[Image: “Warning: Bees Ahead (Joshua Tree National Park),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

What is this thing that has us chewing at our own selves, grating ourselves against our own sharp sieve? It is the act of stepping back. It is the act of separating, and judging. It takes only one because the one becomes two. The self separates from the self. It points a finger and declares, “You are good” or “You are bad.” Either one, it doesn’t matter. The first statement usually flips over to become the second. And vice versa. Either way, the separated self is not doing the writing. Envious, the self is thinking about the writing, thinking about the self, rocking in its dark corner.

(Bonnie (Bonita) Friedman [source, but subscription required — also try here])

…and:

First
we need it as persons, to give us a path into the content of our lives. Of course I don’t need art to know what I think and feel. But without art what I think and feel will become quickly circular, self centered, and limited. Making art gives me a way to start with what I think and feel, and to plunge deeply enough into it until it becomes not only what I think and feel but what anyone thinks and feels, and even, beyond this, what isn’t thought or felt at all. In other words, writing poems I reach beyond my own sensibilities to that which I cannot directly know but very much need to know. When I write poems I am met, through my own thought and feeling, by what’s outside my thought and feeling. In this sense art promotes a profound empathy, a widening of my sphere of awareness and appreciation of my own life.

Second
we need art specifically as spiritual practitioners to help us overcome our weakness for religious doctrine, dogma, and identity. Which we all have, no matter how resistant to it we think we are, for we are all looking for the security of a fixed truth. Not knowing the truth, but having to discover it for ourselves anew through the imagination, is a much more difficult proposition, one that we are all reluctant, at bottom, to undertake.

(Norman Fischer [source: unknown, or at least undiscovered by me])

…and:

And if we found you, standing transfixed, would that be the beginning of the poem? Would you begin to write right then?

(Mary Oliver [source: from an interview with Steven Ratiner; see here, and search the page for the interview title, “Poet Mary Oliver: A Solitary Walk”])

…and (italicized portion):

When I first encountered the phrase [“write what you know”] (as a student: young, horny, etc), it struck me as rather useless. How could “write what you know” account for the writers who mattered most to me when I was growing up? I wasn’t reading John Updike or Saul Bellow; I was reading JRR Tolkien and Mary Renault, writers who hardly seemed limited to personal experiences and the people they had slept with.

Tolkien had never seen a dragon and Renault had never met Alexander the Great, yet they transcribed these fascinations as convincingly as Updike wrote about adultery and office intrigues. (To be sure, Renault began by writing realistic, sexually charged novels set in post-war Britain, but for better or worse, Tolkien never deigned to give us an exposé of the secret lives of Oxford dons.)

Still, “write what you know” commanded such influence that I couldn’t ignore it completely. I made my peace with it by turning it backwards: not write what you know, but know what you write. If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter that world completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder.

But this is the most important rule: write the book you most long to read. Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness.

(Steven Saylor [source])

Not from whiskey river, or its commonplace book:

One final fable. Heaven knows I’m no script writer, but let’s imagine it as a film.

Ten thousand years from now, after the Earth and humans have been through immense upheaval, warfare, and economic collapse, human societies have resurrected themselves and are working toward the rediscovery of science and technology. They are aided by the recent unearthing of a partially preserved ancient library whose texts they are endeavoring to reconstruct and translate.

The reigning culture differs from ours; its highest scientific priority is the study of Earth’s life. While researching marine mammals, whose population is far greater than it is today, scientists notice that whales’ songs change substantially when they swim above the Mariana Trench, the oceans’ deepest canyon. Specialized submarines are sent to the area to investigate. Several disappear without a trace, but just before they vanish, strange sounds, almost musical, are heard over their communication lines. Finally, one badly damaged sub is recovered. The photographs from its camera reveal no sign of any calamity or of any animal attacking the craft; there’s just blurring of the water.

The scientists are baffled. Then one of them, investigating those strange noises, has an epiphany. There are indeed creatures living within the Mariana Trench—the whales are communicating with them—but they’re invisible. Rather than flesh and blood, they’re built solely from sound waves in the water. The submarines weren’t recording the sounds the creatures make; those were the sounds the creatures are.

(Matt Strassler [source])

…and:

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])