a myriad eyes
"The memory doesn't bring our friends back so much as it allows us to see them. Perhaps to see them with a sudden and revealed clarity. Perhaps to see them as, frankly, we never saw them when they were with us. And if we see, what we see is not a thing of memory, not the past but rather the present . . . And, if we see, this is also not a matter of memory. It stands before us in a sudden and revealed clarity. Stands before us as our friends' work and as itself. It is an unexpected gift, an unexpected clear gift."
- John Taggart
occasional hauntings and disturbances have been documented
" . . . for with some people," he wrote, "the imagination is so vivid as to be almost an extension of consciousness. . . ." But here he stuck absolutely. He was not quite sure what he meant by the words, and how to finish the sentence puzzled him into blank inaction. It was a difficult point to decide, for it seemed to come in appropriately at this point in his story, and he did not know whether to leave it as it stood, change it round a bit, or take it out altogether. It might just spoil its chances of being accepted: editors were such clever men. But, to rewrite the sentence was a grind, and he was so tired and sleepy. After all, what did it matter? People who were clever would force a meaning into it; people who were not clever would pretend - he knew of no other classes of readers. He would let it stay, and go on with the action of the story. He put his head in his hands and began to think hard."
- Algernon Blackwood
The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories
but Art - a House that tries to be Haunted."
- Emily Dickinson
Ghost Lights
A still breath on the summer breeze
and high hills in Dak To loom
over us. No quick answers ever
spring to mind, no drops of peace,
not even less than slow, perhaps,
now, inertia, a gradual "settling in."
We no longer even move our lips to ask
or, if we do, old slogans drop from voices
that always have an answer and never find
a truth, just wriggling obfuscations and
something like the Marfa lights dancing
at the dark ends of ancient tunnels.
- H. Palmer Hall
All Saints' Day
Today no breath of life's allowed
For Autumn spins her silken shroud
Thread upon thread the earth is bound
(November's needle makes the round).
No wind may lift the fallen leaf,
No flower, split the face of grief.
No flight of birds distracts the eye
Across the smooth unraveled sky.
So still the day, so pure, so bare;
Imprisoned in her crystal stare,
Earth waits a miracle - Man too;
This is the day all saints pass through.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The Unicorn and Other Poems
"The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then - and only then - it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk's."
- Annie Dillard
"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."
- Annie Dillard
"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment."
- Annie Dillard
"It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years' inventions and richnesses. Much of those years' reading will feed the work. Further, writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick. Similarly, since every original work requires a unique form, it is more prudent to struggle with the outcome of only one form - that of a long work - than to struggle with the many forms of a collection.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too - the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that. He finds ways to minimize the difficulty; he strengthens other virtues; he cantilevers the whole narrative out into thin air and it holds. Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hopes for literary forms? Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking."
- Annie Dillard
Write Till You Drop
"Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented . . .
Reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."
- C.S. Lewis
An Experiment in Criticism
"A novel is a big dream, a whale of a dream. You have to go under for a long time into the dark waters of the mind and stay there. The problem is that there are no good maps for the journey of a writer; each one goes it alone. Ultimately, that is always true, but it's good to hear accounts of the process, so we know others have walked the path.
We, as writers, need to legitimize our way as a path that we have taken. Instead, a lot of writers act like victims plagued by the agonies of writing. We are actually great warriors facing the barriers to truth. We are digesting experience for society."
- Natalie Goldberg
Wild Mind
is like building altars on paper."
- Adam Kinsey
"When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own."
- John Berger
"Works do not have a meaning, rather they have different possible readings, and the possibility of reading lies in the fact that at the heart of the work there lies an absence. The center of the work is a void; this is what fascinates.
The fault of impatience is the desire for the work to mean something. In Kafka's case, as he sometimes writes in his diaries, this was the desire for the work to be a means of salvation. The other side of his experience, however, was the failure of writing; the numerous stories begun and then abruptly aborted. Writing as a terrifying experience of the impossibility of writing. This as the 'truth' of writing, rather than as a sanctuary for someone expelled from the ordinary world of work and love.
The everyday world is made up of meanings which are present to the individual and therefore determined by a horizon of truth. It is this world which disappears in the work. The world of the work is quite different from the world of work. In the everyday world, all is there to be grasped and acted upon. In the world of the work, everything appears ambiguous, and the horizon of this ambiguity is the absence of meaning altogether. The idea of a book only appears in its own impossibility. Every individual author experiences this as the failure of the work to reach perfection.
The writer, unlike the philosopher, is not a mouthpiece for an anonymous truth; rather writing is the very experience of the impossibility of truth."
- Will Large
In Writing
"If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you."
- Henry Rollins
Today has hurt my heart even more.
the autumn wildgeese have a long wing for escort
as I face them from this villa, drinking my wine.
The bones of great writers are your brushes, in the school of heaven,
and I am Lesser Hsieh growing up by your side.
We both are exalted to distant thought,
aspiring to the sky and the bright moon.
But since water still flows, though we cut it with our swords,
and sorrows return, though we drown them with wine,
since the world can in no way answer our craving,
tomorrow I will take to a fishing-boat.
- Li Po
"I believe that what we want to write wants to be written. I believe that as I have an impulse to create, the something I want to create has an impulse to want to be born. My job, then, is to show up on the page and let that something move through me, in a sense, what wants to be written is none of my business."
- Julia Cameron
"There is such a thing as unconditional expression that does not come from self or other. It manifests out of nowhere like mushrooms in a meadow, like hailstones, like thundershowers."
- Chogyam Trungpa
"Didn't anyone ever tell you it was all right to write?" asked the psychiatrist.
