WHY I AM A WRITER
. .
. great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the
book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be
understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only
trustworthy one is the last
—John Ruskin
When I was ten, I first heard the muse. I recall savoring a moment, a small
Joycean Epiphany—looking west, late afternoon. Out of the blue, a voice said: remember everything about your childhood— because someday, you'll be a
writer. Startled, I looked around me.
Not a being, except for my cat Winky who wandered by; surely he didn't
suggest I become a writer. The
resonant voice immediately amended that statement: “. . . not a famous one, of course,” and
then mumbled something about being known in small, but important circles. What’s with the backtracking? Important
to whom?
I was the only one filling the visible air spiced
with the pungency of black-green oaks and bay trees, clay dust, horse manure
and dry summer oat grasses seething in the afternoon heat. Panic-stricken, I felt guilty because
at an early age somewhere in the eternity between the ages 3 1/2 and 4—I
promised to become a visual artist like my mother.
I remember watching her make black India-ink lines on
creamy paper magically transforming into a three-dimensional object even I
could recognize: a broken Christmas ornament. Much to her annoyance, I was literally drooling on her
drawing, but I was hooked. All
through school I declared myself an artist—even though one didn't major in a
given field until college—as my school counselor so aptly pointed out. It took nearly 20 years before the
prophesy of the pen took root.
I wasn't too sure who or what spoke to me on that
fateful day—not the guardian angels again. They had once before, when I struck toothpicks against the
teeter-totter seat.
Mid-summer. The voice
saying, “Don't do that!” I nearly
jumped out of my skin, forgetting why those toothpicks with fat red tips and
delicious sulfur-salt taste were so fascinating. “Fire sign,” my mother explained matter-of-factly.
I always was drawn to fire—and perhaps that's what
writing is: the fire in the head, as the Irish bard Amergin said to be incanted
2-3,000 years ago in The Song of Amergin. “The Mystery,” is an
encoded riddle poem to break a spell.
As he set foot for the first time in Ireland, he roared to the wind, “I
am a word of science, I am the strength of art. . . / I am the god who created in the head,
the fire. . .
/ Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountains? / Who
clears the stone place of the mountain?”
At the time I didn't know it, but I have dyslexia, I
had trouble learning how to read.
Because I didn't say the alphabet right (it spanned two known directions—A to K,
and Z to Q.) L through P were
on shaky ground, always shoving each other out of line. The teacher refused to let me join the
reading groups (but I could sing
it just fine). I sat through first
and second grade in a corner by myself, punished for my lack of orderly
ABC's.
A third grade teacher let me sit in on a reading
group, I remember the moment I learned to read. Magic! All
those letter produced sounds that stood for ideas! The remaining half-year I voraciously read whatever I could
get my hands on—to the sixth grade level.
Unfortunately, reading was about all I'd learned. Math and other subjects fell by the
wayside. My teacher, Miss Lenz,
had a pet skunk, and the reddest hair ever—I'd do anything for her, but the
secrets of fractions never shed light upon me. The tangible world of the skunk, with its rough fur and
cool, shiny claws, scrambling on my shoulders, as it adjusted its weight, was
more compelling.
Where do creative ideas come from? Life experience, pain, conflict—an
attempt to give order to the chaos of the universe. Things just stick in my mind—My other shoe is a Reebok.
Sometimes lines or words come to me in dreams, I repeat them over and
over until I can write them down. Easter
Island is a mathematical equation of the mind. To
trace back an idea is sometimes more cumbersome than just accepting it as a
gift from the gods.
Remember the angel by the swing? Sometimes I just hear voices. No, I don't need psychoanalysis—it's
merely a matter of tuning in to a particular channel. We all talk to ourselves. My grandmother, Jennie Reilly wasn't so silent about her
internal dialogs. Often she
twiddled her hair and discussed her facts with the empty room—usually a rant
against the English, or the Anglo- Saxons who, according to her, were
responsible for most of the world's woes.
No Celtic Twilight in our house, the Irish Renaissance was in full
swing; I grew up a polymath in a self-educated family who had a love of books. I indiscriminately read Joyce, Yeats,
Synge, Beckett; more obscure titles included O'Hart's Pedigrees and the Laws of Brefney. It goes
without saying I hadn’t a clue what I was reading, or why.
When my grandfather wasn't fighting City Hall or
smuggling guns for the IRA, he was consuming several books a day. Though he died when I was four, I
inherited his lust for books. My
grandmother, who raised eight children, then my brother and I, only wanted to
live in a cabin alone in a “bee-loud glade.” I'm living the life she might have lived had she been born
this century. Perhaps it helps to
have an eccentric Irish grandmother to stimulate the writing process. Or nostalgia for the past, and a desire
to find order. I suspect dyslexia
has a lot to do with how I perceive the world. I hear things differently; it both helps and hinders the
process.
