Monica Carroll
Do you ensure a word’s meaning layers break, lance, pierce, Writer?
Chelicerae:
piercing appendages in the face of a scorpion or spider
claw, talon, pincers
cloven hoof of cattle
surgical forceps
hooked needle, crochet needle
notch of an arrow
The fur-lined teacup, saucer and spoon sculpture, created by Meret Oppenheim in 1936, is usually titled ‘Fur Breakfast’ but also has the titles ‘Object’ and ‘Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)’.
Do you feel the power in naming things as they are, Writer?
How do you work with confession, Writer?
Extract from fiction writer G. M. Untervants:
“I had this supervisor who was blind. He called himself blind, not vision-impaired, so he was OK with me saying the word ‘blind’. Frankly, it still makes me feel a little co-opted, like I’m going to get a social frowny no-no every time I say it; anyway, he’s blind.
He used to see. I never asked what happened. In fact, I tried to talk to him as little as possible. I tried hard to not talk to him, especially alone. He gave me the creeps. I know you’re not meant to say stuff like that but the truth is, he did. He was creepy like a fiddling uncle or someone who never washes with soap because they think natural body odours are, you know, ‘natural’.
One afternoon he turned up to the team project meeting. He had the blur of a liquid lunch and stank like a midday beer mat. He turned up but his pants didn’t. His withering legs dangled in faded boxers and if you looked, he was poking through. I saw it but not because I was trying to see. I was just sitting in this meeting and someone said, ‘Craig mate, where are your trousers?’ I turned and it was in my line of view. Craig wasn’t embarrassed or anything. He said, ‘It’s my goal to get through this week without wearing trousers.’
Eleanor, she’s the same level as me but has a different supervisor, she was horrified. I was too, but I already knew how creepy Craig was. So, Eleanor, after the meeting, she complains to HR. Fair enough, right? You shouldn’t have to see penis in a team project meeting. HR hired an ‘independent investigator’. It was a big deal. Everyone got asked questions and recorded on camera. Turns out, Eleanor got charged with harassment for complaining about Craig. I stopped buying guide dog raffle tickets at Christmas and left the public service.”
Untervants, G. M. 2023. Confessions of the Pubic Servants APS2 to APS6. Melbourne: Rough Edge Press
Tell me Writer, how hard do you love a good list?
Up the hill I went, Seeing every blade of grass and every pebble very clearly. Then I was in among the trees where the air seemed made of shadows and the spaces were all twisty. The trees were all somehow crippled-looking, wrong in their shapes. The ground was littered with dead leaves and fallen branches and all kinds of rubbish: rusty tin cans, a rotting car seat, used condoms, crumpled empty cigarette packets, a broken suitcase full of pulpy letters with rain-blurred hand-writing, a lady’s shoe, and soggy newspapers from years ago (Hoban 1996:52).
Hoban, R. 1996. The Trokeville Way. New York: Knopf
Writer, what do you create from accidents?
The tenth poem in Danish writer, Klaus Rifbjerg’s Portrait, portrays the wedding in Rifbjerg’s typical experimental style of words dislocated from logic and expectation. Rifbjerg calls these poems tilfældighedsdigte (accidental/coincidental poems).
slam your legs up on the supper buffet
you have not yet been betrayed
the bridal waltz will be danced
put him down then the liar take him eat him
in the bed of chewed blood oranges
now you are home shit princess
now you can kneel in Abraham’s bosom
of imperishable nylon
dip your vinegar sponge in the midst of the slush
Rifbjerg, K. 1963 Portræt. Copenhagen: Glydendal
Joan Littlewood: “I don’t care who we are. If five of us are gathered at random in this room and we have a subject and it’s exciting, we’d get together on it; you read one bit, I’ll read another, someone can dance, someone knows about music. The objective is just in the team looking for protein; they might not find it, but they might find something quite different” (Littlewood in McCrindle 9:1971).
How do you know when you’ve found protein, Writer?
Joan Littlewood (1914-2002) was both the founder and director of London’s Theatre Workshop.
McCrindle, J. F. (Ed.) 1971. ‘Joan Littlewood interviewed by Margaret Croyden’ in Behind the Scenes: Theater and Film Interviews from the Transatlantic Review. New York: Holt. Pp. 1-12
Monika Pagneux, theatre movement teacher, says in creating that we are not in representation, we are. Pagneux refrains from writing, photographing, recording her work. She insists it exist in the work, in the flesh bodies, of her students in practice.
