Ambling Aimlessly in a Garden of Impressions
The pedagogic dictum to preplan one’s writing strikes me as all wrong
Nothing in mind? So experiment.
Close your eyes. Relax. (I’m coaching myself.) Listen.
Not yet six. Cloudy crepuscular light. (Delicious word, crepuscular, a poem in itself.) Jane and Henry both still sleeping. Do NOT open your laptop! Entering that free-for-all OBLIGES me to check email, headlines, regulars. These days news avoidance is like postponing hearing a biopsy result. You want to know and you don’t.
Silence. Or rather, what we call silence, the continuous complex counterpoint we notice in the absence of noise. In the nineteenth century silence could be a drug on the market – read Chekhov. In the twenty-first century it’s as precious as myrrh. (I don’t know whether myrrh is precious, but I love the word.)
Notice but do not focus. Let your mind bob like a swimmer in a warm salty sea. Open your mind’s windows to any passing inkling. We keep so much out of our mind because we can’t use it or it threatens us. “Need to know” is Consciousness’ bouncer. Make a list of all the thoughts you’d prefer not to think (a missive topic?). The most offensive attribute of the Nameless One is how he invades one’s thoughts despite prohibitions, like the smell of smoke.
Having ambled aimlessly in this garden of impressions, clip a few blossoms to carry indoors and arrange. Six hundred words is a vase of precise proportions, so don’t pick too many. Does confining myself to six hundred words doom me to superficiality? I sometimes think so. But it suits my hummingbird attention, sipping this blossom and that. If I had a big idea, I might make something big. But I distrust big ideas. The bigger they are the surer they are of themselves. A Pyrrhonist (like Montaigne), I’m unsure of everything, including whether I’m unsure of everything. Socrates claimed the like – “All I know is that I know nothing,” he said – but he didn’t act that way. He lectures like a know-it-all, which is why he gives me hives.
Place a blossom in its container – there! Don’t deliberate long, almost any blossom will suffice. One blossom – or word – implies the next. The pedagogic dictum to preplan one’s writing strikes me as all wrong. Reiterating what one knows (or thinks one knows) is tedious. Discovery is the joy of composition.
With surprising rapidity words will arrange themselves if you let them. Just give them their head, let them tug you, not the other way around. Your words know more than you do – but shy, they must be encouraged. On a good day my words pour as blood into a vial. Happy conversations unfold that way too. You’ve no idea where they’re headed – and your time is up.
Nearing its close I start feeling around for the moral of a missive. Description without direction rankles. Readers want to know the point of what they’re being told. Not knowing the point, they start getting antsy: Why is he telling me this?
The point of today’s outing is almost too evident to state: the interest of our world depends on us.“Only bores are bored,” my mother used to sing-song. An infinitude awaits our inspection and reflection, but we must permit ourselves the freedom to explore. Whoever tells you they’ve “nothing in mind” is either dodging the question or indicting themselves for mental torpor.
I love our daily outings because they force me to find words that may be worth your while. As Henry Adams put it, “The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express.” We live in a world of wonders – if we open our eyes.