we know that Ahab is a madman because he drives the Pequod to her destruction, we know that Starbuck is a coward because he won’t dare to stop Ahab when he has the chance.

            What I’m trying to indicate—poorly—is that there’s no abstract essence over and above what we say about the characters in the books, there’s no Ahab-ness over and above Ahab that gives him all his qualities. We only have characters by virtue of what they do—that is, by virtue of the way they participate in the plot. But it’s equally true that we only have the plot in virtue of the actions the characters take in the story. Now, logically speaking there’s a circularity here, so most decent philosophers will tell you that it’s impossible to create a story in the first place… which is of course ridiculous. But this kind of consideration does lead an author to face a crucial choice in constructing a story: do you build a plot and let the characters follow from that, or do you create the characters and, so to speak, let them work out the story amongst themselves? Now, naturally, as a writer you’re bound to be doing more than a little of both (that’s just part of the nature of writing), but you do have to choose an overall approach, a predominating attitude towards the work being created. Now, I’m far from figuring out which approach comes most naturally to me, but I’m beginning to feel—particularly after what I wrote last night—that there’s a great significance in an author’s choice of method.

            I get the feeling I’ve walked myself into a bit of a muddle here, reader. I’ll let you know what I’ve come up with tomorrow, unless in the meantime I manage to come up with something else I’d rather talk about. All my best wishes to you, reader. Good night.

Manufacturing Yourself

            Hi reader, I hope you’re doing well. I’ve got a bit of a confession for you, reader. You’re the one that I write for, the only one I write for, and so I feel that I owe it to you to be honest with you. But how to say it? Let’s try this: I’m sure you know by now that I’m a person who has a lot of fears—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because when you’ve got a lot of fears you’re continually being presented with opportunities for overcoming them. Without fear we can never really become brave. But there’s one thing that scares me more than anything else in the world, and that’s writing. Writing scares me so much that it’s a struggle to make myself do it every day—because I care so much about it! How can I possibly bring myself to write night after night, day after day, wrestling with myself every day of my life? Why, I might write something that’s just terrible! It’s a daily battle, accepting that you’re bound to make mistakes, knowing that the only way to ever reach the pinnacle of the art is to constantly overcome your fear, to leap into your most abysmal failures with the same abandon that allows you to plunge into your greatest successes. It’s a daily battle, and a desperate one at that—after all, once you lose, once you let that fear take you in, all the victories of the past can start to ring hollow in your ears.

            But the fear of failure isn’t the worst fear. The worst fear is the fear of success—the fear of being unequal to your own successes. Because when you realize that you’ve passed the point of no return, when after a lifetime of searching you finally find the source of the stream that flows with sweet poetry, when for the first time it dawns on you what a terrific potency is in those Helicon waters… well, you start having to ask yourself what you’re going to do with it. Reading books becomes an altogether different sort of experience—all of a sudden, books become less like far-distant stories or idle entertainments and more like dispatches from a war. Every book becomes the record of its author’s internal conflict between the part that would use writing as a means for its own selfish ends and the part that would write disinterestedly, looking only to express truth and beauty in the words. And this war can become quite overwhelming. There are a handful of books, probably chief among them being Paradise Lost, that I’ve started numerous times but haven’t been able to finish because I couldn’t take the heat in the author’s kitchen. Milton was either a saint or a devil—all I know is that no normal human being could have written that book.

            But the thing that really starts to strike you, the thing that makes success even more terrifying a possibility than failure, is this: when you write a book, you’re not merely creating a thing like any other. It’s almost like you’re creating yourself for other people, like you’re manufacturing the way other people see you and think of you. People will meet an author and feel like they know this person very well because they’ve read all of her books—well, what if she’s been lying to her audience the whole time? The whole craft of writing is making a living off of words—that is, by learning how people’s thoughts and feelings can be affected by words… and the bookshops are full of brilliant writers who turned themselves into monsters by misusing that knowledge. The English Romantic poets almost universally interpreted Milton’s Satan as the true hero of Paradise Lost—and while this in no way degrades the excellence of their poetry, methinks we’d ought to ask a few questions about what they did with it.

