Life Under Ink
I try to put my finger on it, but it runs away. That’s its nature, to scramble away, to shift. I could try to describe the process, the hunting for it, hunting it down, the struggle to make it stay put… but why? What for? I would just be writing, then, wasting words, saying what many people already know.
I could make art. Art which holds still, or which is like a pool, at least, in which things live and change and die and scurry away into shadow leaving ripples, maybe, or maybe not, but still it is the same pool and we look into it with the same eyes (almost) from time to time.
There is, perhaps, no point in trying to write about life. What you write about life will always be inaccurate. What you write about writing about it will be inaccurate, too. Such as this. I want to make new things. I want to…. make new pieces of life—life-of-ink—and then set them loose and see where they go. I want to make my life by writing it.
What I say is true. What I write is true. I write it, and it becomes true. Tomorrow I will write something else, and that too will be true. Wait. The longer you wait, the more things will become true, the more things will cease to be true, the more they will scurry away. Stop trying to control everything. You have no power-over, there is no such thing, not even over yourself, not even over your own thoughts, not even over your own consistencies and lies. What you have is power-to, and watch it, quick, it will scurry away. You must always be making more.
Here is a triangle with labeled points. Tomorrow, there is a circle, a web, a wheel, or an old woman. Yesterday the old woman was Inspiring, sipping her coffee in the diner; today she implies the cook is incompetent at toasting bread and insults the waitress. What does it matter that you were wrong today? You were right yesterday. Scurry–quick, now, while there’s still time. There will be other ways for you to be wrong tomorrow.
~ by Ali on February 27, 2009.
Ali
A young woman seeking to establish herself as a "working poet" while pursuing a life founded in contemplation, wild wisdom and creative, loving freedom. 
I *think* I know what you mean. Or what you meant to mean, when you wrote it. I *think* I have experienced it. I *think* this is why I haven’t yet written publicly about my divorce — the truth is still shifting too much, there hasn’t been time for it to decide its true form. But that’s just me *thinking*. :-)
This is me asking in earnest curiosity: what about fiction? Is fiction immune to this… shiftiness? Can fiction be True, true forever?
Jeff Lilly | Druid Journal said this on February 28, 2009 at 7:41 am
Immune to shiftiness? I’m not sure I know what you’re asking…. To me, the same approach applies to fiction, nonfiction, poetry alike. When you write, you aren’t merely explaining something else. Writing (or any work of art) is not a signpost pointing at something other than itself. It is what it is. Writing can’t point to life, it can only be what it is and what it is can more or less remind us of or allow us to experience life (just as true for fictional works as for nonfiction, and sometimes fiction has the freedom to be “truer to life” because there is less struggle to remain merely “factual”). You create something new. That new thing has a life of its own, it’s not always “about something.” You don’t have children so that they can be “about you”–they are their own creatures, their own beings. Works of art are their own creatures (and, like children, they don’t always “mean” the same thing). Even when you write a poem about birds, say, and you describe an experience of birds… you’re creating a new (specifically textual) experience of birds, you’re not explaining birds.
I wish I had the guts to say something like, “All bad writing stems from people assuming that they can explain the world with words, and so abusing or mishandling words based on this assumption.” But I don’t. What I will say is that what words really do is recreate the world in a new medium. Why should we expect them to behave neatly and nicely when the world doesn’t?
Ali said this on February 28, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Maybe but then again maybe that is the very beauty of writing about life. Because it is in constant change there is endless variety to write about, just like in nature to some extent. You can visit the same stream a few times a year but in some ways it is never the same body of water from year to year. A single heavy rainstorm can forever change the look of the stream in a place yet as a work of God’s creation it is just as worthy of being written about and described in detail before and after the point of change. So how much more would it be worthy of the attention of paper and ink when we are talking about a person which is according to the Bible created in the very image of the living God.
John Grebe said this on March 15, 2009 at 6:40 pm