Author: Sue

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of attending a special guest lecture for the Fall 2009 Hopwoods Awards ceremony. I have a habit of unabashedly attending these ceremonies regardless of whether or not I have won an award myself, and I would surely recommend to others to consider attending one in the future as it surely will not disappoint. The Hopwood program is known not only for giving away pretty sums of money to aspiring writers in the UM community, but also for inviting quite wonderful characters in the literary world to speak on a topic related to the art of writing every few months after the contest is administered (for more information click here). I recall a moment last year when I had shyly approached the speaker for last year’s fall ceremony, Tobias Wolff, with his short novel ‘Old School’ clutched in shaky hands, asking if he would so kindly, please, perhaps, sign the inside cover. He smiled warmly at me and took out his pen in flourish, writing quite an inspirational little message in a string of black ink, and after allowing the words to settle dry, handed the book back to me. I did not read it until I left the auditorium. It is a strange feeling that overwhelms me when I meet a writer in person, and I imagine it is something like the emotions that come over someone who meets their favorite athlete, their favorite band, or the President of the United States. In fact, Tobias Wolff touched upon the subject himself in that very book he had signed for me, ‘Old School’:

“We cared. And I cared as much as anyone, because I not only read writers, I read about writers. I knew that Maupasant, whose stories I loved, had been taken up when young by Flaubert and Turgenev; Faulkner by Sherwood Anderson; Hemingway by Fitzgerald and Pound and Gertrude Stein. All these writers were welcome by other writers. It seemed to follow that you needed such a welcome, yet before this could happen you somehow, anyhow, had to meet the writer who was to welcome you. My idea of how this worked wasn’t low or even practical. I never thought about making connections. My aspirations were mystical. I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories and poems, hands that had touched the hands of other writers. I wanted to be anointed.”

Thus, the timing had been much too appropriate that year and I had left feeling much inspired and filled with the courage to write.

The man invited this year was the British, literary critic, James Wood who, although I had not read, imparted quite a bit of useful wisdom to writers of the upcoming generation. His speech revolved around the idea of Serious Noticing. That is, paraphrased from his lecture “seeing the world closely and carefully, opening the pores of sense to feel the world and thus transform it”. What I found incredibly interesting and worth reproducing here is his statement of how succeeding generations are much more inclined to fall into the hole of Unserious Not-noticing, with no rebuke or blame placed on their shoulders for this seemingly trendy attention deficit. Their fall could be attributed not to a personal character flaw, but the changing world dynamics. With the world becoming increasingly electronic and pixilated, it’s difficult to see the beauty or the horror in the real world when an LCD screen divides the spectator and the object, the moment of interest. Although allowing the network of the world to become increasingly well connected, Facebook and Twitter have their repercussions. The world, in sum, is becoming increasingly ADD. Wood worried about his children not being able to have such a rich, environment to grow up, a world that had fed his own capability and desire to write. It takes serious noticing of the human condition, of the aesthetic and the metaphysical to become, perhaps, not only a good writer but also to have a fulfilling livelihood. It takes serious noticing to capture human contradiction, to color in motives of characters, and to hold two opposing ideas level as one.

After leaving the auditorium and the reception later with a brownie in hand, I bumped into James Wood coming out of a pair of doors. I stood there again, for a moment, brownie in hand, feeling quite small and overwhelmed with the Hopwood’s selected speaker.

Fundamentally, literature is a means of introspection, an intuitive method in which human psychology over the span of millennia can be preserved, retrieved and then deposited on the lap of a new unsuspecting reader. It is an anthology that every author who wanted to share his or her two cents contributes to; their knowledge is made relatable. We can see literature (and there are a vast number of examples) as some vessel to impart philosophy, allow for the progress of civilization, provide a unified narrative and a model for ethical conduct, and to create a union between the past and present. Many other commendable functions of literature exist as well. We see that authors bring into the light the ensuing battle between the inexorable human instincts and the societal structures we’ve created for ourselves, beautifully detailing the virtues of both in, the best of which are written in subtle, tactful yet penetrating manner. There’s a quote by Adam Smith, and it dictates that “Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.” I think that similarly, literature never lays its finger on its pulse – good literature aspires for its readers to not be actively aware of the effects it has on us until it is just too late. I feel that literature is about bringing forth the paradoxes of life while also defamiliarizing us (ridding us of that godforsaken ennui) with what we see to be the encrustations of the mundane in order to reinvent the world as something “new” again – or at least so, reinvigorated in our eyes.