Writer, how do you flesh-live writing?
“Well, to tell you the truth the dolly wasn’t beautiful at all; she was filthy dirty, she’d lost all her hair, and she was made of old rags. What’s more, this dolly used the most terrible bad swear words and the little girl learned every word and repeated them. ‘Who on earth taught you those dreadful words?’ her Mummy asked her. ‘My dolly’, replied the little girl” (Rame and Fo 1991:55).
Who teaches you new words, Writer?
Rame, Franca and Dario Fo 1991. ‘The Same Old Story’ in A Woman Alone & Other Plays. Trans. Gillian Hanna. London: Methuen Drama pp. 49-60
In Stanislavski’s diary he wrote that his teacher, Arkadi Tortsov, spoke to the class against pernicious enemies of art. He said, “‘You must fight them as hard as possible, and, if that does not work, then they must be driven off the stage. And so,’ he turned to Varya once more, ‘make up your mind once and for all. Did you come here to serve art and make sacrifices for it or to exploit it for your own personal ends?’” (Stanislavski 2008:35).
Serve art. Make your sacrifices, Writer.
Stanislavski, K. 2008. An Actor’s Work. A Student’s Diary. Trans. Jean Benedetti. London: Routledge: From Konstantin Stanislavsky, 1950. Rabota Aktera nad Soboi [The Actor’s Work on Oneself] Moscow: Iskusstvo
Goethe’s life-long Faust project was not written as performable drama. From the early work of Urfaust, incorporated into the Fragment of 1790 and then Faust Part 1, we are offered not a ‘script’ but a cosmological framework that surrounds the story and adventures of the hero.
Dissent in content and form, Writer.
Who do you summon when the words won’t play?
Amable Tatsu (1795-1885) wrote to the lyre, silent and dusty, hooked above the wainscoting.
On silent days listen for the echo. That will be enough.
What is your harp, Writer?
L’Écho de la Harpe
D’un souffle vagabond la brise de la nuit
Sur ta corde muette éveille un léger brait:
Telle dort en mon sein cette harpe cachée,
Et que seule la Muse a quelquefois touchée.
Alors qu’un mot puissant, un songe, un souvenir,
Une pensée errante et douce à retenir,
L’effleurent en passant d’une aile fugitive,
Elle vibre soudain ; et mon âme attentive,
Émue à cet accord qui se perd dans les cieux,
Garde du son divin l’écho mélodieux.
Tastu, Amable 1827. Poésies. Paris: J. Tastu
How do you revive your writing eyes, Writer?
Seeing the world, rather than merely recognising it, is an offer of complicating perception. Agents of estrangement can bring about ostranenie (after Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky). Children and the child-like, animals wild and free, the stranger, the alien, the visitor, the guest; all can move us into seeing.
What do you do if shaken by fear, and by scruples, Writer?
“…Let us meet,
And question this most bloody piece of work,
To know it further.”
Shakespeare Macbeth Act II Scene iii
There’s always a reason.
“When talking about this, Brandi felt very ashamed, holding her stomach and almost doubled over with shame. She thought the first fire was ‘just gonna take care of it and forget about it … but it didn’t stop is all.’ She ‘thought she could leave it alone.’ She ‘doesn’t remember when the second one was.’ She connects her setting fires to times when she and Louie would get in arguments. They had a fight when she asked him to help pay her car insurance. She had been doing everything around the house and repairing all his vehicles. He responded ‘Why should I take care of your bills?’ Brandi says that she set fires ‘to get back at him … make the fire department look bad … he was on the fire department 30 years’” (Kinsler and Saxman 2007:91-2).
Seek the reasoning, find the reason, Writer.
Kinsler, P. J and A. Saxman, 2007. ‘Traumatized Offenders’ in Quina and Brown (Eds.) Trauma and Dissociation in Convicted Offenders, pp. 81-95
Quina, K. and L. S. Brown (Eds.) 2007. Trauma and Dissociation in Convicted Offenders. New York: Haworth Medical Press
Does your work endure, Writer?
Anytē of Tegea (early 3 BCE) was called one of the nine earthly muses for her epigrams and nature poems. Below is her epitaph for the tomb of two lost pets.
For her locust, the nightingale of the fields,
and her cicada that rests on the oak trees,
one tomb has little Myro made,
shedding girlish tears; for inexorable Hades
has carried off her two pets and their double song.
