Humanity and Reverence

Wow.

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Writing a "Palpable Sensation"

"Some folks want to believe that the writing must have been a wonderful cathartic; "playing all those horror tapes," as one guy put it. But I have not found it so. Writing as therapy, God help us; the world doesn't work that way. Let's just say that both of my war novels were written out of deep bitterness; put another way, the impulse to tell the story of the war rose out of an undeniable authenticity of exhausted, smothered rage, perhaps more bitter than tongue can tell. Someone once asked me why I wrote war novels, and I told him that writing novels was more elegant than a simple "Fuck you."

"My war-year was like a nail in my head, like a corpse in my house, and I wanted it out, but for the longest time now, I have had the unshakable, melancholy understanding that the war will always be vividly present in me, a literal physical, palpable sensation."

From Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam
a memoir by Larry Heinemann

What's it all about, anyway?

One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about. "This whole war," she said, " why was everybody so mad at everybody else?"

I shook my head. "They weren't mad, exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing." 

"What did you want?" 

"Nothing," I said. "To stay alive."

"That's all?"

"Yes."

From "Field Trip" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried

Truth

"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. 

Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. 

Here is the story-truth. He was a slip, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was sut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him." 

From "Good Form" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried

On Writing as the Antithesis of Therapy

"I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. . . it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate if from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. (158)" 

From "Notes" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried

Literary Journals

During a craft talk at my past residency in Forest Grove, Marvin Bell advised students to subscribe to at least five literary journals a year. He suggested students chose a couple new journals for subscription each year, but advised keeping the list at five in order to actually read what you're paying for. I've heard this described before as "good karma." If you want to get published in literary journals it's naive (or snobby) to think that will happen without actually subscribing yourself.

So here's what I'm into. And here's what I'm getting into.

The past year I've discovered and purchased/subscribed to these (click on cover for link to website):

Now, I subscribe to and anxiously await issues of these:

And it probably doesn't fall into the realm of journals, but I've been a New Yorker subscriber for over a year now. I like the stories, but I really enjoy the essays each week.

A cost to defining expression?

I stumbled upon this Stanley Kubrick quote today; I really like it.

"I have steadfastly avoided talks, lectures, etcetera, because they tend to formalize my own thinking, which I think would not be a good thing."

Is there a risk of over analyzing art? When we verbalize and quantify what we're doing, or what we're thinking someone else is doing, do we ruin the original expression of it?