Why write?
I returned to Brandon Shimoda's Hydra Medusa and read it through without stopping. And then I went back to the beginning, started over.
It arrived (or I did to it) at a moment of deep receptivity.
Hydra Medusa opens with a recitation of dreams:
I had a dream last night that a rainbow was burning.
I had a dream last night that the war fit on the tip of a finger.
I had a dream last night that a scream did not need a hill to gather speed to reach the people.
I have been thinking about movement as a guiding inquiry. What moves in this unit of thought? What transforms? At the level of the image? At the level of the sentence? At the level of stanza or passage? And this morning, returning to these opening lines, the impulse to document and to demonstrate, compels.
I want to stay and tell you about the experience of reading these lines and then thinking about them. I want to witness my own mind engaging with the trace thoughts of another, and I want this engagement, too, to be witnessed. How else to materialize? Or do I mean metabolize?
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We drove out to a small seaside town, where a friend of ours had a house on a hill. Behind the house, a path leading down to a stretch of pebbled beach punctuated by sharp black rock formations. The children, small then, ran and shrieked happily, returning occasionally for juice boxes and apple slices. As we readied to leave, facing back toward the house, we saw it. A rainbow, or rather, a bit of one — a flat bit — not curved, just a short flat smear of color suspended above us. A portal, a portent, a gash in the sky. Despite the warmth, a collective shiver. How unsettling such distortion can be.
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For a particular assignment in graduate school, I found myself in the library stacks, poring over first-hand accounts of the bombing of Nagasaki. I read about the woman who survived long enough to see each of her three children die. I read of the pyres on which the dead were burned, the thick smoke blotting out sky. Silent images, like black and white film. To imagine sound, to imagine color, is too difficult to bear.
Shimoda's dreams move from strange and unsettling abstractions to the most visceral of detail. A scream so all-encompassing, no one is out of range.
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Why write?
I have avoided it for so long, the question demands some response. There are so many stock answers that I have, myself used. To be in conversation, to talk with the dead, to bear witness, to know what I think, the list goes on. I remember the realtor who sold us our house, how she wrote in ornate, looping script on all our documents. "I love to write," she said, when I commented on her penmanship. "I love writing."
Every statement true, but insufficient. Is it melodramatic to suggest it is like breathing, like eating? Is it melodramatic to want to say it can make some experiences — even if only temporarily — easier to bear? I am certain some would disagree.
