I wonder if the 8-year-old girl, who was sketching at the Frida Kahlo exhibit a few weeks ago, will someday look back with wonder like Ray Bradbury. It could happen.
Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it.
How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?
Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What’s the cure?
I was able, obviously, to answer all of the above. I named the sickness: my tearing up the strips. I found the cure: go back to collecting, no matter what.
I did. And was made well.
But still. At that age? When we are accustomed to responding to peer pressure?
Where did I find the courage to rebel, change my life, live alone?
I don’t want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was. Without him, I could not have survived to introduce these essays.
Part of the answer, of course, is in the fact that I was so madly in love with Buck Rogers, I could not see my love, my hero, my life, destroyed. It is almost that simple. It was like having your best all-around greatest-loving-buddy, pal, center-of-life drown or get shot-gun killed. Friends, so killed, cannot be saved from funerals. Buck Rogers, I realized, might know a second life, if I gave it to him. So I breathed in his mouth and, lo!, he sat up and talked and said, what?
Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They’ll never live the way you live. Go do it.
Except I never used the S.O.B words. They were not allowed. Heck! was about the size and strength of my outcry. Stay alive!
So I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World’s Fairs and began to write. And what, you ask, does writing teach us?
First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
Secondly, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.
Not to write, for many of us, is to die.
We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.
A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.
But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.
I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.
So that, in one way or another, is what this book is all about.
-excerpt from the Preface of Zen In the Art of Writing, Essays on Creativity by Ray Bradbury, How To Climb the Tree of Life, Throw Rocks at Yourself, and Get Down Again Without Breaking Your Bones or Your Spirit, A Preface With a Title Not Much Longer Than the Book, Capra Press, 1990
Makes you want to read the book doesn’t it? Just think, this is only part of the first few pages. I was reminded by The Other Ivy’s post to check my shelves.
There is was, Zen In the Art of Writing. I picked up the book and started reading it again.
-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, January 13th, 2008
-related to post, White Elephants On Art
I need to go get a copy of this book, that is clear.
It is funny that he should say you must stay drunk on writing because so much in this passage also seems to say that the practice of writing is as necessary as water. Writing, to me, seems like a means of clarifying. Something without which it would not be possible to survive.
The progression on the journey made me laugh. I took a trip this summer, a family visit. My journal kept me sane.
Here is one of my favorite writer rousing passages:
“Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all – ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.”
From Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
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My first time visiting Red Ravine and I’m grateful that I did. I had almost forgotten about that 9-year-old …
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What is it about that age? So brave and brash. In some respects, it’s good his friends teased him then, while he had the innocence and courage that comes with almost zero monkey mind.
This quote is amazing to me because it tells me that as writers (and artists), and especially those of us who were encouraged to be engineers or managers or teachers, our struggle is to find that nine-year-old inside us. She’s the me who hasn’t been tainted, hasn’t been told no. (Remember how much Mom and Dad fawned over my creations then??)
It’s a great quote, QM. Thanks for posting it. I also would like to read the book (I’ll have to buy it first).
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Ivy, I like this part of the Rilke quote because it talks about structuring your life around what you are passionate about (whatever it may be):
Easier said than done. But I’m making effort.
tNb, welcome. Glad your 9-year-old went out on a treasure hunt. 8)
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Yes, it does make me want to read it. 🙂
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ybonesy, zero monkey mind…yes, it makes me want to look more closely at that age group, just to notice.
When I looked inside the cover of this book, I saw that I had read it in 1992. I didn’t even remember that Bradbury had said this. And then there it was. It fit so nicely with what you and Teri and I were talking about in the comments on White Elephants On Art.
I wonder what makes some kids instinctually know to fight for the survival of their creative lives…and others crumble under the weight of pressure from others to conform.
Some of us end up fighting the good fight in adulthood. Maybe it wasn’t others who pressured us to conform – but we had to get past our own ideas of what we might be able to accomplish. Maybe for some of us, we are our own worst enemy. We can learn from other writers.
Like Ivy said, writing is connected to sanity for me now. I can’t imagine not writing (or doing art or photograph) every day in some form.
Some things that stuck out for me:
These things remind me so much of, Continue under all circumstances. Don’t be tossed away.
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Hello QM: Since you have quoted some of Natalie Goldberg’s favorite teaching phrases above, I must share that in the mail today, I received a copy of the Shambhala Sun magazine, which includes an article by Natalie titled, “Write Your Life.” It is an excerpt from her new book.
A sneak peek:
“Let’s dare to talk about love for a moment, shall we?
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oops–foiled by cyberspace…to continue quote in #7:
“
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Foiled again…guess it means that you should buy the magazine to read the excerpt. It includes “the Neola.” I wrote to tell her that she is famous now.
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LOL. You’ve left us with a cliff-hanger!! How could you? Now I have no choice but to buy the magazine ; – ).
“The Neola.” Those of us who sat for four weeks with her in the zendo are famous by association 8) .
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Wow, that *is* a cliffhanger. I’ll have to check out the new magazine. I need a refresher on “the Neola.” How cool is that.
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I very much enjoyed reading this.
“I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats”
This is exactly how I feel about painting. It keeps me sane, and happily in zone.
I knew at age ten that my life was NOT going to be like the environment I was in then. I also decided then and there that I was going to be happy (despite what was going on around me), and that I would be “making art” someday.
I think some children are old souls…at least, I always felt like one. 🙂
Thanks for sharing this with us.
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My oldest daughter seems like an old soul to me. Always has.
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I’m so glad that you did post it. What a wonderful passage.
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gypsy-heart, I’m so glad you brought up old souls. I find it so amazing when kids have that kind of wisdom at an early age. I think it’s a great gift. The only downside is that they sometimes seem more mature and more is expected of them. But maybe that’s not a downside.
I find “old souls” sometimes in people half my age as well. They are in their 20’s or 30’s and seem to have all the wisdom I only gained after living twice as long. I’m always amazed by that.
ybonesy, how do you tell about the old soul in your oldest daughter? What are the indicators to you?
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[…] to the bookshelf, and landed on Ray Bradbury’s Zen In The Art Of Writing. There are books I go back to again and again—for reminders that it’s okay to struggle. For stories about moments of success, […]
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