Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (9 page)

And as he sautéed his hat he thought of his mother sautéing his father’s hat, and grandmother sautéing grandfather’s hat, and wished he had somehow gotten married so he’d have someone to sauté his hat; sautéing is such a lonely thing. . . .

With Sincerest Regrets

Like a white snail the toilet slides into the living room, demanding to be loved.

It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets.

In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing.

And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you, you belong to an unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace. . . .

The toilet slides out of the living room like a white snail, flushing with grief. . . .

After the reading, there was the usual wine-and-cheese reception in an ugly, large classroom. I clearly remember Russell Edson in a suit sitting alone across the room. All the students, faculty, and poets stood around the crackers and thin orange cheese slices at the opposite end of the room nervously sipping wine and discussing his work. Few of us approached him. Though we all laughed during the reading, he touched on naked truths in us all and we were uncomfortable.

Try sitting at your typewriter and without thinking begin to write Russell Edson–type pieces. This means letting go and allowing the elm in your front yard to pick itself up and walk over to Iowa. Try for good, strong first sentences. You might want to take the first half of your sentence from a newspaper article and finish the sentence with an ingredient listed in a cookbook. Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

Don’t Tell, but Show

T
HERE’S AN OLD
adage in writing: “Don’t tell, but show.” What does this actually mean? It means don’t tell us about anger (or any of those big words like honesty, truth, hate, love, sorrow, life, justice, etc.); show us what made you angry. We will read it and feel angry. Don’t tell readers what to feel. Show them the situation, and that feeling will awaken in them.

Writing is not psychology. We do not talk “about” feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader’s hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.

When you are present at the birth of a child you may find yourself weeping and singing. Describe what you see: the mother’s face, the rush of energy when the baby finally enters the world after many attempts, the husband breathing with his wife, applying a wet washcloth to her forehead. The reader will understand without your ever having to discuss the nature of life.

When you write, stay in direct connection with the senses and what you are writing about. If you are writing from first thoughts—the way your mind first flashes on something before second and third thoughts take over and comment, criticize, and evaluate—you don’t have to worry. First thoughts are the mind reflecting experiences—as close as a human being can get in words to the sunset, the birth, the bobby pin, the crocus. We can’t always stay with first thoughts, but it is good to know about them. They can easily teach us how to step out of the way and use words like a mirror to reflect the pictures.

As soon as I hear the word
about
in someone’s writing, it is an automatic alarm. “This story is about life.” Skip that line and go willy-nilly right into life in your writing. Naturally, when we do practice writing in our notebooks, we might write a general line: “I want to write about my grandmother” or “This is a story about success.” That’s fine. Don’t castigate yourself for writing it; don’t get critical and mix up the creator and editor. Simply write it, note it, and drop to a deeper level and enter the story and take us into it.

Some general statements are sometimes very appropriate. Just make sure to back each one with a concrete picture. Even if you are writing an essay, it makes the work so much more lively. Oh, if only Kant or Descartes had followed these instructions. “I think, therefore I am”—I think about bubble gum, horse racing, barbecue, and the stock market; therefore, I know I exist in America in the twentieth century. Go ahead, take Kant’s
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic
and get it to show what he is telling. We would all be a lot happier.

Several years ago I wrote down a story that someone had told me. My friends said it was boring. I couldn’t understand their reaction; I loved the story. What I realize now is that I wrote “about” the story, secondhand. I didn’t enter it and make friends with it. I was outside it; therefore, I couldn’t take anyone else into it. This does not mean you can’t write about something you did not actually experience firsthand; only make sure that you breathe life into it. Otherwise it is two times removed and you are not present.

Be Specific

B
E SPECIFIC.
Don’t say “fruit.” Tell what kind of fruit—“It is a pomegranate.” Give things the dignity of their names. Just as with human beings, it is rude to say, “Hey, girl, get in line.” That “girl” has a name. (As a matter of fact, if she’s at least twenty years old, she’s a woman, not a “girl” at all.) Things, too, have names. It is much better to say “the geranium in the window” than “the flower in the window.” “Geranium”—that one word gives us a much more specific picture. It penetrates more deeply into the beingness of that flower. It immediately gives us the scene by the window—red petals, green circular leaves, all straining toward sunlight.

About ten years ago I decided I had to learn the names of plants and flowers in my environment. I bought a book on them and walked down the treelined streets of Boulder, examining leaf, bark, and seed, trying to match them up with their descriptions and names in the book. Maple, elm, oak, locust. I usually tried to cheat by asking people working in their yards the names of the flowers and trees growing there. I was amazed how few people had any idea of the names of the live beings inhabiting their little plot of land.

When we know the name of something, it brings us closer to the ground. It takes the blur out of our mind; it connects us to the earth. If I walk down the street and see “dogwood,” “forsythia,” I feel more friendly toward the environment. I am noticing what is around me and can name it. It makes me more awake.

If you read the poems of William Carlos Williams, you will see how specific he is about plants, trees, flowers—chicory, daisy, locust, poplar, quince, primrose, black-eyed Susan, lilacs—each has its own integrity. Williams says, “Write what’s in front of your nose.” It’s good for us to know what is in front of our nose. Not just “daisy,” but how the flower is in the season we are looking at it—“The dayseye hugging the earth /in August . . . brownedged, / green and pointed scales / armor his yellow.”
⁷
Continue to hone your awareness: to the name, to the month, to the day, and finally to the moment.

