5. Rhythm, repetition, making patterns — these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument /object we call a poem or a story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn’t lose power in revisiting. Writing is not just to know, it is also to console. We need to be reminded that we are part of the obscure rhythm of birth and decay. It is the humming that matters.
6. All true writing moves with profound ethical concerns. (Ah, this is a mouthful. .) It has little bearing upon what we think of as ‘morality,’ ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ But the act of writing, engaging the emptiness, is after all the living proof that man is born good, that Heshe can praise life and sing death to continue inventing Shimself. Which is metamorphosis. Always imagine that there’s real life beyond the page. Don’t be afraid of vulgarity. Allow yourself to be angry and to cry. Sing as often as you can — it is also an excellent breathing exercise. Remember that writing is breath. Get drunk frequently, but always with friends. Do not, however, depend on drugs or drink for an escape. Rather try breathing through one nostril at a time or standing on your head or love-flying. Visualize the community you are part of. Remember, there is no ‘purity’ of race or culture, only a seamless life of mixing, a ceaseless hunger for Other, an ongoing bastardization.
7. Beware of psychology: understanding is a trick for castrating creativeness. Don’t take the puerile and sometimes curmudgeon conceits and /or marvelous flights of fancy of writers like Freud and Jung as science. It is all snake oil for the ache of the absent soul. Western psychology is a ploy in the quest for power and control, for servicing the ‘self’ and ultimately an obeisance to Unum One-God Warlord. Be religious if you can do no else, or at least be aware of that transport, because the rituals and the homes of the gods are often very moving, but know that monotheism will take you to jealousy, inferiority, guilt-production and intolerance, maybe cruelly to the marble ovens and tombs and vaults and truth-rooms or other torture chambers of Western arrogance and power, to bombing starved children from dizzying heights and having colonies of non-people in off-shore concentration camps. Better, if you find it too lonely being an infidel, a heathen or a pariah, to respect humor and honor all gods and spirits, and partake of all rites and the eating of rice. Practice particularly the ritual of mountains, trees and water. Cover your bets.
8. Read as much as you can. Texts, articles, comics, testicles — this is all manure for maturing the mind. With time you’ll find that you read with more discrimination, mainly because you have less time, and then it will become both communion and communication as if you were writing it yourself. There’s a lot to be said for forgetting. Don’t bother with theory and criticism. Never read the kind of shit you have at present under the eyes. Don’t judge. Leave that to the power-mongers, to those who wish to impose democracy, to them who think Africa can be saved. (Or so they pretend.) But develop your capacity for feeling what you read and see.
9. Every stretch of writing that works aspires to its own inevitable shape and form. You have to learn how to accommodate/accompany the emergence towards that shape. Structure, texture, posture — work at these essentials. Shape form. Don’t shy away from structuring, even the old-fashioned way: the most beautiful flesh must still be draped over an assembly, a topography of bones. (You could say death structures life.) The structure embodies the ‘image’ of the writing that will imprint itself on your mind. Don’t be stingy. Think big but speak like a knife. Be irresponsible too — in the sense that you’ll burn your boats and everything else (including the sea) in the wild quest to extract that drowned kernel of the essential life. If you see what I’m getting at. Burn without compunction. Then be kind to yourself. Listen to your stories. Let them sit on your lap and listen to them. Read (to) them aloud, and also those of other people, so that you may feel how rhythm and sound and spacing go toward structuring a sense.
10. By ‘posture’ I mean not only voice and attitude, but also the alert waiting position, the readiness. For that you need to be clean as the barrel of a gun. Keep contact with what’s just below the surface of day. Go fishing. Remember previous paragraphs where you fumbled for fudged kernels. You are the fisher, the hook, the bait and the fish. At all times keep a small notebook on you to wrap the catch in. Don’t scorn a bite when it comes: reel it in, gut it in your pages lest it sink into the mud of a telephone directory or disappear into the virtual forgetting of computed memory. If you don’t it will stink up your head and attract flies. The trick is to keep just enough order in your mind-memory, without Order pushing you out of line. (I don’t know what this means either.) Posture is also finding the right balance. To breathe with the spine.
11. There are many exercises to promote the flow. Make verbal sketches of landscapes. Jot down situations, rhythms, dreams, the things that move through the head. Make an effort to translate from other languages. Improvise variations on a line, even when it is another jazzman’s theme. Make up songs. Use the odd news item as starting point. Reality is an open sore, richly oozing. Cut up and reassemble texts. Write writing books. Write the portraits of your family. Especially and maybe preferably when they’re dead. Make collages and posters and kites.
12. Walking strengthens the mind and loosens the images. (Jogging can be problematical, since you risk running the breathlines out of memory.) The best ‘ideas’ may upear while you shower or brush your teeth or work rhythmically at physical labor, and then probably provoked by the repeated gestures, by the pre-birth sound of water, by the mind being put in neutral. Take these gifts when they come and be grateful. Don’t impede the flow. Don’t ask for names or reasons. Take no names! Don’t bother, at first, what the story wants to be ‘about.’
13. Let it hang to ripen so that the sinews and ligatures may become self-evident — or, at least, so that the ‘thing’ may pass from darkness to familiarity. Let the story become used to you. It may help, literally, to put it up on a wall.
14. Revise, revise, revise. It is never too late to die. This is the other form of writing. Like translating the shape behind the initial clutter.
15. Try never to forget what it is/was/will be like to be a writer-in-progress, wildly paradoxical and deeply ethicaclass="underline" that is, to live (on) the edge, close enough in any event to push the fly-blown Self over it. In this direction lies responsibility. And dignity.
16. I know no more.
17.
what a wonderful journey it was across continents and seasons
through snow and through sand
and past cities with names
singing on the tongue
everywhere poverty, everywhere despair
everywhere abattoirs and battlefields