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10 Questions Never to Ask a Writer

Reposted from a blog by By Lauren B. Davis | January 4, 2010 | 40

I wonder how many of you have asked a writer of your acquaintance what you thought was a perfectly harmless question, one intended to show your interest in that person and what they do, only to be rewarded by a mumbled response, possibly a trembling chin, or, horrors, a glower.  You walk away thinking, What’s wrong with these writer people?  Have they no manners? Well, sadly, some of us don’t, but it’s more likely you’ve stumbled upon one of the questions likely to leave us at…well, a loss for words.

I don’t mean to suggest that writers are such fragile flowers that no one should approach us for fear of having us break down in puddles if asked the wrong question.  Really, that hardly ever happens.  But if you do detect a slight twitch, or an inadvertent sigh, perhaps it’s because you’ve asked a perfectly well-meaning, seemingly reasonable question, one that if you asked anyone else wouldn’t be a problem.  However, as writers, alas, we’ve probably been asked that question a thousand times before, and wouldn’t mind at all, if we had a decent answer, but we don’t, and so we mumble and sigh and twitch and go and stand behind the potted palm where it’s safer. It’s embarrassing to stand there with a drink in one hand and a palm frond up the nose.  Uncomfortable for everyone, really.

So, for next time…these are some questions writers dread, in no particular order:

1. How’s the novel coming? Well, probably not very well.  Novels are wild, unwieldy beasts that resist being tamed.  Really, do you want to hear how Faulkner spent twelve hours writing a scene about looking at young girl’s dirty underpants as she climbed a tree?  Probably not, and that was the definitive scene in The Sound and the Fury, so imagine how much less you’ll want to read about that eel-skinning scene I labored over for hours yesterday, only to erase today.  To quote Oscar Wilde, “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma.  In the afternoon I put it back again.”

There is also a story about James Joyce wherein someone came round to see The Great Man as he worked in his Paris garret

“How are you, James?” he said.  “You don’t look so good.”

“I’m terrible.”

“Is it the writing?”

“Of course it’s the feckin’ writing!  It’s always the writing!”

“Can you not write then?  Are you blocked?”

“I’ve written seven words today.”

“Well, James,” said the friend, “for you, actually, that’s not bad.”

“I suppose,” said the Great Man, “but now I’ve got to figure out what order to put them in.”

Thus, it’s a question for which there is no good answer, and we know it.

2. Are you writing? If I am, see 1. above. If I’m not, you really don’t want to know.  The only thing worse than having writer’s block is talking about it.  Having to listen to such panicked whining is recognized as torture and we wouldn’t dream of inflicting it on you.

3. Has your novel sold? Sad to say, but it’s unlikely.  Publishing is a slaughterhouse these days, and even in the Good Old Days (if ever there were any), almost no one published, and of the minuscule number who did, almost none of those published a second novel.  Having to answer that question over and over again is like rubbing glass in an open wound.  Believe me, if there’s good news, we’ll be telling you.  Heck, we’ll be telling EVERYONE! Most of us write because we can’t stop writing – it’s a sort of mental illness – and thus we do so in spite of the searing disappointments.  Try not to make us talk about it.

4. When’s that new book coming out? Let’s put it this way: if, since the last time we spoke, I’ve finished the manuscript, submitted it to my agent, my agent has read it (which usually takes three months because they are busy, important folks), and loved it just as it is with no changes at all; if the agent has then in turn submitted it to editors and one of them has read it (think another few months or so, or more, since editors are also important, busy folks), and that editor LOVED it, and showed it to the sales force (the important people who really run publishing these days) and the sales force LOVED it just as it is, and made an offer……. even if ALL those things have already happened, it will still be around TWO YEARS before the book will actually come out, due to the editing and production process.  So, if you’ve asked this question once in the past three years, you needn’t ask it again. Also, see 3).

