Dara WierWhat's This If?
Maintaining and changing one's mind, considering with concern what habits of time and mind one takes, notices, as one examines one's conscience, as one embarks on any kind of writing or reading, season or lifetime. To that end there's a door to open that isn't there, a room with nothing in it, darkness to stumble around in, hope to get one's bearings. As Edvard Kocbek says, there are invisible footprints on the ceiling.
Why is there something rather than nothing? That's just one, I say to myself, perfectly good question eons of all of us beat our heads up against, with varying degrees of success and an endless succession of beautiful failures.
So I was thinking to give this why is there something rather than nothing another sort of airing, in some less perilously strict zones, in some of the places one encounters in metaphor and in fictive logics, reasoning by other means.
While skirting around, scouting out and drawing near precincts where speculation and imagination rule. Extremely tentative propositions, fleeting conjectures.
Why is there something rather than nothing? is not strictly relevant to whether or how one gets up in the morning, no? Philosophers and theologians might laugh rightly at this as they get up in the morning. Wistfully I wonder if our politicians might toss this one around as they debate.
And the fact of the matter is this not so strict and perhaps non-existent relevance or lack of it provides a bit of room and leeway. And in this leeway perhaps therein lies some relevance. If relevance can be leaned up against, for a little support.
By means of this have we begun to render relevance and a question equally murky, both dissolving in solutions of pondering. Like, say, when you were a girl, and your job every school morning was to copy down your name and the day's date a hundred times.
Soon you disappeared. Time soon turned around, looked at you briefly and likewise disappeared. You were writing your name into phantomhood, you were erasing the passing of time, you were visiting oblivion.
The question why is there something rather than nothing is so timeless and since it's timeless, capable of entertaining or picturing or imagining what omnipresence might mean: oh, to be everywhere all at once--a state one might find wonderfully shocking, immensely revealing, or not too surprising, awfully exhausting. One could turn into a mildewy cubist! I've always admired cubists for tackling omnipresence tactilely.
And because why is there something rather than nothing wonders promiscuously to conceive of a fabled omniscience anyone who writes might consider just a few of what must be endless or infinitely and exponentially rampant ramifications, exactly because of this, we're needful, I'm needful anyway, of addressing this painfully unanswerable question, why is there something rather than nothing? It was instructive to hear Yeats saying Nothing dies but something mourns.
When is one writing and when is one not?
Where does one go to get going other than finding some time and some place. To take a first half-step or bold swipe at beginning. From where comes courage, daring and boldness to start writing anything. I picture a brave novelist stepping into the ocean to swim alone across it. I picture someone untethered. Gravity inoperable.
So is addressing the question why is there something rather than nothing impractical, just so is the beginning of any kind of writing. And here is where it has to be possible to stop and consider: all of the reasons that keen observation, love and understanding of language, continual practice of syntactical potential, on-going looking into how things that already are appear to be constructed, unending interest in observing human nature and human transactions, and many more things that belong in writing, deserve the treatment we all can sometimes dread: free will will be making a choice of one thing over another, one word over another, one sentence, one sound, one story, one character, one tone, one metaphorical layering rather than another: so when one hears of selectivity's importance, one shudders.
And if one decides to begin one way, all other ways are going to go begging; so in composing in writing all things unused remain, to lurk around in the shadows and can, should the need arise, possibly be lured back into the present. Unless, that is, they've dissolved, been lost or gone into exile. That certain random arbitrary way with the world. Those things left to chance, transformed into fate, inevitable, in retrospect.
Survey how differently it must be to begin a poem, a story, a novel, a mystery, a picture book, an epic, a cycle, a paragraph or stanza or line or a sentence.
Free will asserts its innate character; you choose to begin.
There's something because you've written it and there's something else as well as soon as reading begins. So. Now that nothing's no more, there's something to read.
And since we're paused here with reading coming into being. There's no such creature reading who answers to the name: READER; oh, maybe some smartass writer somewhere has a blue tick hound named Reader. Everyone knows there are as many readers as there are individuals who read; so it's silly to pin down or point out characteristics, attitudes, needs, predilections or most anything else about this so-called reader.
