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I thought of posting this in Joe's Sad/Happy thread, then decided to give this fine essay its own. I do not know this author at all, but there is much that rang true for me below. - Perdita
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Jim Dodge - March 13, 2004, The Guardian
In my lifelong quest for a firm grasp of the obvious, I've scraped together a notion about writing that so far has served me well. Writing is a collaborative act of imagination with another person (the reader), employing language as the medium of exchange. Rexroth called imagination "the organ of communion", but unlike the lungs or liver, the imagination - beyond a fusillade of neural firings and an effulgence around the cerebral hemispheres - has proved difficult to locate. I imagine it as the confluence of memory and dream, or, to put it in Jungian terms, as the dynamic interplay of the four psychic centres: the emotions, the bodily senses, the intellect, and the spirit/soul.
However, as much as I admire Jung, to dwell on the centres and their interdependencies becomes an exercise in moving the furniture around in a room when my true impulse is to bust down the door and go flop outside in the spring light. My finest moments as a writer (and as a reader) have required that I literally go out of my mind, shed my sorry-assed self, and wholly enter the story I would tell - become each character; know every plant, critter, and geological process comprising the narrative's time/space location; hear every phoneme and feel every breath in each sentence; follow the ripple and resonance of each image; adopt points of view and narrative voices different from my own; sense the story's trajectory, which entails knowing the conflicts that move it, what's at stake, and what revelations and harmonies might attend closure.
Another peak of my artistic endeavours, one experienced by many writers, occurs at that mysterious point where you amass enough momentum that you stop telling the story and the story begins telling you. I heard Mel Gibson recently claim that his movie The Passion of the Christ "was directed by the Holy Ghost... I just sort of directed traffic". Although I can't claim the Holy Ghost has ever approached within hailing distance of my work, I can say that what Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower" has occasionally hit me with a few volts, enough anyway to make me leap on my desktop and do the Watusi while weeping with jubilation.
I absolutely don't mean to suggest that the secret to writing resides in simply pushing the pen till the Muses, out of pity or respect, blow you some inspiration, or that The Force requires ego loss, or dramatic self-surrender, feverish transcendence, drug wipe-out, or some sort of psychic woo-woo known only to adepts or initiates. On the contrary, what the Muses seem to favour for getting out of your mind is a concentration so ferocious and total that you seem to disappear.
While the writer has surrendered his or her imagination to the story, some part must still make, by my careful count, 257 exquisitely difficult aesthetic decisions per second about diction, usage, sonics, punctuation, and a few hundred other craft choices required for coherence, compatibility and clarity. If you have to stop to wonder whether a semicolon is called for, or if a Mountie would use the expression "Your brain is like baked, dude" in 1934, your pure concentration on the story flowing through what used to be you is shattered.
To sustain imaginative engagement, especially for the months or years required for a novel, craft must be a reflex, and that only comes with years of dedicated practice, practice, practice; and dedication is meaningless without discipline, and discipline without honest desire becomes empty drill, which will eventually collapse on the weight of its own emptiness.
As Gregory Bateson has noted, "[rigour and imagination are] the two great contraries of mental process, either of which by itself is lethal. Rigour alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity." If imagination is indeed the organ of communion, and art is a collaborative act of imagination with another human being, writers would be wise to remember that communication and communion are as inextricably allied as medium and message.
It may rankle writers, but it's the saving grace of this make-believe community that we cannot be better than our best readers. Through the magic of imagination tempered by rigour and the conjuror's art of voluntary incarnation, we can extend our identities to include other humans and sentient beings, expend our compassion to care for each other, and through co-creation perhaps expand our spirits, thereby enlarging the temple.
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Edited to add: "Jim Dodge is the author of three novels - Fup, Not Fade Away and Stone Junction - and a collection of poetry and short prose, Rain on the River. He lives on an isolated ranch in western Sonoma County and has been by turns an apple picker, a carpet layer, a teacher, a professional gambler, a shepherd for five years and a woodcutter. He currently works as an environmental restorer - primarily tree planting, log-jam removal and erosion control."
