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Why I write what I write and how I write it 2006
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| Title | Why I write what I write and how I write it, Iowa City Public Library, October 13, 2006 |
| Creator |
Pletzinger, Thomas, 1975- Rye, Choi Jeong Amal, Nukila, 1971- Bandyopadhyay, Srijato, 1975- |
| Creator - Nationality |
German Korean Indonesian Indian |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2006-10-13 |
| Description | International authors from the IWP engage the audience in personal stories about the paths that led them to writing. |
| Venue |
Iowa City Public Library |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | Why I Write What I Write and How I Write it. October 13, 2006. Iowa City Public Library. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/EVEN/EVENmain.html Thomas Pletzinger On Writing, On Running and On the Body Writing is war. Writing is a game. Writing is work against the ephemerality of life. Writing is a pilgrimage to the past. Writing is the echo of knowledge. Writing is justice. Writing is restoration. Writing is archiving. Writing is damasking. Writing is deception. Writing is neurotic compulsión. Writing is inspiration. Writing is calculation. Writing is exhilaration. Writing is technique. Or: writing is self-assertion, catharsis, self-definition, meditation, necromancy, exorcism, declaration of love, shaping of reality, politics, theater for the ego. Writing is cleansing, putting things in order, structuring the self. Writing is archaeology, writing is the cultivation of ornamental plants. Writing is a cloud, Writing is agricultural. Writing is the gardening of herbs. Writing is window cleaning and seeing more clearly, writing is a well-paying hobby. I did not invent these explanations. To define and describe their writing, writers tend to use the wildest comparisons, metaphors and theoretical considerations. Many of these descriptions and explanations may be true, but they have nothing to do with the reality of my writing. This may be because many writers tend to make their arguments detached from everyday life and with a certain generality. They very often do not consider quotidian questions of motivation, time-management, deadlines, the quarrels with the non-writing environment and the economic pressure. They almost always leave questions about the connection between body and writing unanswered. These are important issues in my daily life as a writer, which is why I want to take a rather pragmatic approach to explaining my writing and how I do it. It is always difficult for me to say precisely what my writing is about, but for this panel I will try to, because I want to talk about how I do it: off the top of my head I would say that I tell stories about real people—about their self-perception, about sex, about pain, about euphoria, emotion and intellect, about the conflicts between the inner and outer life, about memory, about the physical realities of my characters�� lives. I try not to stop on the surface of clothes or buildings or words or language. I try not to be artificial and superficial. I want the characters in my stories to be real, graspable and physical. I want my language to serve my content. Writing—to me—means to be physical. My words are only stand-ins for real characters, my language represents them. My characters must have a body—at least in the reader’s imagination—and I have to use mine to get theirs on paper. Semi-Pro Basketball. I have to start with a very concrete and tangible example. At age fourteen I stopped reading literature and spent the next five years in a gym, playing basketball, lifting weights, running, practicing techniques and tactics twelve times a week. I learned statistics by heart, I read and re-read the autobiographies of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. I made it to semi-pro-status in the first German league. More than half of my teammates from those days still play professionally in Germany, Italy, Greece and Finland – but I was too small, not ruthless enough, not brave and not cold-blooded enough. At some point I picked up reading again and soon after I started to write poems and stories. I like to see it this way: I was too interested in literature to become a professional basketball player. I 1 stopped playing ball and went off to university. I read Max Frisch and Günter Grass, but also Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, John Updike and John Irving (who also considers sports important for his writing). I went to hear lectures, I went out to drink beer, I became interested in movies and theater. Because I could not sleep without exhausting my body I started running around the lake in Hamburg. After two years I ran around the lake twice every day and ran my first marathon—a semi-professional basketballplayer turned culturally interested long distance runner. I read, I ran, I still lifted weights and from time to time I wrote a poem. You can see that sports has always been a big part of my everyday life and remains so to this day. I would like to explain the analogy between sports and writing and my writing’s direct dependency on physicality. I write well when I train well; I write like I run; my writing only has the desired physical quality when I do physical work as well; in a way my body is my pen. Training, Discipline, Ritual. The