Category: Writer’s block

The need-fire

Featured Monica Carroll11 Comments

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.)

Your herbs and flowers

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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)

What do you write with your last year of life?

Featured Monica Carroll16 Comments

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.

Gather inclination

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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.

What makes no difference?

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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.

Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen

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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)

Asking after the oblique mystique

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“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’?

 

End of the World

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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.

Has this ever happened to anyone you know?

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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.

 

Παραθαρσύνω: embolden and encourage

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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.