Post-election: Back to the writing desk

Here in the U.S., we’ve had a tumultuous week following a difficult election. The final result of our presidential election has sent many reeling and many celebrating. For me, the week with its weird combination of predictions and exultations was sobering and as possessive of attention as a strong vacuum.

In the midst of all the inner and online clamor, I read a social media post offered by artist and author Makoto Fujimura that struck me: "No matter what your reaction to this historic election, our response should be to cultivate the good, true and the beautiful.”

Yes to this, I thought.

Those transcendentals fit with what I have had in the margin of this blog for a long while: “Aiming at the intersections of thought, faith, imagination, and beauty in everyday life.” I'm recommiting to my pre-workday writing desk – a place where I've been absent too often for too long because I’ve been “too tired” or “too busy” – to attend to the entries on this blog that are yet to be posted and the pages of a new book* yet to be fully written.

All that is good, true, and beautiful surrounds us, waiting quietly to fill inner space and then be shared. God be praised.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you might do to cultivate the good, the true, and the beautiful in coming months.

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*If you’re interested in learning a bit about the new book, I invite you to read the [monthly] email I send out to readers who ask to receive it.  

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[Photo: taken of a few leaves remaining on a nearby tree.]

Revisiting the mystery at the table - and the desk

Nearly 7 years ago I bought the icon known as The Holy Trinity, or The Trinity, by Andrei Rublev, brought it home, and hung it above my desk where I could see it every day. Honestly though, over time, I have tended to forget to look at it even though it's right in front of me as I work. After all, there are papers to read and chapters to write and slides to edit. This morning I'm re-reminding myself to look at it, to think about it. So in that spirit, I'm sharing the blog post I wrote just days after I purchased it in February 2010.

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Last weekend I went with a friend to a bookstore in St. Paul that was closing. A bookstore closing is always a sad affair, yet the owner seemed in good spirits and prices were slashed so joy was still to be had. I bought a few books and an icon wall hanging. Since hearing Dr. Roy Robson from the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia speak at The Museum of Russian Art a couple years ago, I've had my eye out for a copy of the Holy Trinity icon by Andrei Rublev, which reflects the story of Abraham's hospitality from Genesis 18. Robson showed a slide of this icon, with three figures seated at a round table. Two of the three figures were robed in brilliant blue. It was so beautiful I could hardly stop looking. The figures represent the Trinity, as its name suggests, and they are seated at the nine, twelve, and three o'clock positions. Left open is the 6 o'clock position. As Robson said, it invites you to "contemplate sitting at the table with the Trinity." I like that sense of invitation and so for that reason I'll hang it near my work space where I can see it.

I want it where I can see it for another reason as well, particularly while I write. In Mind of the Maker, written in 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers examines in great detail the analogic association between the Divine Creator and the human creative process through the doctrine of the Trinity. The ideal literary artist composes his or her works in the image of the three-fold mind comprised of the co-equal and co-substantial Idea, Energy, and Power.

The Idea—or the Father—is the “Book-as-Thought” in the writer’s mind irrespective of any words actually written. The thought precedes the actual activity or material production of the work, but continues on eternally after the work is written and read. The work “is known to the writer as …a complete and timeless whole."

The Energy—or the Son—which “brings about an expression in temporal form of the eternal and immutable Idea,” is the “Book-as-Written." It is the creation that the writer or a reader can witness either as the material form of the work or as the passion and toil of the writer.

The Power—or the Spirit—emerges from the Idea and the Energy. This is the “Book-as-Read” and is the “means by which the [Energy] is communicated to other readers and which produces a corresponding response in them.”

To the writer, the Idea, the Energy, and the Power “are equally and eternally present in his own act of creation…they exist in—they are—thecreative mind itself." To ignore this co-equal and co-substantial pattern of the ideal creative mind, Sayers argued, is to invite failure to a literary work.

Much to think about and be reminded of for 50% off.

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Pearls from the Festival of Faith and Writing

Home now from the Festival of Faith and Writing (FFW), I'm going to try and pick some pearls from the week to share here. This is a hard task considering that the three days were the equivalent of a long triple strand of the finest quality natural pearls of highest luster. How to choose only a few pearls to highlight? I'll start with one from most of the talks or panels I attended.

Tobias Wolff: "Is it possible to have certainty without arrogance or blindness? Without harm to others?"

Dani Shapiro: "Insist that suffering not be meaningless." Writing is a way to do that.

