Writer's Block
Full of nothing, writer's block
is a sacred state. Only the most skillful yogis and advanced Zen adepts
can pull it off for very long. Perhaps in part because writing is so new
to our neurology, this peculiar art miraculously provides ready access to
a special awareness brimful of emptiness - a hallowed psychic state much
revered by mystics.
We took a short tour of those
holy grounds in the previous memorandum, “The Blank Page.” From
that perspective, writer's block is a confrontation with Infinity. It's
the writer's mind mushed up against the boundary between our 3-dimensional
world and whatever is unraveling pi.
For the writer, this divine
rapport generally feels miserable. Divinity serves gods, not scribblers,
after all. What's required is a shift of perspective, pivoting on a word
that can roll over this ponderous incapacity to write and empower new creative
momentum.
Let's go for a word from one
of the oldest spells, from a time when spells were brand new and full of
supernatural brio. Sin-liqe-unninni, this author's favorite Mesopotamian
exorcist (and the world's first known author), opens his metaphysical adventure,
The Epic of Gilgamesh, with the abyss.
The empty page is a modern
emblem of the abyss - a manufactured void, literary cousin of the vacuum
tube. Deep in the dark of the verbal unconscious, well out of sight of prying
eyes, abyss copulates phonetically with the Sanskrit word abhyas, which
means spiritual devotion.
"He who stared into the
abyss" begins Gilgamesh and initiates 5,000 years of people doing likewise,
50 centuries of Dredful Joye - a Way of mind, a noetic yoga, where spirit
equals the Latin spiritus, breath. Breath in the abyss of non-being, on
the blank page, opens to the devotion of creative writing.
Seen this way, writer's block
is breathless suspension in the void. Its silence measures the tensile strength
of yinsanity. How much nothing can a writer take before giving up something?
The Norse shaman god, Odin,
suspended himself in the Abyss by dangling from the World Tree. He did this
in order to attain knowledge for the benefit of humanity. After nine days,
his misery trance opened to revelation, and he envisioned runes and how
to write.
Thanks, Odin! Now, we mortals
each have a small piece of the World Tree, the empty page (usually manufactured
in our citied world by felling trees) from which we too can suspend ourselves
in the Abyss, the abhyas, spiritual devotion of nothing.
And what do we receive for
our devotion, for enduring the empty page? We're not gods like Odin. We
mortal wayfarers create from our humanity - and so, whatever we attempt
is imperfect.
All art is inadequate genius.
That's why it's art. Its inadequacy, its deviance from truth, is its beauty.
Take, for example, the 18th
century literary prodigy John Keats, who concludes his poem "Ode on
a Grecian Urn" with the Romantic anthem (spoken by the eponymic Urn
itself - the voice of art carrying across the generations): "Beauty
is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need
to know."
The force of those lines echoes
weirdly down the blood-smeared corridors of the Industrial Age. Like a bent
blues note, the power of that mellifluous spell is its distortion in a world
of death camps and famine, machete massacres and tsunami annihilation.
Can words mean anything? Of
course. Anything at all, every kind of nonsense, all the way down to phonemic
glyphs and text fragments as verbal twitches in the long page's blank face.
Incoherent demon voices. Sin-liqe-unninni knew how to handle them, and he
receives us into his magic every time we read with the expectation of understanding.
That is a magical act. Therefore, it's dangerous. Text, by definition, is
the power to spell. We must be exorcists not to get possessed and bedeviled
by text and its illusions. The important lesson here: Words mean something,
even when they don't.
And if we write creatively,
the exorcist with a face weathered as earth is our coeval, jumping with
us into the abyss, encouraging our hang time, our breathless devotion to
the Unspeakable. Too briefly we drift full of mighty nothing, an awe and
silence shared by all creative writers - until the urgency to write claims
us, and we fall back into uniqueness.
Then, it goes down as it always
has - linguistic flow leads to narrative vision - just as Odin describes
in verse 141 of the Icelandic saga Havamal. There, the wizard god acknowledges
what happened with him after he received the runes and the art of writing:
"Then began I to grow
and gain in insight,
to wax eke in wisdom:
one verse led on to another verse
one poem led on to another poem." |