Synchronicity: On the Right Track with Jean Rhys

Last week I wrote a post about a marvelous quotation from Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Here’s the whole quotation again, because you can never get enough of this one:

All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

Keep in mind, I’ve never read anything by Jean Rhys. The only way I know of that quotation is because it appeared in an interview in Poets & Writers. And the interview wasn’t even with Jean Rhys; it was with another author who quoted Jean Rhys. And I’ve fogotten that other author’s name because she wasn’t very famous and I haven’t read any of her stuff, and I didn’t save the whole interview; I just clipped out the part with the Jean Rhys quote. The clipping lives on my desk.

Anyway, on the day when I put up that post about Jean Rhys, an hour or two later I read on the Internet somewhere that the literary journal American Book Review had compiled a list of the 100 best first lines of novels. I decided to swing by and check it out, and I do recommend reading it; it’s like eating one tiny bite of 100 different masterfully prepared entrées. I took my time reading through the list, nibbling on the repast at odd times during the day, and that afternoon I finally got to the bottom, where I found this (the lines are listed in no particular order):

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.—Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

I haven’t done a lot of research on synchronicities, so I can’t make an informed statement about this one. But to me the most important thing about a synchronicity is the way it feels. When that unexpected piece of information is staring me in the face, and I feel dizzy or queasy or I get the chills, or my heart speeds up, or I suddenly feel as if I’m not alone, the one indisputable thing I know is that this experience is meaningful to me. And usually what a synchronicity means to me is that I’m on the right track. That music I’m listening to, or that author I’m reading, or that principle I’m trying to apply in my life is the right principle, right author, right music. The synchronicity says, Keep on doing what you’re doing. You’re getting there. It’s a little nugget of encouragement from the collective unconscious. And I need all the encouragement I can get.

Synchronicity: “Skill Comes from Diligence”

 

My wife recently read Rules for the Dance, poet Mary Oliver’s book about how to read and write metered poetry. She photocopied a few pages out of the book and left them on my desk because she knew I’d find them interesting. She was right, but these few pages are beyond interesting; they’re useful.

A section titled “Discipline” begins with a pithy quotation:

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
—Herr Klesmer in Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

Oliver goes on to give her advice about writing:

When you are starting to write poems, make a schedule of the times you will work, and adhere to it with careful and steadfast exactitude. . . . Whenever you work, you (the conscious part of your mind) are summoning it (the much greater, richer subconscious part of  your mind) to sit down at the desk, that you and it may write the poem together. But your subconscious energy works in accordance with waves and tides very different from conscious intent. It needs, in fact, to know when it will be summoned to the actual labor; moreover, it needs to know that you will summon it, and reliably.

I’ve written recently (here and here) about my new practice—or ritual, you might call it—of writing for ten minutes at the start of every day. The word “every” is not to be taken completely literally; it’s at least every weekday when I’m in town, and it includes weekends if I’m working over the weekend, and it may or may not include out-of-town trips, depending. But still, on 75 or 80 percent of my mornings, I’m writing for ten minutes first thing. Believe it or not, that little practice has done wonders for everything from my creativity to my productivity to my overall mood. So when Oliver talks about the value of making a schedule for your creative writing—not just ten minutes in a journal, but actual creative production of a poem or story or screenplay—I get it, right away.

But I resisted actually making the schedule. Who wants to be tied down like that, man? Artists are supposed to be free from all your bourgeois conceptions of—and then as soon as I thought the word “bourgeois,” I remembered this great quote from Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Better to say that I was Resisting the schedule (a la Steven Pressfield). But Flaubert and Mary Oliver were ganging up on me. More from Oliver:

If you prove yourself reliable—if you are always there at the desk as promised—it [your subconscious] will grow strong and more fertile; it will arrive with all kinds of offerings. But the dread of preparing, and arriving and being forsaken, is very real. As in a romance, the partnership will flourish with each expectation met, or it will wither with each disappointment.

Perhaps that helps explain why not writing on day 1 makes it easier not to write on day 2: the jilted subconscious is giving you the cold shoulder; you, sensing this, decide not to even ring that doorbell.

While I was still mulling all this over, I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and I got one of those fortune cookies where the fortune isn’t really a fortune; it’s more of an adage or a proverb, like “Birds are entangled by their feet, men by their tongues” (helpfully provided by http://www.fortunecookiemessage.com/), or “Never invade Russia in the winter” (helpfully provided by yours truly, military expert). I usually hate proverb cookies, but that night I got a good one, which I saved and taped to my desk: “Skill comes from diligence.”

Okay, okay. I gave in. I stopped Resisting. I made the schedule: 7 to 9 p.m. every weekday. At least two hours per day (unscheduled) on weekends. This until my screenplay is done. So far so good—I’m making genuine forward progress on the screenplay—although I’ve already had to shorten one of my writing sessions to attend a birthday celebration for a very dear friend. The way I look at it, I now owe the lake an hour and a half (I’m tracking that time on my desk) on top of the two hours I need to put in every day. Because this is what it takes.

Synchronicity: “The Existential Clown”

The other day I was writing a blog post that prominently featured a picture of a clown and that included a link to a Wikipedia article on the irrational fear of clowns. (As I write this, I am aware that some of you may think there needs to be another Wikipedia article, this one on the entirely rational fear of clowns. And if that’s how you feel about it, you can write the article! That’s the beauty of Wikipedia.) Anyway, I was wading through page after page of clown pictures, and I skimmed that coulrophobia article, and I even found snippets of dialogue from the movie It (featuring Pennywise the clown, pictured above)–in short, I was awash in clownness. This for a guy who doesn’t really give a crap about clowns and hates circuses, mind you; I do not walk around with clowns on the brain, but I did that day.

