Tsundoku
He reads my blog sometimes, and finds it complicated, with long words. He’s not alone in this. I frequently despair of it myself. If I remember rightly, years ago he asked me how he could set up a website. It’s a pretty big deal, I said. Then I pointed him towards Blogger, and he started his own blog, writing simply & succinctly. He soon acquired a devoted following, including Darius, Hayden & Jim—of whom more in my footnote.
When I woke up this morning, the day seemed full of promise. From my bed, I saw the dawn sky, the rising sun reflected on the walls of the Victorian factory opposite, chasing the shadows downwards. It’s not a factory any more. It will be a students’ hall of residence, but at present is a building site where most days nobody is working. The promising day chased away memories of an eventful dream. It was set in a building somewhat like the hall of residence I soon hope to see. Wandering through, I had fruitful encounters with various ex-fellow-students, & many intriguing adventures, all of which I’ve forgotten except for one conversation. His face is familiar but I can’t remember his name or where I know him from. I ask him what he does now and he reels off a string of projects, some of which are so rarefied I can hardly guess what they’re about. I conclude he’s become an amateur historian in his retirement. I marvel at how little he’s aged since long ago, when we knew one another—as students? And now I remember that after Rob’s call I managed to find a recent mugshot of him online, and see that he looks a little older than we last met. It dawns that this character in the dream was Rob: the the same curly hair, the same thoughtful smile.
The day is still full of promise, a feeling so precious that I wonder if we can all feel this, and what gets in the way. We get caught up in things, attached to the fruits of our actions, as I think the Bhagavad Gita puts it, instead of floating above it somewhere. As I write this, “floating above it somewhere” doesn’t sound right at all. That’s merely an intellectual idea of detachment. The real thing is to love the world: all of it.
What is the world? As Werner Herzog said, & I’ve adopted as a motto for this blog, “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.” For this is what I do to get uncaught-up in things. And as Natalie Goldberg, writer and teacher of writing, said, “The deepest secret in the heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world.” I quoted this in a post from February 2012, and it has stuck in my mind. But it wasn’t till today that I got her book, Writing Down the Bones. Its content is so inspiring that I only read one page before learning I can write a different way, or perhaps in the way I used to write. To pen these words, I set the book aside, on a heap of other books I’ve yet to read. The Japanese have a word for it: tsundoku.
But I have just gone back to take another peek, and then another:
-----She has a wonderful word “uneducation”, whereby you can free your writing by unlearning the rules you thought yourself bound by
-----And there’s this: “. . . I studied Zen formally with Dainin Katagiri . . . About three years ago, he said to me, ‘Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace”
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Hayden, Darius, Jim
When I started my new blog—this one—in April 2006, I was fortunate in acquiring some readers from Rob’s blog. Hayden visited frequently and last commented in May 2012. Darius later used his real name Paul Maurice Martin, published his book Original Faith & last commented here in September 2009. He suffers from “a debilitating, progressive, and undiagnosed disease” and I’ve heard nothing since to verify that he’s still alive. As for Jim, he suddenly deleted most of his blog and disappeared in September 2008. I think he may have gone to jail as his chequered past (Army deserter?) may have caught up with him. Not long before his disappearance he asked me if there was any way to save his blog posts. I saved them in a document and sent it to him. I might still have a copy somewhere.
13 Comments:
I've seen that book "Writing Down the Bones" just about everywhere in bookstores and libraries. The oddly worded title has always caught my eye, but somehow I've never gotten around to reading it.
It's funny too that you mentioned that part about "uneducation", because I feel like some of the books on writing fiction that I've read have kind of messed me up. They start talking about character arcs and central conflicts, and I start feeling like "no this isn't what I want to do at all," even though I can't really argue against these things being an essential elements of a good story. If I sit down to right a story and I think, "well I need a conflict and a character arc" or whatever else, then I find myself completely stupefied. I've got nothing, and I sit there frustated until the whole thing begins to unravel and I begin to wonder why I ever thought that I could write a story in the first place. Then I start to get mad at those books for thinking that that's any way to teach anyone how to write a story. And I end up all tied in a million knots inside.
So the only way I can really get around this, my own method of "uneducation" is to think that I'm not writing a story but something else. Following a conversation that we had last spring, I did a few experiments with making up dreams, and I managed to turn out a few decent pieces because I felt like I had much more creative freedom and latitude to work with. I never read a book telling me that you had to have this that and the other thing when you're making up a fake dream. I could just DO IT. And it doesn't have to be a dream. It could be fictional letters, fictional childhood anecdotes. But the minute I start thinking "story" all the air just goes out of it. It's almost like the word has become tainted by those stupid books.
And yet, at it's most basic a story should just be what we all think of as a story. You tell me something that happened to you last week; it starts with a flat tire in a strange part of town and that leads to this and this leads to that, not merely episodic but all details in this complete thing that happened to you. And THAT'S a story. You don't think about the central conflict and how this has to happen by the end of the first act and so on. You just tell the damn thing. And really it should be the same if you're even making up the story of what happened to you last week. If you tell a complete and cohesive story, then yes, someone could come along and show how it's got this that and the other thing, but that's not how you'd go about making up the story of what happened to you last week, and it's insane to think that that's how to go about teaching you to make up the story of what happened last week.
I don't know though. Maybe some people NEED to be told about those things, and it helps this, and maybe other people have kind of absorbed them subconsciously and it just trips them up to have them pointed out in a such a systematic manner, like trying to mechanically break down dance steps.
Sorry for the abundant typos above.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong. As much as I talk about reason, I sometimes have this stubborn and impatient resistance to learning things in a rational, orderly way. I have this more "intuitive" idea in my mind of how I should learn it, and I think sometimes that holds me back.
