Hello again. I've missed you.
So here's what I've been musing about as I've been ploughing through my piles of subs: For us, writing can be a love-affair. And I don't just mean that as a trite cliche. Analyse our language and you'll see what I mean. Discourse Analysts have always claimed that you can tell a lot about any group from studying their language: the metaphors we use, our choice of semantics -- these reveal our attitudes, the "stories" of our group identity.
So here's what I've noticed. Firstly, in the publishing industry you may have heard these phrases: "I admire a lot about this writing, but I just didn't fall in love hard enough to publish it in today's competitive market..." In critique, I've often heard the following: "I didn't connect with the character... I felt pushed away... You lose me, there..." And so on. For many of us, writing (be it ours or someone else's) is all about the love. As you know, I'm currently ensconced in the letters of Nin and Miller, who write in great depth about each other's work. It's not only in the white heat of their romance that these lovers express their desire, but also in their love of words. Says Henry, "It is the desire of the human male to build a world! Soit. Who said that? Anais Nin? Not merely useful, something wonderful. Also, Anais Nin. O.K. Everything Anais Nin says is swell, wonderful, and the world is wonderful and I am wonderful and America is wonderful."
But then, beautiful language is inspired by love, whether or not one is speaking of writing. Take this opening to one of Anais' letters to Henry, for instance:
"Things I forgot to tell you: The quena is an instrument like a flute used by the South American Indians. It is made of human bones. It owes its origin to the worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute of one of her bones. It has a more penetrating, more haunting sound than the ordinary flute.
That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you."
Yup. It's love, and there's the proof.
And it's a love of words that makes blogging just once a week so hard. Maybe impossible, in fact.
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