In “Why Write?” (Paris Review 6/6/22), Elisa Gabbert explores the words and writing histories of some of our greatest authors, and the compulsions that drive them to put pen to paper, fingertips to keys, deeper meaning out to the universe’s collective conscious. Quoting Joan Didion, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka and other notables, she deep dives into how their motivations mesh with why she shares her words and ideas with the world.
The article is rich with ideas that I think Gabbert could easily expand every couple of paragraphs into books. So, what I do is explore further. Like a mom encountering a stubborn shoelace knot, I attempt to untangle. I tug at her sentences and create space for deeper thoughts with scribbled phrases, circled sections, arrows, exclamation points. I thread some ideas through others, attempt to create connections and systems. My goal is understanding. Perhaps the act of arranging these words in some sort of straight line will enlighten me, or at least give me some direction on what to do with my own mostly inept scrawls.
When I come back to this inked up mess later, and I’m sure I will, I’ll curse my illegible handwriting, wonder why on earth I needed to circle three times a phrase more innocuous than uplifting, chide myself for attempting to reduce to simple terms a complexity that requires deeper thought and understanding than I will likely ever possess.
Even as I write this, I see how clumsy my words are compared to her own, and yet I continue. Like Gabbert, I find that the process of writing, frustrating as it always is, primes me for more, because each inadequate phrase I write spurs me on, pinches me into a more alive present. As I write I wake into an understanding that that yearning to express myself is a sign that there’s something bigger than me out there, just out of reach and as essential to my life as breath. Like the author, I find that “staring at my laptop screen makes me better at thinking. Even thinking about writing makes me better at thinking.” Thoughts flash to words to action to, one day hopefully, self-actualization. My hopes, my humanity to the goddess’s ear.
And so, I write this today and do so mainly because of one word that woke me up last night from a sleep that was already thin to begin with. Since the death of my mother sleep doesn’t come as easily as it once did. I accept this as a natural part of processing love and loss, but it’s likely that this nocturnal pattern shift will warrant more literary exploration at a future date. For now, I want to focus on the word that startled me into consciousness and kept me tossing and turning the rest of the night.
Shimmer. That’s it. I wrote all of this because of one word – shimmer, which shows up abundantly in the first section of Gabbert’s piece.
Gabbert opens her article with some words of Joan Didion, who said she needed to express herself in fiction because of pictures that wouldn’t leave her brain. Didion wrote “entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means . . . images that shimmer around the edges. . . What is going on in these pictures in my mind?”
Per Gabbert, Nabokov used similar terminology: “Literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. . . Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story, there is a shimmering go-between.”
I know this brief refraction of light and color, heaven and earth, expansiveness, possibility. I don’t pretend by writing this to even dare to put myself even proximate to the impeccable stylings of the inestimable Didion and Nabakov. Talk about laughable, even thinking of going there. But, like an eagle homing in on its tiny prey from its calculated orbit far above the trees, I grab for shimmer because I know that tremulous mix when the corporeal and the luminous meet and I want to understand it more. I knew a person who shimmered. I witnessed this with my own eyes. It was several years ago, in that saddest of sad places, a hospice. More later.
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