David Kim: We must do whatever we can to "counter atrophy of the imagination." The role of the arts is to "cultivate the imagination." He suggests reading through the Biblical narrative twice a year in order to shape the imagination. "Scripture is so wildly imaginative!"

Zadie Smith: Refuse to be a brand, to be a product, to slip seamlessly into capital.

Erik Lokkesmoe: Signs of life – truth, beauty, goodness – are everywhere!

George Saunders: "I imagine my reader so close and lovingly that she is practically bonded at my shoulder."

Hannah Notess: "Put energy into things that are worth it."

Caroline Langston: "Literary achievement is about spiritual practice."

Paul Harding: After being a drummer in a rock band failed when he was in his 30s, he took a 2-week writing course at a local university. Marilynne Robinson walked in and started teaching and it hit him: "This is the life I want for my mind." His life was never the same. (I love that story.)

There's more that could be said. Much more. This doesn't capture much and certainly not what I learned from conversations or the simple but profound excitement of ideas buzzing all around.

If you also were at FFW, please join me and add a pearl of your own in the comments or feel free to post a link to something you wrote about it elsewhere.

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[Photo: taken of FFW program, which you can take a look at here.]

The Word that shimmers: lectio divina writing exercise

Last weekend I was at a day retreat and led a devotional writing session. It may be something you’d want to try on your own or with a group. The eight of us divided up some passages of Scripture and started with prayer and silent slow reading. Lectio divina is based on the assumption that Scripture is not only the Word of God with wisdom and instruction for living, but also that it is the living Word of God with something to say directly and in real-time to each of us who reads it. To me. To you. To listen for that personal word (that Word), the practice of lectio divina suggests listening for the phrase or image or single word that resonates with you, that jumps off the page at you, that shimmers. I particularly like that last description. Listen and watch for what shimmers, I told the group. Then start writing. Write fast.

I’m a believer in the value of writing fast when you’re trying to bring something to light. Keep the pen moving across the page even if all you have to write is “keep the pen moving,” because something in this rush pushes away the strong and strict self-editor that makes you want to judge each word before you write it down and instead allows something true and deep to emerge, even if it’s only one sentence on a page of throw-away words. There’s time enough later for writing that’s slow and careful.

We huddled each in our private corner and listened for what shimmered. We wrote in response.

But there was deeper still to go. Next we did what I called the “double shimmer,” which means applying the lectio divina listening to what we had just written. What shimmers, what jumps off the page, what surprises and interests you most from what you had just written in response to the initial shimmer? Now write fast in response to that.

The purpose, of course, is not to fill journal pages, but to finally prayerfully consider, what has been spoken to you, only you?

The passage I got was the prelude to the last supper. Someone else got the story of Jesus washing the disciples feet. Another, the story of the woman washing Jesus’s feet with her hair. Another, the Old Testament story of Abraham hosting the visiting angels. So much to shimmer. 

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[Photo: taken of a marble submerged in water in a cut-glass bowl.]

680. To be a person on whom nothing is lost

I've been reading the book The Sea Inside by Philip Hoare. Every day Hoare goes to the sea and swims and sees what he can see. And he sees many things. The book is part memoir, part science writing, part travel writing, part philosophy and history and literature, part many things. Being at the sea, Hoare riffs on the seagulls and crows, shore stones (I particularly liked his pencil drawing of a stone with a hole in it), seals, the people who’ve lived nearby and their ancestors, whales, Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, ships, the sea itself and the sky, medieval monks, and more. There seems to be an endless number of things to catch his attention and be worth thinking about and writing about.

He writes:

“You assume you know your home. It’s only when you return that you realise how strange it is. I first saw this beach half a century ago, but all those years have made it seem less rather than more familiar. I’ve taken it for granted. But now, as I look out over its expanse, it occurs to me that what I thought I knew, I didn’t really know at all.”

When I was in junior high I met a woman, perhaps 10 years older than me, who was writing a 70-page paper for graduate school on what happens inside the body when you pick up a pencil from a table. How can that be? I wondered. 70 pages on such a simple action! Her assignment grabbed my imagination and was one more clue among many to my young self that there was more going on here - right here - than the eye could see.

Henry James famously wrote, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" Here's an experiment to do today. Stand in one place wherever you are and slowly spin 360 degrees and make a note - mental or written - of every thing of beauty or interest or meaning or intrigue or mystery that you see. Imagine how each could trigger a stream of thoughts and questions.

