Art and Arthur

12.27.2007
[Duplicated from Lisa Dale's Blog]

To continue musing on the writer as an artist:

I doubt I'm the only writer in the world who sometimes sits down to a poem, a story, an essay and suddenly finds herself overwhelmed by the enormous responsibility of the task at hand, by the sheer futility of the act, of attempting to "descr[ibe] things they way they are."

The new issue of The Literary Review features an essay by writer Chris Arthur called "Making an Entrance." In theory, the essay is about the author's childhood stomping grounds, particularly a County Antrim farm called Shandon. But more than that, it's about the way writers approach their subjects--particularly, it's about the decision-making involved in approaching a subject. In Arthur's case, the pillars that lead to his aunt's home become "portals to another world," a world where memory, meaning, and the craft of writing blur together like a sonic fog of bells--but where there is less emphasis on "plot" or "story," and more on the indistinct yet rich textures of memory. Arthur describes his writing process in a way that shows how one writer's stumbling blocks can build another writer's castles.

The essay is just beautiful, acknowledging the gray, the unstated, the inexact--in as precise a way as I imagine is possible. He writes:

"Memory's version captures a truth about the place, not merely as it appears, but as it was felt, played in, dreamed of...Memory can offer up the richness of imagining where a photograph would only dole out the thin gruel of the visually literal."


He also says, "Invisible dogs stand at Shandon's pillars, their shared respiration symbolizing the intimate and mysterious connection that exists between the known and the unknown, between the telegraphic attenuations of the names we give things, the descriptions we offer--superficial, partial--and the significance that's coiled intricately within them."

There's some comfort here to think that being overwhelmed by the writing process--by the unthinkable hugeness and inherent futility of it--is a working part of the act itself.

I'll just keep telling myself that next time watching television seems more meaningful than being here, at my computer, filling in these lines.