5. I just love the new Dan Brown novel (or Sarah Palin’s memoir), have you read it yet? My condolences, and no.

6. How come I can’t get your books here? And by ‘here’ you probably mean America. This one may not apply to all writers, but it will to a surprising number of us.  Especially if we are, say, from Canada or Britain or Ireland or Scotland or New Zealand or Australia… doubly so if we are from a country where English isn’t the first language (and no jokes about Scotland, please).  Although, with some justification, America views itself as the center of the universe, people do publish in other countries, and getting published in England does not mean a writer will find a publisher in New York, which considers itself (again, with some justification) as the center of the center of the universe.  Without a publishing contract in the US, the book will not be available to the US market.  You could, however, go on the internet and order books from bookstores in the US or Canada or gasp, even Australia.  I do it all the time.

7. Is that story autobiographical? Until my parents are all dead, the answer to that is no.  I’m joking, really Mum, I am.  However, it can be a bit insulting to a writer to have everyone think that a) you really were a junkie porn star homicidal trust fund baby and just kept it a secret, or that b) you haven’t the imagination to MAKE THINGS UP, which is, after all, what fiction writers are supposed to do, mostly. I will paraphrase what W. Somerset Maugham said, though, in that writers are not God, we cannot create out of nothing.  Everything is inspiration and fodder, even cocktail party conversations.

8. Oh, you’re a writer! Have I heard of you?  Do I know your books? I have no idea, but if not please don’t make it sound as if I’ve failed. Might I suggest, if you’re interested, you note one of the titles and buy a book?

9. How big an advance did you get? How many books did you sell? Now really, didn’t your mother ever tell you it was impolite to ask someone what they make for a living?  It will either be shockingly low by your standards, or shockingly high, neither of which is useful information. People in France, where I lived for many years, never ask these sorts of particularly American questions.  They ask instead, “Where can I buy one of your books?” Which is a lovely question, since it implies they are a) interested in your work, and b) interested in supporting your work by actually BUYING a book.

10. What’s the book you’re working on about? Two problems with this question: the first is that if I talk too much about it, I won’t write about it, so I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t want to answer that question.  (Most people are pretty good about that and don’t take offense, but you’d be surprised, perhaps, by how many do.)  The second problem is that I may not know.  I write a story that pops into my head, but I may not know what it’s really about until a long way down the line.  When I was writing The Radiant City, it wasn’t until I was through the first draft, and heard Rev. Ernest Hunt, the Rector at the American Cathedral in Paris, say, “Cynicism is the last refuge of the broken-hearted” that I understood I was writing about precisely that – whether disillusionment, the kind that breaks your heart, like terrorist attacks, or war, or genocide, damns you to a life of cynicism, or if it’s possible to continue to walk through the world with a compassionate heart. (The quote became the epigram of the book.  Thanks Ernie!)

And although it’s not a question, there is one statement that’s almost guaranteed to send a writer scrambling to a safe nest behind the potted palm:  “I’m going to take six months off from my job and write a book.”

Legend has it this statement was made to either William Styron or Margaret Lawrence, depending on who’s telling it, by a heart surgeon at a cocktail party.  As in, “I just loved your book so much, and you’ve inspired me.  I’m going to take six months off from my job and write my own memoir.”  “Really,” replied William/Margaret. “Well, you’ve inspired me as well.  I’m going to take six months off from writing and become a heart surgeon.”

I wouldn’t have the guts to say that, but I admit it, I do think it from time to time. It takes as long to learn to be a good writer as it does to do anything else – play the violin, perhaps, or architecture, or yes, heart surgery.  And just like those things, having just a soupcon of talent doesn’t hurt.

So at this point you might be asking yourself what you CAN ask a writer.  Well, we love talking about books we’ve enjoyed, as well as anything else that inspires us. And as writers we tend to watch the world pretty closely, since you never know when a story worth writing about may pop up, so current affairs are just as interesting to us as to anyone else.  Then too,  if we’re well-brought up, psychologically stable folk (and some of us are), we probably think YOU’RE pretty interesting. You might not want to answer questions about, say, how much you make for a living, and I wouldn’t dream of asking you, but I’d be fascinated to learn, for example, what you believe and how you came to believe it.  I’d like to know how you met your spouse, and what you think about the death penalty, and why; and what you think about censorship, and that story about fly-fishing, and the one about the rescue dog, and what you think it means to be a good person… oh, there’s a world of things out there to talk about, isn’t there?