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[Photo: taken of a mural painted on a dome in one of the many lovely libraries here in Minneapolis.]

Marilynne Robinson on conventional mind and deep mind

The November/December issue of Poets & Writers magazine featured a cover story on Marilynne Robinson. Her most recent books are the novel Lila and the essay collection The Givenness of Things. The piece gave much focus to her writing process. One of the photos was of a window in her home study that she sits near while writing long-hand in a hardcover notebook. Line-by-line, first sentence to last, she writes her books without revision. Let me say that again: without revision.

While I can’t relate to the “without revision” aspect of Robinson’s writing process, I can relate to her distinction of conventional mind and deep mind. Here is a section from the cover story:

“I tell my students that you have a conventional mind— a front-office mind, I call it—that basically deals with the business of living in the world. It’s what pays attention to things that are, in themselves, perhaps trivial. And then you have a deeper mind that you are very much surprised by, that has its own obsessions that you would not anticipate, that has its own favorite words, that has memories you can’t believe you remember. You can’t trust the superficial mind to give you something that’s original. But you can trust the deeper mind. That’s where you really live, where your truth is.”

I often think of this shift from writing with the front-brain mind to the deeper mind as “jumping the track,” and I can feel it when it happens. I’m not sure I thought about two levels of mind before I started writing, but they are there and not tied to writing. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about the shift from superficial to shallow in his bestseller Flow. Greek philosophers called the two levels of mind ratio and intellectus. Ratio is the kind of knowing that emerges from intentionally working your brain; it is all about reasoning and logic. In contrast, intellectus is the kind of knowing that emerges from leisure, from stillness and contemplation; it is passive and receptive. We need both, of course, for a full life.

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On another note, Relief Journal published on its blog an interview between me and Lisa Ohlen Harris, friend and their former creative nonfiction editor. (I’ve written about Lisa's wonderful books on this blog a couple times before.) The interview is mostly about the writing process and the role of community in writing. Please take a look; I’d be honored if you did. Here’s the link.

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[Photo: taken of a portion of the November/December issue of Poets & Writers]

Christian Wiman on reading and writing

Last Thursday, I skipped my coffee break, skipped my lunch, and left my desk midafternoon to go hear Christian Wiman speak and read at an event at the University of Minnesota sponsored by MacLaurinCSF, a Christian study center. Wiman, in case you don't know, is a "highly acclaimed" poet, former editor of Poetry Magazine, author of multiple books, including My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, a book of prose about his "return to God" while fighting cancer. Currently, he teaches at Yale Divinity School.

Wiman was warm and generous in his reading and comments to the handful of us seated in the lecture room. It is always noteworthy when a public figure is warm and generous to a smaller than expected audience. The poems he read were the kind that made you want to push a pause button after each so you could let it sink in for awhile. My favorite poem he read was “My Stop is Grand,” in which he reflected on his times riding the Chicago El – which I rode so many times over four years of my life – to work. The El shot through “a hell of ratty alleys” and after emerging:

screechingly peacocked
a grace of sparks
              so far out and above
the fast curve that jostled
and fastened us
               into a single shock of—
I will not call it love

You can read the whole poem here at the Poetry Foundation.

I wanted to tell about that poem because I wanted to share with you that image of the peacocking sparks, turning a mundane dreary ride to work experienced by separate individuals into a corporate epiphany. I loved that.

I also want to tell you two other things he said in passing, one related to reading and the other to writing, and when I say related to writing, I also mean related to living. Those of you who've read this blog long enough have figured out that I think what's good for writing is good for living and visa versa.

About reading: Wiman said that he used to read for what he could get out of a book, but the older he gets the more he finds himself reading for relationship. Reading is a way to find out what other people in his life are thinking and what they like, and it provides opportunity to talk about things with other people. (Note: none of this reportage is direct quote but only my paraphrase.) Reading as relational - I want to remember that.

About writing (aka living): Wiman said that most of his poems are the result of an event percolating inside him for about 10 years before he starts to write. I take that as a reminder to be patient with all things, to take the long view, to let things take their time to accrue meaning, particularly those things that have that shimmer around them that says "pay attention."

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[Photo: taken of the paper covering I glued on this composition notebook in which I wrote this blog post - and so many others - before posting. This post took the notebook's last page so time for a new notebook. To give credit for the design: CanvasCorp.]