There is something dark in me, something among all my thoughts, something that I cannot measure with thoughts, a life that can’t be expressed in words and which is none the less my life… --Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Torless
Kafka once wrote in one of his diaries: "The beginning of every story is ridiculous at first." I've always loved that because through the years it has encouraged me to start each new story without embarrassment or apology.
Once we finish the story, what then?
This has been on my mind the last two days. I have written a lot in my blogs about how stories come from a dark place in myself, a secret, hidden place which Jung called the unconscious. To use the title of one of my favorite poems by Adrienne Rich, it is like "Diving into the Wreck."
Often, though, this diving doesn't yield what I had hoped. Very often, I'm disappointed by what I write and have to acknowledge that the writing is nothing like what I'd envisioned. Recently, I came across a quote about this kind of disappointment:
“As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and then when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure, and when we return to the light of the day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.” (Maeterlinck, The Treasure of Homer.)
So my question would be, how do we keep from deluding ourselves? How do we even know whether we've brought up treasure and not just shards of glass?
Posts