            You may wonder why I’m telling you all this, reader… and I ask myself the very same question. Could it be that I’m trying to scare you away? Could it be that I’m trying to make myself out to be some kind of tragic figure? Could it be that I don’t trust myself, that I constantly question my own motives and that I’m terrified of the evil I could do, the hurt I could cause if I don’t live up to what’s best in myself? Could it be all of these things? All are possible. But reader, I think, I hope, I pray that by telling you what I’m most afraid of, by facing it directly and honestly… Well, I hope that bringing it out into the open will in some way defuse it. And I feel I owe it to you, reader, I feel I owe it to you to be as forthright and honest with you as I can be with myself. I may not be able to trust myself, but I hope to someday… what can I say, I’m afraid of my shadow. I hope to see you again, reader. Without you I wouldn’t be here night after night, typing, typing, typing. You take care of yourself, reader. After all, there’s only one of you!

In the Swamp

            Hi there, reader, it’s good to see you here again. Of course, you already know me, so there’s really no need to introduce myself here. I’d shake your hand, but then again time and space being what they are I think we’re bound to run into a few little difficulties there. So let’s pretend we’ve shaken hands here, reader.

Oh, and reader? It’s good to know that you’re out there… I think I ought to let you know that. The work’s nothing without the welkin-eyed reader, as I’m sure somebody’s said sometime.

But to return to the matter and hand, the ol’ “Reading, Writing, and Apocalypse,” I think maybe tonight I’ll take a bit of a detour into some swamps, some marshlands. Most of the flora and fauna in this part of the mind are more than a little unsavory—mind the five-legged boar over there, it’s apt to charge if it’s provoked. Just stay calm, make yourself look big, wave your arms and make some growling noises. Aaaand… there you go, easy as that, the silly thing’s gone up its tree! Five-legged boars are pretty harmless creatures on the whole, as long as you know how to handle them.

But where was I, reader? Oh right, right, the marshlands. Well, as I was saying, the real estate’s not exactly the most pleasant, but there’s a few species of writers that tend to do a lot of their fermenting in these parts… sort of like the little caterpillar dealie where it has to like retreat back into itself for a while before it can break through the shell it’s made around itself. Whatcha say? Oh, you wanna know why they end up here of all the godforsaken places. Well, I’ll tell you reader, this species of writer’s a funny sort, clever, sharp as a tack when he puts his mind to it… too clever for his own good, is what his problem is.

Say you got a rubber band. Well, you take said rubber band and stretch it way out as far as it’ll go. What happens? Thing goes zipping all willy-nilly over the place and ends up knocking something over. Well, this sort of writer’s kind of like that, you see, with all this energy all stored up… but it’s all one-sided. You see because, it’s because he’s spent so much time reading and so much time studying that it’s like there’s whole worlds there developing in his head, that within a few years he’s gone so far into that world in his own skull that he loses his way a bit… it’s like he’s that old Greek with his labyrinth, you see, only he’s built the thing and then forgot the way out. By this time the silly old potential writer’s so locked up in his head and so just downright bored with existing that he starts doing things that he knows are bad ideas, just to like stir things up.

In other words, he’s got no common sense. Maybe it’s because he was never taught, maybe it’s because he learned it and forgot it later, maybe it’s because he loved his silly books so much that everything else stopped seeming real… but whatever the reason, he starts setting out to sabotage himself. It’s around this time he’s headed off to college, so he decides he really wants to shoot himself in the foot and goes and studies some damn fool thing like history or philosophy or whatnot.

So how’s he end up in this swamp? Well, for one because it sounds interesting, there’s all sorts of ghosts and witches and magic potions out here in the swamp, just like he’s always read about in all those books of his. And while he’s out here he’s bound to run into a witch or two, he’s bound to scare himself out of his mind once or twice after sipping on some magic potion, but if he’s true to his writer’s calling, eventually he’s bound to realize that he wasn’t made to live in a swamp. The lightning-bolt helps too, when it comes. But usually he’s got the idea well enough before the lightning-bolt strikes… the lightning-bolt is sort of an all-time low in the writer’s life, but it’s gotta happen so the writer learns not to take himself so seriously. His heart’s in the right place, after all. It just takes him a long time to realize that he’s been letting his mind drive him, instead of the other way around.