Ἀκρίδι τᾷ κατ᾽ ἄρουραν ἀηδόνι, καὶ δρυοκοίτᾳ
τέττιγι ξυνὸν τύμβον ἔτευξε Μυρώ,
παρθένιον στάξασα κόρα δάκρυ: δισσὰ γὰρ αὐτᾶς
παίγνι᾽ ὁ δυσπειθὴς ᾤχετ᾽ ἔχων Ἀίδας.
With thanks to Paton, W. R., 1917 The Greek Anthology. London: William Heinemann
“You may have sympathies, you may have grievances, you may have met with wrongs, and you may use them, if you chance to wish to, in the making of a play. But never in order to attack the wronger, never in order to voice your grievance, but merely using the material because it was sent to you by fate, as a wind of spring may chance to bring a straw to building birds” (Lord Dunsany 1928:62).
Straw comes. Build a strong nest Writer.
Lord Dunsany, 1928. ‘The Carving of the Ivory’ in The Art of Playwrighting. Lectures Delivered at the University of Pennsylvania on the Mask and Wig Foundation. University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 47-68.
Make it so they don’t know where to look, Writer. Make them dizzy.
Helmut Vaag, on the performance of his play Reinuvader Rebane (Cunning Fox):
“The extent of Ferdinand Veike’s imagination makes you dizzy. His puppet show takes up the whole wide stage. Until now, the stage of a puppet show has been four metres in width; Ferdinand Veike, however, makes use of as much as ten metres and perhaps would have used more, had the size of the room allowed it. He staged the play in a way that had the performance going on in three different points at once, so that the audience did not know where to look.”
With thanks to Mirko Rajas for the lead to Helmut Vaag via the 2012 Bachelors Thesis Estonian State Puppet Theatre – The First Decades, Turku University of Applied Sciences
“It is trite but true to say that the government should, in all its legal endeavours, be seen to uphold the law.
One of the fundamental ethical duties owed by a lawyer is the avoidance of any compromise to their integrity and professional independence. A lawyer must not act as the mere mouthpiece of their client. The actions of government lawyers take on extra significance because the government is a client which has powers and obligations that far exceed those of the normal citizen” (Holmes 2023:519).
You have obligations, Writer. They matter.
Holmes, Catherine 2023. Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme Vol.2 Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia
Secant time. You can do that. You are a writer, after all. You can make anything happen.
From playwright Julie Goodall (1997:235):
She knocks over her cup. AUDREY jumps up to wipe the table. ISABEL indicates no.
ISABEL: If you were a fly you’d see that in slow motion. They’re so tiny, they perceive smaller amounts of time than we do. Smaller than a second. I saw it on TV. You knock over your cup. It sees the coffee pour out like a slow waterfall. Or lava flowing down. Hitting the table drop by drop. And single drops fly up to make a crown. Small units of time. See, Audie?
AUDREY nods.
Writer, would you like to stop time. See the moment. Is there collision? Is there crown? Is there crater?
Goodall, Julie. 1997. ‘Texas, Queensland’ in The La Mama Collection: Six Plays for the 1990s. Sydney: Currency Press
“Walking shuts down the sporadic soliloquy to whose surface sour rancours, imbecile satisfactions and easy imaginary vengeances rise sluggishly in turn. You are facing a mountain, walking among great trees, and you think: they are just there. They are there, they didn’t expect me, they were always there” (Gros 2015:82).
Want to go for a walk Writer? Your ideas are waiting.
Gros, F. 2015. A Philosophy of Walking. Paperback edition. London: Verso
Writer, how far can you travel with a single sail? Consider space over words; let life blow in.
Marcia Ferguson trims with a skeleton crew:
On the beach. VEE and ROD sit apart, relaxed, watching the waves. Silence.
Vee: I shaved my legs and now I get these ingrown hairs.
Rod: When did you start?
Vee: At a birthday party. I cut my skin. [Pause] When did you start shaving?
Rod: Twelve.
Vee: Did you have whiskers?
Rod: Nuh.
Vee: Did you shave tonight?
Rod: Trimmed it. Hate shaving.
He feels her legs.
Vee: It goes prickly.
Rod: I love that feeling.
Vee: Oh you do not!
Rod: I love it.
He rubs his cheek on her leg, she laughs. Silence.
Vee: [Laughing] It’s beautiful here. We used to come here when Mum and Dad were together.
Rod: Did you have a house?
Vee: Nah, a caravan.
Rod: Dad doesn’t like caravans. He’s too big he hits his head on the ceiling.
