The Write Brain Initiative: Wrong words stir up a storm
The worst thing about Writer Brain is that it’s silent but deadly.
It wildly carries on in my head without anyone knowing it and then embarrassingly erupts at odd moments when I least expect it. The real problem? It’s not always quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I’ll murmur. But it’s too late. It’s out. And everyone heard it.
This happened to me at a very civilized dinner party of eight. This wasn’t during the unruly cocktail time when I could cough and hide in the folds of a curtain and hope the errant noise was covered by polite chatter and crunchy hors d’oeuvres. This happened while everyone was sitting thigh to elbow around the table and pleasantly eating salad and halibut.
I had been working for weeks on a gangly and lengthy poem that stretched well beyond the reaches of my imagination. It had started in a flash of brilliant clarity that was so pinpoint-exact that of course I could never find it again. Trying to describe it led me on an epic search from which I might never return. I wrote verse after sprawling verse.
The first flash did not coincide with unfettered writing time. So I tucked it away to get back to it. But when I was ready for it, it wasn’t there. I looked in my drawers. My pockets. My every hidden recess.
I thought about it in the shower. On the bus. I looked for it day after day. Then one afternoon while I was walking across a downtown street, a clutch of dry crackly leaves fluttered and caught my eye. It twirled in a mini-tornado and danced across the asphalt, sustained in the air for an ungodly long time and then reappearing. I stopped mid-street and watched. That was almost what I was looking for.
I started writing about motion. It turned into Chapter 2:
I see things
like the swirl of leaves in the street
a mini cyclone
taut and blustery
coiled
like a spring
tense
elastic
an endless line of motion
going up
and going down
forming a hellacious gauze curtain
separating mute wonder outside
from the calm center.A ragged V
spiral cone
going gone
skip touches
to tag the street
and then unwinds
to simple wind.Blown clear.
But a breeze.Gathering again
dirt dust
twists
like twine
on a spinning wheel
spread thin
between fingers fine.Breeze gives way
to breath
in ever arcing air.
More specifically, I started writing about how the movement of one thing affects another thing. Then, as if that wasn’t abstract enough, I started to explore the geometry of motion. Endlessly I could see shapes. Everything moved and danced and took on common mathematical forms in my head. I couldn’t make it stop. Rhythms ran in parallels and spirals and ringlets and orbits. They ran in torrents. I typed while my family chatted around me, hearing nothing.
What was this stuff? I hadn’t planned to go looking for anything. Physics. Geometry. These were not my strongest subjects. Philosophy. Astronomy. Weird.
Trains. Planets. Oceans. Pools of the calmest waters. And saliva.
I didn’t know what this was, but I didn’t care. It was bizarre abstract stuff, and I didn’t care about that either. I was writing the hell out of it. My head was on a completely different plane and I had no idea what the flight plan was. I went everywhere with these odd thoughts tumbling through my head. I was after those elusive movements and shapes and the most basic sensory level I could find. I was after that brilliant moment of clarity, and I had left the planet to find it.
But one peaceful dinner party brought it all home.
We were chatting agreeably about memorization. An actor/director sitting across the table was lamenting about how it was more difficult for him to memorize lines as he got older. We were talking about the different ways people take in information and retain it. We were talking about acting and the irony of having to artificially rehearse something over and over until it was so ingrained it became utterly natural.
And in the midst of all this, my Writer Brain totally betrayed me. A shape appeared. It was like a beautiful soft ripe peach dangling before me on a tree. I reached for it.
I could see the beginnings of a gorgeous Golden Ratio, the very first important steps of a spiral pattern, the very essence of nature itself. None of these people knew I had been spending weeks tossing around tornadoes and interplanetary embraces.
All they knew was that right then I had a fork full of lettuce and out of my mouth came, “Isn’t it interesting how we have to take information in and then down before it can come out again?”
Silence. Everything stopped. No more easy-going back and forth. We all looked down at the table. I wasn’t sure whether it was thoughtfulness or embarrassment. It was one of those moments that seemingly stretched into the next moon phase, and I thought, “OK, that was either sort of interesting or completely stupid.” It was out and I couldn’t take it back.
Quickly, as if to cover up a bad noise, I could only think to say: “Um, could you please pass me the bread?”
– Laura Grimes
July 22nd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Yes,
I have had the same experience with stories flashing through my mind, and leaving just as quickly. Poetry now, is another story. I am not a poet. As for inappropriate comments? I love to use them as comic relief. Either for me, or them, poor things.
July 23rd, 2009 at 9:20 am
Movement, I tell the young critics I occasionally mentor, always with the admonition that dance critics are definitely on the endangered species list and they might want to explore apprenticing themselves to electricians or plumbers, is arguably the most difficult thing to describe. Laura has done this magnificently well in her poem and I’m jealous as hell. And yes, I know, she already considers herself a plumber, but she doesn’t do it for pay. Pay? Did I mention pay? When I was a girl, long long ago, what I wanted to be when I grew up (whenever that is) a poet. So this artist’s daughter, having inherited the genetic will to poverty, became a dance writer. I do if of course for the money. But I spent part of last week looking at a good many of my dad’s paintings with the artistic director of the Nashville Ballet, Paul Vasterling, and came to the realization that my own interest in learning to describe motion in words was profoundly influenced by his ability to describe it in paint, also rather difficult. Laura, have you thought of painting? Pictures, not walls.
As for the gaffe at the dinner party: Ursula Le Guin, deep in a new novel, many years ago, asked one of her children at the dinner table, politely, to pass the spaceship. She meant the butter.
July 24th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Martha, I can completely see how your father’s paintings would inspire you to write about motion. I think one art form is an excellent springboard for another. Language often moves in imperceptible ways. That transition or even intersection of one (or more) language moving into another can provide thrilling discoveries. How exciting for you to discover that your critical writing about dance was influenced by a visual form that, on the surface, doesn’t move. But of course it has movement in it, doesn’t it? Captured. Writing about dance is a way to capture movement, too.
Think, too, that your father’s paintings inspired you to write, and that in turn you wrote about your father’s paintings. That’s a dialogue, isn’t it?
I’m fascinated by the dialogues between (or among) art forms — say between paintings and dance. I think that’s why I was struck to write in a previous post about the crabs stacked up in a glass jar (a visual form) and imagining how that was a metaphor for a poem (carapaces stacked up like lines in a poem) and then writing a poem about it (back atcha) and then writing an essay about the whole business (back atcha multiplied).
Assuming we’re talking about a single written language (English in this case), I think of writing about art forms — which sometimes amounts to art criticism — as being the most common language, the place where all the art languages come together to be debated and discussed. It’s the single platform that gives all of us a common vocabulary. Ah, but the gems also to be found in those dialogues on the sides, art form to art form, because they’re a little more unusual and a little harder to get at.