G2

Nancy Bauer

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Twenty years ago I was delighted when I came upon these sentences in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life: "When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory." These words were an exact and vivid description of how I had always written; they seemed like a validation.

I hadn't read the book since then, but the other day I got it out and remembered my initial delight. I still write that way, the column and everything else, novels included.

It's a miracle to me that I can start out with a sentence or two, follow the path, and after a lot of digging with a shovel and then raking the earth smooth, I have a column of 800 words or a novel of 60,000 words.

But everything about language is a miracle. For many years my friend waited for her second son to speak. He never did. Now every time a grandchild says his first words, tears come to her eyes.

I could criticize Dillard's first chapter. Her perfect analogy so enchanted her that she does go on - metaphor after metaphor. The trick of using "you" instead of "I" or "she" becomes tiresome (although it does avoid the problem of which gender to use.) Still, her description of how hard she works makes any criticism petty.

Reading Tom Smart's book on Fred Ross, I came upon the concept of "charm" as it pertains to art. I looked up the word; it's derived from carmen, a song with a magical formula. I also found that in physics, charm is a "quantum characteristic of elementary particles that accounts for the long lifetime" of the J/psi particle, also known as the charm quark. If I dug at that path long enough, I would, if I were lucky, get "deep into new territory" where I might begin to understand this concept of charm.

Walker Percy wrote: "Language is a means of exploration. When you explore, you don't want to get somewhere familiar to you. It doesn't need to be a place where no man has ever been, but it must be sufficiently unknown not to be cut and dried." I used to be envious of people who could go exploring: Machu Picchu, the Russian steppes.

Now I am content to go exploring in my own mind. The extraordinary thing about this journeying is that even though I know I probably won't get to a place no one has ever been, yet I will still be amazed at what I find. I know that I will only be imitating, but that will be reincarnating an idea, a worthy goal.

Pitfalls can be hiding along this path, traps for the unwary. Critic David Brooks has written about what he calls "brilliant books." The prose in brilliant books "will grow more complex, emotive, gothic, desperate, overheated and nebulous"¦" These brilliant writers are in love with their own brilliance and with their own purple prose. They don't need to explore because it's already cut and dried. Fortunately I don't have to worry about being excessively brilliant.

When I started the novel The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard, I had just a scene, a woman standing in a room, a cardboard box used as a table, a white carnation floating in a bowl. I didn't know why she was there, what she looked like.

Mining with pick and shovel, I found out about her and about the little girl who appears in the doorway. I created a whole set of people, solved a mystery, and ruminated about what constitutes a family and a tribe.

G-talk is an inefficient way to communicate. Up pops a little box on your computer screen that contains the text: "Hi, Grandma."

"Hi," you reply.

"How are you this morning?"

"Fine. It's our anniversary."

"How are you celebrating?"

"We aren't."

"Why?"

And then you're thinking, why don't we celebrate anniversaries? G-talk is like a telephone conversation except that it's in slow motion. Sometimes the person on the other end is engaging in g-talk with several other people, so there are pauses.

You have long stretches to explore the question, why. You don't worry about making complete sentences or using correct grammar or spelling. It's the essential point you're after. You're getting prompted in a dialogue so leisurely that it's perfect for exploration.

Why? Something to do with superstition? Not wanting to tempt the gods? You're digging out one rock at a time from the projected path, not riding on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, but exploring nonetheless.

Nancy Bauer is an arts columnist who lives in Fredericton. She can be reached at wbauer@nbnet.nb.ca.