Right Brain Vs Left

[lettered]

Sometimes I think I am very technical minded. When I read, I pull everything apart into a million pieces. I deconstruct the elegance of the equation by hammering it down into raw numbers. Writers I interact with, some of you reading this perhaps, say to me, "Oh, such clever reading! I never even notice those things were there!" That is because you are creative; I am technical. You give life, while I--I don't take it away, of course. I merely dissect it after it's dead (maybe ideas die when they spew into words, onto the page. Or maybe they don't die until I read them. [Maybe that cat in the box is dead; maybe it is alive. Maybe it is both until you open the box.]). This is a very clinical job of mine that requires no power and quite a bit of cleverness. I am like a scientist, a mortician. I am very business-oriented; I host a funeral parlor.

When I write, I do not give life; I merely do the opposite of undertaking. I add up numbers on my machine. I assemble parts; I fit them together, jig-saw style. I put a lot of things in there, I feed them into the black box that you see, but I can rarely say to you, "I never even notice those things were there!" because I put them there. I am very intentional; I am filled with purpose. This may be a form of creativity, but it requires not a single leap. Leaps are genius; steady steps are merely very clever. (I told you I am very clever; I have no doubt of that.)

This is why I cannot write poetry. Poetry is all leaps. It makes me feel; it makes me think as well, but my thinking is not successful. I don't understand why certain poems make me feel they way they do, or how the words in them work on me. I cannot take poetry apart. I hate it because I cannot break it to bits and I worship it for that same reason. It's smarter than me--or, more hatefully and more sacredly, it is not about intelligence at all but something spiritual that cannot be accessed with logic. I shake my fist at T. S. Eliot, the integrity (the leaps) of whose poetry I interest-list.

But sometimes I think I am not very technical minded at all. The millions of pieces I pull apart from a piece of art require a certain kind of vision, this vision being revelation, being faith, which requires all sorts of leaping, as the saying goes. I am managing, in all this deconstruction, to see the construction itself, the creation, but also all the millions of things that went into it. Millions of things that do not exist as things separately; I look at something smooth and continuous, like a marble statue, and see it as if it was made of a billion bricks instead of carved out of a single stone. And seeing it that way isn't false seeing. Just because the author didn't mean to put it there, didn't have to think of it, doesn't mean it's not there. I'm just seeing of what the rock itself is composed, which the artist might never have understood or considered beyond what it took to manipulate the raw materials, and again I say this takes vision.

In a marble statue are billions of atoms and molecules and particles and dust motes and rubble and rock bonded together by atomic forces, by molecular bonds, by weather and erosion and time, by nature. They exist on infinite different levels, and coexist in different relationships in infinity times as many ways. Obviously I don't literally see atoms. I do see in 80 pages of a good book at least a dozen different themes, which can be broadened so that there are maybe really only two or three umbrella themes, or narrowed such that there are however many sentences come in 80 pages. But I see these different themes and can make almost every word connect to them.

I could reorder every word--of course, I could reorder every word and write the book all over again. But I can also make every word relate to every other word; I can make each idea hark back to one of a thousand threads weaving together the cloth; my view of the cloth is not linear but a web. Of course it's easy with a good book; I think that must be what a good book is. But good writers don't necessarily do it. That is not to say they couldn't. Everyone can to some extent; that is why we have the word "theme" and almost every person knows its meaning. But of course I am a snowflake.

That was longer than 15 minutes. I wonder if it even means anything? To anyone but me, I mean.

Comments

[tkp.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'd like to read that some day (Rose Riddle, I mean).

I do think that cleverness can get in the way of a story. But I think that sometimes the point of a story is the story, and sometimes the point of a story is the writing. I'm in the middle of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet right now, and it seems to me the point is absolutely what the author has to say and how it's said. It's not about the plot, which is barely there.

I mean, finding the "SO WHAT" is part of the fractal-pick-apart game. Finding out what it's all about, what the point of it is. I think the SO WHAT in my fic Down There In The Reeperbahn was that Angel's life is a crazy repeating pattern. And that's what the writing was. I'm not saying it was a perfect piece or that the writing perfectly illustrated that point, but the style of the piece was part of the point.

Thanks, I'm glad you like my poetry. I'm pleased every once in a while with poems that I write, but my problem is I can't force a poem. In prose I can eventually say everything I want to say; in poetry you have to leave so many things out. And while they're both just words that say stuff, poetry says far more in the spaces in between. The meter says stuff that sentence and paragraph spacing doesn't. There's a lot of power in the formatting you do with prose, the way you phrase things, Toni Morrison even sometimes leaves out spaces between words. But you still have far more power in poetry, even in structured verse.