alarm-clock is set to six a.m. This is a regular weekday morning, it is April, it is raining, it is two degrees Celsius and a cold wind is blowing. I run first across the city, then into the forest and then along the river. I can watch my body torture itself: belly aches, my feet get wet and cold very quickly, they are not even warm after seven miles, my knees and leg muscles hurt and I have to will myself along the river and back home. I run the slowest time in weeks. I am exhausted, I have to hop up the stairs to my apartment on the fourth floor on my right leg because the left refuses service. Running is painful. Discipline is painful, too. I shower, I have a cup of coffee and then—because I have already run ten miles at 7:30 in the morning, because I have not given up and stopped, the whole day is spread out on the desk before me. And because I am wide awake after running, because I am finally warm after showering, because the run distracted me, loosened up my thinking and lets me re-focus, I take a pen and start writing. The ritual of getting up early, the discipline and the training are essential for running—at the desk they are, too. Writing is Working Out. When you write every day, you expand your repertoire. You shape and polish your style. You become better at it. Like a slow run, a tired and weak text for me is better than no text at all. If you have at least a little bit of talent, you can mechanically provoke good writing once you understand the ritual and the mechanics of it. Thus the development of a good text is not 100% predictable but it is more likely to happen. Writing and Discipline. You only come across good ideas when you go straight at them. You cannot run a marathon when you are afraid of running ten miles on rainy and cold April mornings. You have to walk up to creativity. You cannot write a decent text when you are not sitting at your desk. When you know your ritual, you know a short cut to inspiration: the muse kisses the disciplined. Walter Mosley writes: “For authors, fragile ideas need loving every day.” He continues: “If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day.” And: “You don’t go to a well once but daily, you don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning, sleep comes to you each day and so does the muse.” Writing is Ritual. When I sit down at my desk, I start to make notes. First, these notes are diary entries, work schedules, ideas, dialogues. I repeat plans like mantras; I need two hours of straight writing to get into a flow. I need this ritual to get ideas and language running. For me, there is no substitute. I am not at a loss for ideas, I only lack consequence in their realization. I never start with flowing ideas and fluid language—the moment of actual writing is always at the end of a chain of rituals. 2 Body and Writing. Practice, discipline and ritual are essential for athletes—they are preparation and goal at the same time. The athlete’s body needs preparation to become better. Moves have to be trained. When you practice regularly, the feeling for the body changes. You start your morning run with confidence that you will easily finish it. When I am in good shape, I know that my mind will free itself from monitoring my body after a few hundred meters. At basketball, a player does not think about the individual moves—he just executes them. When you run, the monotonous movements have an even stronger impact on the mind—thoughts separate from the conscious supervision of the body and ideas and associations start flowing freely. The same thing is true for writing. For me, disciplined running and writing both result in a strengthening of your skills and abilities, your physicality and your mind are at once freed from one another and then tied together strongly. It is exactly this process that I like to see as an analogy and as a direct influence on writing. Running as Stimulus. First, there is the direct influence of running on my writing: running supports the metabolism, the blood circulation. Eyes, ears and body-perception are challenged, the necessary chemical processes are initiated by running itself. After a run one most likely feels the adrenaline and the endorphins flowing; you are in an euphoric state. Writing becomes easier. Thereby, every run is a tabula rasa-situation for the mind, it erases stuck thoughts and concepts and enables the writer to see things from a new angle – especially projects you are working on. This possibility to stimulate inspiration purposefully is of great importance to my work. Once you find out how sports can stimulate thoughts you can easily use this as a stimulus for your writing. Writing is like Running. This is the above-mentioned analogy. The goal in both running and writing is to get rid of the nerve-wrecking awareness of what you are doing. You want to forget the act of running as well as the act of writing. I do not think about putting one foot in front of the other when I run. During a basketball game you should not be aware of the exact movements you are taking and the way you are throwing or passing the ball. These things should be automatic. You just do them and you can concentrate on the intangibles: your opponent, tactics and variations. I write better the less I think about the fact that I am writing. To lose awareness of the act results in the easier usage of all the techniques and