Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky
Novelist, journalist, poet and Zen teacher from Glasgow, Scotland, now based in Portland, OR, USA
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Posts tagged "writing"
What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, “Write what you know.” It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don’t develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.
Hard to develop the silence and humility necessary for creating good art if you are always yelling ‘Look at me’ like a three-year-old who has just shit in the sandbox.
Jim Harrison, the Dalva notebooks
I had to interrupt the novel I was working on to write one that came up and pushed it aside, demanding to be written. I’m deep into it now, and it should be finished in a few weeks. It contains this poem, written in the 18th Century by an Irish monk whose name is long forgotten:
I and Pangur Bán, my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.
‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!
So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.
This reminds me of an interview I read with the actor Ray Winstone, in which he said that his friend Gary Oldman had been helpful to him. As they rehearsed together, Oldman would sometimes tell him, “I can see you acting, Raymond.”
Bresson sees film-making, and every other art, as being separate and unique. I disagree with him on this, and as evidence that he’s wrong I offer that I find his book helpful in all of my writing. When I read books I’ve written and cringe, it’s not because the writing is bad (though it may be) - it’s because I can see the writing, see myself writing, see my own artifice.
I was just told: “Your writing is like a person stripped naked and standing outside when it’s thirty below - and being sprayed with water. It’s beautiful, but it hurts.”
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| Banksy |
In When It All Comes Down to Dust, it is stated right at the beginning that the protagonist has black hair and tanned skin… but, as I wrote the book, and saw the story happening with my mind’s eye, I did not see a woman with black hair and tanned skin. The woman I saw had blonde hair and a fair complexion. In writing the text I cannot even control how I imagine the narrative, so what chance is there of controlling how other people see a story, or the meaning they might find in it?
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
- Bertold Brecht
At this time of unprecedented crisis for America (and therefore for the world), I think of a story told by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova about something that happened as she waited in line to deliver food to her son who was imprisoned by Stalin’s regime:
One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
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| The Picnic by Vince Larue |
Here are the ten most-read blog posts this year:
Beavis and Butt-Head Should Study English Lit
Koan Commentary: The Book of Serenity, Case 20
Chris Hedges’ Hysterical Defense of Cornel West
We Must All Become Grandmothers
Any Man With a Microphone Can Tell You What He Loves the Most
Abortion: Choose Your Ideology and Defend It
Alone
Zen in the Street
There Is No Such Thing as Money
Writing Wipes the Dirt from the Window
I heard from someone who bought my book on Zen, Kill Your Self, the day his father died. “It really helped,” he said.
Someone else told me he read some of the poems in Traffic and Murder out loud to his wife in a hospital waiting room as he prepared to have surgery.
A response I could not have anticipated… A man wrote to me:
I am writing to express my deep appreciation for your book The Wrong Thing, which I happened upon en route to the park with my daughter. It was in a free box at the base of the stoop of my apartment. The flow of your writing style and the imagery contained therein resulted in my inability to put the book down. I identified somewhat with the Kid insofar as I too was rather unloved as a child, got into trouble with the law to some degree, and have been searching for love, which I have found on occasion. I loved how you brought out the Kid’s underlying nature, that he loved to cook for people, especially Vanjii, cared for Catboy, and loved to read and watch the news, all of which could have been nurtured had he loving parents… perhaps. At any rate, the end of the book powerfully overwhelmed me, and all I could do was to let the tears fall. I have a friend, a dear friend, that just barely avoided arrest, having been involved with some dicey characters. She too had a very rough childhood. I called her to tell her that I love her. I believe that if one knows that someone truly loves them, they will more likely than not choose their actions with more care and deliberation. Your book reminded me how powerful love is; for this I thank you.
