As a writer, I am in one of those inbetween periods. The novel I recently completed has been sent out by my agent and is doing the rounds. Finishing a novel has similarities to ending a love affair. The story is done, but it’s hard to find a way forward, to stop thinking about the beloved and move on. I hope that soon I will be able to introduce those characters to you. In due time.
Meanwhile, I’ve started working on something new. Music has always been a big inspiration for me, and I often listen to a particular song or songs when I am in the process of writing. At the moment it is this song, Bob Dylan’s Gates of Eden. I know this will be a sacrilege to some people, but I prefer the Arlo Guthrie version to the Dylan original.
The motorcycle black Madonna, two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause the gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey who pick upon his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
I love the line about wicked birds of prey picking up on bread crumb sins. I don’t entirely know what it means, but I feel what it means. This kind of abstraction works better in music than in prose.
We all create the kind of art that our personalities allow us to. But I admit I have always been a bit jealous of musicians and dancers. Their arts seem less clumsy than my own. I imagine that it does not feel that way for musicians and dancers as they are seeped in the process of making those works. When you’re struggling over a lyric or a bridge, or a choreographic transition it must feel clumsy too.
My partner, when teaching ballet, sometimes says, “I don’t want to see your process.” He usually says this when a student is showcasing the shaking and tentative muscle movements of a transition instead of quickly raising an arm or leg to its final pose to create a fluid motion. More generally, it means that the audience should see the result, not the work it took to get there. So I have the benefit of experiencing arts I do not do myself as complete. They appear effortless.
I’ve been thinking about the cross-pollination of art. Bob Dylan being inspired by Woody Guthrie and going on to write a song that Arlo Guthrie made his own and that now plays in the background as I struggle with one of those periodic blocks that dot the writing process.
Arlo Guthrie once said to me that he thought that you really only get “a half hour of really good creativity” a day. That stuck with me. Alain de Botton wrote that “…a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment… because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time.”
I am thinking about these things because it is as good a way as any to avoid actually writing.
Story and Self 