Poetry
is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of
knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all
science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all
other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which
adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and
withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the
scions of the tree of life.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, In Defence Of Poetry, (1821, published 1840).
The rhythms of writing are spirulations circling the
globe. By writing we come to know
who we are . Knower's ink. The hand creates a dance,
choreographing it, so others will know the patterns. We're always unraveling deeper mysteries, finding our way
out of the dark with our words, small candles in the wind, both blinding us,
and showing us the way home to the end of a sentence.
Sometime the voices just come, it's a matter of
transcribing and ordering the information. Other times, it's a struggle to render an art form from the
scrawled pages of my journal. I
like the physicalness of writing, the feel of pen on paper, the act of mind and
tongue transcribed by the fingers.
The structure of the throat to produce language, and the truly opposable
thumb only marginally separates us from the apes.
Genetically, we're close to apes, DNA-wise, 99.
9%. But that . 01 percent allows
me to glyph my thoughts onto paper.
Even this distinction is losing ground, Koko, the ape who knows sign
language, is learning to communicate via an Apple computer. I write prose on the computer,
forsaking pen for keyboard, but the language is different. I don't know if that has something to
do with the mechanics of writing or not.
Writers should be able to practice their craft anywhere, in beach sand,
blood, paper, the wind, or computer screen.
Mechanics shouldn't be limiting. After all, the pen is a tool too. But the act of writing longhand is
soothing, as is reading. My psyche
gets rattled if I don't read and write often. It amazes me because both are artificial; we think of
ourselves as literate beings in a symbolic society—using numbers and characters
to transcribe our history.
People from so-called “primitive,” or “patterned” societies
who have no writing, no books, have a rich spiritual life. They use body or harmonic memory data
bases. The danger of books is that
they destroy memory. Our mnemonic
capacity is severely diminished because we don't have to remember
anything. It's already in cold
storage. Imagine memorizing the
genealogy and history of a Nigerian tribe for 1600 generations. Aboriginal Dreamtime stories are
said to be 40,000 years old.
The role of the poet in the so-called primitive
societies is that of shaman, or
priest, because they are the keepers of knowledge. Rhyme schemes weren't sing-songy devices to be cute, they
were a means to remember vast chunks of encoded knowledge. As is most ancient Celtic poetry, The Song of Amergin, is a coded poem; I think of it as a reference
index. Each line stood for a
branch of knowledge. The poets
were the bookkeepers, the keepers of genealogy, the historians of the
tribe. The poet reinvents the
definition of language. I have been intrigued with the root origins of prosody
most of my writing life:
This room, with its indirect morning light, a
permeable membrane, like the boundaries of skin, translates the air with
origins. We each bring with us the
burden from earlier fires, but here, we unwrap genetic coals, and though
there's no longer a hearth, it is a place-holder for an idea we can't quite let
go of.
Late at night when there's little else to sustain
us, words burn across the page. Celia talks about the ability to pour thoughts out her arm and onto the
page, this curious process, an arm the extension of a tongue, of thought, of
mind. And as we contemplate the
blank page, we fill it with fingers pointing in every direction begging for
perfection, or some meager form of enlightenment. The page kindles memory of the first fires. What did they call the ones who kept
the hearth fires lit? And so the
words blossom tenderly, small bison thundering to the edge of the precipice.
Maureen
Hurley, from Stacking Wood for Celia
I'm intrigued by what British plant biologist Rupert
Sheldrake coined “morphogenic fields” resonating around the world, the idea of
invisible blueprints, and connecting, or group memory. Why are ideas suddenly relevant? The scientific world is riddled with
the simultaneous combustion of ideas.
Timing. Watson and Crick
began working on the discovery of DNA independently. The person who receives credit for a scientific discovery,
or an invention, may not be the first to think of it, but the first to register
it at the patent office, or to publish it in a scientific journal.
“Someone mentions that between love and death is
life. This casual stacking of
words forms a nucleus we spend a lifetime decoding. Something preternatural about the fall, the quickened night
brings us to the idea of order, and we stack them like wood against the shed
for the coming winter. Like the
leaves of so many books, unwritten, the trees have achieved the purest state,
waiting to combust the stories of the sun for when it forgets to return from
that longest night; they burn steadily, singing of a lifetime of cycles. Informis. This
final combustion of thought arcs across our eyes and glows under our skin.”
