WomanWyrds

Meditations

I am immersing myself in Annie Dillard. It's like swimming in a language already made familiar by love of the word, by love of the world, by love. Every day I find more reflections. Here are some:

The writer studies literature, not the world. ...He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.
The writer knows his field-what has been done, what could be done, the limits- the way a tennis player know the court. And like that expert, he, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. He hits up the line. In writing, he can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now, courageously and carefully, can he enlarge it, can he nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power?
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature...The art must enter the body, too. A painter can not use paint like glue or screws to fasten down the world. The tubes of paints are like fingers; they work only if, inside the painter, the neural pathways are wide and clear to the brain. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, part of the brain changes physical shape to accommodate and fit paint.
You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents. Klee called this insight, quite rightly, "an altogether revolutionary new discovery."...'
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"
"Well," the writer said, "I don't know....Do you like sentences?"
The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences. If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of paint."
...
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
...What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking...

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then--and only then--it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way...

One line of a poem, the poet said---only one line, but thank God for that one line--drops from the ceiling...It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

posted by Heather Cardin @ 11:51 AM