There was a brief period years ago when I was trying to learn the guitar, and my eyes would start to glaze over when they'd start talking about different keys and scales and so forth. I just wanted to play the damn thing. And of course, I never really did learn to play because you need to know that stuff. Meanwhile, my daughter can play great, she can compose these complex electronic pieces, and all because she doesn't have these same dumb hang ups where I think of music as colors and shapes and learning it the right way feels like it ruins it for me -- if that makes any sense.
Anyway, I'll shut up now and yield the floor.
(By the way, I love that there's a term for a pile of unread books.)
The floor was still yours, I wish you could have stayed. I had a day of such doubt, paralysis, ennui & phantom symptoms that it was definitely the flip side, void of promise. But now is another day.
Perhaps it is Writing down the Bones—so splendid, luminous & simple that I dare not read it, fills me with corrosive jealousy. And then I start to expect things of myself, and of the day, with all its "promise". Grrr. It's all good but grrr all the same. (Natalie Goldberg in her book giving me permission to say this, and now I am superstitously fearful of reading her at all, she makes all I've ever written appear such shite, if I may be pardoned the Irish word.
I love your expression "all the air goes out of it". I loved your "Sorry for the abundant typos above", for there's a part of me that rises to the challenge and so I went looking above to see how many typos I could find, while impatiently skimming the meaning as though it were redundant. Such was the shite of my consciousness. And today it's a delight to realize I've been such a pompous twat (even as I write the word, feeling impelled to consult the full Oxford English dictionary, which doesn't exactly say, only that it is "low slang" and a term of "vulgar abuse") for all these years.
Good, thanks. It feels better now.
"Maybe some people NEED to be told about those things, and it helps this, and maybe other people have kind of absorbed them subconsciously and it just trips them up to have them pointed out in a such a systematic manner, like trying to mechanically break down dance steps."
Yes, back to Natalie's G's book. She goes round doing writers' workshops for ordinary people, her advice is so totally unpretentious & childlike & I don't need all of it, but it gives permission to connect with something more real within you.
Maybe it;s that Katagiri guy she talks about: “Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace”.
I like “everyplace” too. I learn (from the OED, where else?) it is "US colloq." but it comes fresh, never heard it before, presents the meaning of "everywhere" to me like a wondrous idea, like the first time I heard about a magic carpet as a child . . .
Firefox now apparently offers a "reader view" of your blog. I think I prefer the original Vincent view.
Thanks, on your suggestion I just downloaded the Firefox Readability add-on, which offers the reader view. I agree with you. But it gives me a "send to Kindle" button too, which is nice because my old method is no longer free.
Meanwhile, this floor yields itself to all comers. Perpetually.
Thanks for introducing me to Tsundoku. (I do still have a pile of unread books under my coffee table.)
One of the things I like about this post is that you let your guard down in places.
(A trap I often fall into is to hide behind an intellectual facade rather in the way that some people hide behind studded leather jackets.)
Hi, I wanted to comment although I feel as though I am butting into a private conversation between old friends that is none of my business here on this free-for-all-to-read-blog on the world wide web.
Comment I shall nonetheless because I feel the urge to and it means something to me - not necessarily to you though, sorry. Wording it like this it makes me feel slightly selfish for just wanting to put in my two cents (or however many), but if I wanted to be American about it I would say I just wanted to 'share' something and then feel fine about it.
Anyway, I started a blog in 2009 and you were the first and only one to comment on one of my two posts. I believe you might also be the first and only one to have ever read my post. Be this as it may, I had geared myself up to write and was now going to be this undercover blogger. I was excited beyond measure that someone was following me and then I read your comment and it scared me right back in to the closet from which I had only just emerged. This is obviously not your fault and I am not writing to you to tell you this 'bad' thing.
I am writing to you because I have re-emerged from said closet and plan to write again even if that means real people might actually read my pieces and may even have an opinion about them. I am hoping not to be a deer in the headlights again.
I have just re-read what you wrote to me and it was a fair and good comment. I would like to thank you for this, 6 years later. Having looked through some of your many brilliant pieces and seen that you are talking about 'Writing down the bones', a book which I have picked up again for the first time since 2009, I feel as though there is some kind of connection between us. Uou might disagree but I say this because I feel it and I am proud of myself for having turned a scary connection (with you) into a good connection. Thank you for being part of my journey.
yes, LLE, I had feared that anyone coming here afresh (or a silent lurker) would have a sense of butting in, hence the remark about the floor being at all times welcome to all comers.
I want to apologize, on behalf of that 2009 version of Vincent, for being so abrupt, presumptuous and prescriptive. But I don't feel burdened with guilt about your going back into the closet. That was what you had to do, I guess. And what are 6 years in the scheme of things?
Writing Down the Bones which I’m still reading slowly, as it stirs up so much and gets me too excited, is of course about more than "how to become a writer", if it's about that at all. As far as I've reached so far (page 47), it's about loving the world and also oneself, in ways which have so much to teach me that I can't just turn the pages as one usually does, to see what else it has to say, and how it will end.
Looking again at your your post of September 6th 2009, I find myself astonished at how much truth and awareness that it contains, and I would have done better to try and absorb that, than come up in cavalier fashion brandishing my latest ideas with scarce reflection.
I’m delighted at your visit and you are anyway by virtue of our previous brief encounter an “old friend” and we can at any time have private conversations by email, or public ones here, which is in many ways more fun.
PS as we are connected by Natalie Goldberg's book, reading buddies separated only by space, I ought to add something more. She gives advice that I don't feel able to take. My writing habits are terrible but I'm stuck in that groove. She is having an influence but it's mainly subconscious.
I'd like to know how it strikes you, re-reading it now.
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