. Spinning .

The things that we’ve done wrong cling to the vulnerable conscience. Impossible to remove completely, some residue remains like the sticky feel of glue from labels picked off a soft ripe supermarket pear left gouged by prying fingernails.

It’s very strange, to think in different language than I speak.

The brain transfers the eloquence to the fingers to articulate, the mouth too slow perhaps or poorly formed. The tongue too thick? Or stolen by the cat? This problem has been a lifelong one, compounded now by poetics that twist thoughts into metaphors unspeakable in daily conversation. Cars are dragons, the earth a hungry mouth, and rocks can walk and talk.

But only in the mind. And then too, of course, only capable of being shared in written form.

Once upon a time I used to sashay,
swinging hips to music played to metronome
and caught in empty bowls
by those who wrote the lyrics,
who understood the words
and sang along.

Women shut their windows
against the quiet, for the only noise
they heard was gospel glory voices
raised in praise of silence, sung
in cooling satin deserts, ringing out
in whispered screams.

He first saw her on the internet, a glimpse of hair and thigh, and though he tried to meet her she was far above him, separated by a time and space created by a society he still himself did not truly understand. He longed to speak but couldn’t, and though he strained to listen, he could not hear her through the silence. One early dawn he found himself slipping down, and reached for her in one last desperate effort but found himself within a moment within another world. He looked for her, but she was gone, still held captive in the world in which they were reformed.

He looked around at lights that sparkled like the stars in nighttime, but neither were they what they appeared to be. Slowly, slowly he adjusted to yet another world again, and sighed. Centuries of living brought no comfort, and all was new again.

For two long days he wandered, not forgetting her, but longing all the more. For those he met were diverse but oh, so contemporary to a time he found so strange and troubling by their very words alone.

And then a morning came and looking up, he saw her. She landed confused and wondering at the loss of the familiar and the newness of her home. Naked, just as he was, she smiled in recognition, but still silent, waited as was proper for him to speak.

“My name is David,” he said, the words gave him confidence and comfort, and he paused in knowing anticipation of her response.

She smiled again, and took a step closer, happy to have found a friend. “I’m Inspiration,” she replied. Together they turned and settled deeper in the archives, where they lived happily ever after.

(NOTE: A bit odd, perhaps, but this little story came as an idea as I typed a post here into Spinning. What happens, I thought, to all the entries, words, and people that not only I, but millions of others have placed for maybe all eternity to live here on the web. As I thought of posts scrolling off the page daily after spending a week on site, I remembered Michaelangelo’s David in a post of several days ago, and then saw yesterday’s “Inspiration” and felt it would be nice if they could meet.)

I shoulda, woulda, coulda asked for slate and chalk, but encouragement breeds cockiness, and now I am left staring at a paper marred with several holes.

Intelligent enough at least to use a pencil with eraser that grants forgiveness to a growing lack of confidence and indecision. Darker, darker, over and over, erasing and replacing lines and words to cover smudges left by errors made; a clean sheet can only take so much. Eyes are black and heavy around a hole that saw too much and yet even with the seeing, never quite looked right. Words that sounded good the first time but left a soul open to interpretation when I wanted to be clear—but why?

I drew bunny rabbit questions that merely met more rabbits to proliferate until there were no burrows empty left to hide in and they must of necessity fall off the page; lost to all but puzzled memory that cannot close the file and seeks them still with useless grabbing at the breeze that trails behind them.

“Do not go gently into that good night,” he said, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” But it is time, I think, to crumple paper words into a wadded ball that may at least serve as a toy to toss around a little while. And move along to second grade without reluctance or regret but with memory I would hope, to ask for slate and chalk instead.

After reading the material and posting the previous entry, which was mostly done out of glee and personal satisfaction, I took a deeper and more sobering look at the situation, and it upsets me even more, but in a calm and saddened, non-political way.

Little by little, even as new words are created by social and cultural changes as much as by technological advances, we are in truth losing the power to use words. Words created under the auspices of being politically correct and non-degrading or demoralizing, are just euphemisms, nothing more. But we are encouraged, or more accurately, deeply discouraged to the point of scornful reprisal, for using the old words, which really meant the same thing anyway.

For example, say this phrase aloud: “Yeah, she’s a beauty!”

See the double meaning? She’s either gorgeous, or, and I have to be careful how I put this, not too intelligent or even may be physically far below what we might generally agree upon as average.

