Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (14 page)

We tried out writing in different cafés, once even driving an hour south to Owatonna, Minnesota, so I could show her the bank designed by Louis Sullivan that I was in love with. We wrote in the coffee shop across the street. I was unemployed then, looking for a job. She was on a writing grant.

I tell you this because it is important. We were willing to commit ourselves to a whole day of writing each week because writing, sharing, and friendship are important. And it happened on a Monday, the beginning of the work week. Remember this. Remember Kate and me on Mondays when nothing in your life seems worthwhile but earning a living and you find yourself worried about it.

When I was in Jerusalem for three months I had an Israeli landlady in her fifties. Her TV was broken and she called the repairman. It took him four visits to fix the screen. “But you knew even before he came the first time what was wrong. He could have brought the correct tube and fixed it immediately.” She looked at me in astonishment. “Yes, but then we couldn’t have had a relationship, sat and drunk tea and discussed the progress of the repairs.” Of course, the goal is not to fix a machine but to have relationships.

That is good to remember. What is important is not just what you do—“I am writing a book”—but how you do it, how you approach it, and what you come to value.

A friend living upstairs from me once said, “Natalie, you have relationships with everything, not just with people. You have a relationship with the stairs, your porch, the car, the cornfields, and the clouds.” We are a part of everything. When we understand this, we see that we are not writing, but everything is writing through us. Kate and I wrote through each other and through Mondays and through the streets and the coffee. Like bleeding one color into another.

There are many realities. We should remember this when we get too caught in being concerned about the way the rest of the world lives or how we think they live. There is just our lives and how we want to write and how we want to touch the rain, the table, the music, paper cups and pine trees.

A good warm-up or awakener is to write for ten minutes, beginning with “I am a friend to . . .” and only list inanimate objects. It helps to bring those things into the scope of our lives. The toaster, the highway, the mountains, the curb, live with us too. Doing this exercise and writing with a friend remind us to step outside ourselves when we are stuck too deep into ourselves.

More About Mondays

I
WANT TO
talk more about those Mondays with Kate. One time we met at her house on the first floor, her husband asleep upstairs and the children at day care, a space heater on the massage table—not helping my cold hands much. We smoked cigarette after cigarette, not inhaling but “playing smoking.” Kate had a scarf wrapped around her neck like they do in New York.

We talked about our voices as writers—how they are strong and brave but how as people we are wimps. This is what creates our craziness. The chasm between the great love we feel for the world when we sit and write about it and the disregard we give it in our own human lives. How Hemingway could write of the great patience of Santiago in the fishing boat and how Hemingway himself, when he stepped out of his writing studio, mistreated his wife and drank too much. We have to begin to bring these two worlds together. Art is the act of nonaggression. We have to live this art in our daily lives.

We spent the whole day mostly talking, only getting around to two twenty-minute writing sessions and a beautiful poem by Kenneth Rexroth, but that was okay. The whole day was a good poem. Friendship, cold feet, feeding the cat, filling the ashtray with cigarette butts. And if we were smart it would have continued into Monday night when we left each other and were alone in our separate worlds.

Katagiri Roshi says, “Our goal is to have kind consideration for all sentient beings every moment forever.” This does not mean put a good poem on paper and then spit at our lives, curse our cars, and cut off someone on the freeway. It means carry the poem away from the desk and into the kitchen. That is how we will survive as writers, no matter how little money we make in the American economy and how little acceptance we get in the magazines. We are not writing for money and acceptance—although that would be nice.

The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world, and why not finally carry that secret out with our bodies into the living rooms and porches, backyards and grocery stores? Let the whole thing flower: the poem and the person writing the poem. And let us always be kind in this world.

Spontaneous Writing Booths

D
O NOT FEEL
left out when your school, church, Zen center, daycare center has a bazaar, carnival, rummage sale. Don’t think you have nothing to contribute. Simply set up a spontaneous writing booth. All you need is a pile of blank paper, some fast-writing pens, a table, a chair, and a sign saying, “Poems on Demand” or “Poems in the Moment” or “You name the subject, I’ll write on it.”

I did this for three years for the Summer Festival and Bazaar at the Minnesota Zen Center. I timidly began charging fifty cents a poem, but by the next year it was up to a dollar. There was a waiting line throughout the day. I let my customers give me any topic. Some were “the sky,” “emptiness,”  “Minnesota,” and of course “love.” Kids wanted poems on purple, their shoes, bellies. My rule was that I filled one side of a piece of standard-size paper, did not cross out, nor did I stop to reread it. I also didn’t worry about putting what I said in poetic stanzas. I filled a page like I did in my notebook. It was another form of writing practice.

In Japan there are stories of great Zen poets writing a superb haiku and then putting it in a bottle in a river or nearby stream and letting it go. For anyone who is a writer, this is a profound example of nonattachment. The spontaneous poetry booth is the twentieth-century equivalent. It is practice in unselfconsciousness. Write, don’t reread it, let it go into the world. There were several times when I felt I really hit home in the writing, but I just handed the sheet of paper over to the customer across the table and went on.

Chögyam Trungpa has said that you have to be a great warrior to be a business person. You must be fearless and willing to lose everything at any moment. With the writing booth there is the opportunity to be a great warrior: you must let go of everything as you write and then in handing it over to the customer. When you work that fast there is a real loss of control. I always said much more than I wanted to say. I feared a child would ask me to write a sweet piece about jelly beans and I’d zip over to how your gut turns green, red, or blue depending on the particular bean you are eating.