Vee: I’d love to live here.
Rod: I love you.
Vee: I know.
Rod: But I really love you.
Vee: Yeah.
Rod: I’ve never said that before.
Vee: That’s boys for you.
Writer, what is the least you can write?
Ferguson, Marcia 2008. Australian Marriage Act. Sydney: Currency Press, pp. 10-11
On writing The Sisters Rosensweig, Wendy Wasserstein said, “I wanted to … evoke a fondness for plays that I love, including Chekhov. On the day I finished it I thought, This was a lot of effort just to prove to myself what a good writer Chekhov is” (Wasserstein 1997).
What are you proving to yourself, Writer?
Winer, L. 1997. ‘Wendy Wasserstein, The Art of Theater No. 13’, The Paris Review.
“While elk, deer, cattle, and sheep use sagebrush as a nutritional forage in the winter, terpenes [a compound in sagebrush that is toxic in high dosage] limit their intake of sagebrush in accord with the amount of terpenes these herbivores can detoxify and eliminate from their bodies” (Provenza 2018:58).
Enough of the right poison, at the right time can be nourishing. A week of rehearsal observation at The Street Theatre, on Childers Street, felt both like poison but also nutritious.
If you, writer, see an opportunity for rehearsal observation, snap it up. It just might feed you over a winter.
Provenza, F. 2018. Nourishment. Vermont: Chelsea Green.
Rehearsal observation was for In His Words: Voices of Fatherhood. Created by Creswick (Liam Budge). Performed by the creator, Brett Williams, Ben Hauptman, James Hauptman, and Chris Pound. In addition to direction from The Street’s Caroline Stacey, Brittany Myers, Antony Hateley, Imogen Keen and Kimmo Vennonen.
Cora Diamond says, “Look somewhere else: that is what we can hear in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy; look where you do not think there can be any reason for looking” (p.143).
Where do you have no reason to look, Writer? Hurry-scurry to that looking.
Diamond, C. 1995. ‘What does a concept-script do?’ in The Realistic Spirit MIT Press, pp. 115-144.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz is renowned for writing on the poetics of power, especially on the use of ritual and symbol in political spectacle.
In Negara, The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali, Geertz constructs an ethnographic account using historical descriptions of theatrical sacrifice. He includes an archival description of three sacrificed concubines, kept by a deceased Rajah. As part of a public ritualised spectacle, the women leapt to their deaths, diving into a sea of flames, each holding a small dove which flew upwards as the women fell, symbolising their escaping spirits (p.101).
Geertz says, “It was an argument, made over and over again in the insistent vocabulary of ritual, that worldly status has a cosmic base, that hierarchy is the governing principle of the universe, and that
the arrangements of human life are but approximations, more close or less, to those of the divine” (p.102).
An interesting aspect of Geertz’ argument in this, and his other works, is that political theatre is neither a means to displaying nor gaining power, it is political theatre as an end in itself.
Can you, writer, devote your heart and hours as an end in itself?
Geertz, C. 1981. Negara, The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali, Princeton University Press
Event: Independent Theatre Forum, 6.30pm, 31 May 2023, ACT Hub.
Karl Valentin, (1882-1948), the German comedian and satirist, tendered the idea of introducing »Allgemeine Theaterbesuchspflicht« (general obligation to attend theatres) as a means of reinvigorating theatre attendance, and thereby, production.
“Where do these empty theatres come from? Only from the absence of an audience. And only the government is to blame for this. Why is there no compulsory theatre? If everyone had to go to the theatre, things would be different. Why is there compulsory schooling? No student would go to school if they didn’t have to. Even if it is not easy, it would not be difficult to introduce compulsory theatre as well. Good will and duty make everything happen” (Valentin 1992:47-8) (My translation, original text below).
No one from last night’s panel discussion of Canberra’s independent theatre scene suggested Compulsory Theatre as a remedy to our current woes, but, as discussed, there were periods of Canberra’s theatre history where theatre-going possessed a joyful but undeclared compulsory force.
As part of the 2023 Forum Series, the ACT Hub offered a solid night’s discussion – chaired by Peter Wilkins – with some esteemed members of the Canberra independent theatre and dance scene: Jarrad West, Karen Vickery, Chris Carroll, Ali Plevey, and Lexi Sekuless.
Peter began with the question, ‘What is Independent Theatre?’ The answers were varied and interesting, and each revealed the intelligence and passion of Independent Theatre in Canberra today.
So, what is Independent Theatre?
