1 The Quotation That Says It
“Every man’s intimate history is a contribution to universal history.”
Anaïs Nin
2 The Precipice
The journal. The beginning. No one picks it up but me. Each year, a new book. This one’s yellow. It comes after a darker one that had a hazy picture of a river on it — a river flowing continuously into the distance. Each year the book is right for the beginning. It isn’t necessary to be true to that beginning, only to know that everything starts somewhere and it’s important to have paper that I like. White pages for the days and their repetitions or surprises/ colored ones for dreams. Loose Leaf. Paste in pictures of myself from the Thrifty Drug Store fifty-cent photo booth. Punch three holes at the edge of a letter I’ve written to my closest friend — for one day, it tells who I am.
Journals grow with all the metaphors of children, plants, bread rising out of yeast that takes its own responsibility the minute it touches warm water. You can’t stop baking the bread once the yeast has started its work. You can’t stop. I can’t stop. I live alone. The journal makes its conversations. The journal rides with me in sleep, as I dream of a visionary design: pure red and black in the exact center of a sheet of white paper.
The perfection of the collected pages is that they are so much beginnings. They are not intended to pose or to stand in front of the mirror with their hair combed. The pages flow as that river — into what I can’t pretend to understand at the moment. I simply write it. I keep up with it. I set it on the paper with whatever handwriting is mine for the day — Scrawling or precise/ ripe or lazy.
I scatter myself, now, back through the days and pick out phrases: “I want to say something about heart — that joiner of thinking and feeling.” And, “Washed and waxed the car — it’s a rare treat to see the city out of clean windows: more lights than I’ve had in months.” And, “I need some small baking dishes and a whole new world vision.” There are questions, too, that I wrote not to answer but to ask: “What does a ticket get you into?” “How many of us are there?” “What things, exactly, are mysterious?” “What do I take seriously — besides everything?”
As the journal gains its own weight, I see the child’s eyes — that sharp intelligence that needs my help. The bread: I want to add flour and wheat germ. Knead the dough. I begin with the beginnings and move some of them out of the journal toward my typewriter. The private and public. A secret room and the stage. My introverted woman who jumps when the phone rings, and my actress who must have performances — the risk taker.
The risk, at first, is to even pick up a pen and find a book of blank pages. The risk is to say it all and to see that every item, every friend, every meal, every failure, every hour is worthy. The next risk is to believe in my own gift of discrimination — some dreams, statements, descriptions, insights are more worthy than others — richer ink/ fuller intentions. I open the locked door. Some of the great moments of our lives emerge from fear.
To work on a piece of writing that starts in a journal is to work on being alive. The heightened moment holds the page and tells me what it wants to be — what can be left out, what can be pushed farther, what can be re-told in finer language. I choose the child’s clothes, paying attention to the colors he or she responds to. Yes, a blue sweater for some soft words about a woman who brings me earrings for my birthday. Black patent leather shoes for a story that has to be danced, faster and faster. A broad-brimmed hat for an essay on the word “threatening.”
This is not pure pleasure. The blood pumps hard and I see that I am really writing, not playing at writing. I use whatever gifts I have. I give respect to the words as I lift and shake and kiss them. I admit that what is secret and hidden is the best advice for the next generation. I rejoice in the large chance and possible mistake of making art — not art that wants to please/ not art that lulls and doesn’t interfere with the conversation, but art that discovers its own form as it writes itself/ as I write it. Art that wakes us up. Art that progresses as we all progress — in leaps or in falling down/ in running or in resting with our heads panting against the largest pillow in the house.
Transforming journal writing into poems, prose-poems, fiction, essays, myth, articles, fairy tales, prayers is the best way to keep art from festering and stinking. We all know the monotony of forms that have been taught too long in English classes. We all know the burden of writing so obscured by the desire to imitate that we lose our ability to know the difference between melody and dissonance, and to know that both things have their value, depending on the purpose of the singer. Most of us know the shapes of words and can tell when we hear something read out loud which ones seem inevitable and which ones have the awkwardness of being out of place in the alphabet. Most of us know when we need punctuation because punctuation is how we breathe, if we’ll listen. Most of us know that the page we write on is the space in which we work, and that that space can be filled, end to end, with words/ can be left nearly blank/ can be used however the writing needs silence or noise.