Photo by SSH
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I Thought the Ocean was Forever

From The Guardian

We hear the call of the sea in poems from Coleridge and Eliot to Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, but those words also sound a warning – if only we would listen

David Farrier, Mon 26 Dec 2022

TS Eliot wrote The Dry Salvages as second world war bombs fell on London. The poem imagines humanity adrift in a leaky boat, the sea “all about us”. But poetry, like the sea, is never still. “Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,” the poem asks. The answer: “There is no end, but addition” reads differently in 2022 than in 1941, as 12m tonnes of plastic are added to the oceans each year.

Reading is tidal, and each tide brings with it new associations. It is difficult now to read John Masefield’s Sea-Fever without thinking of bleaching coral, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner without picturing Chris Jordan’s photographs of dead albatross, their stomachs full of brightly coloured plastic. “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” but avian flu is decimating seabird populations.

Poetry, both old and new, not only reveals the oceans’ uncanny beauty, it also frames the monstrous dilemmas of rising seas, pollution, and declining biodiversity.

Marshallese poet Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s collection Iep Jaltok confronts the existential challenge of sea-level rise for island nations. In 2 Degrees, her infant daughter’s fever prompts a bitter reflection on the arrogance of fossil fuel-consuming nations: the difference between 1.5C and 2C “Seems small … just crumbs / like the Marshall Islands / must look / on a map”. Jetn̄il-Kijiner was the Marshall Islands’ climate envoy at Cop27, and criticised the failure to phase out fossil fuels even as developing nations celebrated the loss and damage fund.

“The call of the running tide / Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;” writes Masefield in Sea-Fever. Likewise, the Marshall Islands’ claim to a liveable future in the face of rapidly rising tides is – or ought to be – irresistible.

There is hope in these poems, but it’s something made in the face of grim predictions. Two poems, arranged to resemble baskets, bookend Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s collection, the words like tiny atolls in the white sea of the page:

Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner poem from Iep Jaltok collection

The loss of indigenous cultures washes away whole worlds. Among the Inupiaq of Alaska, seals, whales and seabirds are people. Even “Oil is a People,” writes Inupiaq poet dg nanouk okpik. Throughout her collection Corpse Whale, okpik uses a split pronoun, “she/I”, to express this sense of shared personhood. “Will they crawl around her / me, sink their eyeteeth in the sea,” she asks in If Oil is Drilled in Bristol Bay.

“Where they want / to claim the sea for roads,” she writes in No Fishing on the Point, “She’s/I’ve watched the currents, / […] / which bring […] feasts, and famine.”

For much of human history, the sea’s vastness has suggested eternity, a metaphysical space into which we have poured both our dreams and our waste. There are at least 415 marine dead zones around the world, areas so polluted by nitrogen and phosphorus that the water is free of oxygen. Like the “the rotting sea” of Coleridge’s poem, where “a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on;” nothing can survive in a dead zone, except jellyfish and bacteria. “Globe globe globe globe,” pulses the jellyfish in Les Murray’s poem, Jellyfish, intimating both its soft-bodied shape and the prospect of a future ocean dominated by anoxic life.

But poetry isn’t science; not bound simply to report on the state of things, poetry is free to imagine what could be. Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum presents a future Earth ruled by cephalopods, creatures whose intelligence is proof that, as the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, “the mind evolved in the sea”. In Caleb Parkin’s day-glo collection This Fruiting Body, chromatophoric creatures rave (“your skin / sings eight-thousand synthesised octopoid loops”) and Ecco the Dolphin, the hero of Sega’s 1990s video game classic, “roves immaculate 16-bit oceans”.

