Word After Word

Federico Garcia Lorca’s essay,  “The Duende: Theory and Divertissment,” is required reading for all art students.

“Now that has real duende!” is a commonly heard phrase in

It is easier to understand duende by noticing its absence: “You have a voice, you know all the styles, but you’ll never bring it off because you have no duende.” On American Idol, we call it star quality or magic. We say, simply, “she’s got it.” We all know there is a quality in art (music, dance, painting, love) that can’t be taught or bought. Some people just have this thing. The juice. The thrum. It’s called duende.

You are born with it. It can’t be taught, but it can be heightened, steered towards and that is one of the ways a writing class can be helpful: the teacher can show students where the duende lurks, how to be with it for longer, how conjure it.

“Whatever has black sounds has duende.” Lorca quotes the words of the Andalusian artist, Manuel Torres, in order to explain the difference between Brahms and Bach (you can hear the difference).

“These black sounds are the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know of, and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art. Black sounds….” And then Lorca, in his wonderful essay, quotes Goethe speaking of Paganini “A mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain.”

When we read something great in fiction workshop—by a student or by Hemingway or Munro—and we all just sit there, not wanting to speak, because it’s just so damn good and speaking will ruin the effect, we’re struck dumb by the presence of the duende.

“The duende, then, is a power and not a construct, is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist, a true virtuoso, remark, ‘The duende is not in the throat, the duende comes from inside, up from the very soles of the feet.’ That is to say, it is not a question of aptitude, but of a true and viable style—of blood, in other words; of what is oldest in culture: of creation made act.”

“All arts are capable of duende, but it naturally achieves its widest play in the fields of music, dance and the spoken poem, since those require a living presence to interpret them, because they are forms which grow and decline perpetually and raise their contours on the precise present.”

“The duende loves ledges and wounds.”

“The duende never repeats himself any more than the forms of the sea repeat themselves in a storm.”

As I am preparing my plans for my courses for spring 2009, I’m looking for ways to keep us moving towards the duende. The theme for the spring semester: Duende Invitational. Get ready to dance.

My dear friend and writing partner Dee is still stuck. She hasn’t written a poem in months. Last night, at writing group, she said, opening her palms, “I have nothing.” She said she spent an enormous amount of time this week feeling bad that she wasn’t writing and it finally hit her: writing is a great pleasure. We can get so caught up in should be writing, not writing, not writing well trap, we forget it’s a pleasure and privilege. We enjoy writing. We live for it. Maybe, when we stop worrying about not writing, we make room for the pleasure to come back.

Dee came to her brilliant pleasure insight because of how her teaching has been going. All week, she was bogged down by humans behaving like humans; she was stultified by conversations where the word “rubric” was used, many many times, like a toothy trap. She had no rubrics. Rubric-less she felt wrong, wrong wrong.

Then she remembered: she loved teaching without a rubric. And she was stunned to realize in spite of how hard and annoying it all was, teaching was a great pleasure in her life, one of the sweet spots in the week. She loves teaching! Steer towards the pleasure.

Teaching and writing are our passions.  We love them. When we are stuck, perhaps we have simply forgotten what we like so much. Perhaps we have taken on someone else’s idea for what we Should do.

When we are stuck, in teaching or in writing, the pleasure has become hidden. But it’s always there. It wants to come back.

What would make it fun today? How did you used to do it, when you first started this work? What is your favorite thing you have written? Could you not write and just remember how great it was to write that? Remembering the pleasure is the way back.

Riding the bike is, I think, the most fun thing that I do.

I found a hilly ride and these photos are supposed to indicate Great Inclines, which they do not, at all, indicate.  But hills were very involved on this day.

Hills are great because, like all engaging work, they give you something to push against. Hills demand conversation from your quads and your bike; hills require attention and focus. Hills are beautiful in that they are up to something, they’re never still, they have secrets and surprises. You can work with them. You can work against them. Sounds familiar?

You know I’m going to compare it to writing. It’s almost too obvious to even put down. But it is useful to me, in my writing practice, to notice the obvious. When the writing is hard, it’s important to remember hard is a side., hard is a half. Hard is part of something larger, part of an arc. It’s not an end; hard never plateaus, ever.  Hard is alive and moving. It’s so essential to remember that the hard part has a backside, a slipside, a crazy wonderful aspect. And when you get there, after all that work, it feels like flying. Hard creates forward motion. Hard increases velocity. What else does that?

I love riding the hills. I like the hard part (going up) as much and maybe even more (I think more, because I have more control) than the flying part.

There is nothing quite so sweet as flying on Saturday afternoon, in fleece, not on the earth at all, but in the wind, over new gold leaves, through fast-changing gold and purple light, through a little town with a wooden bridge and a bicycle shop, past fields of former corn and former soybeans, and under a tree of crows. It makes me feel like a pure girl, powerful, and like a creature, defying human-ness. I annoint this day the first day of Fall. Hello, Fall. Welcome.

