If life is silent, the
oceans hoarse;
If all nature is but purposeful hostility;
If stamens,
furious and maltempered,
Are incited to their fire by a force
Of darkness;
if I light a torch
Only to curse the darkness as it flays
My skin and
terrorizes me;
If death is casual dismemberment;
If the power does not
stay and the power does not be,
Our Maker intending sorrow in our
senility:
Then let it
be,
And as the sun sets, do not
watch,
And do not follow
happiness,
Do not dream of being free.
Tucker Lieberman,
1998
I used to write an awful lot, mostly
fiction. Then I switched to writing in a journal because at the time it
was very therapeutic. For many years, I wrote in a journal obsessively,
and I didn't worry too much about the quality of it because the point was to get
out all the stuff in my head so that I could see it, give it form, and then
analyze it. I've always been big on analyzation, needless to say for those
who know me well. It comes so naturally to
me that it's an unconscious process, like a faucet always running in the
background. It is not what I would call a blessing.
The challenge for me now, moving back
into writing for someone other than myself, this time with nonfiction, is how do
you convey a message without preaching? How do you express whatever it is
you are trying to express without surrounding the reader with more dogma,
without telling them what to think? The answer is, your prose must follow
in the footsteps of poetry. You must not describe the picture, you must
make your words the picture itself; you must convey the feeling behind
your vision using the organized system we call language in such a way that
the sensory function of your reader is activated instead of the
logical function. It is a very neat trick when done properly. I
would refer you, off the top of my head, to e.e. cummings. Or (in another
genre) Beethoven. Or Neil Gaimen. Or New Order. Tolkien.
Mozart. The Cure. American Beauty. I could go on. You
may have your own list.
It is really the secret to all
great art: that creation which speaks, silently, for itself. It is
distinguished by being untainted by human moralism or bias. You
always know it when you encounter it-- whether in a poem, a picture, a piece of
music, a film, a thought, a moment, a memory, or, yes-- another human being--
because it doesn't hit your brain, it hits that other unnamed part of you which
you might call the soul, and when you later try to describe it to someone else
and how perfect it was, you find yourself at a loss for words, often
reduced to hopeless cliches. I have heard it referred to as "seeing
God." Frequently when it happens to me, I am brought to tears
(which is sometimes embarrassing, and misunderstood as sentiment, which it
isn't). Not surprisingly, some people are more receptive to this than
others. Some people are afraid of it-- it is very much a surrender of
sorts. (these people are often called Pragmatists, Control-freaks, and
Capricorns) But whether you like to get the high from music, poetry,
film, sex, drugs, sports, or your own damned brain, I think it is a pretty rare
thing in modern day nonfiction.
Don't expect me to be a master of it
yet.
A Word from Quayle*