What Writing Is About

     My writing career began when I learned my name. That's not to say that I could actually write, then. It took a while to get to that point. I was already five when I wrote my first story.

     But when I learned my name I had something specific I could identify as me: something which was not my experience in this new world. Until I had a “handle,” as we say slangily, on the idea of a self, I had no sure way of differentiating between self and other-than-self. It was all just existence, or existence as experience.

     Identity creates, for each of us, the first conscious separation of self from everything else. And once that separation happens, we can begin to discover, learn, and make connections: to make a world—and a society. Until I exist, us is impossible.

     Chaos isn't chaos, looked at from the outside. Chaos is something that is experienced, from the inside: where one exists, not as one, but as and in the chaos.

     The discovery of self—given to each of us, formally, as a name—is what opens the way to society. And society—as it puts things together (socius is the Latin word for friend)--comes about as the newly discovered self begins to create relationships with what is not self.

     The earliest relationships are probably just identifications: I see that. But then we come to associations: I see that this is like that, or unlike that. And then the young self makes a huge leap: a leap that will eventually lead to choice, or preference. It creates, for itself, the idea of relation. I start to see that toe which I have been playing with as a part of me.

     When I learned my name, I stepped out of the chaos of experience which had included me, a chaos which by definition had no center, no axis, no focus. As I stepped out of that chaos I could for the first time identify a me, which was not my experience in that world.

     And at that moment, though I couldn't write yet, I knew the first principle of writing: the engagement of the self with the other which is not self: with the world. Working out that engagement, thst relationship, is a life's work for a writer. A life's work: as it should be , for everybody, writer or not.

     (When I was a new young professor of English at the University of Michigan, one of the poets in the English Department was a very dry, unengaging and unengaged man who existed under one first name and wrote under another, explained that he wrote poetry “to honor the Muse.” When I heard him read his poems I felt sorry for the Muse, until I remembered that she is deaf.)

     For each of us—each self among us—engagement must be with life itself, in this world.

     The assertion of self is justifiable because the self has work to do. It must engage, relate. That's what writing is all about. To be alone is to be dead, to cease to exist. Individual is meaningless on its own: that is, as simply individual.

     When I master the first-person pronoun—or my own name—I am at step one. Next, I or me or whatever my name is must encounter the world, engage with it, establish a relationship with it which will let me understand it.

     Understand is such a big word! It's as big a word as love—and more demanding, because it says what it means so explicitly. To understand means to “stand under.” Newton, again, standing under that apple tree and understanding gravity. It isn't just weight, or heaviness. If that's all it is, the earth would fall everything else. Gravity is the attractive force that makes things come together. And that coming together is what's important.

     Metaphor is a word for coming together, for putting things together. Sometimes in Greece you see big trucks with “Metaphoros” printed on their sides. They aren't trucks carrying loads of metaphors, however; they are what we would call “moving vans.” They are carrying somebody's belongings—furniture, clothing, books—somewhere. The Greek word metaphoros says to “carry across.”

     But across what, or to where? When the “Metaphoros” truck arrives at its destination, we will know: and we will call it “home.” Somebody's new home: if not ours, somebody else's.

     What a metaphor does is put together things or ideas or whatever than haven't been put together before—and in putting them together, it makes something new.

     When Newton put together—in his mind—the apple falling from the tree and its hitting his head, he got something more than a bump on his head or a bruised apple. He got an idea, a new understanding. From standing there under that tree.

     When, as a child, I discover me—when I isolate me, see myself as an entity, I will immediately start making metaphors. Relationships. Maybe at first I will think “mother” is a breast, or a nipple. But soon I will discover that she is more than that. I may think a brick and a ball are the same thing—until I try to kick the brick. A cat isn't a pillow—but at first, when she was asleep in front of the fireplace, I thought she was a pillow.

     I am the center of my little but ever expanding universe. But soon I discover that there are other centers in addition to me, and each of them has its universe.

     And instead of trying to lie down on the cat, I will pet her. And my mother and I will start to talk. And one day I will start to learn my letters. And then I will spell words. I will be able to put those magical things my mother and I say—words--on a piece of quiet paper. They won't make any noise, but they will be in their own way real. I will have made them. And they won't go away.

     My career as a writer will be launched.

     Writing, as we know it, began a long time ago. Early cave men cut marks into stone. The famous cave paintings at Altimira, in Spain—those beautiful polychrome bulls—are from some 20,000 years ago. Writings were later inscribed in stone. And on baked clay tablets. Then written on the dried bark of trees. Then on papyrus. On paper made from linen, or cotton. Then on paper that has a shelf-life of maybe several years. Then electronically “saved.”

     Will we have access to what we have “saved,” electronically, fifty years from now? Or does that matter? Will our society save anything by then? Will we have—or be—a society by then?

     I don't know. But I know the value of writing, and what writing represents. Writing represents the social ambition to understand this world, and us who inhabit it.

     Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, ended his first book with a poem about being fascinsated by wells when he was a child. And he confesses that the fascinastion remains, though to explore them now the way he once did is “beneath all adult dignity.” Now he writes, he says, instead:

          I rhyme

         To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

For Heaney, rhyming is--was--the very social and socially necessary act of understanding. He practised it brilliantly.

          History says, Don't hope

          On this side of the grave.

          But then, once in a lifetime

          The longed-for tidal wave

          Of justice can rise up,

          And hope and history rhyme.

     When I was very small I loved rhyme. If someone told me to put on my hat, I would run through the alphabet quickly, saying “bat cat dat fat gat hat jat kat kat mat nat pat rat sat tat vat wat yat zat.” And then I would put on my hat. The multiplication tables were fun—but not as wonderful as rhyming. Once you knew the multiplication tables, they were always just the same. No changes, no surprises, no interesting juxtapositions. But rhymes were wide open—and they opened up the world to the rhymester's understanding.

13 April 2014