I was editing a paragraph and remembered what I once read from another writer about how you can only keep what’s essential. Remembering this, I sculpted the paragraph with hungry scrapes. With each scrape, I asked myself, “Is this essential?” And the answer was always no. I would look at a whole clause, answer no, and delete it all. The paragraph started as, I don’t know, maybe ten or fifteen lines. And I kept backspacing and backspacing and the paragraph was down to about five lines. And then I asked myself the same question, “Is this essential?” And I wanted to say yes, but the answer was still no. And I thought to myself, there is not much of this paragraph left. If I take out too much, it will cease to be itself. And then the paragraph will be more like a creation of the editing itself, and none of the original creation will be left—which could be said, I am realizing now, of even the first touch of editing as well. Only a virgin piece of writing, as it was born and unmolested by editing, is real. All else is editing. But still, I was asking myself, “Where is the essential?” Say I take this paragraph down to three lines, and then two, one. Will I be getting any closer? And on that last line: I take out the punctuation, I abbreviate each word, I take out the spaces. What if somehow I could get down to one letter? And then what? I was not taught in school about how to edit one letter. Or, maybe I was. I learned in art class about how to change what I was seeing. Not just the brute binary of add and subtract; art class was about seeing the void in the middle. And in that void lies the answer to how to edit a single letter. Think of any letter in your mind. Do you see it? Okay good. Now think of your letter as a drawing. Draw it and erase it. Once you have done that a couple of times, now start to remove as much of the letter as possible, while still being able to identify the letter as itself. Once you have gone as far as you can, now you can break the rule about identifying the letter as itself. What does it become? A slanted line? A circle? Even simpler—a straight line. And simpler—a dot. And then what? I do not know what, or when. But I am pretty sure that is where the essential will be.
Month: February 2021
Where does writing rank?
As a writer, I am often between wondering if what I want to say can even be worded, or if I just do not have the words in my vocabulary to say it. I do believe that words are limited to describe our experience. I also believe that, in some cases, other art forms are more successful, such that a really talented artist might have a few different art forms in their bag of tricks, to be able to switch, say, to painting, when sight is the best sense to capture the moment, and then to song, when right in the middle of the landscape, a bird chirps, and even though the bird can be painted, its sound cannot be captured, unless by song. This makes me realize the beauty of film, as it combines so many different art forms. In my pursuit to grow as a writer, if my goal is to depict and describe experiences, at some point that goal might find its means of achievement in art more generally, and not just writing. It takes a great deal of time to become talented at even one art form, even to be just mediocre at one takes time. If I were very intelligent and knew the exact moment, I wonder when I would change over from learning writing to learning another art form, in the interest of being able to describe more holistically (because words are limited, like we said earlier). And which art form would be next in the hierarchy? Where does writing even rank in the first place?
Theories
In the morning my theories about myself and the world and how the two relate and interact seem to be strong and resolute and I dare even use the dread-word “right.” But then the day comes along to muck that all up with its messiness and make me feel wrong again.
I am learning from my spiritual studies that that feeling of rightness may not come from the math and science and test-taking rightness I have known from school. It may be closer to the metaphysical truth of all of existence really being One and myself being part of it and feeling closer to that One when I am in the all-black, silent, unconscious night, and farther away from that One when I am in the differentiated, working world, feeling separate, more like a link in the food chain, and less like a drop in the ocean.