Literature is then, a method to achieve awareness of our lives, to see into the heart of things, and to realize that most of the time, these things we feel are not that unique although revisions are made tailoring the common human experience to particular time periods – essentially, all small alterations. Good literature is the sort that does not bombard you actively with morals so that you are keenly aware of it; it is not didactic, but is passively absorbed the reader through the narrative which is exactly what allegories and other literary techniques do. Though, being aware of literature’s own limitations is also a good thing to keep in mind. Borges puts it well in his short story, The Aleph in the lines: “What my eyes saw was simultaneous: what I shall transcribe is successive, because language is successive.” It’s these little morsels of wisdom and truth, about writing and more importantly, about living that are contained within every piece of good literature. We soon realize that we are not the first people to be confused or sickened at human behavior or notice the paradoxical patterns in which we behave. One of my favorite quotes by J.D. Salinger follows appropriately with “Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.” I think it’s this extension of the invitation to take part in a discourse about human nature that makes literature so worthwhile.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

What a vast, terribly uncertain abyss perception is. It is through some flurry of processes, interacting in a lurid convection akin to the turbulence of a particularly belligerent sea, that we produce, in our mind’s eye, something coherent and meaningful. Objective physical sensations (a squiggly sound wave, a playful touch on the wrist) converge and pinch together into a holistic image, an abstraction which is then projected on to the screen stretched taut and pinned within the architecture of lobes and cortexes. It is this pictoral representation, shaded in with our singular experiences and memories, that we incline our heads toward in acknowledgment. Hundreds of editions of a hundred separate, independent textbooks carefully delineate the precise mechanics of impulse transmission in nerves… and yet…

And yet, in spite of our understanding of how the nervous system’s minute electrons, leaping haphazardly about to culminate in what we call, “chemical activity”, we seem to have run against some sticky impenetrable darkness if we yearn to look further onwards. That is to say, nobody knows (yet) how these alterations of chemical activity relate to psychological states. The entire procedure indeed occurs, but there’s a gaping, palpable absence of a bridge of sorts that elegantly arches to render a connection between the quantifiable ocean of ion channel openings to the wonder of consciousness — to the mystery of perception and of interpretation. And surely, when we engage with art, we perceive and interpret seamlessly, while the systematic processes that are unbeknownst to even ourselves murmurs quietly and opaquely on. Regardless of how introspective we feel, we cannot reveal to ourselves what fantastical things are happening behind this black curtain.

Cognitive psychologists try to work this out, to sketch to their best ability a sort of crude functional bridge, by assessing at how automatic processes we take for granted operate and sometimes “malfunction”, producing what we know to be optical illusions. Psychologists call the “real world out there” the distal stimulus (a horizon), while the image projected upside-down on our retinas is termed as the proximal stimulus (a tiny, two-dimensional, rotated by 180° image of a horizon). The percept is that coalescence of the rather impersonal sensations (proximal stimulus) with the quiet whirrings of our cognitions, drawing in recollections and logical procedures to capture the most sense we can of this little upside-down universe, this universe beyond our seemingly disembodied mind.

What’s noteworthy is the observation that we are mostly ineffective, in recollection or in recreation, in seizing the entirety of what we perceive. Something, or rather, a dazzling cavalcade of things occur between the step of the proximal stimulus and the percept. We sometimes recognize what is actually absent while other times don’t see certain things that are there — things that are mightily exerting their existence in the corporeal world.

Automatically, like doting parents, our minds assign depth to the two-dimensional, maintain size constancy, and fill in blind spots with a surreptitious flourish. The mind does this by means of monocular and binocular cues, like relative size and linear perspective (artists have exploited these methods) to transform that image, pricking our retinas, to a more faithful description of the three-dimensional world outside. It is when these “cues” are mixed and used contradictorily, that we see optical illusions.

And this is simply visual perception. What about the embarrassing gaps of other perceptive mediums? What about more complex abstractions like thought and emotion?

Interesting musings, no?

Perhaps, as time trudges onwards, we’ll understand better. For now, the battalion of psychologists and neuroscientists continue to work in their labs, trying to answer smaller questions in hopes that one day, these collective little advances give rise to a fuller view on this front of knowledge.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at quarter before one in the stretch of early afternoon, I would push open the side-doors of the Union, a peppermint dissolving languidly on my tongue, and stop by Panera to fill my thermos with coffee in anticipation for two and a half hours of lecture.

Late every evening, at whatever obscene hour I decide it’s time to call it a night — to exalt my pillow in my dreams — I pull on my soft, black sweatpants, wash my face, pouch up the cushions into a more lively, dynamic and agreeable arrangement, and clamber into my bottom bunk with a book to fall asleep to.