"Yes, but not to be a writer." Behind me lay the sort of middle-class education that encourages writing, painting, music, theater, so long as they aren't taken too seriously, so long as they can be set aside once the real business of life begins."
- Jane Cooper
Maps and Windows
"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.
I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist;
I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.
But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living."
- Anais Nin
Sunset
Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,
leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs -
leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Robert Bly
I know not,
But with gratitude
My tears fall.
- Saigyo
"The English word gratitude is related to grace. It is the enjoyment of receiving as expressed in giving. It is a living, vivid mirror in which giving and receiving form a dynamic practice of interaction. For receiving, too, is a practice. Look at the word arigato, Japanese for "thank you." It means literally, "I have difficulty." In other words, "Your kindness makes it hard for me to respond with equal grace." . . . The word arigato expresses the practice of receiving."
- Robert Aitken
The Practice Of Perfection
"Writing is closer to thinking than speaking."
- Joseph Joubert
"Writing is a witness, a seismograph of sentiment as well as of meaning."
- Georges Jean
"Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind."
- V.S. Pritchett
"Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."
- Scott Adams
"The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they’ve been in."
- Dennis Potter
Poem As Priest
Like the good Catholic boy
who tells his all
to the patient priest,
the poet pours his soul
into the poem,
confesses his passions,
his private fears,
that flow like lamb's blood
upon the pure white page
that passes sentence
after sentence
upon his sins
and turns his penance
into prayer.
- Charles Ghigna
"The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)"
- C.S. Lewis
An Experiment in Criticism
"Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
- Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood
"I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven't seen anybody all day."
- Angela Carter
Expletives Deleted
- W. Somerset Maugham
"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."
- W. Somerset Maugham
- W. Somerset Maugham
"Don't listen to any advice, that's what I'd say. Write only what you want to write. Please yourself. You are the genius, they're not. Especially don't listen to people (such as publishers) who think that you need to write what readers say they want. Readers don't always know what they want. I don't know what I want to read until I go into a bookshop and look around at the books other people have written, and the books I enjoy reading most are books I would never in a million years have thought of myself. So the only thing you need to do is forget about pleasing other people, and aim to please yourself alone. That way, you'll have a chance of writing something that other people will want to read, because it'll take them by surprise."
- Philip Pullman
"Don't compare yourself to anyone, and learn to keep from building expectations. People develop at different rates, with different results, and luck is also involved. Your only worry for yourself should be did I work today? Be happy for the successes of your friends, because good fortune for one of us is good fortune for all of us . . . You will never write anything worth keeping if you allow yourself to give in to petty worries over whether you are treated as you think you deserve, or your rewards are commensurate to the work you've done. That will almost never be the case, and the artist who expects great rewards and complete understanding is a fool."
- Richard Bausch
"Trust your original impulse. Trust the muse completely until she proves to be, beyond the shadow of a doubt, unfaithful. But after vision comes revision. That's another thing, a bag of tricks and then some. You need to know, confidently, that during revision you can fix anything, change anything to suit yourself . . . all of us would rather not have to revise anything at all. Just put it through the typewriter or into the computer, perfect and complete the first time, effortlessly. Pure inspiration. No sweat and strain and doubt. And that happens, probably will happen once or twice in your lifetime. And that will always seem to be the best time, the way it ought to be. But through the labor, sometimes hard labor, you will discover what every good writer does, that you can make a work seem to be the effortless result of pure inspiration."
- George Garrett
"The use of automatic writing or scribbling to tap the subconscious was borrowed by the Surrealists from spiritualist mediums ( particularly Helene Smith, Muse of Automatic Writing ). The objective of Automatism is to capture original thoughts, uncontaminated by reason or aesthetics, through accelerated intensified doodling in which unexpected and unpredictable images can appear. It works like this. Put yourself in a receptive frame of mind ( a bottle of scotch helps ) and draw or write something without consciously thinking. That's much more difficult than it seems. The hope is that the resulting scrawl or wordage produces an unpredictable image to develop into something new and original."
- Alan Fletcher
The Humpbacks
Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.
- Mary Oliver
The whale moves in a sea of sound:
shrimps snap, plankton seethes,
fish croad, gulp, drum their air-bladders,
and are scrutinized by echo-location,
a light massage of sound touching the skin.
The small, toothed whales use high frequencies:
Finely tuned and focused sound-beams,
intense salvoes of bouncing
clicks, a thousand a second,
with which a hair, as thin as
half a millimeter, can be detected;
penetrating probes,
with which they can scan
the contents of a colleague's stomach,
follow the flow of their blood
take the full measure of
an approaching brain.
From two cerebral cavities
in their melon-shaped heads,
they can transmit two sonic probes,
as if talking in stereo,
and send them in any direction
at the same time:
One ahead, one behind, one above, one below . . .
lengthening the sound-waves,
shortening them, heightening them,
until their acoustic switchboard
receives the intelligence required.
Spoken to in English,
the smallest cetacean, the dolphin,
will rise to the surface,
alter its vocal frequencies
to suit the measures of human speech,
pitch its voice to the same level
as that of human sounds
when traveling through air -
an unfamiliar medium -
adjust the elastic lips of its blow-hole,
and then, after courteously waiting
for silence,
produce a vibrato imitation
of human language:
Words, phrases, sentences . . .
- Heathcote Williams
Whale Nation
To Tu Fu from Shantung
You ask how I spend my time -
I nestle against a treetrunk
and listen to autumn winds
in the pines all night and day.
Shantung wine can't get me drunk.
The local poets bore me.
My thoughts remain with you,
like the Wen River, endlessly flowing.
- Li Po
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