Do the Poets Teach?

In my quest to understand my writing better—which seemed necessary this morning—I remembered a passage shared at the end of this post. It was this that made me think about more than one simple phase of in my life, or—it turns out—my writing. I got stuck with my current story because I had forgotten to ask, even though the question was still there: what will I think of it at the end of my life? What will it have become in me, and how will I write it so that it is as rich as that memory? If this selection is applicable to other aspects of my life then, well, fine.

This passage taught me to not think lightly about important matters, no matter how small any inciting moment may have been. Writing is one of those matters, with many small moments that reverberate with meaning. If the bad guy, for instance, is written so well that any reader, casual or otherwise, sees into the mind of a murderous deviant, then that could be bad. No… I want the reader to see into the mind. I do not want him to be aroused by it in any unfortunate ways. How do I write it so that his thoughts are off-putting? Especially as the story is beginning to grow from the first moment I started it. How do I arouse disgust and horror, instead of even mild titillating interest? Ever the quest in my more contemporary fiction. The question I seem to be starting those stories with in hopes of answering.

If I look back at books like On Combat and On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, I can understand the rich argument that our reading and movie viewing and game playing—so many mediums!—has inured our culture to violence. In John Varley’s Titan, Gaea says that the anti-war films were the most violent. Only one movie continues to shake me with its horror of violence.

Out of the Silent Planet
Gaudy Night
The Light Princess
"What the Rose did to the Cyprus"
Platoon

Five stories that are the foundation of my writing. There are others, I’m sure. Books I read when young, books I’ve read since. But these influenced me in so many ways. I know I write because even the moment of writing is not one thing. The final product is not divided from a reader’s thoughts. The pleasure of reading is not—should not—be final when one has finished reading the last word or turned the last page.

From C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, chapter 12, with thanks to this "Poet" and teacher.

“But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?”

“But it takes a whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.”

“But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?”

“That is like saying ‘My food I must be content to eat.’”

“I do not understand.”

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmān, as if the pleasure were one thing and memory another. It is all one thing. The séroni could say it much better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remember is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of the poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What will it be when I remember it as I lay down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not each you this?”