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Saturday, June 24, 2006
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Saturday’s Scathing Online Schoolmarm… ….shows you how it’s supposed to be done. Yes, today our regular Saturday scathe-fest, in which UD, an English professor, analyzes in detail a bad piece of writing she has found ‘pon the web, will be a little different. Today UD, courtesy of a link from her blogpal Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, will show you how a great writer produces great writing. The blog barista is run by David Tiley, an Australian writer… or, it was run by Tiley, until he got very seriously ill - almost dead ill - and had to have lots of operations and be in the hospital for ages and generally go through hell. Let us see how Tiley writes his first post after having to be away from his blog’s readers for a long time: I’ve been home from hospital for a few days, and I can focus on fine print. I’ve cut my fingernails so I can type again. Bread tastes funny and I can’t tolerate coffee. I’ve been away a lot longer than we expected. Notice that he’s chosen to start with very brief, very simple, declarative sentences. This makes sense because it conveys his still being in something of a state of shock, knocked back intellectually by what’s happened to him. The style all by itself tells you Tiley’s not himself. The detail about the fingernails makes graphically clear how extended his absence has been. My first conscious memory after my bowel resection is one of the worst things you can confront in a hospital – an apologetic surgeon. I’d been hit by a medical emergency which was fifty years in the making. Tiley knows a rule of good writing UD has talked about more than once on this blog: Try to end each sentence with your strongest word or phrase. The apologetic surgeon shows up at the end of the sentence. It’s more dramatic this way - especially introduced with the dashing dash. When I was very small I had some kind of unidentified infection, which stopped one kidney from growing. Instead, the bowel had occupied the space, which meant the spleen had moved too. Reorganising my unexpected gut design, the doctors nicked my spleen, which collapsed and had to be removed, while I bled badly. Now, as Tiley settles into his writing task with more clarity and focus, his sentences begin to look more complex, with transitional phrases and subordination and all of that. He’s coming back to the world with greater force. Two days later, I responded to the trauma with a small heart attack. Tiley has also learned that it’s extremely effective to alternate between longish paragraphs with longish sentences in them and very short paragraphs of perhaps only one simple sentence. And again, he doesn’t write, “I had a small heart attack two days later.” He ends the sentence with “heart attack.” And he gives this horrendous event its own paragraph because it is horrendous and deserves its own paragraph. The next ten days became a blur of disconnected vignettes, my bed a nest, pushed from scan to scan and ward to ward. I’d have taken the word “disconnected” out of this sentence, since “blur” already does the job, and the sentence scans better without it. The metaphor of the bed as a nest is wonderful, conveying all at once the smallness, vulnerability, fragility, and perhaps also the growing sordidness, of Tiley’s suddenly constrained and frightening world. With all that morphine I made friends with a huge bear in the corner. I lost control of my visual cortex and lay for days in a muddle of spontaneous images, some viciously ugly, most collaged from shattered pieces of coloured Perspex cut with frozen, scanned memories. In my own naturally verbal sensorium, I suppose this was the pictorial equivalent of voices in my head. I puzzled for hours over the way that could happen but still be under control, which I guess is the way visual artists function, in a parallel to the stream of words coming from my fingers to this screen. Note, first of all, that we’re now fully recovered from that first-paragraph primitivism -- this is a complex, beautiful paragraph. It starts with humor, which shows up in this chronicle of misery just on time. You want to vary the tone in a piece like this one and not stay on “what a vile nightmare” throughout. I laughed when I read the huge bear line. The successful part of that sentence -- what makes it funny -- is the phrase “made friends with.” Notice too that, whether he’s aware he’s doing it or not, the writer is treating us to some pretty smooth alliteration: morphine made my muddle images most memories The second part of the paragraph, where he puzzles over his responses, is extremely moving. He is sharing with us the intimate business of the mind struggling hard against muddle, asserting self-consciousness in the battle for mental and physical survival. I twisted back and forth on a mobius strip of recursive identity, trying to work out who I was if the drugs had seized my brain. The “I” that I needed being a creature which could ask questions, organise my bedclothes and work out whether to put my hearing aids in or not. Spectacular. The writer also knows that we crave new and even weird forms of writing, original writing. And here we’re treated to writing appropriate to this man’s particular experience of real extremity. Hence the great “mobius strip of recursive identity,” which is a strange phrase I don’t entirely understand -- but I don’t care, because its baroque intricacy is somehow exactly right for the elaborately askew mentality of the sufferer as he tries to put himself back together again. I remember a man across the ward who was 86 years old, stone deaf, who shouted very loudly and was mentally flitting through the twilight zone. The doctors seemed to think he might have had a stroke in his fall at home; his family simply ignored his ravings, as if they had known his behaviour for a long time. These three character sketches are excellent, but probably were the easiest part of this post to write. I like the way he begins with the old man mentally flitting through the twilight zone, since it allows the reader perhaps to see this as a kind of panicked projection of the younger writer’s own condition -- being sick threatens to make him old before his time. As far as the Islander is concerned, ending the paragraph with what in other contexts would be a cliché - “sobbing in his mother’s arms” - works gloriously here because of the writer’s powerful prior account of the man’s toughness -- “swanking around” and all. More broadly, these sketches of other people reassure us that the writer is not dully concentrated on his own being and his own suffering -- he has the capacity to look compassionately at his world. Indeed, in his penultimate paragraph he’ll tell us that “I know something more of mortality, of compassion, of friendship and love” for having gone through all this. These sketches have already conveyed that to us. I’m not going to go on to analyze Tiley’s entire post -- it’s quite long -- but I want to end with the following paragraph: I rowed on through the hospital, my bed a dinghy, across rivers of knowledge. Bowels. Spleen. Hearts. I saw slices of my own heart beating, which were slowed down and repeated with their own sound track. ‘Beat’ is not the right word – the thing flutters, endlessly precise, fabulously fragile, each dancing move identical for every second from the womb to the grave. I’m fascinated by this metaphor of the dinghy, in part because I’ve seen it used in a very similar way in Harold Brodkey’s stupendously written account of his decline and death from AIDS, This Wild Darkness. Toward the end of his chronicle, Brodkey writes: My identity is as a raft skidding or gliding, borne on a flux of feelings and frights, including the morning’s delusion (which lasts ten minutes sometimes) of being young and whole. Brodkey comes back to the raft in his book’s very last paragraph: I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and the instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then genuine amazement. It is all around me. Even in the last days of his life, Brodkey finds the word “pliable” -- rare, lovely, apt. The pathos of a powerful writer struggling to assert verbal power even at the end resides in “pliable.” One can no doubt find other great writers, along with Brodkey and Tiley, locating themselves upon rafts and dinghies as they attempt to convey identity suddenly made to float and maneuver in a new world. I suppose the cliché lying behind this utterly fresh writing about rafts is “clinging to a liferaft,” but that cliché has developed precisely because this floaty singular bobbing thing is in fact what losing your physical and mental moorings feels like. Tiley and Brodkey haven’t discovered a new metaphor; they’ve hit on one that was always there and set it skimming again. Labels: SOS |