And every day, before I sit down to begin a writing endeavor, a lunch-date, breakfast-date, midnight-rendezvous with words, if you will, I clear my desk, and turn on the relevant lighting appliances while I boil two cups of water to steep tea in the one, singular mug I own.

Rituals – mundane as they are, my life is guarded by them, as I assume yours is too to some degree. And this was what my fiction-writing professor inquired of his class. Searching into the small coterie of students, apprentices to his own craft, he posed the following queries. “Do you have a writing schedule? A particular fetish-object? Do you believe in the chisel or the muse?” And as the class, seated conveniently in a somewhat elliptical circle, proceeded to give in fine detail of the elaborate rituals they undertook in order for the words to surface and break into the realm of the consciousness, like swimmers gasping for air, I realized the eccentricity of the writer-personality. Twirling, tapping, and balancing pens and pencils, we all took turns to embrace the spotlight with some small tale of our lives. Some spoke of their joy of burning the midnight oil, driven by the ineffable comfort of the dark and the pin-point stars fastened to the sky; some, the pressing deadline chasing at their coattails. So far, nothing too shocking considering that we were, after all, a class of undergraduates; we were, on average, nocturnal. Others somewhat deviated from the “norm” a bit in either direction, with their best work penned on retractable airplane desks soaring 500 miles an hour over the steel blue Atlantic and thus, the mind and the corporeal body were equally engulfed in coils of wispy clouds. The rest of us, more earth-bound, alternatively would look up towards these tresses of blue sky for inspiration during the peak of the day, when the sun shone squarely on our pages, and while the wind could playfully nudge our curiosities. One classmate only used a typewriter for composition, to “feel the tactile sensation” of pressing a thought to paper, one discrete letter at a time. Meaning, would in effect, be knit together by these quick little physical displacements made by the synchrony of interphalangeal joints. Also suggested were stress balls. There were ski-masks. Apple jacks. Nothing was too bizarre or inconceivable for our group.

As I packed up my belongings and thoughts at the end of the class, I began to wonder at how some of the most renowned writers, those that were or would be commended generously generation after generation throughout the continuum of time, have organized their days and their habits around their passion for writing. I discovered, (to a slight dismay) that often, it was the other way around. Kafka who worked an office job during the day, allegedly started writing at 11 at night, and wrote “depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or three o’clock, once even till six in the morning.” Flaubert was “unable to work well on a full stomach, he ate lightly, or what passed for such in the Flaubert household, meaning that his first meal consisted of eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate.” Toni Morrison found her frame of mind for ingenious, sharply brilliant composition through coffee and watching the sun’s rays break the air of the cold horizon. “I realized that I was clearer-headed, more confident and generally more intelligent in the morning.” Writing before dawn began as a necessity for Morrison, who found time only in the tiny hours of the morning before her children awoke, to lay down sentences from the fountain of her pen. Other fascinating rituals for writers (and artists) can be found here.

As for myself, I don’t think I’ve permanently fallen into one tradition or another that I must follow before I write. At least, nothing that extends beyond testing the buoyancy of a tea-bag (earl grey) in a mug adjacent to my notebook. Noon, midnight… my habits are eclectic and uncertain as I stand on the threshold of adulthood. More or less for now, I adopt Eliot’s approach to writing. “The poet’s mind is a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” Whenever the right moment arrives, when that tremendous electrical storm shatters the attic upstairs after days of deliberate observation, you’ll find me furiously, ecstatically scrawling on any portable surface, never mind if it’s the backside of a half-destroyed menu or one of those programs they hand out before a concert or play. Some days, when the receptacle is empty, I try to schedule time to write and I stand convinced that the tea helps.

Now, I turn the inquiry over to you: What are some of your own idiosyncratic writing rituals, if any?

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Does anyone remember these old B&N bags before they decided to shift emphasis to a more “let’s endorse our store colors” look?

My dad use to bribe me with money when I was still into the The Chronicles of Narnia hullabaloo (circa ‘97). He said that if I read all the books on the front of this bag he’d give me $50 and another $50 if I read all the books on the backside. Now, let me remind you —$100 at that age was like winning the lottery so I took this very seriously. I read To Kill a Mockingbird because for something reason or another, I thought that once I read that book, no doubt I would’ve won the respect of all my elders and I could just die in peace. I managed (by some miracle) to meander my way through Of Mice and Men and a part of Death of a Salesman (depicted on the other side) by the age of 11. I feel certain that at the time I was hopelessly oblivious to the notion of “classic, canonical literature”; I did, however, know that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was not categorized as such. Ultimately, I never finished all the novels on this Barnes and Noble bag and I never did get that $100. I’m still short two or three of these books at the age of 19.

