It’s been a while since my writing has taken the time to soak up a sunrise. Hence the delay in sending this latest missive to you, dear reader.
My writing wants to describe, but is driven to distraction. My writing gets tangled up in other things: half-truths and full-rush. It loses focus and grinds gears that wear away the page. When the ink and ideas dry up, when a lever is pulled on thoughts and feelings, putting pen to paper becomes a crunch-click motion, and nothing much gets written. These kinds of days have been doing their best to grow mould over my desire for description.
I’ve been thinking a lot about description lately.
Gertrude Stein writes, in her round-about-way, about the moment her work began to change. This ‘long and tormenting process’ saw her move from ‘interested only in the insides of people, their character and what went on inside them’ to wanting to ‘express the rhythm of the visible world’.1
Torment emerges when writers are unable to describe rhythm. Stein is ‘tormented by the problem of the external and the internal.’ To become un-torn she experiments, tries inventing words. When that doesn’t work she ‘describ(es) rooms and objects’. And then, she creates her ‘portraits’: pictures of the textual kind.
Stein is not alone her the battle to ‘describe’. The Italian writer Elena Ferrante, writes outside the margins, desperate to ‘circumscribe, inscribe, describe, prescribe even proscribe if necessary.’2
For me, the write path to description is not paved in bitumen. It exists on shifting sands, subject to tide-times and washouts. The write path basks in the heat of a winter’s day, revels in the sound of sunset and seagulls and half-moon ladders. The write path scratches its way around sketches of objects that emerge along the path, or as was the case recently, a winter’s beach.
As researchers we are constantly trying to describe what is happening, what we are seeing, or thinking or suspecting. But the parameters we are forced to do this within keep us contained, and forced to write within the margins. In reality, great writing edges away from the boundary line. It emerges in written and visual sketches, in poetry and silence as much as from the parameters of the academic paper.
Lately, I have started drawing to describe. It helps me pay attention and to bring the ‘faraway near’, as Rebecca Solnit would say3. This faraway-nearness, Solnit writes, has been key to some of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time. It is a method the artist Georgia O’Keeffe so famously depicts in her art, specifically the Faraway, Nearby.
And so, I follow this write path with notebook and pen in hand. The sketch pad is also now, not too far away. It helps me pay attention to what is nearby, and to what is faraway.
Gertrude Stein, 1933. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Penguin. p. 130
Elena Ferrante. 2021. In the margins. Europa. p 41.
Rebecca Solnit. 2013. The Faraway Nearby. p53.
This is one of your best. Perhaps put these together in a book. 🌻