As I linger before the blank page I often chase after inspiration in the words of others.
I hope to be lifted up and taken away for a moment to that good and high place that the simple wonder of human language can open to the willing imagination.
When this happens it is a wonder, yes, but it is also a weight: the heavy press of the greatness and genius I ascribe to those who have come before and made a mark with their words. I feel like I am St. Augustine before God, small and unimportant, “but a particle of Thy creation.”
So I discover that, in the search for inspiration, I continue to stumble upon the question: “Why do I write?”
Novelist Carol Shields recently died of breast cancer. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling novel The Stone Diaries. The very day she got the prize someone said to her, “You know what this means, don’t you?” To which she said, “No. What?” The reply: “You already know the first line of your obituary.” (National Public Radio interview, May 2002)
So much for the shelf life of literary greatness. If not for fame and fortune, why write?
As for me, I am compelled to write. When I am engaged, when the words are flowing, I feel I am doing something I am meant to do; a thing that has nothing to do with recognition or reward, a thing I must do.
In The Prophet Kahlil Gibran wrote, “…that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.”
This is an appealing notion. It says, to me at least, that Shakespeare’s sonnets were somehow seminally present in the burst of celestial matter that spewed from Nothing’s womb into Eternity’s cradle. So, too, were the simplest movements of the simplest persons: the mother fetching water at the stream, the child stooping to pluck a daisy from the field, the feet of the ancient savage dancing beneath a blood-red moon.
And so it unfolds constantly, the story of us all, the story of all life ¾ of which I am a part, as are you.
I find I want to capture a moment of the great story ¾ just a moment, simple and profound, transient and eternal. I want to give it to you and have it move you in some way: a brief tingle of recognition, a smile, a laugh, a tear.
John Irving’s character, Garp (The World According to Garp), muses: “It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.”
The feeling I have when I close a good book (the sense that I’ve been elsewhere, felt the
heartbeat of another) I want to be able to give that gift to you.
It is not possible for me to completely extract ego from this desire, so my intended gift has to contain some of my corruption. Even the most selfless giver finds pleasure in the giving, enjoys the brief afterglow of the act itself, secretly hopes the recipient is grateful for and pleased with the gift. Still, there is a place of naïve purity that can be known, if only for the most brief moment, in the giving.
I will return, then, to the page, time and time again, trying to keep my heart as close to this pure place as I can. I will try not to be too intimidated by the statues of the great writers I imagine looming on all sides as I sit in solitude with my thoughts, a mere particle in all creation. I will try to remember that their works are products of their time and place, their unique inheritance of mind, talent, passion and experience.
I will hope that (as I search for inspiration, as I contemplate and sing, as I harvest the moment from the imagination to keep the dead alive forever) I am able to give you a good gift.
Copyright ÓApril 12, 2007 by Jim Wormington