Parkin’s poems celebrate a fluid nature uncontained by binary thinking. A carrier bag floating in the sea becomes “a lazy misremembering / of plankton masses”. The synthetic and the organic flow into one another. That fluidity can be deadly: turtles eat plastic bags because they resemble “the ghost of a jellyfish”. But Parkin’s carrier bag wants no more than “to unpack itself […] / to become once again bustling plankton masses.” We know some bacteria colonise marine plastic, and have even evolved to metabolise it. The force underpinning all life, Parkin reminds us, is desire.

Desire is also the main current of The European Eel, Steve Ely’s lush recreation of the incredible transatlantic migration eels undertake to their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea. Little is known about their ocean-going lives, but in Ely’s telling it becomes a testimony to life’s irrepressibility. A female eel will gradually consume her own body to fuel the journey, “reducing herself to the seed of her species’ future”. It culminates in an ecstatic account of eel sex, coiling in billowing clouds of golden milt and ova, “sparks from the cornucopian flame / of Archaea’s unkillable, dark pleroma”.

Life thrills in the shallows as well as the deep. The glory of the foreshore is celebrated in Of Sea, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s bestiary of the intertidal zone. Mud shrimp drifting with the tide float in “silk light”; ragworm, burrowing in estuarine mud, shimmer “in all the love of being”.

We might say a poem is a bit like a boat, a vessel borne aloft by rhythms that surge or eddy. It is also like the sea itself, with its deep places and ever-receding horizon. “The sea has many voices,” observes Eliot in The Dry Salvages. More than anything, the many voices of oceanic poetry declare the vitality of life even in the midst of crisis. “There is a lullaby in all of us,” Burnett writes, “a call of sea”. If only we would listen.

David Farrier is professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

Photo by SSH
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Perspective

I am standing on the seashore.  A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.  An object of beauty and strength, she sails into the distance diminishing in size, until she hangs like a speck of white cloud where the sea and sky mingle.

 Then someone says, “There!  She’s gone.” Gone where?  Gone from my sight—that’s all.  She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of her destination.

 But her diminished size is in me, not in her; and just at the moment when that someone at my side says, “There!  She’s gone,” there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

Henry Van Dyke

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Endings

In literature, we have a chance for closure. We can put the punctuation mark wherever we like, whether it marks the end of grief, the beginning of a relationship, the birth of a child, the end of a life, or the decision to live again. . . . Writers are not seers. Armed with the “knowledge of what has gone before,” we mold events, truths, into narrative, and hope and know that the last punctuation mark is not the end, but the invitation to begin again.

http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/author/evdecleyre

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Finding the Right Words

For a long time, I have looked for a way to describe my connection to the natural world.  I tried in Evelio’s Garden, but no writer that I have encountered since has come as close as I have the privilege to quote here. Of  course there have been many before me, but none that I have discovered as right on as these two: Robinson Jeffers and Oliver Sacks. (And I’ll keep looking!)

The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation.

— Robinson Jeffers

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image.png

The sense of deep time brings a deep peace with it, a detachment from the timescale, the urgencies of daily life. Seeing these volcanic islands and coral atolls, and wandering, above all, through this cycad forest on Rota, has given me an intimate feeling of the antiquity of the earth, and the slow, continuous processes by which different forms of life evolve and come into being. Standing here in the jungle, I feel part of a larger, calmer identity; I feel a profound sense of being at home, a sort of companionship with the earth.

 – Oliver Sacks

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Creativity Needs Silence

I’m sorry I’ve lost the attribution for this quote — if anyone can help me here, I’d be grateful.  Meanwhile, I thank the nameless writer for some important thoughts about what we need to start paying attention to.

Hello chatter, my old friend.

The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.

As far back as half-a-century ago, the Swiss philosopher Max Picard warned: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,” once as natural as the sky and air.

As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.

There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the “cotton wool of daily life.”

