Voices

My latest post on A Wayfarer's Notes, Accompaniment, started out with a different agenda: to try and escape a continuing writer's block by writing a further post---about writer's block. (The last such post was reprinted in a Catholic women's journal by request of a reader, so I now consider it an auspicious topic.)

I was trying to say that the "I" is not a single voice but many; and that my silence for more than two weeks on Wayfarer was due to a voice being absent: the voice of spontaneous inspiration that picks up various components and sews them together in a patchwork that establishes an unexpected theme. And that is precisely what happened in my new post.

I had thought to publish the ragbag of ideas on Quotidian Stuff which I find less intimidating to write for. But it's out of a ragbag that life comes. Did you ever read about some scientist's theory that mice could be generated spontaneously out of old rags, just as mould might develop on food?

Jan Baptista van Helmont’s recipe for mice:
Place a dirty shirt or some rags in an open pot or barrel containing a few grains of wheat or some wheat bran, and in 21 days, mice will appear. There will be adult males and females present, and they will be capable of mating and reproducing more mice. (From http://biology.clc.uc.edu/courses/bio114/spontgen.htm)

Here's a more radical corollary to the multiple-voices theme. I've been trying to express it for some time.

All writing should make space for the reader's voices. Too much stuff I read here on the net---the unpublished novels etc---is delivered like hammer-blows on the poor reader's head. Especially the opening paragraphs: therefore I seldom read on. Respect the reader's own experience and imagination. The best short stories give hints. They are porous. They don't reproduce the author's unique world but create a shared space.

I haven't seen this advice anywhere, though there are so many writers' courses.

And in the "spiritual" writing---I increasingly see that this must be the slot or genre that my writing fits into, though I never voluntarily use that word---the reader's own inner experience must be respected, not bullied.