Laying it All On The Line

The putting-off of meaning has been reflected in the fashionable writing of the last years. Our most popular novels and poems have been works of easy mysticism or easy wit, with very little between. One entire range is represented, for us, in the literature of aversion. There has been much silence. The silence of fear. Of the impoverished imagination, which avoids, and makes a twittering, and is still. –Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

There’s a difference between talking and writing. Everyone can talk. Not everyone can write. Sure, there are a few New Age money-makers who would like us believe otherwise. They’re out there journeying with heroes, writing down the bones, and providing 10 easy steps to writing the great American novel.

According to linguist Steven Pinker talking, language itself is an instinct. We need it for survival–always have, always will. Pinker, author of The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.) says if one person were isolated from birth from all others, that person would develop language–not English or Spanish or any other existing language–but his/her own language. But that person would not write. Historically, there’s lots of evidence for this. Prehistorical societies lived without writing, but never without language.

Writing is different than talking. Talking is not an art. Well, perhaps it is for Joan Rivers or Ellen Degeneres. But generally, talking is an instinct. Writing, as in forming letters and learning grammar, is a learned behavior. But writing that is art is an affliction. You are struck with the disease, or you are not.

Bottom line is: some writing is art, and other writing is not art. Writing as a substitute for talking is not art: a grocery list, a memo, a piece of technical writing that tells you how to do something because the teacher cannot be present; a manual; a book that goes so far into conversational tone that you eat out of boredom, pray for it to end, and love when it does end–these are forms of writing that take the place of talking. Boring, mindless, and soulless.

Writing a story or a poem does not take the place of talking. Even if you perform the story or the poem, it is still not talking, because lines have been crafted, formed into something that transcends talking. If you speak a poem, it is a performance, not a conversation. Same with oral storytelling.

The most basic element of any art is the line. Choreographers look for a dancer’s lines. The lines in painting, calligraphy, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography–these are what make the images interesting, original. Lines can turn a snapshot into a piece of art. In music, the line is the basis for a phrase, for a chord change. The line makes the difference.

Same is true in writing. Some would say we’ve forgotten the line. I say we’ve forgotten nothing. We long for it in ways we long for so many things that have been destroyed by the violence of marketing, greed and commerce. Feed us, we’ll eat, and still starve.

These days, mere information entertains us–because thinking makes us dangerous, and information is not thought. Information occupies our minds and satisfies us for a few seconds, then we move on to the next few seconds, and so on, our lives flavored by one saccharine packet in our java followed by another: sweet and wired, we are; fake and energetic.

Pages of information is not good nonfiction writing. Story is only half the story of a novel. If a work of fiction is only story, why write it down? Why not put it on the screen, act it out (where the actors, not the writers, will turn the lines into art)? Why have writers given up their art to other artists?

Writing, like all art, begins (and ends) with the line. There is a beauty in the line that is lost if we look solely at story. Lines have music in them, have image, have art and soul. They turn a corner with surprise. They are not just information and story. They are what makes a story worth writing, and so, worth reading. Listen:

Fleur took the small roads, the rutted paths through the woods traversing slough edge and heavy underbrush, trackless, unmapped, unknown, and always bearing east. — Louise Erdrich, Four Souls : A Novel (P.S.)

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. — Vladamir Nabokov, Lolita

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. –Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

—Money . . . in a voice that rustled. William Gaddis, JR

My heart– I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God. –Amy Hempel, Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane. –Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Those nettling paint chips stuck to my slick skin, the fingernail on blackboard sound, and the sweat bees drawn to my stickiness. –Ann Pancake, Strange As This Weather Has Been

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. -Louise Erdrich, Tracks

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. — Ron Sukinick, Blown Away

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. –John Hawkes, Second Skin

I felt its urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. –Jay Griffiths, Wild

Some of the best stories are simple stories. And the best line is the line that simply says what is, and what is rarely adheres to grammar, and never adheres to cliche. No line=no art=no heart=not worth reading. Simple as that.

These first (and sometimes middle) lines in fiction and nonfiction justify their existence on the page with music, image, surprise, and with heart.