But once the lightning-bolt comes along, he realizes that he’s got to get out of that swamp if he’s ever actually gonna be a writer, and not just a potential writer. It may take him some time, but as long as he works on it steadily he knows he’ll get out eventually. He knows that the worst is behind him, and he’s learned the humility to admit that life still has much to teach him about the art of living. He hopes that life will prove to be an excellent teacher.

Well, that’s about all I’ve got to say about this species of writer. Well, we have gotten pretty deep into this swamp, now haven’t we? You wouldn’t happen to remember the way out, would you reader?

Suspense

            Evening there, reader. I hope things are going swimmingly for you today. Now, I notice these last few days I seem to have gotten into some rather uncertain territory, making all sorts of odd surmises and suggestions about what writing is… methinks I’ll take a break from all that heady theoretical stuff—although it is such good fun—and go back to looking at how writing works, how certain techniques produce certain effects in a piece of writing. Now, one thing that you absolutely have to produce if you’re going to get anyone to read a work of any substantial length is the effect of suspense. And this is how it works.

            Suspense doesn’t apply to writing alone, but also to everyday conversation. Ever been talking to someone, and they say they’ve got a story to tell you about this thing, this awful-awful or maybe just funny thing that happened to them at work or out on the street? They say this, but then they go into the story and it’s just, “This happened, and that happened, and this other thing happened next. Then we got here and now I’m telling you about it.” The problem with this is that this is just a chronicle, not a story. The difference between a story and a catalog of events is in the way the events relate to one another: in a way, every moment of a story implies every other moment. There’s a wholeness, a coherence to a story that isn’t present in a chronicle. The key to developing suspense is to periodically wink at the reader, smile and point the finger over at some detail of the developing narrative that implies the wholeness of the narrative, but without giving the game away.

            It seems like there’s kind of a wave-pattern in the way narratives work. For my purposes I’m only talking about a linear narrative that starts at the beginning and moves forward in time—not necessarily good storytelling technique, but it’ll do as a basic model of structure. You start with an event, and this event is always presented to the reader as somehow implying the rest of the story. This event is a sort of “peak” of the story’s first wave. But after this event, especially with longer works, the pace drops off and you get the introduction of a few key players (but not all of them), you get some background (but not all of it), you get some rumblings of conflict… some of the characters may disappear for a time, a kind of hide and seek effect. But if this goes on too long, the reader may get bored—so it’s time to introduce another event! And this structure goes on working, so you’ve got event/background/event/background and so on and so on and so on, until you reach the main event, the catastrophe, the climax, the what-have-you. Then things taper off, linearly speaking.

Never thought I'd use a graph on this blog, but maybe the visual helps... sort of.

            Put it another way: let’s assume that the ideal narrative would be entirely the most exciting part of the story. It would be ten, fifty, a thousand pages of beatific perfection. But if you’re going to tell a story you’ll never be able to manage that; somebody’s bound to think this is the best part, somebody else likes such better… and so. An ideal narrative could never be a work of any length at all, in fact it would look a lot like this:

Exhibit A: The Ideal Narrative

!

Which, when you really look at it, isn’t that interesting of a story. The first time you read it you might say, “Whoa there!” But you read it again and then it just looks a little flashy… even a little dull. Trust me on this one: it doesn’t improve on a third reading.

            So, granted that some parts of the story have to be better than others if we’re going to have a story at all, we have to pay special attention to matters of arrangement. Now, if you’re the writer you already know what the best part of the story is, or at least you know the part that you personally like best. So in order to keep the reader going on reading to that point, you put it at or very near the end of the book… assuming you’re not some brilliant but infuriating formalist who likes to puncture the narrative at the very end of the book in very clever ways that, while they seem kind of appropriate are also pretty infuriating.

            Which isn’t to say that frustrating the reader’s expectations isn’t also a good way to maintain interest in a narrative… it just has to be done with a bit of finesse and it’s best if the reader knows that it’s all in good fun. A good author always defers to the reader’s expectations eventually. You don’t want to cheat the reader. But I digress.

Laurence Sterne's immensely helpful diagrams of the plot of Tristram Shandy.