But nowadays, I couldn’t be bribed with enough money to not read them all.

What we need are books that hit us like most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

— Franz Kafka

Alas, books. I’ve monopolized the 200 square feet of dorm room space with a series of these fascinating specimens; an alphabetized avalanche leans against one of the walls. Come my fortieth birthday, I will be encased in a house constructed of books and accompanied with a select number of cats, plants, and telescopes. (The likelihood that I will become that proverbial cat lady has soared through the stratosphere. I have embraced my fate long ago.) Most likely, I will stumble upon these memories of my boisterous college years and laugh at how scant a pile of books this was and how meager and few the ideas I owned were and how naïve I was when I felt my life’s significance diminish under the weight of the unknown Universe and what terrible food I tolerated… and this stream of memories would be a nice token of remembrance to have. But these were the kernels of ideas that constitute me and encouraged me to think on my own accord and to try, standing on the shoulders of giants, to bring truths that I have discovered and have yet to discover, to light.

On another note, I’d love to be introduced to your favorite books. Let me know. I’d be eternally grateful.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Descending to human affairs:

An accurate report on the transforming shapes of my cognition as I leave the grace and levitation of celestial things and orient the axis of my mind back on societal matters. I’m that kid scuffing my dirty sneakers in Barnes and Noble and sifting through the books in the Science section, sampling Darwin, poring through Copernicus to Hawking, sympathizing for Tesla the underdog of electrical history… though I suppose immortalizing your name for the units of magnetic density flux somewhat compensates for the fact you have been commercially thwarted by Edison. An old man bespectacled with thick glasses once gave me a smile loaded with a sympathetic understanding when he saw what I held in my hands. These whorls of information contained in the seemingly innocuous text would undoubtedly form themselves into arrows of abstraction: the physics of a soap bubble to the physics of consciousness to theories on the shape and direction of Time. I always wonder how anyone can root their feet firmly back on the ground after such a perusal since I for one, have a difficult time completing this seemingly simple task of closing the book, returning it to its proper place on the shelf, and continuing on without feeling though my innards have transmogrified into some erratic fitful of lightning about to storm. I get stuck.

These endless hours, the paychecks I spend, this need to delegate someone with the duty of prying these books from me when I have fallen asleep with them – why? Is it for that Holy Grail men and women for centuries have aspired and died for — Truth? For sublime and magnificent thoughts? Frankly, I don’t know what it’s all for. For the past two weeks, I’ve had this sticky-note stuck to my wallet that blotchily reads “In awe of the universe, one develops a detachment to life” which was some muck of a thought that surfaced when I was on the brink of falling asleep one night, causing me to grope for a pen in the dark. It’s not at all as dramatic as it sounds, in fact, it’s the apathetic air about it that renders the gravity of the meaning. All life has evolved from the constraints of purely physical laws and given the right conditions, this phenomenon of life will proceed to occur — we, these entropy-facilitating mechanisms have no choice but stir to life.

And it’s fascinating. We’ve created such a wondrously crazy system here that has little to do, and even blatantly ignores the existence of the rest of the Universe — those sprawling fringes of infinity. Nobody told me when I was kid that I was just stardust or anything and that every carbon within me has suffered the cosmic violence of a supernova (picture an explosion in deep space; there’s something almost poetic about it). Instead, I obediently memorized the multiplication table.  We are decorous, and dutifully, we more or less pursue respectable jobs, marry, have kids and the whole shindig, which essentially boils down to a cycle of small rituals, predetermined by repetition, falling unspoken and uncontemplated into their places. Our manners are a history of civilization. It’s utterly irrelevant that the Andromeda galaxy is scheduled to collide with our own in 3 billion years. Down here in this enterprise on Earth, pragmatism triumphs and beautifully, it’s the source of our humanity. We are ballooning with desire and memory, are moved by the color of the pounding tides, a familiar scent…

So what exactly does this have anything to do with art?

Possibly — probably everything. The most compelling art forms allow us to come to terms with these fundamental spatial and temporal truths, looming overcast in the peripheries of thought. Shadow-like and operating at quiet plane of conscience, profound arts remind us of the fabric and texture of our humanity; it humbles us, as does the sheer, utterly magnificent magnitude of the universe.

Art allows us to begin to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Admittedly, there have been days when I just want to be an amoeba for the sake of simplicity.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.