Describing Reality is a Spiritual Thing

Taking a break from reading and responding to fellow classmates’ poems. This is more of a personal post today, and might not make a lot of sense, but I’ve begun to read Mark Doty‘s The Art of Description, a deceptively tiny book of richly concentrated insights into the craft of translating world into word. It begins…

It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see. But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking straight into your eyes, and it immediately becomes clear that all we see is slippery, nuanced, elusive. As Susan Mitchell says, “The world is wily, and doesn’t want to be caught.”

Yes. Exactly. But as I read Doty I remember why I must write. I remember that fiction and poetry are my lifeblood, my spirituality. I’ve dabbled on many spiritual/lifestyle paths in my life–different Christian flavors, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, gothic (!), satanic, hippie, anarchist, I Love Lucy–but I can’t explain why I tried any of them. Looking back, the one truth to which I always return and which has never left me since I was five and began reading Little Golden Books, Alice and Wonderland, Winnie the Poo, Wind in the Willows, A Child’s Garden of Verse, The Jungle Book, Oscar Wilde stories, Swiss Family Robinson, and on and on is literature & poetry.

Reading is one thing, but writing is a completely different experience. Capturing reality on the page is as slippery as Elizabeth Bishop‘s famous fish. At the same time, reading Doty helps to clarify and solidify why they have always been my ethical and spiritual guides. Because they begin and end in the essence of my existence, the thing inside that never changes and which the rest of my life revolves around: for lack of a better word, psyche or soul. I have no idea if there’s such a thing as transcendence after death. All I know is what my senses write on the tablet of water called consciousness. I need the physical to lead me into the non-physical both in my reading and my writing, but also in my life. Tattoos and trinkets, for example, to remind me of my Quest. An Egyptian hieroglyph of the Principle of Consciousness tattooed on my left hand and a cord of three symbols around my neck, symbols for poetry, literature, and the rightness we call “love.”

If you have read to the end of this and are lost about what I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter. In order to touch the sublime sometimes I have to leave my rational mind at the door, knowing that, whether or not I’ve succeeded here, ultimately as a writer I’m in the business of connecting.

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