Upon this gifted age, in its dark colour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts …they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Is writing ‘the loom’?
RLF: You say we need a loom to weave our wisdom into fabric – what do you mean by that, exactly?
ESM: I mean that each one of us has wisdom – in our hearts and in our minds, but there it resides, often never seeing the light of day – thoughts go unspoken, and then linger in our subconscious – never leaving us, but needing to be uttered, or written to add to the stock of our self-knowledge, and so that we can all benefit.
RLF: Rather like the Buddhist notion of enlightenment, to be gained by meditation.
ESM: Yes, I suppose I do mean something like that, but I do not mean to give the impression that only the chosen few can find a way to voice thoughts. Rather, that each and every one of us has the means – if we do but know it.
RLF: It has been said that writers get their best ideas by sleeping on their thoughts, letting their subconscious do the thinking – that unencumbered by life’s daily travails, the mind, fully at rest and yet still active, can transcend our pre-occupation with the comings and goings of life to create something new – something of which the conscious mind had been hitherto unaware of.
ESM: Yes, I believe that happens – can testify it happening with me. But I would go one step further and say that it is in writing that the writer finds out what he or she has to say.
RLF: Do you have any proof of that? It sounds as if we do not entirely know what we think – at least it sounds that way.
ESM: I do not mean to imply that we don’t know our own minds, on most levels, and in the general sense of the phrase, but that in writing, we synthesize – we create something that would not have been created in just that way, were we not to have written.
RLF: Can you give us an example of what you mean?
ESM: Yes, of course, and I will give a very simple example to illustrate exactly what I mean.
Suppose someone begins to write a sentence – The man stood in the bank…
Then certain things will spring to mind – the writer will surely be reminded of being just such a person standing in a bank – waiting to withdraw some money.
But then suppose that the writer adds something, or changes something. Then we might have:-
The man stood in the bank just as the town hall clock struck 12 midnight.
Right away, an entirely different scenario suggests itself. Who is the man, and what is he doing in a bank at midnight?
He might be a night-watchman, but then again, he might not. Let us continue.
The masked man stood in the bank just as the town hall clock struck midnight.
The addition of one word has removed any ambiguity – this is no night-watchmen, I think.
Let us go back.
The bank teller stood in the bank just as the town hall clock struck midnight.
Now, what could an employee be doing there at midnight – has he secreted himself to be there at such an hour – and to what purpose.
Reality, the reality of life interrupts us. If this is the beginning of a story about a bank robbery, then the reader will be alerted to the possibility of this being ‘an inside job ‘as they say.
And so begins a train of thought, which we may call the plot, in the writer’s mind’s eye. But do you suppose Shakespeare, as meticulous as he undoubtedly was in his writing, had the dagger soliloquy in his mind even when his tragedian, Macbeth, first walked out on that ‘blasted heath’, coming to hear the prophesies of the witches huddled around their bubbling cauldron, or it occurred to him to use the words, ‘With Tarquin’s ravishing stride, whose howl’s his watch,’ when his protagonist deliberated on the death of King Duncan, or even that he imagined the Scottish nobleman would himself use such language, being schooled only in fighting, and not in the history of Roman king, Tarquin (Sextus Tarquinius), though Shakespeare would most certainly have been aware that in Macbeth’s desperate words, he was shadowing the Rape of Lucrece.
No, I am sure that the words only came to him upon his penning them – the shape of those infamous words would have been planned beforehand, of that there can be no doubt. Yet I still maintain that the exact wording would only have come to him as he composed the metre of the lines he wrote to be uttered by Macbeth on that fateful night when the King lay sleeping on the other side of a door.
Similarly, do you imagine that Charles Dickens writing his colossal novel, ‘Bleak House’ wouldhave been aware that three parts through it, he would have Inspector Bucket bringing up the chorus of ‘British Grenadiers’ in the cheerful house of Lignum Vitae, or that the illustrious former soldier would have named his offspring with the unlikely, but in some ways, very plausible names of Quebec, Woolwich or Malta.
Did he craft his novel from the beginning knowing Tulkinghorne’s murderer to be Mademoiselle Hortense, rather than other, much more likely suspects, who had far more reason to despise that lawyer than she did.