“In the future, not getting any imagery or story line or content is going to be the equivalent of silence because people are so filled up now with streaming video,” said Ed Schlossberg, the artist, author and designer who runs ESI Design. “Paying attention to anything will be the missing commodity in future life. You think you’ll miss nothing, but you’ll probably miss everything.”

Photo by Coral Jewell

 

 

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Poetry is a Presence

From John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos:

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.

Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. Poems are nearer to prayers than stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge. For the religious poet, the Word is the first attribute of God. In all poetry words are presence before they are a means of communication.

Yet poetry uses the same words, and more or less the same syntax as, say, the Annual General Report of a multinational corporation. (Corporations that prepare for their profit some of the most terrible battlefields of the modern world.) How then can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of God?

That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones from the same quarry, joined by the same mortar. Everything depends upon the relation between the words. And the sum total of all these possible relations depends upon how the writer relates to language, not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as a principal and a presence.

The poet places language beyond the reach of time: or, more accurately, the poet approaches language as if it were a place, an assembly point, where time has no finality, where time itself is encompassed and contained.

If poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, the claim is more far-reaching than that of the genius of a particular poet in a particular cultural history. Immortality here should be distinguished from posthumous fame. Poetry can speak of mortality because it abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present, and future.

To speak of the promise of poetry would be misleading, for a promise projects into the future, and it is precisely the coexistence of future, present, and past that poetry proposes. A promise that applies to the present and past as well as to the future can better be called an assurance.

…

During the 18th and 19th centuries most direct protests against social injustice were in prose. They were reasoned arguments written in the belief that, given time, people would come to see reason, and that, finally, history was on the side of reason. Today this is by no means clear. The outcome is by no means guaranteed. The suffering of the present and the past is unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness. And evil is a constant ineradicable reality. All this means that the resolution – the coming to terms with the sense to be given to life – cannot be deferred. The future cannot be trusted. The moment of truth is now. And more and more it will be poetry, rather than prose, that receives this truth. Prose is far more trusting than poetry; poetry speaks to the immediate wound.

The boon of language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with exactitude and without pity, even a term of endearment; the word is impartial: the usage is all. The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience – everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable. In this sense one can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man. For prose this home is a vast territory, a country which it crosses through a network of tracks, paths, highways; for poetry this home is concentrated on a single center, a single voice, and this voice is simultaneously that of an announcement and the response to it.

One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or any god. Yet it’s very openness can signify indifference (the indifference of language is continually solicited and employed in bulletins, legal records, communiques, files.) Poetry addresses language in such a way as to close this indifference and to incite this caring. How does poetry incite this caring? What is the labor of poetry?

By this I do not mean the work involved in writing a poem, but the work of the written poem itself. Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry. And the task of this unceasing labor is to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart. Physical pain can usually be lessened or stopped only by action. All other human pain, however, is caused by one form or another of separation. And here the act of asuagement is less direct. Poetry can repair no loss but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered. Three thousand five hundred years ago an Egyptian poet was writing:

O my beloved

how sweet it is

to go down

and bathe in the pool

before your eyes

letting you see how

my drenched linen dress

marries

the beauty of my body

Come look at me.

Poetry’s impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not to make comparisons (all comparisons as such are hierarchical) or to diminish the particularity of any event; it is to discover those correspondences of which the sum total would be proof of the individual totality of existence. To this totality poetry appeals, and its appeal is the opposite of a sentimental one; sentimentality always pleads for an exemption, for something which is divisible.

Apart from reassembling by metaphor, poetry reunites by its reach. It equates the reach of a feeling with the reach of the universe; after a certain point the type of extremity involved becomes unimportant and all that matters is its degree; by their degree alone extremities are joined. Anna Akhmatova:

I bear equally with you

the black permanent separation.

Why are you crying? Rather give me your hand,

promise to come again in a dream.

You and I are a mountain of grief.

You and I will never meet on this earth.

If only you could send me at midnight

a greeting through the stars.

