Writing to Live
I always think a lot about writing, but when I am on the Vineyard, I think about it what seems like all the time. In my mind, the other people in the coffee shop get to sit there and enjoy their coffee and their friends while I sit here feeling like a pastry bag searching for the right tip. I’m not envious of the other people—I just wonder why sometimes my body/mind has to turn life, describing it, seeing it through the written word, into such a big deal.
Why do I feel like I would die, be dead, if I didn’t write?
Maybe asking why isn’t the right approach. Maybe a cleaner way to talk about this is to just take the thing at face value: I live because I write. I also, obviously, write because I live.
I’ve been reading about prehistoric cave art because time and time again, when I think about writing I think about the hand paintings and stencils made by people like me (only not sneaker-clad or with crowns and feelings in their mouths) so many tens of thousands of years ago.
Some of the handprints are up high or placed so awkwardly when the artists could have created the prints in more accessible areas that scientists have come up with the concept they call palpation. These scientists think that perhaps these hand prints are actually a method of communication about how to move safely through the dim and often treacherous underground cave world.
When I was first in massage school, my teacher pulled out an orange and began feeling around the skin with his fingers. He told us he never peeled a piece of fruit without palpating it first. I watched him feel his way around that thing, and I have never wanted to badly to be a piece of fruit. He finally found a way in, a soft spot, and his thumb effortlessly slid its way in.
I had never palpated an orange like that. Or, truthfully, maybe anything.
The invitation and the permission to exist in the hands, to palpate the world, my own body, the fruit I was going to put in my mouth, was a game changer.
I had received similar permission in college when I took a writing class, only this was about the eyes and the invitation and permission to observe. “At last,” William Gass wrote, “I am living in my eyes.” This was such a relief. I didn’t have to always be “doing” something to feel like a good person, to feel like I had a purpose. It was enough to live in my eyes.
When I teach Write or Die, the third exercise involves describing a real or imagined photograph of you that shows the essence of who you are. I love this exercise because I had found that one reason I’d struggled for so long as a writer is that I had no idea who I was. It’s hard to narrate a story when you don’t know who the narrator is.
I have done this exercise now so many times, and each time I have seen the same picture of me: I’m 6 or 7. I’m wearing a nightgown and my long hair is uncombed. I’m standing on a white fence by our rented house on Martha’s Vineyard, and I’m watching the hippies come out of the converted chicken coop to greet the morning.
When I first realized this young girl was the essence of who I was, I found freedom. I was an observer. I was the young eyes that saw and reported back her sightings. This got me through a book and years of blogging. I was William Gassing my way through life, securely perched in my eyes.
But I realized something recently. Putting myself behind a fence as merely a pair of eyes may be the biggest cop-out of my life. What if I were one of the hippies? What if I were actively living as part of a community? What if I was involved in life more than I was acting as a camera?
Yikes. That’s totally scary. What if people don’t like me? What if I don’t get enough time alone? What if time goes so fast that the next thing I know I’m dead?
What if I was both the one who palpated and the one who is palpated? What if I write because I’m standing on the fence when really I want to be one of the hippies? What if I write because I’m afraid to live?
Or.
What if I write because life is so amazing and confusing and beautiful to me that I need to live it more than once? What if seeing it all isn’t enough? What if everything I experience goes into the pastry bag of my being and I need to pipe out proof I was here, proof I saw, felt, smelled, tasted the world.
What if I write to feel?
What does it mean to be touched, to touch?
What if I write because I want to leave a hand print on the cave wall that lets others know what I have learned about the best ways to move safely through this life?
Why do you write?
What do you want to leave behind on the cave wall and why?
It’s time to head for the beach to search for the shell my friend Janet Nordine requested. I know what it looks like in my mind. I just have to find the real thing out there emptied by a hungry gull and washed clean by the tides.