knowledge that you have gathered over the years. Ideally, writing resembles a perfect run or a perfect game. At my desk I want to work on imagination, stylistic improvisation and formal variation—less on Word 2000, my pen or merely correct grammar. With discipline, ritual and practice you can achieve this both on the running track and at the desk. The body is important to athletes—they try to develop an improved corporeality. Physicality is important for success, at least for the ease with which the sports is played or executed and the confidence in the moves. In sports, corporeality means an equally conscious and subconscious understanding of one’s skills and possibilities. This is also true for writers. Writers aim to develop a literary corporeality. Like the athlete, the writer has to have confidence in automated moves and writing processes. He has to know—consciously and subconsciously—what he can do and what he cannot do. He has to accumulate theoretical and practical knowledge about literature and his own writing, he also has to use it subconsciously. While I am writing I need to temporarily detach my ideas and thoughts from the actual act of writing—from the keyboard, the pen, the paper, the clock, from deadlines. Categories of style, literary history and theory, role models have to be used without too 3 much awareness of using them. Ideally, I write without monitoring all these aspects deliberately. I just write, and all these categories, this knowledge, are at work below the surface. Thus, writing as well as running, are mechanical and ritual acts. “You have to start moving your literary feet,” says Joyce Carol Oates. Euphoria. Running and writing can both evoke a euphoric state. When you run long enough, your body produces beta-endorphin, an endogenous opioid that is responsible for heightened alertness and mobility in life-threatening situations. It has a similar chemical structure as morphine. It is produced during long runs as well as during exposure to sunlight, sexual stimulation, praise and nervous tension. It sets free hidden energies, makes pain disappear and creates happiness. I believe that writing can have a similar effect as running, praise or sunlight. The results of having written something that you consider to be good are very similar – including nervousness before deadlines, time pressure and praise. At least it feels like endorphins are poured. Writing about the body. Writing about the body, about all its functions and malfunctions, about sex, sickness & sweat—things some of us would surely consider too obscene to be written about—to me is a necessity. In it lies the individual experience of the world and of our times. How we perceive our own and others corporeality is significant and important. Our bodies carry meaning and it is my task as a writer—among others, of course, I am simplifying here to be true in this area and not disguise anything, not to stop where everyday communication about the body stops. And since physicality is so important to the writing process as I know it, it is also important to the writing itself. It need not be said that writing for me has many more functions; writing is work against the ephemerality of life, it is archived memory, shaping and structuring of reality, placement of the self in the world. Why I write and what I write surely resemble many other writer’s ideas—my writing is filled with references to books, writers, music, history and the spirit of the times like many writers’ work, too. How I write can be explained the easiest with the metaphor of sports. I cannot imagine any other way to write and, maybe even, that is a sign of an athlete’s approach. I write for the sake of writing, like I run for the sake of running. I hope to increase the quality of my writing, to polish and shape it. I want it to be more secure, more intense, more disciplined and even more professional. Maybe then writing can become a full-time job and maybe—even if I am too small, not fast, not ruthless, not brave and not cold-blooded enough—maybe then I can become a full-time-pro writer. 4 Choi Jeong-Rye (Korea) Why I Write Do you think dolphins can live in a river? I have never thought that to be possible; yet, an incredible thing happened in Seoul, Korea. Surprisingly last April, a dead dolphin was found on the riverbank near the Banpo bridge of Seoul’s Han River. The Han River is very wide and deep; but sluggish; the water is not clean enough for dolphins to live in it. Then why did he go against the stream? Why did he want to leave the West Sea and swim up the Han River? Was he looking for his ancestors who moved from land to sea a long time ago? There would have been many obstacles for him, such as sluice gates, a dam under construction, and many noisy railroad bridges. And above all, fresh water unlike the seawater could have tormented him terribly. Moreover, how could he swim over the dam? I guess that high tide made it possible for him to jump into the river. He would have suffered increasingly by the lowering of the salt content in the water. The dolphin would try to go back to the sea, but maybe he could not find the direction because his pain was too severe to generate supersonic waves. Later, an investigator announced that it was a kind of harbor porpoise. He found a big fester inside the stomach, and it seemed like the dolphin had difficulty using his supersonic