On Writing

"Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,
'Fool' said my muse to me 'look in thy heart and write!'"
-Sir Phillip Sidney

Now, I could apologize and make excuses for not having posted in nearly a month and a half but in defiance of sounding anything like my students I shall, instead, stoically make no excuse and merely plod on with a new post.

This posting may take this little blog in a bit of a different direction since, as I've been poring over these great many books that tower behind me as I type, I've been feeling a need for a little variety. This may shed some light upon my reluctance to post as of late (but again, I refuse to make excuses). What I've been thinking about is how it came to be that I chose my current profession; that of professing and specifically, professing English Literature (since such is what I profess to do). This little mental exploration requires a context which I will now set:

A number of years ago while I was studying abroad in London, I frequently found myself drawn to a particular room in the old house in which our group was lodged. The house itself was a converted block of those old Georgian semi-monoliths that line the streets of London from the central neighborhood of Kensington to the shady surburban outskirts of Islington (I know this because this house was on a particularly well-treed little avenue just a two-mile walk from the Highbury-Islington tube station in northeastern London). The architecture in these houses was designed to progressively diminish the ceiling height as well as the window area of each subsequent floor in order to present the illusion that they towered much higher than they actually did; thus my term 'semi-monolith.'

This house had a particular room that sat between the reception area and the path to the kitchen. This room was unlike any other in the house in that, rather than the drab taupe or yellowing, patterned wallpaper in the rest of the house, this room was bedecked with the colour blue from top to bottom. The carpet was a lush sapphire; the wallpaper, striped with azure and robin's-egg reached from the elegant white chair rail to the crown moulding far above my head. The small couch that I sat on had been upholstered many years ago with a royal blue that had since adopted subtle shades of grey that seemed to match the dining table's place-settings. And when it rained the room itself swam all the way from the backyard window, over my knees, past the room's little piano parlour and out toward the tree-lined street.

This was my writing-room and I had spent many an hour there attempting, to the best of my ability, to translate the feeling that I had when sitting there into some kind of a narrative. I had always been an avid reader. During High School I had devoured Tolkien and Bradbury, spent a summer following the cases of Sherlock Holmes, and in college, after a short and silly attempt at studying Psychology, decided that I was best suited for studying Literature, which would hopefully allow me to continue to read for the rest of my life. But at that point I looked on this field not with a sense for the academic pursuits in which I now find myself enmeshed, but rather with the increasingly universal desire (at least among English majors) to become canonized myself. Unfortunately it was with this inflated Ego that I hacked away with my then blunt creative instrument, attempting to conjure some sense of the fantastic; an affective experience of inspiration that might someday spur some reader to the same pursuit. I have since learned that writing creatively is significantly less self conscious, at least for me.

Oddly enough, what I discovered after a semester of sitting in this room and throwing inspiration at the page like so many Jackson Pollock paintings, hoping that a story would arise, is that, though some narratives DID indeed manifest themselves they all appeared to be about the same thing: inspiration. Some say that writing will always reflect the writer, and despite the fact that many modern literary critics would rail at such a notion, at least for me this is tragically true. There I was, sitting in a room seemingly full of inspiration, ready to conquer writer's block and produce a truly incredible work of fiction yet so much inspiration oddly enough only bred itself and the only characters I appeared capable of producing were ones who, through various fantastical or magical experiences, sought this same Holy Grail of 'Inspiration' as if it were a mythical item to be found and possessed.

Oddly enough, since turning my pursuits to the academic rather than the creative aspects of literature, I have discovered that, at the heart of Arthurian mythology, the Grail Quest is not one of possession but one of understanding; specifically, an understanding that shall forever alter the life of the worthy knight or, in my case, the unworthy writer. I still feel as if I am somewhat barred from the real experience of creative writing, perhaps as a factor of my initial hubris (much like Malory's Lancelot is barred from a true vision of the Grail. But I mustn't attribute quite so much nobility to myself), and consider myself, in a way, relegated to the position of talking about literature rather than producing literature. But then again I have quite a collection of manuscripts that have been sitting around for the past few years, waiting for a more patient, and perhaps more mature writer to re-approach, remould, and resubmit them for publishing.

Since I've been looking for a change of pace (at least temporarily) I have thus decided that The Eastin Collection would be a nice format to submit some snippets in-work to an "audience" (I place all of you in quotations simply because I'm not entirely sure that you, my audience, even exists. Apparently I'm not much of a blog-networker). So in the next few months expect to see something a little different and while this probably won't be a regular thing, since my primary goal is still to talk about books, I'll still hold on to the hope that at one point I'll be talking about a volume in my collection that I quite literally had a hand in...