On Writing
A small note on where I've been, the first fruit of spring, and a small invitation should you like to be involved.
Silent Spring
It has been a cruel winter.
Even the idea of writing things down has found a way to terrify me. Coming home after work, often to places I am only staying one or two nights, the white wall of the page makes ghoulish faces appear. “My year of silence,” I repeat to myself, a mantra for staying sane.
My dad, walking the dog one day, bumped into an old colleague of mine. She goes to the same church as him, and she made the connection quickly. “Would you mind asking,” my father repeated to me over burnt coffee, “if he’d run a writers’ group at the library. And I said yes you would do it.”
I didn’t want to do it. I had just spent over a year in a cauldron of shame, boredom, terror, anxiety, frustration, all aimed at the same target - writing. Helping others, or even worse, teaching others to write was nowhere on the map of my plunge to literary obscurity. Convinced by my father’s acceptance on my behalf, I emailed the local library and set a date.
I feared the group would save me. That I would finally admit to myself that community is more important than literary genius; that perhaps genius is crafted together, not in the isolation of a cabin but in the warm air of the library table, too short for anyone to sit comfortably.
My plan was to instill the edicts of challenge. I don’t want to be a leader, a teacher, a revered whoever-he-thinks-he-is of a miniscule collection of writers. I want to cultivate something else, something that isn’t usual. And I would definitely not be teaching them anything. The group, all seasoned group-goers, reacted well. I explained my position, one of camaraderie and not of hierarchy, and that all the exercises (if you could call them that) I would also do. And so, the first task was set: to write about writing. No specific genres, no word length, no rules really, except to respond to the charge: Your Name, on writing.
I plan to share everything that I write with you here. We meet once a month. There may even be more regular work about performance. I can’t promise that. I can promise some kind of a look into what I think, what conversations we have as a group, and if you fancy it you can join in. I’m sure the group would love that.
Jon Berry On Writing
I have always been suspect of absolutes.
Throughout my life I have taken positions on writing. The act and the concept, the force and the feeling, writing has been a preoccupation of mine. From an early age writing has been some escape. Agonising over poor metaphors in bed as an adolescent, having lofty and too-luxurious poems published in a local magazine, to holding the physical manifestation of my work in my hands, writing has been a consistent practice. Perhaps consistent is wrong; my years of complaining to myself (and to others) about my inability to write, my frustration with myself/my environment/my artistry stopping what I was “meant” to be doing. Writing is a firm island in my existence to date.
Sitting to put my thoughts down on writing has been a marathon. Once, a doctor professed me “pensive”; my mother has always called me “deep”. More often than not an idea latches to my brain like food in my teeth, and before I know it I am driving myself mad trying to get it unstuck without a proper way to take a good look. What I think about writing, something so immensely ancient and well-trodden, feels like a chia seed in a maw of history. Writing is so large, so long, so important. To discuss it is to risk some awful fate. Writing is a plant that long has and long will outlive me.
I am painfully aware of its tendrils. When I think about writing, I think within it; when I try to describe writing, it spreads out, a million rabbits running down a million warrens. My recent (and yet always arriving) philosophical disposition against stasis betrays my love of writing, a traitorous pair in uneasy partnership. At least, that is what I suspect would be said. Writing is the making static, the making concrete – writing’s origins in its various birthplaces always stems from a desire to record something that would otherwise disappear. Writing, quite literally, is the making static of the ephemeral.
Instead I see writing as anything but static. Writing, from the gutter I lie in, is always moving. French philosopher and essayist Jacques Derrida wrote extensively (and verbosely at that) about philosophy’s tendency through the ages to prioritise speech over writing. Something of writing’s ability to be changed, to be crafted, betrayed itself to early philosophy as some kind of artifice. Derrida sought to reverse this tendency, prioritising writing as a philosophical craft enabling something speech cannot. In one sense, I align with Derrida.
Writing is no abstraction to me. Writing is both writing and reading – it is a surface and its own depth. In a literal sense, the arrangement of glyphs on a surface produces recognisable patterns, opening up the possibility of reading. Writing then is a technology: it enables the transfer of information, no, more than information. The temptation is to say that writing encodes, it entraps something of the world into itself; communication. Writing goes much further than this.
Writing allows us, those who can experience it, to encounter the potential of change. Writing cannot, and will never, capture thought – it is immediately out of time with thought, two dancers haring different beats. Writing cannot capture the world, its lame tools improper. Writing, however, transforms. It is an alchemy, a pact, something that is at once immediately knowable and occult, divine and profane. Simultaneously, writing is both the transfer and the transformation of the world, how thinly that world is sliced. It allows for an encounter for the reader with another time, another place, another body – writing is a molasses, a treacle on the board of life.
Writing, both doing and redoing, is some kind of magic act. In writing, I attempt to bottle lightning - this, here now in my mind, in my fingers, in my soul. This I need to record, and in recording I transform it, give it some new sense. Perhaps I give it rhyme, metre, form; perhaps I condense, pour sense into neat parcels, nuggets, bombs. It is by writing that I attempt, vainly, to produce a change in the world, a new beat to the rhythm.
Within writing is its double, reading. Writing feels like it must capture some thing, even as uncommunicable as it is. It is in this capture, this recording, imperfect and imprecise, that the double-edged sword arise – to write is to be read. This is the true dance of writing, that of writing and reading. They are skaters on ice: moving, spinning, away or towards, in a close embrace or at opposite ends. Yet it is the ice that joins them, the potential to move, to glide together or apart. Writing and reading are in a constant dance, one that produces marks and relationships between each other in a ceaseless whirl.
To read is to re-write. Writing, itself, is to re-write. It is an always-transformation, one that is tied to its raw matter – its glyphs – and to its timeliness. Writing is both of and apart from language; language can produce new writing without changing its form. Think of the new interpretations of Shakespeare, of Chaucer, of whosoever; language transforms writing just as writing transforms language. Beyond this, writing can affect without language-understanding. It is hard to shake off the power of writing when looking at the dives and twirls of Arabic calligraphy, or the crude joy of ancient Greek graffiti. Writing then is not within language; perhaps our dance is a pied a trois.
All of this is to say that writing is wonder. It is a difficult birth, an unsteady fire. When I sit down to write, I wish for something to take over me and allow itself to speak. I am in awe of writing and drawn to it. My deepest desire is to produce a change; to write something that produces a profoundness in another. Writing, then, puts on its final hat: it is the desire to be more than one.
An absolute? Or a perspective from one hill in a landscape rolling? Writing is both quite literal and entirely otherwise; it is both a sort of stasis and a surrender to never staying still. The more I think about writing, reading, meaning, sense, time, it all becomes beautifully, sharply unclear. Writing feels less like a thing and more like a doing; a verb pretending to be a noun.
Somewhere I read that reading is a way to break out of this cursed cage of self. I extend this to writing too. To be exposed to writing, all writing, is to come into contact with the potential for something new. To risk one’s world to change, and to dare writing to try. Writing is a current, a moving and deeply real force that threatens to alter everything we know. Whether is it to read or write yourself, to encounter writing is to open up yourself to the potential that living may now be a difference. The safe passage to the world that once was no longer guaranteed; isn’t that exciting?