I like to think about reading's chemical and alchemical properties. How amazing it is we can do this. We can read. And since you are when you are writing also reading what you're writing one will inevitably have thoughts about reading while working.
How does one begin to read? I'm not so much thinking about cognitive skills and developments. I'm thinking about why one chooses to read when one needn't do so. No one has to read.
Can any of us recall when we didn't know how to read? Is it possible for one to remember the feeling of meaning and sense dawning, as a word or a sound begins to be materializing? It seems it would be a delicious feeling to remember, to learn to read all over again! Akin is the sensation of beginning to learn how to read any particular piece of writing.
But for the sake of referring and remembering, back to why and perhaps when can one be sure there is something rather than nothing. Something on a page that is, that seems worth pursuing, how can anyone know when to keep going after one's started something. Perilous times.
So many writers have eternally addressed these mysteries, why and when is there something rather than nothing in any piece of writing. Sometimes one knows one wants to go on with a piece because one sees strange relationships between spirit and matter. One can sense a presence of upsetting all manner of cause and effect, one can reverse what can't be reversed in not-writing, one can upset the finite cart of fabled apples and search around in it for unique sorts of logic. Unsettlingly beautiful. One can surprise one's self into a state of anxious pursuit.
One can turn back the clock and step in the same river any number of times, one can change horses in midstream, inhabit what one doesn't or can't or shouldn't inhabit and one can be someone one is not. Great relief in that. More mundanely, one can practice behaviors and tempt emotions one would not otherwise; one can become substantively more empathetic through sustained imaginative acts.
How cautiously one realizes John Cowper Powys' decent caution, something along these lines: That which ye contemplate, that ye become, he who contemplates hideousness becomes hideous, he who contemplates unreality becomes unreal. (It's hard not to love a writer who's unashamedly prone to saying "ye"--well, anyway, it's a relief from "one" and "you" and "I" and "we".)According to Powys' sense of things ye and we and one and you best be careful what we wish for,
Imagination's active, mildly active, very active or famously, over-active; one's ability to imagine can grow stronger with practice and attention or it can weaken with disuse or misuse. One can imagine awkwardly or imagine grandly, one can imagine as a means of escaping, one can imagine as a means of restoring or its reverse, as means to create a panic. This happened a little while back.
We live in an old, a bit dilapidated farmhouse on the northern edge of Amherst, Massachusetts; beautifully handmade stone foundations surround much of it, with more stone walls stoving up a terrace on our southwest corner. Because of this we've always had snakes around, a good number of snakes, summer after summer, snakes coiled and basking in sunshine, snake skins shed in unlikely crevices, snakes making their way in and out of foundations and walls. That is, until last summer, last summer there were none to be seen, they were gone, and we missed them. So with this spring's arrival we wondered would we have snakes around or not; we talked about how to encourage some wandering snake to stay and make its home with us.
We've had a chilly, misty, New Englandish-gothic spring thus far and for this reason on a sunny day of great northwesterly wind we went west to the river to take a walk on the levee. The wind was strong; we were walking into it. And I surprised myself by saying to my friend with whom I was walking: we're in a gale so strong it could blow the skin off a snake. I should be ashamed to admit how happy this made me.
It was a couple of days later when it crossed my mind there were a great many circumstances conspiring to cause that thought to condense.
We'd been talking about snakes on a regular basis; and the levee is where, on another walk I'd last seen a snake. The wind was strong then, too. If one were to have to pick out what demanded the most, what insisted on one's attention, what quintessentially marked this moment on this particular afternoon--it would have to be wind, wind was winning, hands down.
The river was nothing compared to the wind, the river existed only for wind to stir up its surface, sky existed for wind to rip through it. So it was wind tempering and enlivening.
This is what one is getting at when one thinks about all of the likely and unlikely combinations of things that come into play when we're doing what we fondly call thinking. Which is what anyone is trying to do when one begins writing. In the slight case of a blown-off-by-the-wind-snakeskin, I suppose my mind had been prepared to combine several otherwise uncombined things. At least in my mind, poor thing.