waves. Like a dolphin, sometimes I lose my sense of direction and time. I don’t know where I am and when is now. Whenever these strange times happen, it’s like my supersonic waves won’t work. I have an illusion; I mistake a flying stone for a bird. (I had many experiences of throwing stones in anti-government demonstrations in the 1970’s and 80’s.) These moments are usually short, but sometimes they last long enough to build a kingdom. These moments inspire me to write poems, such as this one: “Within Three minutes” within three minutes what can you not accomplish? have a shotgun marriage give birth to a child a bridge can collapse a department store falls down a kingdom can be built but hey, you socks, pants, and jackets hanging in the dusty veranda! you shame and oblivion, drying while still remaining folded! what are you guys doing? Look at that! a flying stone 5 quickly spreading wings coming out from the armpits before those wings get folded you should hurry and get married have a baby stamp a seal ask for a handshake and make a nation before a plane crashes a river gets locked sands pile up on the table. you should arouse the cockroach sleeping under the cupboard you should rush and fly with your deep blue wings under your arms I wander in an illusion of these moments. Whenever I ask myself who I am and what I’m doing, I cannot help but recall my past. Memories shimmer in my mind and remind me how I’ve become what I am. In one memory: I may have fallen into a doze, on a train ride, I saw a small red field between green valleys. It was softly twisting around the furrow. Strangely, there was not a single plant in it. And then it disappeared. It was just one short moment. Whenever I pass those valleys, I look carefully for that small red field. But I have never seen it since. I don’t remember why my mother threw my textbooks into the woodstove. “What good will they do?” she said. I rummaged through the stove, took out the books with their charred edges, wrapped them, and went to school for the semester. I don’t know why. I don’t remember what I did later with those books and the half-burnt schoolbag. I don’t know why that field didn’t want a single plant to shoot up, and then to where it disappeared, I couldn’t know. Sometimes when I wake at midnight, I see myself lying down on that small red field. These memories are scattered inside me, and they wander in the mist of time. In the fragments of memories, I feel like I can find my real existence, and I think it is the way I understand the world and others. As you can tell from my poems, memory is both my deficiency and my mind’s ruin. I wanted to escape these moments of deficiency and ruin to reach this world. That is, I wanted to understand the pain of others, and eventually the whole world, by way of my own pain. Let me go back to the dolphin story. Why did the dolphin leave the sea and swim up the river? Why did it desire to go elsewhere? The answer to this question is the same as the reason why I began to write. I wanted to leave the place where I had lived—to dare to swim against the times or to go to a new place. And that also brings me here now. But here, my supersonic waves won’t work; my native language became useless. Iowa, where my language 6 became useless, makes me think of my language and my country. Korea is a very small country geographically; moreover, it is divided into south and north. Many Koreans, including myself, still suffer form memories of the Korean War in the 50’s, the division and the poverty we experienced. These days when I watch bombs exploding in a poor country on TV, it reminds me of my childhood. I also grew up eating candy, chocolates, and gum that the American soldiers threw to us along the railroad tracks. We, the poor, were hurt by the insolence and pride hidden inside the kindness of the rich. When I was young, I used to wish that I had been born in a rich country. However, come to think of it, I think I love my country because it is small and because it suffered so much in its history. Remembering the hurt is not only the willingness to recover from it, but also an effort to prevent hurting others. If I had grown up in a wealthy country, I would have enjoyed life more, wasting time and energy, drinking, dancing and so on. Of course, I would never have tried to write poetry to remember the pain. In Iowa, my mother-tongue is useless. Here, a Korean writer, Park Kyong-ni, comes to mind. She devoted twenty-four years to finishing a single novel (which is in sixteen volumes). I love her passion for and persistence in her career. Her novel, Land, opens in 1897, a turbulent time when the Korean people were struggling against their history. She once said, "I didn't know how to write this novel. It was like someone else was writing it through me. If I had not been unhappy, I would not have written Land for such a long time—twenty-four years for one novel!" Many Korean people think Park Kyong-ni's novel could be loved by the whole world. But there are too many references to Korean customs and too many Korean idioms to translate it easily. I love her novel and admire the full twenty-four years she dedicated to it. I admire her language that digs deep into the human mind and into our sad history. I write in a language that is internationally less prominent than other languages. My language becomes useless when I go abroad. Whenever I think it is useless, I think of Park Kyong-ni and her dedication of twenty-four years. Difficulty of communication doesn't mean a language has no worth or no depth. But I didn't answer why I write yet, or if, like Park Kyong-ni, I write because I'm unhappy— maybe; maybe not. We live only once; this is frustrating. So we have to do our best in our time. I think that is my duty and a courtesy. Someone gave me life and I should answer. Now that I am alive and have a memory and can feel things deeply, I have to answer the questions of who I am, and where I am. So I write. 