Why We Write
I had planned this week's blog to be about what attracts me to the wild North West, but a post from Publishers Weekly just flat stopped me in my tracks.
Why do we write?
Please allow me to share a poem from my 'Scenes From a Life' collection:
The Bond
We’ve
touched each other, you and I: become one.
Not just
for now; but for our entire lifetimes and eternity after that.
Thirty
years from now we’ll be totally different externally.
We’ll be
products of the experiences between now and then, and of time’s molding.
And we’ll
be radically different internally.
Dreams
will have come and been fulfilled, or been and gone.
Do you
know what I’d wish for then?
A love.
Of walking
in wild places or among history.
Or with
ocean wind and spray on our faces.
Of a
loving look across a room.
Of icy
glasses of Pinot Gris and low voices by a bright fire, with rain outside
driving against kauri-framed windows.
A
longing.
For the
delicious touch of hands on breasts and throats,
And of
fingers in each other's hair.
I hope
our love for music will have endured.
I do know
we’ll always love books; the way written words caress a thought and make it
perfect.
I wish then,
for the joy of endlessly rediscovering each other.
That our
lives together had been like petals of a flower unfolding -- each more wondrous
that the previous.
But
whether we’re together or apart at that time, this love we have will live on,
secure in those places we’ve dedicated to it within us.
These
temples of our souls.
My
point is the underlined piece. We strive to make thoughts perfect.
These
sentences do that:
My
father was right: you could make anybody amazing just by insisting they were.
-”What
We Know About the Lost Aztec Children”
by Elizabeth McCracken
She
thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed
forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby; a sunrise over the
library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the
slope faced west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the
Bartok Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept
over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she’d always had the hovering fear it
would someday topple on them.
-The
Crying of Lot 49 by
Thomas Pynchon
On
heart-broken pretense of entreating a cup of cold water, fiends in human form
had got into lonely dwellings, nor retired until a dark deed had been done.
-Benito
Cereno by
Herman Melville
I
sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the
coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.
-”In
the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” by Amy Hempel
“I
get the idea perfectly, Mickey,” said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that
this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular
ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve been
present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge, thought
Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but
is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in
monstrousness.”
-2666
by Roberto Bolaño
Best,
and Merry Xmas :-
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