Archive for September 10th, 2009
Samuel R. Delaney and the “annealing moment” of doubt
Reading the excerpt below makes me think of how difficult yet rewarding it must be to peel and eat a durian, that strange fruit found only in southeast Asia, and guarded by not only a foul odor but a thick husk of thorns. The excerpt comes from an essay by the science fiction writer, literary critic, and teacher Samuel R. Delaney called “Of Doubts and Dreams.” It’s part of a collection of related essays by Delaney titled About Writing.
Delaney is talking in this essay about doubt - doubt as a barrier to writing anything at all, to start with; but doubt also as an aid to good writing, or more accurately to the search for good writing. In particular, he notes, cliches of both language and thought must be seen for what they are and discarded - even though they are often the first things that come to mind when we set out to write. He goes on:
The act of refusing to put down words, or crossing out words already down, while you concentrate on the vision you are writing about, makes new words come. What’s more, when you refuse language your mind offers up, something happens to the next batch offered. The words are not the same ones that would have come if you hadn’t doubted . . .
If there is a privileged moment somewhere in the arc of experience running from the first language an infant hears, through the toddler’s learning that language, to the child’s learning to read it, to the adolescent’s attempts to write journals, tales, dramas, poems - if there is a moment, rightly called creative, when the possibility of the extraordinary is shored up against the inundation of ordinary rhetoric that forms, shapes, and is the majority of what we call civilized life, it is here. This is the moment covered - in the sense of covered over - by the tautology against which so many thousands of would-be writers have stumbled: “To be a writer, you must write.” You must write not only to produce the text that is the historical verification of your having written. You must write to project yourself, again and again, through the annealing moment that provides the negentropic1 organization which makes a few texts privileged tools of perception. Without this moment, this series of moments, this concatenation of doubts about language shattered by language, the text is only a document of time passed with some paper, of time spent pondering a passage through a dream.
What wonderful yet thorny motives this passage suggests - not for why we write, but why we ought to write.
- “Negentropic,” if you’re wondering, means “characterized by a reduction in entropy, and a corresponding increase in order.” ↩
