Negril Notes

Zen, Cigars & Hemmingway

February 23, 2005

I bought a book of Hemingway’s short stories today. I was thinking, since I’m kind of writing short stories I should read some really good ones. Of course by contrast my stories really suck, but I enjoy the process and the apparent sucky-ness will hopefully either be short lived, or at least some un-sucky material will poke thru the drek from time to time.

I was struck by the preface written by old Ernie himself. It had a playful character to it. He even joked that his favorite stories are the ones teachers made their students study, and thus putting more coin in his pocket. It made the guy real to me, I understand being self-deprecating.

About a dozen years ago my brother Michael gave me “The Old Man and the Sea,” complete with two “Hemmingway” cigars. I remember the cigars more than the book. I could write two pages about those cigars right now, but other than an old guy, a boat, a kid and a fish, the smoke from the story is gone. It’s funny how things come to you at different times in your life. I’m going to dig up that little book and re-read it, if not for inspiration then to illustrate this point.

I do something called “Writing Practice.” It’s like journaling with a mission. For the last several years I’ve kept an irregular journal, irregular both for the frequency of my journaling and the strange thoughts and associations that come from my less than sane head. Writing Practice is committing to the daily practice of writing as a discipline.

It’s wide open writing, punctuation and neatness don’t count, and the only rule is to keep your hand moving. Sometimes it gets to the point where all I write are the words “keep your hand moving,” which when someone reads these notebooks years after I’m dead they will be assured I was just another nut-job writer.

I’ve been hot and cold with my new discipline, often I write absolute nothingness, but then I’ll get a good line I can use in a story and occasionally I’ll have a breakthrough. Sometimes I find myself writing the deep truths of my soul that all of the sudden just pour out onto the page. I can feel it coming through, I try to stay out of the way and keep going with it as long as I can before the “Editor” or “Thinking” part of me begins to look for sentence structure or proper word usage.

In Zen it is called Satori, gimpses of enlightenment, where you get out of your own way for a short time and become connected to what Alan Watts calls, that what-cha-ma-call-it of all what-cha-ma-call-its.

Hopefully I’ll be able to string enough of these together to make an impression.

- To be continued . . .