Reading and writing is connected. I've been reading Drifts by Kate Zambreno, a book about writing, or more in particular, about "how to write the day when it escapes us.” To drift in writing is a beautiful image, another word that I remember from the book is porous.
And here two more precious thoughts by Kate Zambreno, both connected to autumn.
“In yoga class, everyone goes around and gives their “fall intentions.” The sexy girl with the shaved head whom I sometimes fantasise about in class says she is working on kindness, and discovering that kindness to self and others can be a slow process. Two others say they’re working on being comfortable with doubt and uncertainty, not pushing things, knowing they will happen. Some more “loving kindness”. I pass. It always gets me how mute and inarticulate I am in these settings. I’m supposed to be a writer, yet language doesn’t come easily to me. A ritual. My impulse to write was private, was the way that I was silent, or not silent, in the face of capitalism, desire, the family. Was a way to write through these feelings.”
“I found myself finally being able to read, and with reading, write a little, and while walking through the autumnal fire of trees up the hill to campus I let my mind wander, writing in a way. I never know, when I sit down to write, how to replicate that movement and those discoveries that come when my mind wanders. When I sit down to write, I begin to wander to another thought entirely. I think of Sebald saying in an interview that when he sat down to write, he didn’t know where he was going, he followed his thoughts and connections like a dog in a field. And yet why do I love thinking about that, but dislike George’s assertion that there’s a mystical aspect to language? Maybe it’s the loftiness I felt that some ascribe to the project of writing, as if it’s some sort of higher plane of existence. Or the preciousness of it. Or, worse, the idea that writing is a form of therapy. And isn’t this what we’re supposed to say to students who want to be writers, as a way to tell them that writing isn’t about success, or capitalism, it’s personal, self-directed, sacred? Maybe I even feel that, but I resent that I’m supposed to sell it. Sell writing. Sell a life of being a writer. Was being a writer a way of escaping from having a job, or was it, as others have framed it, extreme discipline and unceasing solitary labor? I didn’t know anymore. The lofty comparison irked me; the spirit of Sebald’s comment is right, to write with attention to the present is in some way to become like a dog.”