Another day; another search for something to write about
Early on in my PhD studies, I stumbled on the work of a particular philosopher. I can’t remember now just how and where I learned of him, but that moment of learning marked a significant point in my graduate studies, because I later wrote my dissertation on his work. I said then, and I would say now, that it’s fortunate that this worked out as a dissertation topic, simply because I was sure I couldn’t have come up with something else that I wanted to write on. This is on my mind these days because I’m convinced that the biggest challenge I face in writing these blog entries is coming up with a topic I want to write about. I’ve not clocked it, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that I spend more time figuring out what I want to write about than I do on the actual writing.
Earlier this morning I was thinking I might write something about memory. As I thought about that, I remembered reading recently that James Joyce said something to the effect that imagination is memory. That seemed to be worth looking into, I thought, and retrieved Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce from my bookshelf. Moments later, I was reading this passage:
Joyce often recited Yeats’s poems from memory, and seemed to wonder if his own work was imaginative enough. In the midst of writing Ulysses he confided in Ezra Pound, “I have little or no inspiration or imagination and work very laboriously, exhausting myself with trifles.” Later he said to Jacques Mercanton, “Why regret my talent? I haven’t any. I write so painfully, so slowly. Chance furnishes me with what I need. I’m like a man who stumbles: my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.” On the other hand, he often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered,” and said to Frank Budgen, “Imagination is memory” (p. 661n).
I found what I wanted — the quotation that I saw somewhere about imagination and memory. But I also gained some comfort in learning that a writer as great as Joyce sometimes found inspiration when he least expected it. I think that the metaphor of stumbling is particularly apt here. One doesn’t stumble unless one is walking or running, or, more generally, moving. The movement that makes sense to me here is that of moving through pages — i.e., reading. And that reminded me (there’s that memory again) of something Haruki Murakami said in his essay “So What Should I Write About?” In this essay he offers advice to aspiring novelists:
It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on — great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading (Novelist as a Vocation, p. 74).
But, Murakami continues, it’s also important to pay attention to the world even when one is not reading. “Observe what is going on around you and the people you encounter as closely and as deeply as you can. Reflect on what you see.” (Perhaps, I would say, one might be focusing so closely on the people one sees that one stumbles. Pay attention to that, too!) Murakami’s point here is that in this reading and more general observation the aspiring novelist is constructing and populating a “mental chest of drawers” with ideas that might come to mind later when one is writing. “If you have stockpiled your chest with a rich variety of unrelated details, … you will be amazed to see how naturally they pop up when the need arises, full of life and ready to be fit into the narrative” (p. 78).
Just as I finished typing that last sentence, my eyes wandered down the page of Murakami’s book, and I stumbled on this: “James Joyce put it most succinctly when he said ‘Imagination is memory.’” Someday — perhaps someday soon — I’ll write something about that.