Jared West, of Everyman Theatre, saw Independent Theatre as an opportunity to bring works that are not routinely staged to a Canberra audience; in Everyman these are existing works, not created works.
Karen Vickery placed Independent Theatre as sitting between the professional theatre strata (i.e. commercial and government-funded) and the community theatre strata. For Karen, Independent Theatre is about creating opportunities for work at the highest level by garnering the best local talent and providing opportunities to express and share that talent.
Chris Carroll, using a comparison to the concept of ‘Independent Film’, saw Independent Theatre as free from the shackles of the machinery of mass production and the requirement to maximise audience. This freedom, he argued, gives Independent Theatre the potential for greater artistic integrity, the chance to take risks, and an overall clearer artistic vision. Independent Theatre is, he said, “Trying to create work that values the art as the primary vocation; the purpose of the artists life.”
Ali Plevey shared her experiences of engaging and working with Independent Artists in site-specific contemporary dance. Ali recognised independence in the work of artists striving to “push the envelope” and engage with art forms “outside the box”.
Lexi Sekuless carried us through the homophone qualities of “independent.” As an adjective ‘independent’ is “values led”; Lexi said, “it has the quality of risk-taking and the values of the artist or company.” As a noun, ‘independent’ opens the conversation on theatre funding and resourcing.
Through this, and later phases of the discussion, the panel explored the interconnected meanings of ‘Independent Theatre’, ranging across issues of funding sources, audience development, and artistic excellence. The discussion made clear that Independent Theatre in Canberra can be an instrument for excellence in expression, genuine risk-taking, refinement of values, and an exploration of the purpose of art. From this vantage, perhaps Karl Valentin’s satire cuts through to authenticity as it is possibly true that “good will and duty make everything happen.”
Event: Independent Theatre Forum, 6.30pm, 31 May 2023, ACT Hub.
Chair: Peter Wilkins, Canberra Critics Circle
Panel: Jarrad West, Everyman Theatre & ACT Hub Creative Director
Panel: Karen Vickery, Chaika Theatre & ACT Hub Creative Director
Panel: Christopher Samuel Carroll, Bare Witness Theatre
Panel: Alison Plevey, Australian Dance Party
Panel: Lexi Sekuless, Mill Theatre & Lexi Sekuless Productions
Original text (extract)
ZWANGSVORSTELLUNGEN
WOHER DIESE leeren Theater? Nur durch das Ausbleiben des Publikums. Schuld daran — nur der Staat. Warum wird kein Theaterzwang einge- führt? Wenn jeder Mensch in das Theater gehen muß, wird die Sache gleich anders. Warum ist der Schulzwang eingeführt? Kein Schüler würde die Schule besuchen, wenn er nicht müßte. Beim Theater, wenn es auch nicht leicht ist, würde sich das unschwer ebenfalls doch vielleicht einführen lassen. Der gute Wille und die Pflicht bringen alles zustande (Valentin 1992:47-8).
Valentin, Karl. 1992. ‚Zwangsvorstellungen’ in Monologe und Soloszenen Vol. 1 of Sämtliche Werke in acht Bänden, miteinem Ergänzungsband, edited by Helmut Bachmaier and Dieter Wöhrle. Munich: Piper
What sort of lamp, Franz?
…[W]riting means revealing oneself to excess …. This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why even night is not night enough. … I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up!
Franz Kafka, “Letters to Felice,” 1913
Do the signs of auspiciousness reveal themselves only after?
Can ritual initiate the needed state?
Does writing, as verb, tell as spectacle in your body, writer?
I awakened early. It was a soft and slightly rainy Wednesday, not very different from others in my life, but I treasure that Wednesday as a special day, one that belonged only to me. … I poured a cup of black coffee and sat down at the typewriter. I took a clean white piece of paper—like a sheet freshly ironed for making love—and rolled it into the carriage. Then I felt something odd, like a pleasant tickling in my bones, a breeze blowing through the network of veins beneath my skin. I believed that page had been waiting for me for more than twenty years…
Allende, I. 1987/1988 Eva Luna
From Walter Ong:
“Once upon a time,” we begin. The phrase lifts you out of the real world.
Once lifted, where to, writer?
Ong, WJ 1975 The Writer’s audience is always a fiction. PLMA 90,1:9-21
In searching for ways to fasten truth and meaning to the structure of sentences, Donald Davidson says that,
One trouble with such sentences [i.e. ‘Galileo said that the earth moves.’ and ‘Scott said that Venus is an inferior planet.’] is that we do not know their logical form. And to admit this is to admit that, whatever else we may know about them, we do not know the first thing.
