A World in Every Word

The ripple, ebb, rush, and flow of the writing life requests patience, demands quiet, and seeks groundedness. Talent helps. It is a fluid, liquid journey: Every current of story curls a world. Dip your toes into the literary waters, test the temperature, adjust your psyche.

Water inspires an aesthetic response on a guttural level.

Monet painted the pond at Giverny over and over again. Think about Handel’s water music or Debussy’s “La Mer.” How many literary selections use the voyage over water for thematic purposes? Some examples are The Iliad, The Odyssey, and “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” Genesis, Exodus, Jonah, The Gospels, and Revelation. Writer, poet, and mystic Rainer Maria Rilke echoes this tradition in his line from his “Third Elegy” in Duino Elegies, “dissolved in water which lightens the living seed.”

Where does an affinity to story begin? Is it some muffled flow of voice and language in utero, the first word that pours into our sensual fluid-filled world that sparks the love of the word in the writer?

I suppose it is a mystery of some sort. One that joins all those whose hearts beat inside of the word and communion of our craft. Perhaps it is a beautiful, cryptic mystery-map of genetic and creative origin that offers us the possibility of the word-painting that the combination of syllable and syntax offer.

How does the word assert its influence on you? How does it insist on expression?