Simplify, Simplify…

Novelist Dorothy Sayers’ most well-known character, the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey, is welcome to his opinion that “a facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought”, but he’ll not dissuade me from my fondness for quotations. I collect pithy selections from other writers’ work and correspondence with an enthusiasm usually reserved for baseball card traders or fans of architectural remnants. I’ve always found a good quotation focuses my attention, helping to make another person’s wit or wisdom accessible in new and useful ways.

Like any collector, I enjoy showing off my treasures. A few of my favorites are posted here. Occasionally I pass along tidbits I find especially piquant or amusing via Twitter, but most of the time I go old-school, taping current favorites to the bottom of my computer monitor. Rarely inspirational in any traditional sense, these hand-written snippets are meant to provide the kind of wacky encouragement and perspective I find stimulating.

They change frequently and vary according to the nature of my current frustration. Only one has earned the privilege of continuous posting, a friend’s utterly perfect description of our beloved computers as “infernal persnickety time-suckers”.  Taken separately, each word is apt. Taken together, they bubble up into a perfect verbal storm that never fails to make me laugh, even as it washes my mind clean of whatever cyber-frustrations have built up around my desk.

More than Paper and Pen

I nearly missed it. Hardly larger than a child’s playhouse, tucked into a bend of Oklahoma highway, its red stone walls flickered in the rising light and complemented the hand-lettered sign. For rent? I thought as I drove past. Furnished?

Pulling onto the side of the road, I turned around and headed back to park in the dirt driveway that edged the property. A house to the east seemed vacant. An air conditioner humming in one of three slightly larger brick cabins to the west only added to the sense of desertion, if not desolation. Camera in hand, I walked around the car to get a better look at the cottage, and stopped.

Above the battered door, a carved stone lintel betokened human presence: friendship and welcome, affection, familial bonds.  Beautiful and unexpected, it brought tears to my eyes and unexpected longing to my heart. I wanted that cabin.

Bowling with Ansel Adams

Blogger or novelist,  columnist or poet, anyone who writes consistently knows the experience.  After hours or days of steadily increasing pressure, a dam breaks. Encouraged by the warmth of reflection, a jam of frozen thought gives way and words begin to flow, irrepressible syllables that splash and tumble over one another as they swirl away to unexpected conclusions.  Images rise into consciousness, yeasty and pliant as freshly homemade bread.  Sentences take on the burnished glow of parking lot pennies. Impatient phrases nudge against the resistant mind, begging for attention.  

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining.  Show me the glint of light on broken glass”, says Chekhov.   And now and then, we do.  Often we’re unable to explain how or why it happens ~ some lines do seem to “write themselves” ~ but however strange or inexplicable the experience, there’s no question that it’s real.

Kaleidoscope Eyes

 

Writing recently about the coming of the New Year, I admitted to loving “the image of the blank slate, the fresh canvas, the empty page. The thought of turning from the past and moving into a pristine future is deeply appealing. Like feet of freshly-fallen snow, a new year blankets the disappointments and pain, conflicts and loss of the old with beauty and peace.  Glinting in the sunlight, piled high on fenceposts and streets, whorling into intricate patterns against parking lots and sheds, the fresh emptiness of snow gives the illusion of clarity and simplicity.  Clean as a fresh canvas, empty as a page still waiting for words, it tempts us toward an imagined world free of complexity and ambiguity, a world reduced to the twin realities of sunlight and shadow.”

From time to time each of us hungers for the simplicity and clarity of a fresh start, and the New Year is a traditional time to acknowledge and assuage that hunger.  In this week’s Write on Wednesday prompt, Becca narrows the focus a bit by asking, ”What fresh ideas do you have for your writing?”  For a writer, the metaphoric hunger for an empty slate, a blank page free of  stunted paragraphs, unfinished sentences and untidy piles of words can be almost visceral.   When desks pile high with false starts, orphaned phrases and errant thoughts that refuse to lead to any good conclusion, the sense of frustration can be suffocating.   When it comes to a fresh start, writers’ block is not precisely the issue.   Writer’s boredom seems a more adequate description.  There is a certain ennui, a stifling lassitude, a distaste for one’s own thoughts that leads inexorably to that particular dead end called “I don’t have anything original to say.”

Surviving the Guilt, Reclaiming the Gift

Sometimes, we don’t have a choice about whom we entertain.

I don’t remember making a call and I surely didn’t send out invitations, but suddenly a new problem has come to visit.    Sitting cross-legged at the corner of my mind, riffling through my thoughts like so much junk mail and looking for all the world like a bored ingénue who’s misplaced her nail file, my problem doesn’t seem inclined to leave.  So, it’s time to set aside the social niceties, and cope with this uninvited guest.

My problem is a sudden inability to write.  Since Hurricane Ike, I’ve produced a few blogs,  including one or two that pleased me very much. But the joy of writing, the sense of unfettered creativity, the easy flow of words simply has stopped. Ideas continue to pile up in my head, notes get jotted and beautiful, fragile phrases flit through my mind like clouds of rare verbal butterflies, but none of them lands on my paper.

The experience is passing strange.

For someone whose home experienced the eye of a hurricane, I’m unbelievably blessed.  My house is secure, and my business will survive.  While I’m getting things back on an even keel, my mother not only is being cared for, she’s rather enjoying herself on an extended midwestern “vacation”.   The stray kitty I worried over survived the storm perfectly well with some help from the neighbors, and the camphor tree I planted and love lost hardly a leaf.

My possessions are intact, including a little antique china collection I fuss over every hurricane season.  I experienced no financial losses because of the storm, apart from evacuation expense,  loss of income and the need to throw out a refrigerator-full of food.  My flowers are blooming and my bills are paid.  In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, I have no problems.

And that, it seems, is the problem.