I had been going to write a post about the writing process, what inspires it and what drives the motion, but in the end, there was not much to say. We’re told that all stories are the same and have all been written over and over by countless authors, and we have taken that to mean that the most unique, worthy writing, in prose and poetry, is about the personal, about feelings. But I think it’s exactly those emotions that are unchanging. They have all been a part of human experience since humanity existed. We moderns, contemporaries, avant-gardists are not specially endowed with feelings. Neanderthals had them, the cows in the fields have them. Our speciality is in thinking we are special.
Take grief, perhaps the strongest emotion of all, stronger than love, because there is no future for it, no hope in a happier outcome. It comes in innumerable forms, from the loss of a child to the loss of summer, all the sad shades in between, but they all feel the same, the phantom knife twisted in the chest searching for the aorta and the life spring. For some griefs it will be just a pang, fading gently. For others, it digs deeper, harder, and remains, a throb, like a shadow in the corner where something waits the unguarded moment to step into the light. All grief is, and always was, like this, all pain, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Perhaps that is the crux of the matter. The story is ours and we can treat it how we like, but we should write emotions with reverence, like talking about the dead. They belong to all of us, and all who have ever lived, and only the language we borrow to describe them can be even partly our own. The story, the mechanics of it, is our creation, but what drives it is common property. We should remember our insignificance when we write, be humble. It might be unfashionable, but it’s the only way to retain our humanity.
Indifference
If I were to write the pain of grief
of bone-splitting to the heart
dull orange skies that rain rust sand and ice
the deer that slip away and out of sight
the no-birds silence in the leafless trees
no stream-murmur in woods stripped bare
would you listen?
Or like the fox
that sits beneath the hedge at dusk
beneath the swelling storm
watch and wait
until my thunder dies?
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