7 Why I Write What I Write and How I Write it. October 13, 2006. Iowa City Public Library. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/EVEN/EVENmain.html Nukila Amal Why I Write What I Write and How I Write It: a Writer’s Puzzle Puzzle: A game; can be taken lightly or seriously; scattered pieces here and there dreaming of a whole image; flashes of images; puzzling. And so the play begins: discerning an image, fitting the pieces together, breaking them down again, re-ordering, starting from the puzzle’s edge, seeking the hidden, emerging images, branching-out, intensifying, recurring. The interconnectedness of the pieces: parts becoming whole, creating a semblance of order out of the disorder, giving form to the formlessness. And at the end, one stares at the images in the big picture that turn out to be entirely different from what one had in mind; and one is left puzzled as ever. “Puzzle” will act as the keyword for this discussion. The word is very suitable because writing for me has always been like working on a puzzle, and I write for some reasons which still puzzle me thus far. So perhaps the better way to approach the topic is by scattering a few puzzle pieces in random order, and perhaps you can get a glimpse of the big picture. Some Plausible Reasons for Writing: The answer to the first question: “Why does one write what one writes?” is simply because there are things that leave me puzzled with my head reeling in dizzy confusion, and I happened to stumble into writing one day and happily discovered that it is my only way out of this confusion. It came quite accidentally, and afterwards, naturally. Apart from my childhood infatuation with puzzles, and coincidentally I live in a country that looks on the map like scattered pieces of puzzle—Indonesia is indeed a puzzling country, another plausible reasons for writing is that it puts my thoughts in order, or a semblance of order; some people are cursed with chaotic minds, and writing becomes a sweet salvation for the chaos, puzzlement and awe in one’s head. Another reason for writing is to make sense of the happenings around me—to give form to thoughts, feelings, perceptions, phenomenal forms, the five sensual and mental continuums, all which comprise our consciousness and our existential experience. The impalpable reality turn into words: e.g. the horror of war, the taste of a fruit, the human condition, the inner workings of a human being in extreme situations, loneliness of old age, etc. Writing is a mysterious and elusive process, and surely there must be other unconscious reasons beyond my awareness which render writing to one of the most pleasant things to do, making the process puzzling to me as ever, from the beginning to the end. And how ideas, or phrase, or words appearing like organic entities that grow and proliferate, taking flight according to their whims, is another great mystery. And anything that puzzles is surely fascinating: these become my subject matter. In the beginning was the word, and a shape. Ideas and inspirations come from both an inner and outer world. My stories usually start from flashes of words, or phrases, or lines, or a certain geometrical shape, which would arise in my mind and keep reverberating for an uncertain period of time. That’s how I know that my mind is brewing a story. This is followed by random scribbling and drawing. Paragraphs or chapters are not written in linear 8 fashion, but fashioned out of a cut-and-paste technique, and then are fitted together in the passages in one chapter or chapters in one book. Inspirations are also achieved from countless stimuli in the outer world: nature, a painting, graphic works, comics, posters, advertisements, etc. Half of the stories in my second book, Laluba, were inspired by the works and life of the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, whose works I admire, disorienting and mind-boggling as they are. My other story of a circus dancer who can spin faster than her own shadow, came from a poster of a blurred ballerina dressed in red. I also find exotic sounds inspiring, such as the name of a city or village, archaic words, or words in the local languages that strike my ears delightfully or roll nicely off the tongue. Indonesia has more than 500 languages and dialects with different distinctive traits, even alphabet systems. This richness in vocabulary becomes a fertile ground as well as a challenge for me to take these languages from the margins into the center, the lingua franca. The titles of my two books are not even Indonesian words. Methods, Motifs & Patterns: “Apa-apa jatuh ke mana-mana,” Everything falls everywhere. The novel Cala Ibi started with this phrase that played repeatedly in my mind. The next thought was the story: two women writing about each others’ existence. Then came the