That we do not know “the first thing,” for Davidson, is a deficiency, a lack; a seemingly undesirable position from which only wrong moves can be played. Isn’t this, however, the achievement we strive for?
Twists and turns make a story story. The less that is known upfront and outright, and the more “the first thing” can be obscured by you, writer, then isn’t it the case that your work pulls deeper?
On Saying That, Synthese 19 (1968-69) 130-146.
What is the name of your demon?
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
From Orwell’s Why I Write (1946)
Note well: Thank you for the books, friend.
A need-fire is a ritually produced fire that reverses illness, blight and malady afflicting a village.
An interesting precondition to an efficacious need-fire is that all other fires in the region must be extinguished. Only in a state of darkness can a need-fire be struck.
We must begin in darkness, writer. If we lack darkness we must create it. Only then can your words have the power of a need-fire for yourself and others.
If you want to strike your own need-fire this is the historical process as described by the well-read J G Frazer in The Golden Bough.
Two poles were driven into the ground about a foot and a half from each other. Each pole had in the side facing the other a socket into which a smooth cross-piece or roller was fitted. The sockets were stuffed with linen, and two ends of the roller were rammed tightly into the sockets. To make it more flammable the roller was often coated with tar. The rope was then wound round the roller, and the free ends at both sides were gripped by two or more persons, who by pulling the rope to and fro caused the roller to revolve rapidly, till through the friction the linen in the sockets took fire. The sparks were immediately caught in tow or oakum and waved about in a circle until they burst into a bright glow, when straw was applied to it, and the blazing straw used to kindle the fuel that had been stacked to make the bonfire.
(Drive your cattle or horses through the smoke of a properly lit need-fire, or, walk yourself through the smoke and put a little ash on your face to cleanse and protect from whatever misfortune is afoot.)
Is there a deep deep down, writer? Is that where we are driving with our words and sounds and paper and scratching?
Thinking on the process of thought, John Robert, the philosopher in Iris Murdoch’s novel The Philosopher’s Pupil says he, “descended into primeval chaos and rose grasping some encrusted treasure which instantly crumbled. He pursued quarries into thickets, into corners, into nets, and at the end found nothing there. … If only he could get down deep enough, grasp the difficulties deep deep down and learn to think in an entirely new way.” (Emphasis in original.)
Is it a folly, or mere romance, to contemplate thinking in an entirely new way? Not thinking ‘about’ but thinking ‘how’. How does the wind think? How does a galah think? How does thinking think?
Protect the garden patch of your sprouting creativity and fertile idea-seeds, writer. Heed Elizabethan poet, Isabella Whitney, when she advises in A Sweet Nosegay;
In any wise, be chary that
thou lettest in no Swine:
No Dog to scrape, nor beast that doth
to raven still incline.
For though he make no spare of them,
to such as have good skill:
To slip, to shear, or get in time,
and not his branches kill:
Yet bars he out, such greedy guts,
as come with spite to toot.
And without skill, both Herb and Flower
pluck rashly by the root.
Extract from A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posy: Containing a Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers (1573)
Ever reflective and tender, Keats, in a letter to his love Fanny Brawne,
“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” (Feb. 1820)
Love the principle of beauty in all things, writer.
Are you afflicted with weakness of will, writer?
Do you sometimes suffer the malady of acedia?
What can remedy the bind of listlessness when there is only the want of energy?
Baudelaire suffered acedia. In his journal he wrote,
“In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it. In refusing instant conversion one risks damnation.
To heal all things, wretchedness, disease or melancholy, absolutely nothing is required but an inclination for work.”
Can you muster an inclination, writer?
Trust me; it will be enough.
Have you left it too late for your writing? Too late in the day? Too late in your life?
No. Not conceivable.
Marcus Aurelius says, “Many grains of incense fall on the same altar: one sooner, another later—it makes no difference.”
Write now, writer.
He turned his eyes from her, paced up and down the room, and murmured, “Things cannot go on this way,” between his teeth. Lotte, who sensed the terrible state into which these words had plunged him, tried to divert his thought by all sorts of questions, but in vain.
“No Lotte,” he exclaimed, “I shall not see you again!”
“Why do you say that?” she replied, “Werther, you can, you must see us again, only be moderate. O, why must you be born with this vehemence, this unconquerably clinging passion for everything on which you once lay hold! I beg you,” she continued, taking him by the hand, “be more moderate!”