To argue here that the subjective and objective are confused is to return to an empirical view which the extent of present suffering challenges; strangely enough it is to claim an unjustified privilege.

Poetry makes language care because it renders everything intimate. This intimacy is the result of the poem’s labor, the result of the bringing-together-into-intimacy of every act and noun and event and perspective to which the poem refers. There is often nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty and indifference of the world than this caring.

From where does Pain come to us?

From where does he come?

He has been the brother of our visions

From time immemorial

And the guide of our rhymes.

. . . writes the poet Nazuj ak Nak’-ika.

To break the silence of events, to speak of experience however bitter or lacerating, to put into words, is to discover the hope that these words may be heard, and that when heard, the events will be judged. This hope is of course at the origin of prayer, and prayer – as well as labor – was probably at the origin of speech itself. Of all uses of language, it is poetry that preserves most purely the memory of this origin.

Every poem that works as a poem is original and original has two meanings: it means a return to the origin, the first which engendered everything that followed; and it means that which has never occurred before. In poetry, and in poetry alone, the two senses are united in such a way that they are no longer contradictory.

Nevertheless poems are not simple prayers. Even a religious poem is not exclusively and uniquely addressed to God. Poetry is addressed to language itself. In a lamentation, words lament loss to their language. Poetry is addressed to language in a comparable but wider way.

To put into words is to find the hope that the words will be heard and the events they describe judged. Judged by God or judged by history. Either way the judgment is distant yet the language, which is immediate and which is sometimes wrongly thought of as being only a means, the language offers obstinately and mysteriously, its own judgment when it is addressed as poetry. This judgment is distinct from that of any moral code, yet it promises, within its acknowledgment of what it has heard, a distinction between good and evil – as though language itself had been created to preserve just that distinction!

Photo by SSH

 

 

 

 

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Inspired by Stephen Hawking . . .

From The Universe in Verse

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

(after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?

There was no   Nature.    No
them.   No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

This Hubble image gives the most detailed view of the entire Crab Nebula ever. The Crab is among the most interesting and well studied objects in astronomy. This image is the largest image ever taken with Hubble’s WFPC2 camera. It was assembled from 24 individual exposures taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and is the highest resolution image of the entire Crab Nebula ever made.

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Words as Camera: Erin Van Rheenen at Four Corners

Lower Antelope Canyon, photo by David Webster SmithLower Antelope Canyon, photo by David Webster Smith

On a trip to the famously photogenic Four Corners, a traveler chooses to leave her camera behind.

How many of us have thousands upon thousands of trip photos on our hard drives, waiting to be sorted and shared? And who among us hasn’t wondered, in this age of any and all images available at the click of a mouse, why bother to take pictures at all?

On a recent trip to the outrageously scenic Four Corners, I chose to leave my camera behind.

Without a machine clamped to my face, I figured, I would have time to think and write. And sketching with sentences would give me something to do while my traveling companion set up his shots.

*            *            *

“The guy in Escalante is deluded,” says David, my fellow traveler, one warm October afternoon at Calf Creek Falls. “That definitely wasn’t the most beautiful waterfall in the world.”

I have to laugh. We’re on the return hike from an idyllic falls in southern Utah. We splashed in the pool at the base of the 200-foot cascade, mist hydrating our sun-cracked skin. While maybe not the most beautiful in the world, the falls had looked and felt pretty damned good.

David’s vision may have been colored by the fact that for the better part of an hour he’d fiddled with his camera, trying – and failing, in his estimation – for the silken effect of falling water caught on a long exposure. My vision had been colored, too, by the roar of the falls, cool water on chafed feet, the smell of sunscreen and the chatter of other hikers claiming 20-minute miles. I recorded my impressions not with a camera but with pen and notebook pulled from my day pack.

David tried to stop time, to freeze flowing water. I tried to extend time and expand focus, searching for words to convey the beauty but also noting context, like that we’d arrived in a deserted clearing but left behind a group of more than 40, including 23 hikers of a certain age on a Road Scholar tour of the Southwest. In my notebook I described the vertical stripes of desert varnish and the Fremont granaries tucked high in alcoves, but I also posed questions. (Can you do that with photos?)