In the middle of all that, I took a break to eat an apple, and while I ate I cruised through my blogroll. Then I came across a blog post that linked to the introduction of a newly released book, so I clicked through to the intro. Once I got there, I saw that the intro was titled “The Existential Clown.”

Hm. Does this mean coulrophobia isn’t so irrational after all? Imagine the horror of finding out that they really are out to get you—and that “they” are clowns.

That really is kind of horrifying. Way to go, self.

Synchronicity: “Change Is Inevitable”

A couple of weeks ago, I was working on my screenplay, feverishly hurrying to get as much done as I could before leaving town for the AWP conference—except it’s hard to “feverishly hurry” through the intricacies of creating a character. What are the character’s strengths? What are his or her weaknesses, skills, moral failings, deepest desires? You can’t exactly bang that stuff out at a thousand words an hour while you’re waiting for your clean underwear to finish drying so you can pack your suitcase. But I did manage to get some work done, thanks to the use of a certain technology, and here’s a screenwriting tip for you: the technology was index cards. Really this is a tip for anyone working on a large project, i.e., find a way to break the large project into smaller pieces. Do the smaller pieces one at a time, and over time they add up to the larger project. Not exactly a brand-new concept, but sometimes it helps to be reminded of the obvious truths.

Anyway, on the evening in question, I took an index card and wrote out one of the principles that one of the characters in our film is going to have to accept at some point: “Change is inevitable.” It doesn’t sound too impressive stated so baldly like that, but believe me, once it’s enacted in a fully dramatized scene? With special effects and explosions and 3D? CINEMATIC GENIUS.

So later that night I was unwinding with a post-escritorial glass of wine and reading the New York Times online when I ran across an article about the recent promising use of psychedelic drugs in psychiatric research. Here’s an excerpt of the article:

Researchers are reporting preliminary success in using psilocybin to ease the anxiety of patients with terminal illnesses. Dr. Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist who is involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as “existential medicine” that helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression.

“Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”

I think we’re on to something here.

Synchronicity: Song of Solomon Part 2

Yesterday I posted about a synchronicity I had with the Song of Solomon. In the synchronicity, one day last week I edited a book chapter that dealt extensively with the Song of Solomon, focusing on its status as erotic poetry; and later that night I watched the movie Bright Star, which had a scene that mentioned the Song of Solomon, focusing on its status as erotic poetry.

I made that post at 1:20 p.m. yesterday afternoon. Immediately afterward I began editing a novel, a new project. About forty or fifty pages in, I ran across a character who quotes this Bible verse: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine.” Do you recognize that? It’s Song of Solomon 1:2 (you heathen). Another character, upon hearing that verse, thinks that there is something “holy” about it (the author’s word). Compare that with these lines from my blog post, just a couple of hours prior: “Erotic love as holy. An important line from the movie: ‘There is a holiness to the heart’s affections.’”

At this rate I should be having another Song of Solomon synchronicity in about eight or nine minutes. I seem to be located at an interesting confluence of sex, poetry, and holiness. Should I start writing religiously tinged erotic poetry? As I seriously think about doing that, I remember that the only legitimately “literary” publication I’ve had is an erotic poem: “Men Who Have Sex with Men in Hanoi,” which appeared in the poetry journal caesura. (Just for the record, and for you writers out there, I distinguish my “literary” publication from my other types of publications, which I categorize as quasi-literary [short stories in newspapers], journalistic [feature articles in consumer magazines], business [company profiles for industry insiders], academic, ghostwriting, and so on.)

So maybe I really should start writing more erotic poetry. Or going to church? Sex in church! While reciting poetry. It’s on.

Synchronicity: Song of Solomon

Last Friday I was finishing up a big freelance job, editing a book about how to teach literature that’s been translated from a foreign language. The last chapter in the book talked about how to teach poetry that’s been translated from Hebrew, and the chapter focused on two examples: the modern Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, and the Song of Solomon from the Bible. The chapter dealt extensively with the strong eroticism of the poetry in the Song of Solomon and how that eroticism has bedeviled orthodox Jews and Christians in the centuries since it was composed.

That night, with my deadline met and the edited manuscript delivered to the client, Angela and I finally watched a Netflix DVD that had been sitting on her desk for weeks: Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. About halfway through the movie, there’s a scene where the Brawne family’s maid is talking about how Keats’s poet friend, Mr. Brown, has offered to teach her how to read. She says, recounting her conversation with Mr. Brown, “‘And what would I read?’ And he said to me, ‘There’s parts of the Song of Solomon that are so juicy they’ll make you blush.’” I’m paraphrasing the actual words spoken, but she definitely said it was the Song of Solomon they’d talked about. That detail is important, because Mr. Brown later gets the maid pregnant, which makes it difficult for him to care for Keats when Keats takes ill. Essentially, Brown was using the Song of Solomon—the sexiest book in the Bible—to flirt with the maid.

Not sure what to make of this one, but it felt significant for a lot of reasons: the unusual coincidence; the fact that I hadn’t read or heard anything about the Song of Solomon in months or years before this coincidence; the connection with writing—Song of Solomon as poetry, and as the device a poet uses to get laid; and something about the religious dimension seems significant too. Erotic love as holy. An important line from the movie: “There is a holiness to the heart’s affections.”

Thoughts?