June 29, 2005

I have been doing a lot of thinking about writing lately. About whether I could actually write something longer, more meaningful, not about myself, and not destined to grace a screen but actually a printed page.

Even the mode would transform the act I think.

Last night I read a story that Maya has taped to her bedroom wall, it was written by Mayas sister and was incredibly moving, carefully written and shockingly great. It was taped to the wall in peices. Each peice formed a discreet scene so I could read the pages in whatever order I chose, the story just sort of came together from those vignettes it wasn't nailed down to the reader/author pact of page order = times passage.

I can't really do the story justice in summary. It was of trees and of a leaf, and of Sam. As I read it, the leaf launches itself from its tree and gets trapped in sams car windshield, prompting sam to ask andrea to marry him. of course those are the physical entities only, again bound to a narrative thread. The leaf is certainly not just a leaf and the metaphors float very delicately over the surface of the images which are all of time and greenery and safety.

The entire 10 minute interlude reading Mayas wall was intimidating and beautiful. I went home and thought. Can I actually write or do I just over-use a large vocabulary.

Anyways, than I read these two passsages by Margaret Drabble;

Some of them do die. Nostalgia can be lethal. A new medical condition is discovered and named. It is called Sudden Death Syndrome. For no reason, for the sake of a smell, a perfume, a memory, a dream, the heart panics, fibrillates, then stops.

Perhaps for this subject matter, one should seek the most disjunctive, the most disruptive, the most uneasy and incompetent of forms, a form that offers not a grain of comfort or repose. Too easily we take refuge with the known. Particular anguish, particular pain, is in its way, comfortable.Unless of course it happens to be our own."

She is writing in both these cases about the Cambodian Genocide. And about the relocation of the Boat people. I am interested especially in the second quote where she descibes the comprehension of tragedy as being akin to the picaresque. We can't deal unless we bring it down to something of our own human stature. ie one inidvidual or one family, one experience that is singular. because to comprehend things on a universal scale is simply not appealing to human beings, on the whole.

Of course, this is also an intimidating thing, To a wannabe writer. Drabble has apparently made a pact with herself to avoid the simply nostalgic or emotional and to try and present a tragic stroy outside of the common emotional techniques of a narrative construct. Maya's sister too, is letting a leaf carry all the meaning in her story.

It is amazing stuff, I just don't know how I am going to learn to do it. I think my first step is to try to get rid of the need to explain things and just write..

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