shape, which would be the form (and content) of the novel: a horizontal eight, the symbol of infinity in arithmetic. This shape forms a circular loop, mőbius strip, a tangled hierarchy of sort, in which the two stories intertwine and enfold back into themselves—beginning is the end is the beginning…—the story goes on and on. Readers can start from any chapter in the book and would find themselves back to square one. The shape and the phrase are recurrent motifs that appear here and there throughout the novel as an event, thought, or image, resonating in slight variations and derivatives. Meaning is shown as a process, unstable, always shifting on different contexts, open-ended, multilayered. Mostly I use lyrical and figurative language that is suggestive rather than definitive, hinting instead of stating. I steer away from singular, tight and fixed meaning. My writing tends to be disjointed, discontinuous, disorderly, non-linear, a hit-‘n-run/hide-‘n-seek game, seemingly arbitrary; yet this is only the way it seems. Under closer scrutiny, readers will discover an underlying structure, which is what I also discover, gradually into its complete disclosure only in the process of writing. The fragmentary nature of the writing renders each chapter to be read independently like a short story. Readers can always throw away the book after reading five pages or so if they are annoyed. Perhaps I do this, also, because I like the idea of constantly disturbing the reader, making them aware that they’re reading a book— mere words and letters, just a literary landscape. The shape of this horizontal eight became my point of departure to delve deeper into the novel’s motifs or patterns: duality, mirroring, meta-fiction—in which it tells about the process of writing, reading and narrating in the text. And these lead to other thematic preoccupations such as language, consciousness, reality, history, ethnicity, etc. Writing in this discontinuous web-like pattern means letting loose of the reins of the text, wandering to wherever the words and lines take me, taking leaps and bounds, discovering connections, surprises, and coincidences along the way. Thus writing becomes a way to learn to trust my own instincts and to go by my nerve—to play; to take risks; to allow mistakes, 9 spontaneity, changes, and doubt to take place in the process of writing; to pass back and forth and to feel over words, over lines: to love language. Another idea for this kind of writing was to construct events from words down to the level of the individual letter. The naming of characters plays an important part since these words act as ignition for the branching-out of associative ideas. The proliferations form a web-like structure, a kind of semantic network, in which everything falls everywhere, interconnected; the nodes are not in linear sequence, but patterns of relationships that are inseparable. Nothing stands on itself. In this web of writing, a little tiny change can turn into a gargantuan effect, like Lorenz’s butterfly effect (It is a pleasant coincidence, to find out that the Strange Attractor has a horizontal eight shape, with more lines and trajectories.). All nodes related to that change would also have to change, respectively changing other nodes connected to them. I ended up elsewhere than I intended to be, falling to everything and everywhere, but it is a trip and a risk worth taking. Dualities: Maya-Maia, dream-reality, night-day, logic-imagination, form-content, beginningend, prose-poetry, order-disorder, sense-nonsense, center-margin, city-forest, fact-fiction, feminine-masculine, writer-reader, etc. I play with these dualities through the narratives of the two women living in two different worlds, by juxtaposing, contrasting and confronting the opposites. And inevitably, I find myself transgressing the boundaries, blurring and merging both sides into a penumbra with no clear edges, a hazy area in which no hierarchical order exists. The twin poles blend, complement and strengthen each other to pave a different way to discern our so-called reality. As the outcome there is a third sort of entity that dwells in this grey area: a hybrid of the two, but neither of those two. A Universe of Verses: The idea of constructing events from words, I suppose, sprang up from my religious background. I have always been fascinated with the concept in Islam which sees all creations in the universe as ayat, verses, and signs, kalimatullah (words of Allah). In Islam, parallel to the linguistic genesis in Judeo-Christian tradition, the coming into existence of the universe started from the first divine saying ‘kun fayakun’ (Be, and the word becomes). The concept of kalimatullah, the universe of verses, or, verses of the universe, is explored in several chapters. The two women eventually come to this haunting premonition that each of them is the creation and creator of the other. But which is which does not really matter as they face the ultimately reality: that their universe is a book, and they are mere characters in this literary mindscape, a construct of vowels and consonants. The word human is only a word amidst infinite words, a verse among other verses in the uni-verse. And what follows is silence. In this light, life for them becomes a process of signification in the multitude of signs in the universe. And perhaps, inevitably, this is where I had to take a plunge