 london diary 4.2.01 On Writing I am a writer for many reasons. To write is to learn, to explore, to edify, to create, to challenge. Writing is taking half- thoughts and jumbled whispers from their resting place and releasing them free into the world to swoop and dive as indiscriminately as birds. In writing, that purely solitary act, I am whole and free. Right at this moment, in a solely physical exploration I watch as my pen moves across this softly lined page alternately lit and shadowed by the passing clouds outside my window. The movement of my hand is particular, my letters round and fluid, my arm stiff. My wrist controls the journey across this page, the making of marks where there once were none. Writing is like scarring, a word is like a scar. Both walk the line between the indelible and the ephemeral. Both tell stories; both transfer emotion in the moment of their action. I often compare certain words that haunt me to the scars on my legs. No, perhaps I am wrong! The emotions that cause scarring have been absorbed into my skin leaving little besides milky white traces. Words live on in my head, forever pounding into my heart, eluding any attempt at reason or rationality. A few days ago a Kurdish man drove me home in his cab. He questioned me about my life and I told him some of my stories. A single, brief remark still hangs in the air in front of me-- still and bright like a star in its simplicity and clarity. I paraphrase: "A word said-- is thought a thousand times." I turn the idea over and around in my mind. Do words echo in our souls like shouts into a deep cave? Do they struggle madly when caught like a small bird in an enclosed space? Do they linger forever like scars, shaping and reshaping our brutal physicality? Why are some words wieghted, "sinking," as Neruda says, "like dead medals to the bottom of the sea." Why are some airless, disappearing from memory, from time, from place? Why do I write? I suppose that I write to understand myself and the world around me. It is a compulsion, yes, something I will do obsessively, daily, hourly, until death. I like words, their shapes and textures, the way they taste in my mouth and linger on my lips, falling into silence or noise, changing the way the world looks around me in their mortality. I like sentences that fit neatly like puzzle pieces into each other, sentences that dance like chess pieces to explode into ideas, dreams, and fantasies. And, very importantly, I write to find courage. To pen the thought, put shape to emotion in the scope of a phrase is a terrifying thing. Locked inside of me, my words are safe, and therefore I am safe. No other person needs to know me and I can exist quite happily in the world in which I reside outside of my waking, sleeping life; my world where monsters are familiar and sleepy and angels benign. To say, to utter, to pronounce these hidden sounds- to unleash them to unseeing eyes and mad, rushed minds is sometimes more than I can bear. And this is why I write: to find the courage to live. For as a warrior, a healer, a woman unwilling to allow life to glide by as slowly as Mississippi mud on a treacly hot day...no. No, I must speak, I must bear witness. I must open my self up to the molten earth and allow life to cradle me in the palms of her hands. Towards this end I expose my interior life, mention it by name, and through a glorious osmosis gain the courage to get out of bed in the mornings and smile to meet the skies. I write to breathe, I write to live. |
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