Saturday, August 30, 2008

Saturday Scribes: August 29, 2008

Theme: Five Senses

Words: sympathy, error, fraction

No title

It’s a mistake to read some really good fiction before you write. So have some sympathy for me. I made a mistake. It was an unfortunate error. I just finished one of the best hard-boiled mystery novels ever written. I turned over the last page, felt the eeriness of an ending that inspired Camus into writing ‘L’Etranger’, and the sat down at my big almost-clunky old computer and expected to write something.

Hah!

It’s five o’clock in the morning, and my mind is filled with images of green water, a shark and two specters on board a ship. An Ancient Mariner illusion.

Where does this take me? If I could have a fraction of the morning back again, I might take it. I’d make my coffee all over again, avoid reading that ending, and let myself begin feeling. Tasting. Smelling. All those good ways of getting into a new story.

A story about...... where is my ‘l’etranger’?

I know that I’m not meant to write an existentialist novel. I can be moved by that tradition - Coleridge, Conrad, Camus ..... not the usual names yoked together - but I don’t have to write in it. I may live in a post-existentialist world, but most of the time I don’t feel irretrievably cut off or lost at sea. I feel loved, happy secure, which is not an ideal state of mind for writing.

Hand me a bottle - hand me over some new sorrows - perhaps that would help.

You can choose to live in your head. Perhaps this is one of the biggest dangers that humans face. Live in your mind and not in your body and you literally cut yourself off from experience.

If your hide from your pain, then it is easier to commit all kinds of scandalous crimes. But the pain comes back to you. You murder, drink and vomit. And the vomiting reminds you of your humanity. Your body rebels against the crimes you commit.

But if you allow yourself to taste the bitterness of coffee, feel the cool smoothness of the grey mouse under your right palm, experience the pain of a sore back, then you can’t feel entirely cut off from your own pain or that of others.

We take pain-killers to avoid the experience of something unpleasant, but perhaps that very experience is what can bring us back to ourselves and others.

1 Comments:

At 1:06 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

That went in an interesting direction once it got going. I find reading great fiction inspires me to write. The only danger I worry about is not wanting to accidentally write a poor echo of what I was reading. Homage and parody are all well and good, but what I most feel is wanting to write that well, but in a way that tells my own stories. I think in the end though, all the great writers were also passionate readers. It's how you learn what works, and what doesn't.

 

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