to the abyss of language. Language: It is unadvisable for a beginner writer to start with a novel, and on top of that, it is unadvisable for the beginner to come to doubt the very tool, language itself. It is an early doom. After I experienced the pure bliss of discovering how fascinating language is—its richness, play, subversions, possibilities contained and allowed in itself; another aspect of language, as a formal system, convention with its many codes and practices, language itself appeared to me more disconnected from actuality. Some ideas and experiences occur at the 10 very limits of what words can accomplish; representation of concepts and propositions fail their own process. The expressive power of language and its limits of communicability were questioned throughout the Cala Ibi, in a hesitant way, as if torn between speech and silence, absent yet present. Eventually the book shows that language is inadequate to represent reality, words fall away when it comes to the direct experience of reality that is amorphous and ineffable. The book defies the logocentrism that we have always taken for granted: language as the precise, stable and definitive representation of Reality. In the end, experience is the reality; it is primary, and can only be felt, while language is abstract—secondary, derivative, limited, even empty in itself (e.g. the experience of eating sushi vs. the description of sushi on the menu). Here is the paradox of language—how the experience itself could only find its form when articulated in language. The semantic construction is what creates the substance out of the formlessness of reality, of our existential experiences in it. And this is the beauty of language, it is valuable not because of their mimetic capacity to represent reality, but because of its power to produce it. It is our last frontier. And at the end, language (and the two characters in my novel), having been traversing the webs and journeys and arrive before the larger reality, must stand before it in absolute silence, in awe. There are stories that one can tell, and stories that should be left untold. 11 Why I Write What I Write and How I Write it. October 13, 2006. Iowa City Public Library. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/EVEN/EVENmain.html Srijato Bandyopadhyay Why I Write What I Write and How I Write It The title of this panel sounds like some questionnaire that we used to answer while studying in 5th or 6th grade and I wish I could go back to that time to answer these questions, because as we grow up, it becomes more difficult to face these three words: “why,” “what” and “how.” And believe me, these are the toughest tricks, and they can bring a writer down. But, nevertheless, writers always carry their very own tricks to counter things like this and I am here to do so. The first question, as you can see is ‘why I write’. When I considered this for the first time, it appeared as a purely literary question. But later on, as I tried to explain the answer to myself, it seemed a biological question to me. Although we must firstly learn why we breathe, eat and sleep, the next query must be why we write. I believe to all the writers who do their job seriously, writing is as spontaneous as breathing, eating or sleeping. The one line answer could be this: “I write because I cannot live without writing,” and that would be true enough, but not long enough to satisfy a panel. Therefore, I have divided my answer to this question into three separate parts, each of which relates to three different time periods of my life lived so far. My first reason is related entirely with expression—self expression. Let me explain this. I was born in a family which carries the rich tradition of Indian classical music. It was my grandfather who took performing Indian classical as a profession: he was a vocalist. My mom and her elder brother did the same thing, following his steps. So, my exposure to Indian classical music was as natural as of light and air. I even cannot remember the time I began listening. Altogether, I grew up in a musical atmosphere which provided me a sense of thorough understanding of classical Indian music. But, as I was adding years to my age, the structure of Indian classical music gradually started to fail to satisfy me completely. No doubt, with a tradition of a few thousand years, its content was unquestionable, but somehow, I was unsatisfied with the vast ambiguity and abstractness it offered. I had some definite questions budding in my mind and I had to find out some more definite answers for them. And in a searching campaign like this, abstractness is the last thing you need. I was desperately looking for some means which could help me broach my questions, and I started to write. I started just to see whether it would help; and it did. It was the first time I could express myself correctly. I was not dependent on ambiguity any longer. I could have whatever I wanted. It was a thrill, it was fun, and it opened many possibilities. The words started to come out of me as a punch to the enemy’s face, as a kick on a football, as the sharp whistle of a pressure cooker and god knows what else. It was a time of outburst, like when it becomes quiet after a volcanic eruption, I was feeling much more relieved, like the touch of a feather, like the smell of a first kiss. I knew I had it. It is writing and nothing