As a writer, you cut open your chest, grab your beating heart with your own raw hands, pull it out and squeeze it dry, until all the dark, black-red, dirty, unfiltered blood, tainted by your thoughts and your actions and your deeds collects in a cup, and you dip your pen in that blood and wait for the words to form. There is no other way. There must be no other way.
There is no other ink.
Writing is a strange art. Letters and words and sentences are the building blocks of this art. But more than words, the impact of the meaning of the word on the reader’s mind has a greater influence on the art. There is very little writers can do to affect the interpretation. Yes, we can be more descriptive, more detailed, more explanatory, but in the attempt of this we have to make sure we fall in line with some mental rules of this art. We have to fall in line with an underlying rhythm that stipulates how much is enough. Misunderstandings then will occur. But the true gift of a writer lies in achieving a balance of these two elements – meaning and rhythm. The true gift of a writer lies in the realization that in every sentence there is an opportunity for balance.
In every sentence there is an opportunity for poetry.
The intricate fabric of this art form gives it the powers of unspoken energies. Its modular structure is a greater vehicle for visiting the secret deviations of the mind. It is the sole domain of this art to explore all limits of human imagination. To explore exaggerations. To explore reality. To explore. This is why literature exists. This is the art form that allows a description of other art forms. While a poem can be written with a painting in mind, thereby adding to the total enigma of the painting and the poem, no painting can be drawn that can accurately represent the various nuances of an intricate poem.
This is also an all-encompassing art form. It derives its various flavors from the complex influences of other arts – It takes from music rhythm and meter, from painting depth and color, from poetry structure and subtlety. It is a receptive art form and thrives in the presence of other arts.
Words are for writers what shades of color and paint are for painters. Writers insert colors directly into the minds of the reader using words. A writer’s canvas is the universe of the reader’s mind. We use words and sentences, pauses and punctuations, to shape the neural network of the reader in the same way our own neural network have been shaped, so that the same effect is released upon the landscape of both minds. In the writing of our tales, we relive them, and recall the scenes in different levels of detail and blur, and then try and translate the same imagery into the mind of the reader. And through this alternating current of detail and blur of memory, a fluid mix of subtlety and exaggeration is infused into our tales. The story, when relived, becomes larger than it was in life. Words give them this power.
Words, before they are released, seem to hold court in a dimension of thrall. All words seem suspended in mid-air waiting for the reader to come along and pull them down on one of many sides, based on the reader’s interpretation of them. And because of this, we are careful with our words, knowing them to contain strange powers. They have the power to alter and change, mold and shape, inspire and encourage. And they have the opposite powers, sometimes demonic, and can cause chaos and pain where only tranquility existed. And words have the kind benediction of communication. By stringing them together, we form sentences that allow us to express the deepest sentiments of our minds. They allow us to share a snapshot of the current structure of our minds with the reader far away in the light-year distances of neural space. This distance is defeated by words.
Distance is defeated by words.
Words are shadows of action. They lie on one end of that strange spectrum that contains countless uncertainties before solidifying finally into action. They are precursors to action. And then there are precursors to words that are more powerful. If words could be dissected like atoms, within you would discover a constellation of thoughts circumambulating the vibrant nucleus of imagination. This is the foundation upon which all writers begin their journeys - imagination. Imagination is the cloth of dreams. It is a sacred space – a laboratory of wild ideas and strange thoughts allowed to mix in the vacuum of rationality, morality and mortality. Only here is all impossibility possible. Only here is everything within reach, within grasp. This is a lawless land, a space that permits all excursions against all rules of the mind. This is the cradle of dreams.
But what appears if we could split imagination and take a look inside?
The restless energy of expression – the Higgs-Boson of the anatomy of words. A desire for expression is the fuel of the writer. The more it is confined, the more it breaks out, taking newer and stranger forms. All waves and gentle swells that appear on the climatic ocean of the mind are caused by the gravity of this energy. Without it, no art can exist.
And deeper yet in the anatomy of this art lies an unnamed entity of silence. It is this we seek to tap. All things tend towards their opposites, and so an avalanche of words appears only after drenching the mind in a rain of this silence. I am able, in my mind, to quantify this silence, but I am unable to qualify it. I can tell you how much of this silence exists, but I cannot tell you what it does, or what its characteristics are. It does not let me grapple with it. I believe the reason for this is because this silence is the end. It is not made up of anything – it is not, for example, a flock of imaginations that form a thought; it is not a collection of thoughts that form a word; it is not an entity that is made of something. I cannot split it into two to survey what it is made of. It is made only of itself. And since it is not made of anything but itself, it has no quality to speak of. It has no features and characteristics. It has no nature. Being nature-less, it provides an unexplainable unperspective, a point of view that is just eye, disconnected from a judging mind. The recognition of rhythm and pause, the importance of punctuation and hesitation, the calculation of meter, are all derivations of this silence.
*
The Anatomy of Journey Page 44