That's a blurb on a publisher's website. The dude's a neighbor!
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Jim Dodge - March 13, 2004, The Guardian
In my lifelong quest for a firm grasp of the obvious, I've scraped together a notion about writing that so far has served me well. Writing is a collaborative act of imagination with another person (the reader), employing language as the medium of exchange. Rexroth called imagination "the organ of communion", but unlike the lungs or liver, the imagination - beyond a fusillade of neural firings and an effulgence around the cerebral hemispheres - has proved difficult to locate. I imagine it as the confluence of memory and dream, or, to put it in Jungian terms, as the dynamic interplay of the four psychic centres: the emotions, the bodily senses, the intellect, and the spirit/soul.
However, as much as I admire Jung, to dwell on the centres and their interdependencies becomes an exercise in moving the furniture around in a room when my true impulse is to bust down the door and go flop outside in the spring light. My finest moments as a writer (and as a reader) have required that I literally go out of my mind, shed my sorry-assed self, and wholly enter the story I would tell - become each character; know every plant, critter, and geological process comprising the narrative's time/space location; hear every phoneme and feel every breath in each sentence; follow the ripple and resonance of each image; adopt points of view and narrative voices different from my own; sense the story's trajectory, which entails knowing the conflicts that move it, what's at stake, and what revelations and harmonies might attend closure.
Another peak of my artistic endeavours, one experienced by many writers, occurs at that mysterious point where you amass enough momentum that you stop telling the story and the story begins telling you. I heard Mel Gibson recently claim that his movie The Passion of the Christ "was directed by the Holy Ghost... I just sort of directed traffic". Although I can't claim the Holy Ghost has ever approached within hailing distance of my work, I can say that what Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower" has occasionally hit me with a few volts, enough anyway to make me leap on my desktop and do the Watusi while weeping with jubilation.
I absolutely don't mean to suggest that the secret to writing resides in simply pushing the pen till the Muses, out of pity or respect, blow you some inspiration, or that The Force requires ego loss, or dramatic self-surrender, feverish transcendence, drug wipe-out, or some sort of psychic woo-woo known only to adepts or initiates. On the contrary, what the Muses seem to favour for getting out of your mind is a concentration so ferocious and total that you seem to disappear.
While the writer has surrendered his or her imagination to the story, some part must still make, by my careful count, 257 exquisitely difficult aesthetic decisions per second about diction, usage, sonics, punctuation, and a few hundred other craft choices required for coherence, compatibility and clarity. If you have to stop to wonder whether a semicolon is called for, or if a Mountie would use the expression "Your brain is like baked, dude" in 1934, your pure concentration on the story flowing through what used to be you is shattered.
To sustain imaginative engagement, especially for the months or years required for a novel, craft must be a reflex, and that only comes with years of dedicated practice, practice, practice; and dedication is meaningless without discipline, and discipline without honest desire becomes empty drill, which will eventually collapse on the weight of its own emptiness.
As Gregory Bateson has noted, "[rigour and imagination are] the two great contraries of mental process, either of which by itself is lethal. Rigour alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity." If imagination is indeed the organ of communion, and art is a collaborative act of imagination with another human being, writers would be wise to remember that communication and communion are as inextricably allied as medium and message.
It may rankle writers, but it's the saving grace of this make-believe community that we cannot be better than our best readers. Through the magic of imagination tempered by rigour and the conjuror's art of voluntary incarnation, we can extend our identities to include other humans and sentient beings, expend our compassion to care for each other, and through co-creation perhaps expand our spirits, thereby enlarging the temple.
----------------
Edited to add: "Jim Dodge is the author of three novels - Fup, Not Fade Away and Stone Junction - and a collection of poetry and short prose, Rain on the River. He lives on an isolated ranch in western Sonoma County and has been by turns an apple picker, a carpet layer, a teacher, a professional gambler, a shepherd for five years and a woodcutter. He currently works as an environmental restorer - primarily tree planting, log-jam removal and erosion control."
That's a blurb on a publisher's website. The dude's a neighbor!
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