A high point of this summer: Sweetie, a row boat. I love to be in her.

Rowing is slower than kayaking, in a good way and sexier than canoeing. It’s childhood

perfected, row row row your boat round, and prayerful. You don’t have to get anywhere.

You can go in perfect circles. You can sing.

I was bringing in the groceries (plus purse, dry cleaning, and a herd of loose ideas) thinking about RGE Monitor, men and sports, drama and emotion versus information, chicken Marbella, my heart, Spain, and a sentence I am working on regarding the tango, and I tripped on my pot of mums and I fell onto my front steps and I fell hard. Elbow blood, knee blood, a bottle of good white wine, broken. As though I christened my house. (The Izzys sodas, thankfully, were spared.) Rush hour. I live on a busy street. It really, really hurt on a number of levels.

I sat down on the wet steps. The wine poured down the front walk and there was a soft, soft rain even though it was bright and sunny, the early evening lit by chaos. I took a deep breath.

Slow down. Going too fast. Watch where you are headed. One thing at a time. 

I was grateful for the ungentle reminder. I sat for awhile, breathing. Stay grounded. Good to know where your feet are, what they are up to, when they are actually hooked around a pot of mums.

Whose blooms lasted, I hate to say, only a very, very short two weeks. I tripped on a pot of stems, green stems.

I was at the Grille with mi sobrino J. tonight and he is the greatest company ever, really, in the history of dining out. He’s so funny and sweet and present and relaxed, all at once.

He was talking about his trip at West some more, as he assured us he would, and I hadn’t realized that before climbing Ranier, he went to Cat World and Water World in order to consider the oppositional powers in the two Sub-Kingdoms: lions versus sharks. In order to discuss, at length, their ultimate galactic battle against each other.

I was laughing so hard as he talked about he and his brother arguing cat versus shark, shark versus cat, which one would kill you faster? At the summit of Ranier, they were still arguing, seriously kind of arguing. It’s so stupid and funny. I thinking this was the high point of the day: hearing J make observations about his brother, the purpose of mindless conversation, the existential nature of the mountain climbing episode.

And then my student, Tony. came up to our booth and introduced his father, Steve. They had a moment with J., where they took the time to see him, and shake hands, take him in.

We all shook hands like men, like compatriots, like soup-lovers, and they left and then, suddenly, the dad was back and he popped right into the booth, leaning way in, into my face and he said, “Thank you for what you did for my son, thank you for everything you did, it means so much.” And he was gone.

It happened so fast. I got tears in my eyes. It was better than money, publication, dessert. When frustrating things happen in the classroom next semester, I want to remember Steve said thank you.

It was a perfect day. The new writing program in place. A satisfying hard run in the soft rain with my small red dog at the cemetery. Time with J. Time in the library. Healthy nourishing abundant good. The student’s dad, coming back to the booth, leaning in.

Think of prose as sounds

There is this veil between human interaction, all of it, that is what I am interested in.

Four hours a day. 1500 words. (Much—thirty percent—will be useless the next day. What matters is practicing. Doing it every day. Only good can come form this and no bad can come from this way of life.

Your account of your life is potentially amazing to the people around you.

Writing is, for me, like having dinner. It’s what I do each day. It’s not going to not happen. Language is like breathing. It’s an essential thing.

Confidence and work ethic.

Always knowing today I will work.

Feeling competition among writers can be useful to production.

Write a story in 20 minutes. How much narrative can you pack in? go.

Reclaim a spot in your process where ethe writing is sheer play. The early sense oyu had when you began writing that this has to place in language.

For inspiration: visual art. Or silence.

Four hours. Fifteen hundred words. I have confidence I will get somewhere. To develop that kind of patience takes time.

Writing fiction is just like dreaming. Try writing in bed.

I’m never 100% content. This keeps me engaged in the work.

Read everything.

Worry about genre later. Big bang theory. Let it be created first. Then decide.

In a foreign language, if you can say anything, you are happy.

If it is too willfull, too conscious, not sideways enough, it’s not interesting.

Poetry is far weirder than prose.

I don’t like to break the page barrier.

You don’t want to have a big plan. (For dating, for revision. Blogger’s addition.)

You have to take yourself out of the world to get to it.

Unnerving is the quality you want.

Resist finishing! Resist order and resist finishing.

Mythic elements create lyric space.

You need the tensions of lyric and narrative. Some things in the poem move, some don’t. That’s perfect. Like in paintings. You have some elements that are static and some that are moving.

Read against your grain to get over your own biases, the ones you can’t see.

Danger: saying I wanted I intended. Danger in saying thinking feeling.