Dickens wrote his great novels piecemeal, to be serialized in the Cornhill magazine, and so it is doubtful if he gave the minutiae of his long works any thought until he arrived at the point at which Bucket apprehends George whilst that good man was sitting by his friend’s fireside smoking and drinking the health of the Old Girl, Lignum’s wife.
Did Joyce know when stately, plump Buck Mulligan was shaving, that thousands upon thousands of words later, Molly would mention General Gordon of Khartoum in her punctuation-free monologue, or that she would say those forgiving seven last words, ‘Yes, I said yes I will Yes.’
RLF: He most certainly would have known the last words of Finnegans Wake, those being the beginning of the very first line of the novel, but yes, I see what you mean. But are not those somewhat obvious examples?
ESM: Isn’t that somewhere from which to begin? Remember, if we appear lofty, we may lose our readers, and I have no desire to do that. My point is that the writer, even one as skilled as those undoubtedly were, does not necessarily know the direction in which his words will take him.
RLF: And whereas some writers see characters as everything, some even allowing their main characters to dictate, as it were, the direction which the story takes, others rely heavily on plot, fleshing out characters as they go.
ESM: I would prefer to start with something practically anyone can relate to and then take it from there. I have written prose (under my pseudonym – Nancy Boyd) and let me tell you that some of the things I have written, took me to places I had never dreamt of – I went there because my writing – the act of writing took me there. I have no other explanation, and neither could I have predicted the destination prior to sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and a pen.
I have learned something I didn’t know I knew – which may sound a bit tautological or confusing, but I mean every word of it, I assure you.
RLF: Again, can you illustrate what you mean?
ESM: Yes, certainly. I was writing about the lion lacking cruelty, despite being called a ferocious beast that devours its prey.
RLF: Surely the lion is ferocious.
ESM: Are you sure, or is it our reaction to being attacked and possibly killed by the lion that makes us say that the lion is ferocious. I used something by Rudyard Kipling to illustrate my point.
In his marvelous poem, ‘The Hyenas’ Kipling describes how a pack of animals comes in the dead of night, to a young soldier’s shallow grave on the side of a hill in South Africa. Being hyenas, they discover the body from its scent, though it lies in a foot of soil. They dig and scrape until they uncover the poor man and then they rent his body asunder, whooping with delight at having found such a feast.
Kipling notes, however, that they do not defile the man’s good name – that, he says, is left to his kind. He concludes that ‘being free from guile they are innocent’. If that is not an illustration of what I was driving at when I say that the lion is not an animal that kills for the sake of killing, but that killing is in his nature – like it is the nature of a trader to buy cheap and sell dear, the nature of a moneylender to be parsimonious, of a cleric to be pious- perhaps that is a bad example, but you get my drift, do you not?
I convinced myself of the innocence of the worm that lays its eggs in the body of another creature, for the hatching eggs to feed on the host, eating it from the inside, bit by painful bit until the poor unfortunate creature dies in agony that the worm may survive.
Is that in your scheme of things – when you think of evil, or is it a creature’s way of living, in the way only God devised.
RLF: But how did your writing about this help you? How can you say that you learned something new? You must surely have thought those thoughts before you started writing them down on paper.
ESM: That is just my point; I didn’t think it beforehand. I had always employed the conventional wisdom that, for example, a lion is cruel, a lamb meek, a donkey stupid – when in reality they are none of those things.
If I must say it, it is man that is stupid, biting the hand that feeds him, destroying that which keeps him alive. and, man is the only creature on the face of God’s Earth that indulges in self-pity.
No, we must look to internal processes for an explanation of how writing helps to create thought. No doubt the neuro-surgeon could enlighten us, knowing that the corpus callosum is instrumental in transmitting the crackle of the synapses from one side of the brain to the other, that the mass of dendrites that make up the human brain is such a complicated and intricate web.
Writing – the act of putting language down as marks on a piece of paper, is nothing more or less than a catalyst for thought to occur, and having once occurred, connects to other thoughts and to a whole train of thought.
Why, do you imagine, we say, ‘a train of thought’ - is it surely not because thoughts are connected like railway carriages, pulling one another out of that dark chamber we call the brain, that entity we refer to as the mind. It is words that are the engine that quickens the pace of that train until it speeds out of the seemingly unknowable into the light of day.
Robert L. Fielding