Most of us, when we read other people’s writing, have some ideas about how the writing got done — what bores us, where we lose interest, how we are excited when each line has been made as clear and shining as possible. Most of us don’t trust our discriminations — what we already have — because we consider ourselves uneducated if we don’t have PhD’s in English (and often if we do)/ if we haven’t read every book from some book list we’ve been carrying in our pockets since junior high that’s ten single-spaced pages of The Classics. We don’t trust ourselves because we think that craft comes only from reading chapters with titles like “Paragraph Development” or “Outlining Made Easy.” Craft is not easy and is not summed up in any of the words connected to it, such as “syntax” or “form” or “plot structure.” Those are words used by people who aren’t writers, usually, to decide what it is the writer has already done.
But the question of craft isn’t settled simply by dependence on our own intuitions, either. Craft is power. Craft makes words ring and convince and comfort and heal. The things I say to myself when I’m hungry for new ways to think about craft are things like: Read more. Learn from writers whose work I can’t put down, even when I smell something burning. Sometimes I make lists of these writers’ words, words I don’t or can’t use myself, but I’m interested in vocabulary as a reflection of who the writer is or how she or he makes sentences, ideas, pictures. Sometimes I read out loud to myself in the bathtub to hear the echoes of these words. The thunder of words in a small room reminds me that words, chosen by any of us as the perfect words for what we have to say, can arouse, elate, kill, soothe, inflame, seduce, explain, inflate, inspire. . . .
I also talk to people who write. My friends. Writers are often verbal, and their eyes get very bright when you begin to mutter about ideas for writing/ for craft/ for what they’re writing or reading now. One friend and I recently started with some simple question about what was Gertrude Stein’s address in Paris, and, three hours later, ended the conversation with hug after hug, having fallen in love with each other and with words all over again through talking about history and meaning in literature and comparing the pulse of one poem with another, and another, and another. Look for idea junkies to find craft.
And I listen to painters — visual artists — because there is so much color and line in writing. One painter, Gene Davis, said, “I guess I like to be mystified — all clear ideas tend to be wrong.” At the time I read that, I was working on some pieces of writing that wanted to mix disconnected elements — his remark helped me stay true to the pieces and to the odd form I was immersed in. And I listen to music/ to how people talk in the supermarket/ to dream language which is such a rich source of fiction for me.
I rely, too, on my own experience as a teacher and on the education that came before I began to teach. There are things to learn from classes and colleges and even from the old-maid school teacher that we all hated for her prissy objections to giggling in the back of the room. I can never deny my formal education, and can never pretend that my pleasure in craft doesn’t come, partly, from knowing rules/ standard English/ sentence patterns. The pleasure is in knowing them so deeply by now that I can do anything I like with them, with some security. I can give my own rough drafts to a student and answer questions about what got changed to what — and why. This deep education in language stands with me and helps me because I’m not afraid of it. I’ve been around it for a long time. I love it, because I can use it.
I think it takes a whole life to learn craft. I think it is not one thing. I think that it gets more and more complex as I write and want to do more in my writing. I think it’s different for each of us, though everyone seems to be afraid of the commitment to craft, and oppositely, of the lack of it. Women that I work with, often, after about a year of writing, sense something going on in them that feels like fear and resistance. They reach some moment in themselves when they see that their perceptions are valuable, when they’ve discovered that they can write, and then they say, “I’m afraid to go back to something I’ve written and to work on it — to finish it.”
The fear seems to be the fear of training the child, who will resent you as well as love you for the discipline. The fear is the fear of becoming too logical, too self-righteous, too business-like, too unfeeling. The fear is to take the next risk: to give the work — and oneself — dignity. Women have been told so often that if we take ourselves seriously, we’re in trouble. We might threaten the neighbors because we stay up late at night, typing loudly. We might run the risk of success. We might find ourselves alone. We might, finally, have to stand up and admit that we are artists and take the consequences of that admission in a society where artists are generally unwelcome. We might have to live our own lives. We might, dear God, have to learn about craft and laugh at anything it tries to say. We all know mass-produced greeting cards and popular psychology — writing so thin that it would gratefully starve to death if all of us would turn from it, back to our journals, back to our blood and yeast. Can we credit ourselves with the right and responsibility of being human and artistic? Can we create from ourselves and our journals new, exciting, revelatory forms? Can we give ourselves meaning and give meaning to the precious, throbbing lives that we endure? We need the courage to share who we are and who we’re becoming in the highest way we can — through our trust in our own visions — whatever those visions may be for each of us. The river doesn’t end. The yellow cover of my journal this year is blatant. It will be noticed. I will be noticed. The writing that goes into it, much of it, will stay where it is. But what I choose to revise and nurture, bring forward and raise above my head — ah, the risk is the endless choice.