What does it say about us, for instance, that of the dozens of people arriving at the falls, the vast majority did one thing: pulled out a camera, first thing, before even turning to a companion to share the moment?

In the face of this overwhelming tilt towards the visual, another question arises: what can writing do that photos can’t? Why photograph, or describe in words for that matter, landscapes that have already been nailed down by hordes of fellow travelers? (Google Calf Creek Falls for a small taste.) Is beauty diminished by having to share it with crowds of people, as if each gaze leeches away a little bit of the gorgeousness?

In the Southwest, there may be enough gorgeousness to go around. The variety is astounding, and often seen in the same landscape. A scrubby plain falls away under your feet, exposing the steep-sided howl of a canyon. Palisades jut skywards. Mountains are the buried rib bones of a fallen giant, exposed by wind.

Some places are especially crazy. Think of all that water can do – swirl and eddy, surge and crest and crash – then imagine rock doing all that, but caught mid-action. If you judge by geological time, the rock actually is in motion. It’s only in our split second of human time that we see the landscape as static. We make it even more so with photos, grasping at a permanence that doesn’t really exist.

At the end of Desert Solitaire, when he’s leaving the Southwest for New York City, Edward Abbey writes, “Five hundred and sixty tumbleweeds roll toward the horizon, herded by the wind; may they, too, never come back. All things are in motion, all is in process, nothing abides, nothing will ever change in this eternal moment.”

But we want the eternal moment to abide, and the timeless furniture of that moment is there for us to try to capture: peaks and domes and spires and Seussian hoodoos, in colors that come especially alive at sunset and sunrise. Comb Ridge rears up like the 100-mile spine of some prehistoric lizard. East of sunset-hued Capitol Reef National Park, ashen monoliths look like where Darth Vader has his summer home. Loopy hieroglyphs — ATV tracks — scar barren foothills. Irrigation makes for the occasional neon green field hemmed in by red rock sentinels. Towns huddle in the shadow of cliffs scrumptious with lollipop swirls of color. Dirt and gravel tracks lead who knows where, branching off from curving one-lane highways. Up at 9,000 feet, the sun supernovas though aspen leaves quaking like sheets of gold leaf.

Did I stick to my no-photo plan in the face of such splendaliciousness? Not exactly. I pulled my phone out more than once to snap shots of scenes I didn’t have the time or inclination to get down in print. Try describing the landscape as it’s whizzing by outside your rental car window. Sometimes you just have to snatch away an image, however blurred or partial.

But is that so terrible? I’m not sure. I do know that at its heart – and despite Facebook and Instagram privileging one over the other – the photographic impulse is not so different from the desire to describe a scene in words.

Both are attempts to hold on to beauty. Even more, both are tools to let us sift through a world that’s far too big and varied to take in at a glance. Whether we chose to hone our gaze by narrowing down in words or images, both methods let us see more deeply, if less widely.

The process is the same whether we’re using camera or words: focus, capture, edit and enhance. Sharing is the final step, whether it gets you a “like,” a nod, or nothing.

They say that travel broadens us. The vacation frame of mind lets in more than our workaday blinders. But that very broadening calls for a way to focus and take hold. Trying to get even a fraction of it down in words or pictures is not just a grabby exercise; it’s a way of going deeper, of really noticing, and of doing the processing work – both mental and technological – to help make sense of this crazily beautiful world we pass through all too briefly.

A version of this article appeared in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat.

Erin Van Rheenen writes travel narratives, profiles of prisoners, philanthropists, scientists and filmmakers, and fiction in which place is as important as character. She has won awards for her fiction and nonfiction, worked as an editor and staff writer, and taught in high schools, universities, and at the San Francisco Women’s Jail. She is also the author of Living Abroad in Costa Rica. See more of her work at http://erinvanrheenen.com