"How do I know what I think until I see what I say" has always been one of the very good reasons for beginning to start writing anything.
Louis Pasteur's CHANCE FAVORS THE PREPARED MIND. For some reason that's always made me think about kitchens. So one thinks about what sort of preparing one who wants to be writing should be doing. Too many choices. Each one either or neither or one another a blessing or undoing.
Choices as material as what materials you find suit your needs, what times of night or day, where will you choose to be working, there's always the tower, the attic, cellar, coffeehouse, study, studio, bedroom, kitchen table, there are very many places.
So many superstitions you can apply to your circumstances: toward which direction do you face: up or down, left or right, north by northwest or east and so on, do you enjoy white noise or music or traffic or absolute silence--I picture Elizabeth Bishop atop her fine mountain, surveying the valley, the valley, the donkey. How much and how often one works. So much time and effort and imagination needing to do little but find ways to get started again. To suppose that there's something rather than nothing. With what has one been filling one's mind?
There is competitive reading: there is passive/aggressive reading: there is sympathetic or empathetic reading: there are so many things to read and once we let reading be as metaphorically active as it would seem it is meant to be: we will find ourselves to be always reading, hoping to be writing something, anything.Transference that is the essence of any reading experience is really miraculous when one isn't taking it for granted. I've heard it said that so-and-so says he/she won't read a novel or that she/he reads little but contemporary letters or that another one likes to read about places never to be visited. Or to read before writing in order to find a borderland that offers a crossing over and out of not writing, unsatisfactory state when one wants it otherwise, and into writing, conditions in which anything is possible.
One can resist something and still understand how thoroughly that something has added to one's thoughts. Poe covers this nicely in his "Imp of the Perverse." A perverse thought or action as a brilliant stroke on an arresting note; something one couldn't have predicted might be on the horizon.
More Poe on this nebulous subject: "Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition--and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought--at the true purposes seized only at the last minute--at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view--at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable--at the cautious selections and rejections--at the painful erasures and interpolations..." I like Poe's sympathetic tone; his collection of precise machinations and transactions, his none too subtle observation.
When one isn't writing one feels a little lost, a little empty, a little unreal. When one is writing one loses oneself. Losing oneself approaches a nearly blissful state. But suppose what you're writing is a memoir! Contingencies and contradictions mounting up.There is this character so-called you which you live with, you have loved ones or not, family, family responsibilities, a job and engagements with society's and civilization's and history's demands, a rock in your shoe, a thorn in your side, a wound in your side someone's hand can slip into, a mule you can ride.
When I was nine or eleven a godmother gave me Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. I liked especially anything pertaining to things such as these: when children are playing alone on the green/In comes the playmate that never was seen. Or: What are you able to build with your blocks? Or: simply a title: Armies in the Fire. Everything in that collection of verses for and about an imaginary child points to the primacy of imagination's relationship with play, fantasy, fable, fairytale, myth and all such things imagination covers. Located directly in the heart of these things, all of which take as a given our appetite and aptitude for wondering and invention. What I loved about the gift book was looking awestruck at its pages, un-reading its words, hypnotized by such wondrous ways words can be arranged. So that is poetry! I liked turning pages, poem after poem, to gaze upon words so emphasized.
Is it possible any act of imagining might be theoretically neutral? Once content or subject accrue, neutrality shies away, retreats into the background. One imagines badly or blandly or sorely or not at all. One can imagine what someone else finds unimaginable.
One can yearn to tell of things impossible to know, and we come to have faith in some of the means by which we approach mysteries that determine the value of our lives. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we want to know? Where do we come from? In a question's guise. If sometimes a glimpse of a swiftly disappearing answer and the next question appears, then all this bother and trouble and work reward enough. It seems a little strange ending this pretending as if a lot has happened, when why is there something instead of nothing?
Dara Wier's Reverse Rapture was awarded The American Poetry Archives 2006 Poetry Center Book Award. Her newest book is Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006).
