I Must Struggle to Write

I have written before about my irregular habit of posting for this blog, and my desire to do more. But, as I say in the title, I must struggle to write ... as in write more, and more regularly.

Great writers develop habits, like those listed here, and here. I need to make a habit of writing.

As with all things, the problem is time. I've written about time before too, though not in a way useful to this, but it is interesting. The problem is there's not enough time. Like most Americans today, I feel I barely have enough time to do what needs to be done to begin with. (And I'm told I need to accept this as "the new normal," which I refuse to do, but that's another post. Look, I'm ahead of the game already!)

What I need to do is start controlling and carving up my time in some sort of fairly organized fashion. Writing is work too. Treat it as such.

More Amazing Writing ...

Heard the opening line from Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" on the radio today.

Simply amazing.

"What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?"

Now that's a lead sentence.

Here's the whole thing ...

Now THAT's Writing ...

There's an anecdote that when the miraculous comedy writing team that worked on Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" came up with a great joke, none of them would laugh.  They never actually laughed as they wrote some of the best sketch comedy ever.  When someone came up with a truly wonderful gag, the rest would simply nod and say, "Yeah, that's funny."

Though I lack that kind of self control, I sometimes feel I want to do something similar -- but with an added tone of awe in my voice -- when I run across truly great journalistic writing.  Usually, it's old writing, the kind of reporting that's not done anymore.  It's the kind of journalism that was necessary in an age when the reports had to be mailed back, and the news was often days if not weeks old.  It was the kind of description that had to be put on the page when there were no 24-hour cable networks, no television at all.  You'd be lucky if there was a newsreel, and that usually without synch sound.  The reporter had to put you there, and do it only with the written word.

I think that art is too often forgotten today.  Look at the complaints when, at the recent "Whitey" Bulger trial, cameras were not allowed in the courtroom.  Legions of journalists, used to having their television  -- with sound -- and still images, found themselves at a loss when composing reports of the most dramatic mafia trial in recent memory.  People were describing murders right out of the movies, old gangsters were staring each other down in the courtroom ... novels have been built on such things, and you can't crank out a decent minute-and-a-half with drawings?

I look at things like Kirke Simpson's 1922 account for AP of the return of the Unknown Soldier from France to Arlington.  It won the Pulitzer.  Sure, it's sort of antiquated in style, but look at that rich description of the ship slowly moving up the Potomac, the minute guns thumping as she comes.  You want to savor the words like a fine wine, rolling them around in your head.  Or the articles that triggered this post, in the New Yorker, chosen by editor David Remnick (of whom I am jealous beyond words in general).  He points to two separate reports on the Nuremberg trials, both written in 1946, but in a way neither describing the trials per se.  Rather, they are rich descriptive stories, telling about the places and people who are what make something like the trial an event worth reporting.  Because, when you think about it, an event is rarely a thing unto itself.  Rather, it is the actions of people in a place, even when that event seems apart from the people.

Tornado ratings, for example, are not really rating the tornado itself, but its effects on houses and people.  There can be (and I suppose are) tornadoes out to sea, away from ships and people, about which we never know ... and never shall.  They are not, for us, an event.  But what if someone should go out seeking those storms ...

Anyway, great writing, writing like these authors created, now that's something a person can aspire to, something one can wish to create for a magazine or a book or a blog ...

There are no followers...

That's what it says: "There are no followers.  Be the first!"  Over there, just to the left of this text (or just to the left until I manage to crank out another entry here).  

It sounds like a philosophical statement; maybe a Zen saying*.  There are no followers.  What does that mean?  Where is the front?  Could you be a leader, but in the middle?  "There go the people.  I must follow them, for I am their leader."  Google Book Search shows that attributed to French revolutionary Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, according to Respectfully Quoted by Suzy Platt, of the Library of Congress.  (One website attributed it to Gandhi, which shows why the internet cannot be trusted.  Trust me.)

So I have no followers, yet I write.  Do I care?  Well, yeah.  But I also make pictures with no particular outlet or viewer either.  I have about seven rolls of film in the darkroom, waiting for processing.  (And that's film -- remember that? -- not the easily run off digital.)  In a way, that's also a purpose of this blog: to find an outlet for all that stuff.  But what if an outlet is not an inlet?

I think the tree falling in the forest makes noise.  It may even make a lovely noise ... or at least an interesting one.  Does it matter that no one hears?

*Koan.  Damn, that's the word I was looking for.  Koan.

And I really mean it...

The blog seems to be the graveyard of good intentions, or rather the haunted house.  By that I mean that, for every entry I've managed to do here, I've thought of at least three -- and probably more -- clever ruminations that haven't appeared.  Their ghosts now hang over the "Create Post" area, weakly moaning, the barest, faint outlines of their original forms drifting about in a thin cloud of regret and frustration.

There was, for example, the micro-essay on the Academy Awards that I thought of Sunday night.  It would touch on my eagerly watching them year after year, even as I've managed to break the habits of presidential speeches and Sunday talk shows.  (The common thread: All are essentially meaningless in themselves; it's only the myth of what happened that is established afterwards through constant commentary and repetition that matters.)  There would be the humorous, self-deprecating aside about how, like anyone who works in film, I have imagined being there and accepting an award ... even though the documentary category is probably the moment everyone chooses to go to the bathroom.  And I won't go into what I think about Michael Moore winning, aside from saying his film stretches the definition of "documentary" beyond breaking.

But my memory of it ends there.  That brilliant thought -- I know it was brilliant, because that's how I remember it -- has evaporated, first a mist and now ... poof, nothing, my hands grasping the air in hopes of catching that last little drop.  It's gone, another ghost in the machine.

There are others, some of which I hope to recover, like the explanation of my love of ellipses...

However, in the end, all I can do is renew my resolve.  Lent is a good time for that.  Let the ashes be spread, and my thoughts broadcast to the internet world.  God help us all...