"If the mind were constructed on optional lines and if a
book could be read the same way as a painting is taken in by the eye, that is
without the bother of working from left to right and without the absurdity of
beginnings and ends, this would be the ideal way of appreciating a novel, for
thus the author saw it at the beginning of its conception."
-Vladimir Nabokov -THE ART OF LITERATURE AND COMMONSENSE
-Vladimir Nabokov -THE ART OF LITERATURE AND COMMONSENSE
I bookmarked this passage when I first came across it in
Nabokov’s LECTURES ON LITERATURE, because it resonated so fiercely with my own
experience as a writer. I come back to it now, because I have somehow found
myself in the position of making final edits on a soon-to-be-published book and
also at the very start of a new book’s fresh and raw first draft.
Each of my novels has begun as a sort of yearning energy
summoned from, it seems, the act of moving through certain places and feeling a
sense of something powerful going on there in a simultaneous past and present. This “yearning towards” may go on for a while—weeks
or months--but then there seems always to come a time when things focus and the
book suddenly appears to me whole and finished—I can feel the weight of it, see the words and
spaces on the pages, understand absolutely in a way beyond words what the book
has to say and transmit.
Ah, but then I have to write it. That becomes the daily work, sometimes flowing
and effortless, other times close to impossible. Each draft does seem to bring the book closer to that initial vision. And
eventually, first readers’ and editor’s comments and suggestions will
be taken and addressed in the light of that first apparition. Details may shift
and change, but the book will, for better or worse, arrive at being itself: Paradoxically, words will accrue to transfer
the wordless energies that inspired in
the first place
All of this was clarified to me further yesterday, when I
came across another passage in my reading, this time the story of the
bell-stand carver in THE WAY OF CHUANG TZU ( Thomas Merton’s translation is the version I was reading.)
Khing, a woodcarver,
is asked the secret behind the beauty of the bell-stand he had carved. He
explains that there is no secret, but that the wood itself—and his own focus on
the “single thought of the bell-stand”--tuning out all distractions--was
necessary to the outcome.
What Khing says next
makes deep sense to me:
“Then I went to the
forest
To see the trees in
their own natural state.
When the right
tree appeared before my eyes,
The bell stand appeared in it, clearly, beyond
doubt.
All I had to do
was to put forth my hand
And begin.”
I’ll be keeping
these words in heart and mind as I explore the surprises of a first draft, as I
ferret away at the fussy details of a final proof. And I’ll do my best to keep my focus and
desire on the original vision as it first appeared: clearly, beyond doubt.
-KMB