            I was saying that you put that event, whatever event, somewhere in the future off towards the end of the narrative. You’re already constantly referring to it from the very beginning of your narrative, but always in very vague, very general terms, always as if it’s some kind of secret knowledge. As you’re working your way through the various narrative peaks, you keep referring to whatever it is that you’re driving at, but also to the previous peaks and to all the other major events in the narrative. And the references grow increasingly direct over time, so that what we call foreshadowing seems like nothing more or less than a progressive narrowing of vision. This is the way, or at least I think a way, that narratives can maintain coherence and unity. Plenty of books are nothing more or less than collections of fragments that are lacking in unity and cohesion, and so they never really achieve anything more than a sort of momentary interest. Some writers have a very difficult time learning that particular lesson.

            So those are my thoughts at the moment, structure-wise. Penny for your thoughts, reader? I know I’m certainly still in the process of learning the art, but I think there’s at least a kind of sense to all this mess. I’m sure I’ll learn. Have a great day, reader. Go weave some beautiful narratives.

Stepping Outside

            Hello there reader, I hope you’re having a wonderful day so far. And I also hope I can do my small part to improve your day… or at least I hope I don’t make it worse! Well, here’s hoping—anyways, anyways, anyways, I was talking yesterday about some awfully confused notions. The thought, more or less, was that writing, when we’re not addressing ourselves to one particular reader, could be regarded as a kind of prayer, or at least an attempt at a prayer. I suggested this might be the case because when we do certain kinds of writing, we don’t preoccupy ourselves with the thought of how our writings could affect any particular reader. Say, when we write a love letter, we always and essentially mean for it to be read only by one specific individual. We may even be quite mortified if anyone other than our intended audience reads it! But if a novel, for example, were written for one individual and one individual alone, why—we would only need to print one copy! This kind of writing, the writing of stories and some poems, in short what we call literature, is always directed at something that transcends the individuality of any given reader. Whatever else literature may be, it is always at least partially written or shouted into the void itself, in the hope that it may prove to be an active void.

            But what then, is this author, this projector of meanings off into infinity? At the highest moments, at the very best moments, at the moments of reading that make us love reading, we never feel that we’re reading the words of any individual human being. We always feel as though, given the necessary skill, we would have written precisely the same words in precisely the same way—there’s something immediate, something pre-reflective in our reaction to a beautiful passage, a perfectly executed incident, a feeling that the words reach into that part of us that is most us. We no longer feel separate from the characters in the scene, from the author of the book, from the countless other readers who will doubtless experience precisely the same thing. At moments like this, our reading gets caught up in, and somehow becomes identified with, the writer’s act of writing and all the individual instances of reading that all the readers of this book will ever experience. In a way, we stand outside of time and become all readers, past and future, and we become the author as well; in this way, however briefly, we overcome the constant flux and variation of the world and tap into something truly eternal.

            But to return to the original question, what must we say about the act of writing if we accept that it can produce these effects? Well, for one, we have to say that writing, when pursued faithfully and perfected by however much practice it takes, is an activity that is able to originally produce this sort of effect in the author. It is precisely when authors forget themselves as individuals that they become able to produce these sublime moments, to speak as if from the mouth of eternity itself. What is that horrible old cop-out they call writer’s block if not an excess of self-consciousness?

            Self-consciousness, to a great extent—although this, I think, gets extremely complicated and there’s a lot of nuance and imprecision here—is the enemy of real creativity. The highest, most sublime, most beautiful moments in any of the arts have been produced, I think, by (although it sounds like, and in fact is a paradox) a sort of controlled release of self-consciousness. Technique, in this case literary technique, is always present, and without technique writing just becomes sloppy and rambling and incoherent—a lot like this blog, really. But, however necessary technique may be, it’s still not enough to produce the moments that allow us to forget ourselves.

The most technique alone can produce is an eerie feeling that the author of a book is sitting there with us inside of our skulls, talking to us like some kind of daemon or bad conscience. And this is a great effect, it’s really really cool to just be reading along and suddenly saying, “Oh hey there, author! I didn’t realize you’d be visiting me here in my head today. I’m terribly sorry about the mess, I would have cleaned up a bit if I’d have known you were coming. Now, not too much of course, I don’t want to look like the sort of person who has to clean up their mind every time an author visits… but at least a bit. And… please don’t look under the cerebellum.” Don’t get me wrong, this is cool, this takes a lot of skill and patience, but it doesn’t make us step out of ourselves. It’s remarkable, but not beautiful. There’s a forgetfulness in beauty, and a kind of return. You have a beautiful day, reader.