else that can save my soul. 12 As the days went by, heaps of diaries filled up my room. They were full of expressions of joy, anger, sadness, solitude, sexuality, even love, but expressions only, and nothing else. Expression is necessarily the primary element for any art form, but it is not the only one. If it were, painting would not have come to Paul Klee, flowing down the ages. It would have satisfied itself after having the bison in the cave of Altamira. Thus I understood it is the time to make sense—make my “expressions” something more meaningful, of more worth. This understanding unlocks the second phase, and here the key word would be ‘communication’. I gradually discovered a separate self which tries to write and to communicate with me, which reads my writing. So I, the reader-self, had to be more conscious, more attentive, and more eager to fulfill the two-way communication. It was a period of crisis indeed. On the one hand, I was writing as things were coming to me; and on the other hand I was trying to understand language and semiotics. It was like a split mirror image. It was like a game I was playing with myself. I was my only friend those days; the only enemy as well. So the reason I write became clear to me. It was, certainly, to communicate. As the game unfolded its endless tricks, I found my own writings more tangible for myself. I started to understand what I wanted to understand. I deeply believe that every artist on this earth creates something primarily for herself or himself. There is no other reader, listener, or viewer that she or he thinks of while creating. I, as a poet, do support that. But, we are, after all, social animals. We like to interact, to share, to exchange. And here lies the last but not the least important of the reasons to write. After I have had myself as a reader of my work, in addition, I want someone else to be a reader. I want Miss J or Mr. V as a reader too. I want to share my thoughts, to exchange them with others. I want to see if what I think actually can make any difference to someone. So here is the final reason to write. No creator should be influenced by the popular sentiment while creating, but there is also no harm if people get to know your work. Now is the time to face the second question of what I write: well, poetry. The third part of the title of the panel refers to the very procedure of writing—that is, “how.” I used to read a comic book with a hero named Mandrake. He was a gem of a magician and he would always save good souls and punish the evil ones by using thousands of spectacular tricks. And at the end of every single comic strip, he was asked by somebody: “How on this earth did you do that?” and his humble answer with a mysterious smile would be: “Oh, you know, magicians never tell.” This could be the best answer for me too, but life is no comic strip, and neither are poets magicians. To be very frank, the answer is I do not know how I write. Writing poetry always has something to do with different types of technicalities, but the basic structure is built up by thoughts, images, perception and experience. And no school can teach you these things. Unlike this part of the world, we do not have creative writing schools or courses in our land. It is the only art form that you have to learn by yourself. So, practically there is no one whom one can ask how. What my little experience as a poet says is that poetry comes to you— not always, but most of the time. It comes to you in various shapes, colors, smells, sounds and might be in terms of other dimensions as well. In my case, it never appears as a full, accomplished form. I only get a glimpse of it. When it comes to my mind I do not even know whether it is the initial part of a poem, the middle portion, or the conclusion. Some 13 words strike my mind and suddenly I know therein lies a poem, as a little bone can lead you to the dinosaur. After that, I start to live with that fragment automatically. It is very awkward to have all sorts of permutations and combinations going on in your head while you are crossing the road, paying the bills or kissing your lover. It really is. But after some cultivation and care, it starts to take shape and then I feel that I have the steering in my hands at last, and I can mold it how I want to. This is one side of the story. Sometimes poems do not come to you that easily and it’s not worth trying. The only thing you can do is to wait. And this blank period is also a part of writing. How patiently you wait reflects your ability. I think I have only tried to find out a glimpse of the answers which were asked for here. If it makes any sense to anybody, I will be happy enough to forget the pain from writing 1501 words in a single stretch. 14 |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (AAT) |
Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection |
International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
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| Title | Why I write what I write and how I write it 2006 |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Duration | 01:32:16 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4. |
| Date Digital | 2006-10-13 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_10-13-06.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_10-13-06.mpg |
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