This is freedom of speech? Although I suppose we could proudly point to the fact that “ass” and other words that our mothers didn’t approve of are now written into almost every new tv series and movie script. That’s progress, I guess. But the word “beauty”, with its derogatory hidden meaning, probably should be banned.

As a writer and lover of words, this bothers me. It bothers me a lot.

I love it, I love it, I love it!

Via Jerz’s Literacy Log, I found this and just absolutely have to call it to anybody’s attention I can–even Googlers and Yahooers seeking The Swimmer:

“Call me nuts, but PC language cripples us“

Written by Margaret Wente for the Globe and Mail, please do take the time to read it.

Where are all the bleedin’ hearts when you need them! Hey, we’ve got an issue of freedom of speech developing here!

Oh, and if you go by way of Jerz’s Literacy Log, please do cast your vote on his website color and design questions.

This is a lazy way of doing it, but honestly more professional that what I’ve offered so far, and it deserves a post of its own in this series.

First, in the previously referenced Critique Guidelines by Amy Sterling Casil, this line recalls the reason we’re even discussing this:

“When we criticize work, we are commenting for the purposes of publishability, and our goal is to help authors to become publishable and published writers.”

Obviously if we’re writing for our own personal self-satisfaction and enjoyment, even as in this weblog for example, we don’t need more than our own opinion to publish. Type it up, press a button, and voila!

And this, from The Reading Experience, a literary weblog that I have just discovered and whose author, Daniel Green, has just posted an excellent comprehensive piece named The Poet-Critic that I would suggest you read in its entirety, but for now:

T.S. Eliot once wrote that in his view “Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author in composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism; and. . .that some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior.” (Eliot means not that such writers should be judged superior because they manifest this critical faculty, but that it is the possession of this faculty that has made them “superior” in the first place.)

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Very often a writer feels he is most critical of his own work, and this is very commonly true. But unless the writer knows what he is looking for, and what the reader is looking for in a story as well, he can well depend on others to honestly offer feedback that can be helpful, useless, or sometimes, provide the vital spark that makes a story leave a reader whispering a quiet, “Wow.”

Just noticed that in referring to Casel’s piece, I typo’d Hardcore Critique Guidelines into Hardcare Guidelines. Aside from wanting to make the correction, I’m wondering if this wasn’t a Freudian slip…

Care is an essential element of the process; care on the part of the writer to observe certain rules of story—aside from that flung-out first draft just to keep up with the mind’s warp-speed production of ideas—as well as care in the reader’s honest evaluation of the work. Obviously, not everyone will like everyone else’s style of writing or the concept of the story line. But well-written stands out in a piece that is easy to read because of the flow, sense of building conflict to climax in a story arc, or grammatically correct so that the reader is not interrupted by awareness of improper punctuation—think of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian here; most readers will complain at first about the lack of punctuation and long sentence structure until you get used to it and find how skillfully he has used his knowledge of the rules to break them beautifully.

Care also comes into play in the way critique is voiced. Obviously, “this sucks” is not a pleasant thing for a writer to hear, and somewhat rude for a reader to offer. Even if the piece truly does suck, there is a nicer way of saying that, (critique your own words, first!) as well as pinning down why it didn’t work and offering suggestions; i.e., it was slow, it was unclear, move the action up a bit with dialogue, add background through imagery, etc. On the flip side, honesty is the best policy here; don’t rave about something that obviously needs work. All it shows is a lack of interest or belief in the author’s ability to improve it.

Another point to make here is that it doesn’t take a writer to make the best suggestions to another writer, often a writer’s inclination is to come up with another twist, a different scenario, a dead body for the last page, because one idea triggers another as a natural effect. That’s why reading is so important to writers; despite my worry of inadvertent plagiarism, reading is merely a textual rather than another visual experience. But any lover of reading is the best critic of all. Pay attention to what these people say: “It made me feel…I saw the pain coming…Man, I was really hoping he’d make it out alive…” You’ve got someone hooked—and if you have let them down anywhere within your story, beg them to point it out to you.

Even the most willing-to-accept-criticism author is bound to feel a little hurt by even the best critique. After all, it is almost like telling a parent, “hey, your kid’s kind of small for his age, isn’t he?” Try asking the parents of a one-year old if he’s walking yet. I know that my first reaction to suggestions on my work is not always an excited, “yeah, yeah, that’s it!” until after I stop the bleeding. Why do you think that the initial name of our local writers group was Garmhos — the Go Ahead, Rip My Heart Out Society.

But know this: It always heals.