Strange is good. “The sense of mystery lives in another life.”

So, I sent my book off and I am lost, wandering, desolate, reading Lorca poems.

I know we haven’t broken up. I know the ms is simply on a business trip, a Grand Tour – but will it come back all changed? Will we still be us? Will I have changed?

These have been difficult writing days. Then, I realized this: I need to reconfigure my writing life. I need a good plan, a shape, an elegant structure within which I can work. I need something to push against. Boundaries. I can’t be loose like this, in the world, I’m on sabbatical for crying out loud, I’m completely unsupervised. 

Backing up a moment. This new phase started out really well. I thought I had a great plan: the day I wrote the last sentence of my book (which I really like quite a lot) I simply saved, closed the file, and opened a new file and gave my next book a working title, and wrote the first sentence  (I like it pretty good, too). Good good good! I felt like Thackeray. Like a carpenter. I felt employed and steady and seamless. End one book. Keep writing, start the next one. I didn’t even get up and stretch between the two sentences. I just went from one to the other. It was like dating more than one person at a time: wild and healthy and is this going to work? Let’s see! 

To drive the dating metaphor into the ground: no instant chemistry. I wrote the first sentence and then made a table of contents (desperate attempt for shape structure boundaries, a plan). I wrote pages of notes. I reflected. I quit reading Lorca. I tried to think. What kind of book will it be? Who will read it? What’s it for? After that wonderful propitious instant start, a radical falling off (and a cheering tango lesson!)—I fell into the horrible torso-less malaise I referred to earlier, the lost desolate wandering reading angsty awful days.

Then, a wonderful stroke of luck. You know how when you aren’t looking for something, something specific will spring into your hands?  I came across my old notes from Visiting Writers Series events, specifically the genius writers and teachers Rick Moody and Marianne Boruch.

I read how Moody writes 1500 words—good words, polished words, a day. Instantly I knew: new program! Perfect for me! A perfect way to organize the working life—not by a table of contents, not by hours, but 1500 good words.

*

Fifteen hundred words a day—it didn’t sound like that much but it turns about to be hard, and the perfect level of hard. I need something hard to do each day, don’t you? I need something to push against. I need a shape, a goal, a task, a list, a sense of forward motion. I need to know where I am, and how far it is, exactly, until I can stop. (This is why I love running and training for races and Holm’s temperature game.)

I am awed that these writing mentor angels, Moody and Boruch, showed up just when I needed them.

Fifteen hundred good words a day. It takes Moody four hours. It takes me exactly six hours.

I mailed my manuscript off on Friday and ever since I have been lost, lost, lost, empty, desolate, lonely; it feels exactly like when someone breaks up with you for no good reason.  It’s so quiet in the house. No blinking light on the answering machine. No messages from the book, no little distracting ideas for sentences, scenes, cutting. Nothing. The wire is dead. 

I feel as though I excised my torso and mailed it off. I’m head, and feet, and absence.  I wander around my house thinking I should meditate more, ten minutes isn’t enough, especially since I drink tea during it. Or! I should sort out the winter clothes and summer clothes (they’re commingling now in unholy fashion), separate the hostas (also commingling and clumping in overwhelming ways in the garden). I keep thinking I should be happy. I should be organizing. I should be relieved. I am not. Not at all. I want my book back. 

*

I met D., my writing partner last night, as I do every Monday night, and she said she was surprised I was so bereft. “Isn’t it a huge relief? On some level?” 

Nope. It is not a relief. It’s a re-grief. It’s another ending. (I know the work will start again on this book but no, it’s not a relief.) I want to still be working on it. Working on this manuscript is how I know where to find myself.  I want the illusion that I am moving it forward, engaged, alive. Rick Moody says “I am never 100% content. That keeps me engaged in the work.” I don’t want to feel relief. (This is the root cause, I fear, of my insomnia, but that’s another topic for another day.)

We ordered our wine, and then my writing partner, D., was talking about how hard it is now that her son is at college. How empty the house. How rarely he called. She compared it to the end of a love affair. She knew they would never have the same relationship again. Something huge was irrevocably over.

That, I told her, is exactly how I feel about the book. I’ve sent my only child to college. I am happy for my book but not happy for me. I can only think of how much better I could have done by it, if only I had tried harder, been more focused, if only I had driven it all the places it wanted me to take it. If only I’d kept my mouth shut. Ruined, and gone. 

Plus: season change. In these days since the excruciating mailing, it’s raining cold assertive needly rain and I am not riding my bike.  And people call me and tell me the world is falling apart and I should have done this, should have done that. And my book’s topic is this tiny, tiny part of the brain, fusiform gyru 12. It has nothing to do with banking or greed. It has everything to do with love and poverty and the very essential sub-economy of the torso. And I stand by it. I am standing by the work, the process of this work.