Summer 2005

HOW NOT TO COME TO THE PAGE

How do you approach the blank page? Steven King says no matter what, whether we come to our work with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness or despair with the sense that we can never completely put on the page what’s in our minds and heart, we must never come to the blank page lightly. "You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world--" Come to writing any way we want, he says, but whatever we do, "don't come to writing lightly." "You must not come lightly to the blank page."

In the year 1494 a small volume of allegorical verse in German was published, "The Ship of Fools." Its author, Sebastian Brant, chronicled the follies of his society from gambling to lack of faith (for instance, lack of faith and ingratitude Re. the discovery of the New World two years earlier). The book was enormously successful. Most interesting, however, is the frontispiece, a woodcut by a young Albrecht Dürer illustrating the follies of the "book fool." The book fool says, "I have great treasures here, of which I understand not a word."

In the woodcut we see a man wearing glasses (the official symbol of one engaged in intellectual pursuit) sitting in his study utterly surrounded and framed by books. He wears a nightcap (to hide his donkey’s ears) and holds a duster to swat at the flies who buzz around the books. He climbs into the ship of fools comparing himself to Ptolemy II of Alexandria who accumulated books but not knowledge. When a writer approaches the blank page lightly he does a service to the book fool who has no thought for what the writer has to say. They share the same sort of non-mind.

Both reader and writer need to be equally serious about those marks on the blank page. To quote King again, "If you can take it [writing] seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car maybe."

So what’s serious writing, we ask. Ernest Hemingway wrote simple serious sentences like, "He came to the river. The river was there." ("Big Two-Hearted River.") And Sydney Lea writes: "There'd be hours to watch autumn come to the shores upstream, the spray hardening to crystal on Mink Rock, the young loons calling up the migrating breeze they needed so that they might cross the flat-topped moon of November" ("A Place in Mind"). Books like "Grapes of Wrath" and "Sound and the Fury" are classic works of serious literature, yet Oprah notwithstanding, how many people on your tour bus or golf course or real estate office give a hoot? Mark Strand said all writing is writing against the void, and if that's true, reading is also an act against the void. The void calls out what is deepest in us and in the act of creation for the writer as well as the reader, we engage a certain courage or faith that banishes any shred of half-heartedness; we refute what King calls "coming lightly to the page."

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