Pablo Neruda, one of the most popular poets of the twentieth century, began writing when he was a young teenager in Chile. By the age of nineteen had published his first book.
Later in his career, he reflected on how he had felt after writing his very first line of poetry. "And I being, tiny," he wrote, "drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, felt myself a pure part of the abyss. I wheeled with the stars. My heart broke loose with the wind."
When we first discover the act of writing, really writing, it has a way of putting us in our places. The instant we take pen in hand and write as if our lives depended upon it, we feel both grand and insignificant.
The act of writing is an awe inspiring one. The Sumerians, Egyptians, Maya and people from every early culture that used symbols to permanently record events and ideas believed that writing was a gift from the gods. Scribes held a special place in these societies because they made marks that served as a bridge between mundane reality and numinous mystery.
Many writers get their first glimpse into this mystery when they begin reading for pleasure. Childhood trips to the library opened doors for them, doors to other worlds. They opened worlds of possibility as well.
For others, the initiation into the power of the pen came when they moved beyond writing one-paragraph reports and lists of spelling words assigned to them in school. They wrote poems and stories instead. Something clicked. A light dawned. Writing was more than making marks on paper. They had tapped into something magical and they knew that through writing they could create anything and everything. They understood that no matter how much they wrote, they couldn’t get enough of it.
When we first began to write, most of us got what writing really means. We discovered on our own what the poet John Keats called Negative Capability. He wrote,"…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
The fortunate few not only glimpsed at the mystery, they have managed to remember that initial vision, and it continues to fuel their creative fire. Most of us forget the feelings that compelled us to write in the first place. We grasp, instead, at fact and reason, telling ourselves that the more practical we become, the better writers we will be.
We buy more how-to-write books and focus on tailoring our writing to this or that market. We stop reading for joy, preferring to analyze books in order to discover new techniques. We trade our grand feelings for the illusion of control in order to spare from feeling insignificant. Forgetting that we are part of the mystery and that the mystery is us, we settle for becoming competent craftspeople. We tell ourselves that is good enough….but deep inside we know better.
Even though the craft of writing is important to writers, it is and will always remain secondary to the art of writing. Without craft, we have great difficulty communicating what we know. Without art, which is our relationship to the mystery, we are left with little that is meaningful to communicate. When our hearts remain chained, we lose our reason for writing.
This month take time to recall your initial vision as a writer and reconnect with your deepest reason for writing.
Although Neruda writes of the starry void, other writers describe their first transcendent writing using different metaphors. What metaphor fits your experience? Write about the first time you understood that writing meant much more than penmanship. Describe your location. What were you writing? Recall the physical feelings you had as your pen or pencil moved across the page. What were your thoughts? Allow yourself to sink into the feelings you had at that time and write about them. Keep what you’ve written handy, so that you can reread it and add it to later.
If you rid your heart of the ballast of fact and reason for a month so that the wind could knock it loose, what would you write? Go write it.