I feel, somehow, as though floodgates are about to open.
When I read, I am overcome with emotion and thought. Reading ignites ideas, little bits of fire grow wings, more often than not sputtering and fluttering out after I've had a chance to calm down, to leave the idea behind and let it walk on its own. I'll read a paragraph and I'll have the most enormous inclination to write the perfect sidekick, an inspired companion to the lines I'm mowing through. I read something set in an office, and it convinces me with the force of God dictating to Adam that I should add a chapter onto whatever I've cooked up and set it in an office. Add a couple of Canadian tropes, twist it with a little magic realism and VOILA! But then I stop reading. More often than not, the fire goes out, the wings cease to beat, the idea can't walk on its own.
But sometimes... once in awhile, the idea sticks. There's a purity in it that I can sense. I carry this idea around with me, adding
accouterments, shaping it in my brain, sometimes for years at a time. I become obsessed with it. I start to value it as one would value a childhood love. It becomes something almost physically attached to my body - a wrinkle, a rib, an unsettling click in a joint. And then... I can't write it down.
I'll mention what I know for certain. I never felt more alive as a writer than I was as recently as a couple of years back, when I was printing out my own chapbooks fairly regularly for about a year and a half. I don't know if anyone read them, if they retained any of the information, but it felt as though I was saying things that needed to be said. Lately I've been wondering if it was simply a youthful idealism on my part to think that I was being unique in my output, that I was writing worthwhile material that would impact some loosely defined world of readers and critics and artists. But none of that matters.
In the five chapbooks I wrote alone (
Heartsex, Joel, The Scene, Kitsch, and Puget Sound) I wrote about love, sex, art, coincidence, accidents, apocalypse, dreams, idol worship, memory, music, alcohol... and God. Last night I tried communicating to Andrea how writing about God was really the only thing that kept drawing me back to the craft (I probably failed miserably, looking too much like a Modernist and coming off as a little crazy). But it's true, and I didn't really recognize it until I tried explaining it. To use your classic
neoliberal preface, I'm not a religious person, but I see God at work in everyday life. Nothing provokes my curiosity more than the existence of God, despite the fact that I've developed an outwardly calm veneer on the matter, as opposed to my younger, more adamantly existential self. On the
flip side (?), I believe in the existence of beauty as truth. What's in front of us - our loved ones, that pencil on your desk, is enough to bring spiritual satisfaction, simply by its being there for us to engage, regardless of the presence of God.
These are the two most pointed conclusions I have to come to regarding my writing - first, is the notion of God still important to me, and secondly, whether or not I can still find beauty in an agnostic world. If the answers to either of these is no, I won't be able to write any longer. I just won't. It won't work. Thankfully, I don't think that will happen.
-
Position is where you
put it, where it is,
did you, for example, that
large tank there, silvered,
with the white church along-
side, lift
all that, to what
purpose? How
heavy the slow
world is with
everything put
in place. Some
man walks by, a
car beside him on
the dropped
road, a leaf of
yellow color is
going to
fall. It
all drops into
place. My
face is heavy
with the sight. I can
feel my eye breaking.
- Robert
Creeley,
The Window-On another note, things happened today:
I saw Andrea off at the bus terminal. Through the haze of being awake at 8:30 I still felt like crying. She leaves for Germany in a week. We kissed long and hard and squeezed hands.
I had to go to my MA orientation almost immediately afterwards. While waiting in the Sanford Fleming building, Jonathan
Abresch sidled up to me. We graduated Carleton at the same time and are now entering our graduate studies, though with very different priorities. He's pretty
heavy into the Medieval side of things, whereas I'm going as interdisciplinary and contemporary as I can. It was good to see him. The meeting was your average hodgepodge of
vagueness, but everyone who spoke seemed genuinely approachable. Some folks from
echolocation also took the floor, inviting students to their first meeting of the year, which I am looking forward to and will most certainly attend.
I went home and slept for what turned into a couple of hours, then slouched
back to campus for my meeting with MA program Associate Director Sara
Salih, which went swimmingly. I'm going to stick around Toronto until Friday so that I can take a tour of the library. I've been in
Robarts a handful of times now and I still haven't seen a book.
I spent the rest of the evening reading, letting the floodgates open. Read the ten-year anniversary intro to
Whylah Falls (complete with Discography. That's what I like to see). Hopefully I'll be spending the next couple of days effectively organizing what remains of my free time. It's a commodity I will soon miss.
