That said, I report that for this writer at least, regularity is as helpful with the Muse as with the bowels: a comparison to be taken just so far and no farther. Go to your worktable at the same time daily, establish your Personal Prep Routine, and you’re likely to find that just as making breakfast (to change analogies) may sharpen your appetite, so some established little ritual of muse-invocation may get your creative juices flowing. I myself — after the breakfast afore-alluded-to with wife and newspaper, followed by that toilette likewise alluded to and a ten-minute routine of stretching exercises picked up half a century ago from an RCAF training manual — refill my thermal coffee mug and disappear into my Scriptorium no later than half past eight every weekday morning. It has separate workspaces for Creation, Production, and Business; ignoring the third of those (appointments calendar, file drawers, check registers and accounting ledgers, telephone, clock, and calculator, all relegated to Later), I pause at the second just long enough to boot up and then promptly anesthetize my more-or-less-trusty Macintosh, which will remain in Standby mode unless this morning’s work is to be the revision and editing of an already first-drafted text — for me, the most enjoyable stage of writing, because it feels agreeably creative, but is so much easier than invention and composition. Turning then to the sanctum sanctorum, the worktable consecrated to Composition, I do the following routine preps, the musely equivalent of those earlier RCAF exercises:
1) Insert a set of Mack’s earplugs from supply in worktable drawer: a habit carried over from that same half-century ago, when my now middle-aged children were high-energy tots and their father was an overworked, underpaid young college instructor obliged to snatch the odd hour of writing-time at a little desk in the bedroom. By the time the nest was empty and my work-area a more commodious and quiet Personal Space, the earplug habit was as fixed as Chekhov’s requisite rotting apples. My muse sings only through ambient silence — her song not always clearly distinguishable, I confess, from the tinnitus familiar to many of us oldsters.
2) Ears plugged, slide selfward the worn, stained, and battered three-ring looseleaf binder procured during Freshman Orientation Week at Johns Hopkins in 1947, in which has been first-drafted every page of my fiction since those green undergraduate days. It’s as weathered now as its owner, who however counts on its continuing to hang together for at least as long as he does.
3) Open that “serviceable old thing” (as W. H. Auden fondly addressed his aging body) either to the Page in Progress or to the blank Next Thing, and take from its nestling-place among the gently rusting triple rings the somewhat less venerable but by me equally venerated Parker pen bought 40-plus years ago in “Mr. Pumblechook’s Premises” in Rochester, England, in honor of the great Boz. Uncap and fill that instrument with its daily draught of Permanent Jet Black Quink, and then….
Well, that depends. Like Hemingway & Co. aforementioned, I try to end each morn’s first-drafting while the going’s good, with maybe a brief penciled or ballpointed note of what’s to follow (the Parker is reserved strictly for Composition, not for notes, correspondence, and suchlike mundanities). If today’s session involves work in progress, then reviewing and editing the print-out of yesterday’s installment usually suffices to reorient the imagination and pump the creative adrenaline enough for me to resume first-draft penmanship — which a couple of hours later I’ll break off in mid-whatever, date in parentheses (with ballpoint pickup-note appended), and type into the waiting word processor for ease of subsequent revision, already editing the draft as I transcribe it. If, on the other hand, what awaited me back there at 8:30 was the between-projects three-hole ruled blank page, it’s a whole ’nother story, so to speak: one in which I’m likely to have recapped and renestled that refilled Parker, taken up Papermate and clipboard instead, and scratched hopeful preliminary notes toward. . who knows what? Maybe a mini-essay on writerly Rules of Thumb?
Most prose-writers nowadays in every genre — perhaps most poets, even — dispense altogether with the venerable, to them perhaps obsolete medium of longhand and compose directly on the PC. For all I know, maybe even their preliminary note-making is done on laptop or Palm Pilot. If so, so be it: As aforedeclared, whatever floats the old boat. For Yours Truly, however, the equation of narrative “flow” with the literal flow of ink onto paper, of the fountain pen with the Fount of Inspiration, holds as firmly as my right hand holds that maroon-and-brushed-silver Parker 51: a rule of (sometimes inkstained) thumb.
Future Imperfect
In the spring of 2008, for what it described as an upcoming Political Issue, the journal Tin City invited responses from a number of people to the following questions: 1) What is your greatest fear for the future? And 2) What is your greatest hope for the future? After due consideration, I replied (tongue at least partly in cheek) as follows:
1) My chiefest fear for the future is that, like past futures, it will become the present.
2) My main hope for the future is that when presently it becomes the present, and anon the past, the worst its relieved survivors in some future present will be able to say of it will be that although they had feared the worst, as now-past futures go it could have been worse.
I
From The Art of the Word,1 an anthology of essays by various scholars, critics, translators, novelists, poets, memoirists, essayists, editors, and others about some word that they find particularly fascinating, intriguing, poignant, irksome, whatever. .
SLIMMEST OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE pronouns and yet most self-assertive, even self-important, the nominative-case first-person-singular I (identical in most type-fonts to the Roman numeral, as if to declare “I am Number One!”) is always upper-case, unlike the more self-effacing Spanish yo, Italian io, French je, and German ich, for example, capitalized only when beginning a sentence, or even the English me, my, and mine—suggesting that in our tongue the self that is acted upon, or that merely possesses things, is less self-possessed than the self that takes action or possession.
The skinny thing’s antecedent, its user’s self, is at once obvious—self-evident, let’s say — and teasingly elusive. “Myself”: whose self is that? Who or what is the “self” that’s conscious of self-consciousness, even of being conscious of self-consciousness, et cetera ad infinitum? The “I” who asks that not-unreasonable question — who tries to peer behind that so-slender vertical letter — finds him-/herself caught in the classic philosophical quandary of the Retreating Subject, the infinite regress of facing mirrors. Gnothi seauton, “Know thyself,” advises the Delphic oracle: an incompletable project, sometimes vertiginous, in extreme cases even paralyzing, and commonly productive of unpleasant news. Professional storytellers like. . myself. . may incline to the “neurophilosopher” Daniel C. Dennett’s definition of the Self as one’s “center of narrative gravity”2 (always allowing for the famous fictive device of the Unreliable Narrator). Not a bad idea, in “my” opinion, to sneak a peek from time to time in those funhouse mirrors. Having done so, however, better to turn away and ask, not “Who am I?”, but “Who are you? Who are we, and they? What is this, and that, and that?”—and get on with the story.