But we should never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth. The booth was extremely popular. Though American society does not particularly support poets and writers, there is a secret dream and respect for the act of writing. Ten years ago when I lived in Taos, New Mexico, I rented a run-down adobe for fifty dollars a month. The landlord had been born in the house thirty-six years ago, hated it, and was now an up-and-coming middleclass insurance agent living in Albuquerque. He scorned anyone who chose to live in that environment. I loved the house with the zeal of a foreigner. I didn’t care that it had an outhouse, one cold-water spigot, and wood-burning stoves. I tried many times to be friendly to my landlord when he came from the big city in his big car, but nothing seemed to work. We were in two different worlds.

One day I received a very thick envelope from him sent special delivery. I thought, “Uh-oh! He’s going to raise the rent.” (Every time I made an improvement, he raised the rent.) When I opened the packet, the first thing I saw was an article torn from a local newspaper about a poetry reading I had given the previous week. As soon as I saw that, I thought, “Uh-oh! I’m being evicted.” Instead, I read a letter from Tony Garcia saying, “Dear Natalie, I see that you are a poet. Enclosed are twenty-five poems I have written over the last ten years. Please read them at your next poetry reading.” In my wildest dreams I never thought of using poetry as a way to connect with him!

One year ago I received a letter from a man in San Francisco who wrote that he had been pretty mixed up and joined the Coast Guard. He only brought two things on board with him: photos of his family and the poem I had written him three years ago at the bazaar in Minnesota. Now he said he was doing well, making money with computers. He asked me if I was short on cash and said if I was, he would love to send me some money. He wrote that he always kept the poem folded in his wallet.

Frankly, I have no idea what I wrote in that poem, but I hope it said something good about the huge maple trees above our heads that afternoon, the light on the lake across the street, the sound of roller skates, the distant playing of a sax, and how good it was to be there that summer in Minnesota.

Having a writing booth is excellent practice in letting go. Let go completely. Let yourself totally be a writer from now on.

A Sensation of Space

W
HEN YOU WANT
to write in a certain form—a novel, short story, poem—read a lot of writing in that form. Watch how that form is paced. What is the first sentence? What makes it finished? When you read a lot in that form, it becomes imprinted inside you, so when you sit down to write, you write in that structure. For instance, if you are a poet and want to write a novel, you have to learn to write full sentences and not leap from one image to another. In reading novels your body digests full sentences, the steady hand of setting scenes, knowing the color of the tablecloth and how the writer gets her character to move across the room to the coffeepot.

If you want to write short poems, you must digest that form and then exercise in that form. Try this: write a series of ten short poems. You only have three minutes to write each one; each one must be three lines. Begin each one with a title that you choose from something your eye falls on: for example, glass, salt, water, light reflecting, the window. Three lines, three minutes, the first title is “Glass.” Without thinking, write three deft lines. Pause a moment. Do another. Three minutes, three lines, the title is “Salt.” Continue in this way until that short thinking is a structure inside you and you can call it forth when that’s the form you need. Especially in a short poem, all words are used economically and the title should add another dimension to the poem rather than repeat a word already used in the body of the short poem.

Tony Robbins, the fire-walker, says that when you want to learn something, go to experts who have put in thirty years and learn from them. Study their belief systems, their mental syntax—the order in which they think—and their physiology, how they stand, breathe, hold their mouth when they do the task they are expert in. In other words, model them. So when you go to break wood, you are not you, you are the black belt in karate that you have been modeling, and your hand does not stop at wood but goes through it.

So this is good but it is very tricky. Form alone will not create art. For instance, we are taught that a haiku is a Japanese short poem form. It has seventeen syllables and is written in three lines. It often mentions a season and something from nature. Children in elementary schools all over the United States are taught to write these three-line poems, but in truth, they are not haiku. If you sit down and read a lot of Basho, Shiki, Issa, Buson, four of the greatest Haiku masters, in good translation by R. H. Blyth, you will see that, in fact, his translations do not even follow the form of seventeen syllables with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Japanese is a very different language from English. Each syllable in Japanese carries a lot more weight than it does in English, so in order to write haiku in English, just use three short lines. “Okay. I’ve got it. I’ve studied Blyth’s translations. It’s three short lines to make haiku, and I can skip the syllable count.” Yes, but then what makes it haiku and not just a short poem?

If you read a lot of haiku, you see there is a leap that happens, a moment where the poet makes a large jump and the reader’s mind must catch up. This creates a little sensation of space in the reader’s mind, which is nothing less than a moment’s experience of God, and when you feel it, there is usually an “Aah” wanting to issue from your lips. Try reading these, translated by R. H. Blyth.
¹⁵
Take your time and pause after each one.

Among the grasses,

A flower blooms white,

Its name unknown.

—S
HIKI

Spring departs,

Trembling, in the grasses

Of the fields.

—I
SSA

The scent and colour

Of the wisteria

Seem far from the moon.

—B
USON

The voice of the pheasant;

How I longed

For my dead parents!

—B
ASHO

That sensation of space is a true test of haiku. No matter how well we learn to write three-line poems, it takes much practice to fill those three lines with an experience of God. Basho has said that if you write five haiku in your life, you are a haiku writer, and if you write ten, you are a master.

We may write three novels before we write a good one. So form is important, we should learn form, but we should also remember to fill form with life. This takes practice.