As I said in yesterday’s post, the minute I started writing the Mystic Journey section of Writing as a Sacred Path, I knew I was going to have a problem. For one thing, mysticism is such a complex topic, with so many facets coming from so many different traditions. For another, it’s a notoriously difficult topic to pin down. At first, I wasn’t even sure it was something I should include in the book.
What fed my muse during the writing of that section was reading what other writers had said. I scoured hundreds of interviews, biographies, essays, collections of letters, and academic articles as I wrote my book, and in them, I found gleaming gems about writers’ experiences with mystic states. One writer after the other talked about the mystery of the writing process, the sense of not being in control of the words, the feeling of oneness or communion. These were the people I learned from, and whose experiences helped make the Mystic Journey one of the most popular sections of Writing as a Sacred Path.
Only a small number of the many quotes I collected during the writing of that section were included in the book. Most had to be set aside for lack of space. So, today, rather than babbling on about the writer-as-mystic myself, I’ll let some of those truly eloquent voices speak.
Only a small number of the many quotes I collected during the writing of that section were included in the book. Most had to be set aside for lack of space. So, today, rather than babbling on about the writer-as-mystic myself, I’ll let some of those truly eloquent voices speak.
Poet William Meredith: A poem is getting at something mysterious, which no amount of staring at straight-on has ever solved. . . You don’t stare at the mystery, but you can see things out of the corner of your eye that you weren’t supposed to see (Plimpton 41).
Suspense writer James W. Hall: At the most extreme conditions of creation, you’re not there. You’re witnessing it, perhaps, or you witness it when you wake up at the end of a writing period. I can be at the word processor for hours and hours and not even know what I’ve written, not know it in a real rational way (Epel 110 – 111).
Charlotte Bronte: When authors write best, or at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them, which becomes their master—which will have its own way—putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their own being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new-molding characters, giving unthought-of turns of incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones (in a letter to G. H. Lewes qtd. in Charlton and Mark 38).
Dylan Thomas: It is my aim as an artist . . . to prove beyond doubt to myself that the flesh that covers me is the flesh that covers the sun, that the blood in my lungs is the blood that goes up and down in a tree (Fitzgibbon 87).
And, for a slightly different take:
Mystery writer Sue Grafton: I think there’s a sort of mystical process of getting information. I swear. It couldn’t be luck because it happens too often. I always find exactly the right person to help me. It’s like I’ll look in the yellow pages and I’ll pass up six names and pick one, inevitably somebody who’s reading my books, somebody who has just the perfect touch of information (Epel 71).
I could add about three dozen more quotes here. But you get the picture: They all say it differently, but they’re all talking about the same thing.
Sources:
Charlton, James and Lisbeth Mark. The Writer’s Home Companion. London: Franklin Watts, 1987.
Epel, Naomi. Writers Dreaming. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Fitzgibbon, Constantine. The Life of Dylan Thomas. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1966.
Plimpton, George. The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice From the 20thCentury’s Preeminent Writers. New York: Viking, 1989.