—from Stacking Wood for Celia
I refused to take typing in school because I didn't
want to be a secretary or teacher.
So now I make my living as writer, and a teacher— an artist in
residence. In spite of my
dyslexia, the computer has allowed me to blossom as a writer, but that doesn't
stop my fingers from typing the wrong letters: shape-changers p, b, g, q still refuse to toe in line. I've discovered it's OK to write all
jumbled up, because later, tangled ideas can be unraveled in a logical
order. But I began writing by
longhand, transcribing everything to calligraphy because I couldn't type. (I now type with 4 fingers, and an
occasional thumb.)
I've been luckier than most writers in that I've
been able to survive at my craft, primarily through seven California Arts
Council artist-in-residency grants, with projects in Sonoma county schools, and
at Napa State Hospital. I'm also
on the roster for the Montana Arts Council. Another grant eventually launched me into a child and adult
Soviet poetry and art exchange, which has absorbed nearly all my available time
for the past three years (I've been commuting to Russia and the Ukraine). A poem from that journey, Country of
Origin, won the San Francisco Bay
Guardian Poetry Award. It seemed
funny that the award check presented to me was from the investigative
journalism fund—yet many poets and writers were journalists as well.
Hemingway comes to mind. He said “Travel broadens the mind. Writing broadens the ass. I write standing up.” Though, due to an old neck injury, I tend to write lying
down, travel always stimulates my writing process because the newness is a
sharp foil against the complacency of what is known. I started wandering at an early age. Macy's, in San Francisco, with its
escalators hiding dragons beneath the bottom step, scared, but didn't deter me. I wound up smothered in the coat racks,
the ghostly rattle of hangers whispering among themselves.
On horseback (we rode anything on four hooves), we explored
the long north-south ridges that traversed west Marin—where we could see the
bell curve of the ocean arching beyond the Tomales headlands—and Point Reyes
peninsula, a floating island.
Later, the Sierras, Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Galapagos,
Europe, and Russia beckoned.
Our family has always maintained a fierce unslakable
love for the land, which I inherited, without really knowing what it
encompassed. The land itself
shapes culture, art, and cuisine.
Having grown up in a pristine area, the San Geronimo Valley, in Northern
California, has shaped my art. I
remember my neighbor's visiting sister Borg, exclaiming on and on how beautiful
it was where we lived, the fresh air, etc.
I suppose we were spoiled, but we knew no other
life. The horses took us across
the boundaries to freedom and change in the form of fences and county lines and
home. I had to leave west Marin to
understand the concept of beauty; by understanding loss after the fact. Maybe that too was responsible for the distillation
of vague ideas into tangible writing.
Is my story any different from that of an inner-city writer? Other than locale, I suspect the
primary impulses are the same, my story is any writer's story.
Why I write is to heal something within myself. It's the most vulnerable act I know of,
to be a poet. Perhaps it's also
the most political of the arts. As
a painter, I turned my back on the world, working in isolation. I was mute and shy; communicating was
the hardest thing I could choose, and so I, having no words for what was
boiling over, I began to write reams and reams—not calling it poetry. That came later.
Perhaps it was the dissatisfaction with the pimping
and whoring of the art world that made me turn my back on it. Or it was time to grow in another
direction, to become literate.
Once I interviewed dancer Joan Marler, who said the reason why she got
into writing (who is editor and biographer of anthropologist Marija Gimbutas,
and a public radio producer), was to prove to herself she was intelligent. As a practicing dyslexic, I know that
story all too well. The supreme
challenge for me is to paint pictures with words. To string two ideas together, to prove I had a brain.
Dostoyevsky said everyone is an artist. I like working with children in poetry
and art because they're closest to the creative process. As a writer, I keep going back to early
childhood memories, and I wish I didn't have to wait until I was 27 before
writing my first poem. Everyone
has a poetic voice (or creativity), it's merely a matter of finding and
uncovering it—sort of like being a detective. I belong to a “detective” agency (code name: Private Irish):
we meet once a year to read poetry, and play softball, Northern against
Southern California. What we have
in common is a love of language, this is what bonds us.
I tell students, “As artists we're spies. We record what's around us.” Poetic license to snoop. In art there was no one “right” answer. In fact, there are multiple
solutions. Sometimes the third or
tenth solution is better than the first.
Art requires going back again, working with the material until it feels “right,”
it requires persistence. Like with
science, it comes from those hunches and intuition. If we always knew what we are going to say or paint—why
bother?