Williams also says: “No idea, but in things.” Study what is “in front of your nose.” By saying “geranium” instead of “flower,” you are penetrating more deeply into the present and being there. The closer we can get to what’s in front of our nose, the more it can teach us everything. “To see the World in a Grain of Sand, and a heaven in a Wild Flower . . . ”
⁸

In writing groups and classes too, it is good to quickly learn the names of all the other group members. It helps to ground you in the group and make you more attentive to each other’s work.

Learn the names of everything: birds, cheese, tractors, cars, buildings. A writer is all at once everything—an architect, French cook, farmer—and at the same time, a writer is none of these things.

Big Concentration

O
KAY.
T
AKE SOMETHING
specific to write about. Let’s say the experience of carving your first spoon out of cedar. Tell us all the details. Penetrate that experience, but at the same time don’t become myopic. As you become single-minded in your writing, at the same time something in you should remain aware of the color of the sky or the sound of a distant mower. Just throw in even one line about the street outside your window at the time you were carving that spoon. It is good practice.

We shouldn’t forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do. And if you throw a line in about it, it reminds the reader, too, that though we must concentrate on the task before us, we mustn’t forget the whole breathing world. Tossing in the color of the sky at the right moment lets the piece breathe a little more.

If you are on a Zen meditation retreat, between forty-minute sittings you do kinhin, walking zazen. Very, very slowly, in a standing position, in coordination with your out-breath, you begin the motion of taking a step. You can feel both knees slightly bend, your heel lift off the floor. Very slow. On the in-breath, you actually lift the ball and toes of the foot and step forward about one inch. Then you repeat the process with the other foot. Kinhin lasts about ten minutes. In the act of slowing down that much, you realize you don’t take isolated individual steps. With every step you take, you feel the air, the windows, the other meditators. You become aware that there would be no step without the floor, the sky, the water you drink to stay alive. Everything is interconnected, interpenetrated. Even the season we step in supports our step.

So when we concentrate in our writing, it is good. But we should always concentrate, not by blocking out the world, but by allowing it all to exist. This is a very tricky balance.

The Ordinary and Extraordinary

I
WAS CAMPING
this weekend in Abiquiu among fantastic pink cliffs and bare hills. It is the place that Georgia O’Keeffe chose to live. The weekend before that, I was in Hopi land in Arizona to see the snake dances. There were complete moonscapes that you could look out over from atop First and Second Mesa. The snake dances were for rain. Snakes were caught, all kinds—bullheads, rattlers, blue racers—and medicine men sat with them for four days and nights before the dance. During the dance the men of the village put them between their teeth and moved rhythmically back and forth. When the dance was completed, the dancers ran down the long mesa with the snakes and let them go in all four directions, the same directions where they had collected them.

I looked and looked in wonder. “How could I ever write about these vast expanses and mythic rituals?” A friend who had been with me asked: “Look at this huge space, the hills and mesas and the sky. You can feel God here. How can you just use the original detail that you talk about to capture this?”

We mistake detail for being picayune or only for writing about ants and bobby pins. We think of detail as small, not the realm of the cosmic mind or these big hills of New Mexico. That isn’t true. No matter how large a thing is, how fantastic, it is also ordinary. We think of details as daily and mundane. Even miracles are mundane happenings that an awakened mind can see in a fantastic way.

So it is not merely a materialistic handling of objects that is the base for writing, but using details to step through to the other shore—to the vast emptiness behind it all. For the Hopi Indians, who had always lived there, the large expanses around their village were very ordinary. They saw the huge mesas every day. Unfortunately, many of the young people want to leave to go to the city where it is more exciting.

Original details are very ordinary, except to the mind that sees their extraordinariness. It’s not that we need to go to the Hopi mesas to see greatness; we need to view what we already have in a different way. It is very deep for the Hopis to have a snake dance, but it also is one of their festivals that has been performed every other year for their whole lives. Like any other dance, when it was over, they invited friends to their homes for dinner. If we see their lives and festivals as fantastic and our lives as ordinary, we come to writing with a sense of poverty. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close. Details are not good or bad. They are details. How do you get to First Mesa? Go west one and a half hours from Window Rock on Highway 264.

The snake dance was made up of detail after detail with extreme concentration; it had to be that way—the snakes were in the Hopis’ mouths. We who watched thought it was unfathomable and fantastic because it was new and foreign. It was also ordinary and had been done for hundreds of years. In order to write about it, we have to go to the heart of it and know it, so the ordinary and extraordinary flash before our eyes simultaneously. Go so deep into something that you understand its interpenetration with all things. Then automatically the detail is imbued with the cosmic; they are interchangeable.

A friend of mine had a motorcycle accident recently. He had not slept the night before and left early for a long journey to Massachusetts. He fell asleep at eighty-five miles per hour and ran into a car. He was very lucky and didn’t have a scratch on him, though his bike was totaled.

I was shattered when I heard about it. If he had been killed, the balance of my life would have changed. We are all interwoven and create each other’s universes. When one person dies out of his time, it affects us all. We don’t live for ourselves; we are interconnected. We live for the earth, for Texas, for the chicken we ate last night that gave us its life, for our mother, for the highway and the ceiling and the trees. We have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly; then we will treat the world in the same way.

This understanding is how we should come to writing. Then we can handle details not as individual, material objects alone but as reflections of everything. Katagiri Roshi said: “It is very deep to have a cup of tea.” Understand that when we write about a cup or a mesa or the sky or a bobby pin, we must give them good attention and penetrate into their heart. Doing this, we will naturally make those leaps that poetry talks about, because we are aware of the interconnection of all things. We can also write prose that moves from paragraph to paragraph without having to worry about those transitions we were taught about in high school. They will happen naturally, because we will be in touch with the hugeness of movement.