Reluctant Words

[Image found someplace or other on the Web, while searching on this post’s title. It suggests a battleground on which a writer went head-to-head with his words — with neither emerging the clear victor.]

From whiskey river:

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: the world of art is the only such realm. I entered it without any apparent talent, a thorough novice, incapable, awkward, tongue-tied, almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness. I had to lay one brick on another, set millions of words to paper before writing one real, authentic word dragged up from my own guts. The facility of speech which I possessed was a handicap; I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them.

(Henry Miller, “Reflections on Writing” [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Spelling

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.

Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

(Margaret Atwood [source])

Not from whiskey river:

“What do you want to make?” “What do I want to make?” “Yes. What will you become?” “I don’t know.” “Surely you know.” “This and that.” “What does it mean this and that?” “I’m just not sure yet.” “Father informs me that you are writing a book about this trip.” “I like to write.” I punched his back. “You are a writer!” “Shhhh.” “But it is a good career, yes?” “What?” “Writing. It is very noble.” “Noble? I don’t know.” […] “Why do you want to write?” “I don’t know. I used to think it was what I was born to do. No, I never really thought that. It’s just something people say.” “No, it is not. I truly feel that I was born to be an accountant.” “You’re lucky.” “Perhaps you were born to write?” “I don’t know. Maybe. It sounds terrible to say. Cheap.” “It sounds nor terrible nor cheap.” “It’s so hard to express yourself.” “I understand this.” “I want to express myself.” “The same is true for me.” “I’m looking for my voice.” “It is in your mouth.” “I want to do something I’m not ashamed of.” “Something you are proud of, yes?” “Not even. I just don’t want to be ashamed.”

(Jonathan Safran Foer [source])

…and:

A writer I know who is now in her sixties told me that in her late twenties, she had a nervous breakdown because she didn’t know who she was. She moved to New York City from the rural South, and she was estranged from her family. She wandered down Thirty-Fourth Street, completely lost. She said she found a therapist who slowly, over three years, saved her life. In the very first session of her therapy, the therapist asked her to find one thing that she liked, just for herself, not because her mother said it was good or the South said it was good or because she wanted to impress a New Yorker. Finally, by the end of the hour, she came up with one thing. She knew, irretrievably, just for herself, that she honestly liked the taste of chocolate. From that one pleasure, she and the therapist began the construction of an authentic life.

I dare to say that literature is built on such pleasure. Let’s put school, exams, criticism aside. The actual act of reading a good book is a pleasure. Miriam said, “When you read a book, you’re not creating karma.” You have stepped out of trouble, out of cause and effect. You are just there with legs swinging over the arm of a chair, your eyes on a page, your mind connecting with the mind of the author who wrote a book once upon a time.

It is good to begin from this place, for us to notice what brings us true pleasure. It is a foundaton for writing. It will carry us further than if our work is fed by anger, revenge, jealousy, or hate. I am not saying we should avoid writing about these things. I am saying, let the furnace of writing be fueled by what pleases you, so as we write about rage or destruction, we don’t get stuck there. The world is bigger than that.

(Natalie Goldberg [source])

If something you’d written — or might write, were actively resisting writing — could speak to you, what would it say? What might it sing, how might it warn you, whispering in your ear? Maybe it would sound something like the rather creepy, rather seductive “Pulling Your Insides Out,” by Jill Tracy.

[Below, click Play button to begin Pulling Your Insides Out. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 6:23 long.]

[Lyrics]

Tracy (that’s her at the right) is a self-professed “singer/pianist/storyteller and ‘musical evocateur.'” The Wikipedia page about her says, “some of her biggest childhood influences were film score composers such as Bernard Herrmann, and classic suspense tales, including Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang films, Ray Bradbury stories, and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.” In a 2005 interview with sfist (about San Francisco new and “events” such as Tracy herself), she answered the leading phrase You can tell someone is a local here IF… as follows:

They know about secret parking. OR — they don’t bat an eyelash when a seven-foot drag queen walks by with a dwarf on a rhinestone leash.

Hard not to like somebody to picks a detail like that out of the air.