3 The Artist (Aztec)
Read Denise Levertov’s translation of “The Artist” in Shaking the Pumpkin (edited by Jerome Rothenberg, Doubleday & Co., 1972).
4 The Knife Into The Loaf
I’ve mistrusted my devotion to craft sometimes, and have encouraged students, and myself, to write from feeling: the smallest, most ordinary, or the most profound — whatever delights or emergencies keep us truly in life. That’s the stuff to turn to, turn around in, turn upside down — the stuff to write about. Then, there’s a moment when it’s not enough to feel. It’s more than enough, but it’s not enough. I want to make art. I want to pull the pot from the center of the wheel, upward. I want to combine the feeling with all the power of thought and conscious illumination that I have.
My mistrust of craft comes because I fear rigidity. I don’t like wrinkles in my clothes — I iron everything, even T-shirts to sleep in. I can’t work at my typewriter if every plant in the house isn’t watered. When I was a little girl, I’d scream for my mother to come and wash a single hair out of the bathroom sink. Something in me calls this fussy and old-maidish. I’ve feared that shadow — the archaic school teacher in sensible shoes — never muddied. Even when I draw, my lines curve toward each other. They carry detailed figures of geometry within them. Always, the completed circle. “So,” I ask myself on my strongest days, “What’s wrong with that?” The dark and the light.
I lessen my fear of polishing, molding, rubbing, smoothing as I gain respect for myself as the artisan as well as the creator. To find one perfect word is as full of inspiration, though in a different way, as to feel the first burst of an idea race from my hand to my pen. Craft is the respect for what can be made out of raw material.
How does anyone find craft? Most of us know it already, somewhere in completion and being public in some way and constant rejection slips and the depression that comes after a long, energetic piece of work is done. We might have to learn about ecstasy. We might have to become intimate with ourselves and with other people, and with the whole world, because that’s what a writer does.
I sit with my journal and its yellow cover, wondering how I got myself into all this. I’m trying to bring this page to its conclusion, and I can think only, again, of bread. Holding the loaves under my arms and walking the streets with them. Hugging the loaves in the night. Passing out slices to anyone who looks interested in caraway seeds and raisins in the same dough/ who looks interested in the struggles to rise/ who looks interested in alchemy: changing the journal to art — changing the raw to the baked. Alchemy. Jung says that if you give yourself to the laboratory only as an assistant you will never learn the mysteries of transformation. Make your own bread, and we will eat with each other.
5 A Warning
This is not only for women.
6 All Of Us: A Summary
Journal writing: the selfishness of finding one’s own way and the craft that is infused into the intimate writing will bring about art that sings for more than the individual. I am never more understood than when I write my secrets. They are the secrets of others. They are the dreams of dark men/ the desire to give birth but not knowing what I’m pregnant with/ the yearning for a mother or father/ the curiosity about the sexual folds of my body as I touch them myself/ the anger of rejection/ the simplicity of one bulb, rising now from soil where I’ve planted it. It carries its bloom already, in its homely onion shape.
My Jungian analyst says that so many of us dream of shitting because we don’t share enough of our shit in the external world. We need to expose our hidden strengths and vulnerabilities. When a writer does that, that writer may repel us with what we don’t want to look at, but we come back for another look. We’ve been broken into, and what has been stolen is, perhaps, the Puritanism with which we dress.
To write from the intimate self is to write as individually and as collectively as possible. We do have the same dreams. We do carry the constant human seeds that people have carried for thousands of years. Why do we feel we are different, bestial, inappropriate when we devote attention to our personal lives and wail that we can’t write vast, all-encompassing philosophies to be published in twenty leather-bound volumes after we die? The truth is that we do write those philosophies: we do write history and immortal poetry. We write them because, if we write in an intensely honest way, with the hands of the real artist, we can write nothing else.
This article originally appeared in New magazine, published by the Beyond Baroque Foundation, 1630 W. Washington Blvd., Venice CA 90291.
