JUST PAGES APART

As I said at the time …

For me, writing means watching my own shifting mind while opening myself up to all the living energies around me. It means simplifying, following unexpected leadings and openings, sometimes to dead ends, other times to unanticipated ranges. Some time ago I discovered that to write poetry I had to be sitting in meditation every day. And later, I found once a week would suffice.

If ego is an ever present trap, the practice can introduce repeated humbling. As do the rejection slips.

Detachment: who wrote that! And when? (The surprise of rediscovering your own work five or ten years later. Who wrote that, it is so incredibly fine! Or: Who wrote that piece of tripe? I’m glad it never saw publication. Sometimes only pages apart.)

And then the piece goes its own way: a living organism: readers, editors see it differently from you. What you would cut they love. What you love they see as sore thumb.

What we’re most fond of is likely to be what bothers others the most; what we’re about to toss out in the next revision may be what is most effective with our readers. (Point raised, I believe, by Joyce Carol Oates; true to my experience.)

As critics of others’ work: harshest, at times, on those whose work is most like our own! Too much mirror? Push ourselves as far as we can, coming to a point where we no longer know if a piece is any good or not only that we’ve done everything in its pursuit that we possibly can at this period in our life.

Prophetic practice: light in the wilderness.

The dilemma of arts/responsibility/spirituality brought into focus by looking at something like the Florentine court of the Medici: High Art interwound with brutal political/economic force. (Throw the man out the fourth floor window; nowadays, we have helicopters. How exquisite.)

The dilemma of the news photographer: Should I save the victim and lose the opportunity of taking a great photograph? Or should I be “professional” and observe the world as an outsider? This holds for all artists: at one point are we being selfish in our pursuits? At what point is our solitude essential for the well being of all?

Into solitude / the Silence / the Holy Now, as Thomas Kelley phrased it.

At its core, I write to discover / remember / connect / distill.

In my writing I collect – that is, bring myself back together. More and more, I think on paper. I write to find what is under the words and phrases before me. Go deeper, and then wider. I write to listen. Eventually, I write to sing.