(The sufferings of young Werther, Goethe)
O, why can Werther not be more moderate? Why must be so relentless? Why does he fall, doubt, hurt, commit?
For the reason that he is Werther.
Let yourself be who you are, writer.
Suffering will come whether you do or whether you don’t.
Ich wandle unter Menschen als den Bruchstücken der Zukunft: jener Zukunft, die ich schaue.
Und das ist all mein Dichten und Trachten, dass ich in Eins dichte und zusammentrage, was Bruchstück ist und Räthsel und grauser Zufall.
Und wie ertrüge ich es, Mensch zu sein, wenn der Mensch nicht auch Dichter und Räthselrather und der Erlöser des Zufalls wäre!
Die Vergangnen zu erlösen und alles „Es war“ umzuschaffen in ein „So wollte ich es!“ — das hiesse mir erst Erlösung!
(Also sprach Zarathustra, Von Friedrich Nietzsche)
Gathering by writing creates unity from the pain and chaos. Zarathustra claimed this as his rescue, his deliverance. Let that power into your words today writer. Turn every fact of the past into the acquiescence of your command. Be brave. Make it so.
“I walk among people as among the fragments of the future: the future into which I glance.
And it is with all my poetry and aspiration that I write into unity, as I gather the fragments and the riddles, and the terrible accidents.
And how can I endure being human, if each person were not also a poet and a riddle-reader and the Redeemer of accidents!
To redeem the past and to change everything from ‘It was’ into an ‘I wanted it so!’—that alone means redemption to me!
(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from Friedrich Nietzsche)
For the wounded normally fall in the direction of their wound: the blood spurts out towards the source of the blow; and the enemy who delivered it, if he is fighting at close quarters, is bespattered by the crimson stream. So, when a man is pierced by the shafts of Venus, whether they are launched by a lad with womanish limbs or a woman radiating love from her whole body, he strives towards the source of the wound… His speechless yearning is a presentiment of bliss.
Sensation and Sex
To cast a phenomenon as ineffable is effortless but is that you, writer, hiding from your hard work of bringing to words? Do you lay deceit upon your less than best so that you may settle? What labours allow you to articulate the speechless of being?
“To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly…”
This is Barthes’ observation in The Pleasure of the Text.
Why would it be the case, writer, that our best ideas come indirectly? What power lay hidden beneath our floorboards, in the back of the cupboard, waiting for us to grope and grasp at another object altogether so that we may say with surprise, ‘Look what I found’?
For Volume IV of his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote an entry for ‘End of the World’.
The greater part of the Greek philosophers held the universe to be eternal both with respect to commencement and duration. But as to this petty portion of the world or universe, this globe of stone and earth and water, of minerals and vapors, which we inhabit, it was somewhat difficult to form an opinion; it was, however, deemed very destructible. It was even said that it had been destroyed more than once, and would be destroyed again.
Let this set you free, writer. The end of the world will come again, and then again. Let it come. Hasten it with your words if you dare.
Following his early career success, a fictional revolutionary poet in Nabokov’s short story A Forgotten Poet, grasps for straws in the pond of ineptitude in his follow-up collection.
“… he had got hold of some German philosopher or other, and several of these poems are distressing because of the grotesque attempt at combining an authentic lyrical spasm with a metaphysical explanation of the universe…”
Do you, or someone you know, suffer from lyrical spasm? Are you tempted to dot your poems with the names of philosophers or literary theorists? It’s not too late to stop. Help is at hand. Just say no.
Writers need tactics. Tactics is the only known surviving work of philosopher Asclepiodiotus (c. 1 BCE – unknown). The text focuses on the titles and formation needed in the phalanx, including the use of chariots and elephants. Chapter V details the character and appropriate size of arms including the use of bronze shields and spears of varying lengths.
“And the Macedonians, men say, with this line of spears do not merely terrify the enemy by their appearance, but also embolden every file-leader, protected as he is by the strength of five…”
καὶ Μακεδόνες μὲν οὕτω τῷ στοίχῳ, φασί, τῶν δοράτων οὐ μόνον τῇ ὄψει τοὺς πολεμίους ἐκπλήττουσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῶν λοχαγῶν ἕκαστον παραθαρσύνουσι πέντε δυνάμεσι πεφρουρημένον
The things you fear in your writing, the things you are afraid to write are also the things that give you courage. Your greatest enemy, writer, may be you. Embolden yourself.