“While we stretch metaphor to its limit, each new
crenulation of word, where ideas rub shoulders, becomes clichéd the moment it's
conceived. Forever divining the
spirit of word in purgatorial surroundings, we are headhunters in search of our
own heads. Cannibalistic dreams
are a natural phenomenon in the New World. Prospero's daughter in love with the island of Caliban. Canvas, the hemp sails and rope that
took Columbus to the New World—E.
Cannabis Unum. Entire civilizations fell.
The trough in the mind made by this houseboat, a
canyon, a small river seeking the blood mother and our beginnings. Who came first? Alpha or omega? Omicron, small o's as we face the second coming. Umlauts and epsilons. The invention of letters
on the mud flats is left to the crabs calligraphing their way to safety. Kathleen says she writes in order to
keep her sanity. The saxophone
upstairs seeks union with the human voice within the channels of the ear.”
—From Sunday
Morning, Berth 1-11
Poetry is
not limited to what is “poetic.” Poetry, the apex of culture, is the distillation of human
expression. The integration of the
physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves should coalesce in a poem. The Mayans and Aztecs called it the “flowered
word.” Poetry is a form of activism that took me into the schools—to affect
change, to make sure the children were getting the tools to help them put their
feelings in perspective with the logical world. Poetry is empowerment. It's political.
It saves lives.
To be a poet one must live life fully. You have to have something to write
about, a need to tell someone the story, and a reason to write it. If you're stuck, ask: who's my
audience? Whom do we write for and
why? It could be to yourself, to
your our peers, or to the tribe at large.
We spend a lifetime designing an imposed order on this chaos of thought. One can feel so alone in the midst of
the personal journey of the creative process.
Cafavy wrote that the journey, not the destination
is what matters. I think we need
both aloneness and fear—some inner conflict to hone the creative process—forcing
us to write. I have to write, it's
not a matter of choice. There's no
magical formula. You just do it
and do it and do it. It's also
about self-empowerment. It offers
another perspective responding to the painter Gauguin question: who and what
are we and where are we going.
There was an interesting study on art and madness.
Of course, writers, artists and schizophrenics
shared similar symptoms. Only, the
artists weren't clinically insane, they just seemed that way. It's because we delve deeper into the
unconscious and utilize it in our craft.
We render it, give it a shape; a byproduct is to heal ourselves. Art is a process, not a product. This is why art is a mirror reflecting
back who we are. The only trustworthy
mirror we have. A poem is like a
stone thrown into the pond of our collective unconsciousness. A small splash—concentric ripples
spreading out into the conscious dimensions of the larger pond of humanity can
affect change.
“.
. . This battle of the sexes continues to
operate between the sheets making no distinction between lines of gender, the
shore line, midline, line of declination, the screen phosphor line, a line fed
to us from the psyche, the gods, or another man or woman wanting something
other than commitment between church and state, war and peace, enemy and
friend. The helical line of the
electro-magnetic spectrum, where anything from radio to color bands is
explainable, to the staircase of DNA unwinding the haploid life, drawing the
line, toeing in, the shortest distance, points of recognition—is a song
line. The earth's name is
Gaia.
Last night I dreamed Kathleen told a man she wrote
under the pseudonym of Gaia; and she was smiling, alone and ruddy-cheeked,
loveliness in a white room suspended above the squalor of mud, the tide going
out, something larger than love coming in. In this way I understood we are all imperfect transmitters
and receivers—pain is not interference from deep space, it is a conduit that
allows us a glimpse, the curtain drawn for a moment, we see in the mirrored
air, a little beyond the image we call “self,” the first “I am” we cannot help
but utter in the plasmic void of what we are, and what is to be, becoming
literal in this littoral zone.”
—From Sunday Morning, Berth 1-11
Plato said “all knowledge is recollection.” Wordsworth wrote poetry is what is
recollected in tranquillity. And
now, in this technological revolution, when we're barraged with meaningless
facts, it's hard to string information together, to make a deeper sense of
things beyond the shallow impressions.
The role of the poet is to reinvent the myths. We've been on a crash-course destroying
what we believe in, and as a species, we need the myths in order to
survive. Like dreaming. Otherwise we enter into a world of
nihilism, of denial. This is why
there are so many gangs—in search of identity, they form tribes in order to
know who they are.
Poets are the keepers of the conscience of the
larger tribe of man, they give shape and meaning to our existence. These small stones thrown into the pool
of the world leave concentric ripples lapping on the near and far shores of our
thoughts. As the good doctor-poet
William Carlos Williams said: “It is difficult getting the news from poetry but
men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