An idea from the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s book The Anthologist (2009):
Isn’t crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don’t weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what’s the first thing you do? You can’t help it. Crying is a good thing. And rhyming and weeping—there are obvious linkages between the two. When you listen to a child cry, he cries meter. When you’re an adult, you don’t sob quite that way. But when you are little kid, you go, “Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih.” You actually cry in a duple meter.
Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. We’ve got to face that, and if that’s true, do we want to give drugs so that people won’t weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die.
Tell me you sob. Tell me our poetry lives.
What have you read, writer, that made you weep?
Have you ever been betrayed by your words? In the comedic ‘war between the sexes’ text, Gospels of the Distaff (Les Evangiles des Quenouilles c.1475), a sewing circle of women, led by six elderly doctresses, decide to gather and share their collective feminist knowledge in the form of a book. Their knowledge is both profound and trivial.
On Garters in the Street
Nowe ye for as true as the gospell that yf the hose of a woman or of a mayden unbyndeth in the strete & that she lese it, it is sygne & fayleth neuer that her husbande or her loue gothe elles where.
(from Watson’s 1510 translation)
As none of the spinners and needleworkers can write, they ask a humble cleric to transcribe their teachings. He wields a pen, they wield the distaff. He transcribes their words not in the frame of an intimate knowledge but unfortunately, for himself and the women, ironically, as an immense joke.
You, writer, are in possession of both your knowledge and the means to write it. What are you waiting for?
Are you writing what needs to be written? It takes guts, and balls, to do so.
Take, for example, Gwerful Mechain (1460–1502); a medieval Welsh poet who wrote Poem to the Vagina as a correction to the canon of poems about women, and women’s bodies, that neglect the quim.
Cywydd y Cedor (Extract from Poem to the Vagina)
You are a body of boundless strength,
a faultless court of fat’s plumage.
I declare, the quim is fair,
circle of broad-edged lips,
it is a valley longer than a spoon or a hand,
a ditch to hold a penis two hands long;
cunt there by the swelling arse,
song’s table with its double in red.
And the bright saints, men of the church,
when they get the chance, perfect gift,
don’t fail, highest blessing,
by Beuno, to give it a good feel.
For this reason, thorough rebuke,
all you proud poets,
let songs to the quim circulate
without fail to gain reward.
What does your world say you must not write? What are you denied to write?
Write it.
The grace of writing is an allowance for change.
You, writer, are not stuck.
You are not trapped.
Take, for example, Dionysius the Deserter, sometimes also called Dionysius the Renegade (330-250BCE). He was a Stoic philosopher, poet and author of multiple books on apathy, training exercises (askesis), pleasure (hedone), freedom from the passions (apatheia), how to live, prosperity, kings, praise and barbaric culture.
Confronted with the pain of severe eye inflammation, Dionysius renounced stoicism. According to the biographical entry in Diogenes’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Dionysius “suffered so severely, he could not pronounce pain a thing indifferent.”
Instead, Dionysius concluded that pleasure is the chief good of life. He indulged his remaining years, as a Cyrenaic, in all manner of bodily luxuries and sensual pleasures.
And he wrote.
Disband the canon. Appraise the things you were told have significance. Read for yourself.
Poetry does not begin with the Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis. It begins, says Robert Graves in The White Goddess, with the Song of Amergin, an ancient Celtic calendar-alphabet.
I am the womb: of every holt,
I am the blaze: on every hill,
I am the queen: of every hive,
I am the shield: for every head,
I am the tomb: of every hope.
(Stanza III)
What are you, writer?
In Book II of Lives of Eminent Philosophers Diogenes recounts a story about Anaxagoras (500 – 428BCE), a Pre-Socratic philosopher who adopted Athens as his home in his twenties.
“When someone inquired of Anaxagoras, “Have you no concern in your native land?”
Gently, he replied, “I am greatly concerned with my fatherland,” and pointed to the sky.
Anaxagoras was tried for impiety and Medism in 450BCE. The accusations were based on his claims that the sun was a red, hot stone and that the moon was made of earth. Following the trial, ostracised from Athens, he returned to Iona and settled at Lampsakos where the anniversary of his death was marked as a holiday from school for all children of the region.
What claims do you own in your writing?
What statements do you utter that could befall trouble?
What lands do you call father?
What do you stand for, with your words, so that a public holiday may be named in your honour?
Reasons to Keep Writing 