wild truth

Posted on by Maia

I love this quote:

Philosophy is really there to redeem what lies in an animal’s gaze.                                                                                                    – Theodor Adorno

It’s the epigraph of the book I just read by Gordon Grice called The Book of Deadly Animals.  I’m working on a chapter about survival — the ways we find to keep our physical and emotional selves intact.  At least I think that’s what it’s about.  When I start a chapter I don’t know exactly where it’s going to wind up. I have a murmuring in my head — words, images, fragments of stories.  I have to investigate this murmuring and see what kinds of connections develop.  Thinking about survival led me to predator and prey.  Hence the rather bloody research.

The idea for this chapter started with me remembering the way I thought about animals when I was a kid — a certain look my uncle’s dog had in his eye that suggested to me a different way of knowing the world.  Then I started wondering about the ways we are animal — the ways we hide and protect, fight and defend, nest and mark our territories, the ways we communicate with one another outside of language.

The chapter is also about being a kid and becoming aware that although the world is home to abundant beauty, it can also be brutal.  It’s about how I struggled (and struggle) with that awareness.  So I’m reading about predators and prey, watching old episodes of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on youtube and writing about tooth and claw and hunger and flight.  I think writing for me sometimes is an effort to articulate things I know but don’t yet know that I know.  So I like that quote about philosophy somehow being an attempt to recover or uncover a wild truth, to know something about ourselves we didn’t know we knew. And I like that the key to that truth might lie in the gaze of an animal.

In Praise of Slowness

Posted on by Maia

I’ve been working on The Saltwater Twin for about a year now in earnest.  I’m about halfway there, I think, and I’m impatient.  It’s slow going. I get antsy when I finish yet another draft of a chapter and realize it’s still not done.  I have to go back and work on it some more.  Maybe even set it aside and come back to it in a few days or weeks.  It is a little-by-little process of finding a path forward, looping back around, creeping forward again.  I write many, many drafts. There are pages of typed and penned rambling that end up discarded, but lead to what will stay in the end.  Sometimes there is research to be done.  And of course there are mundane distractions like laundry, groceries, dog walks and earning a living.

So I have noticed a couple things.  1. Being impatient does not make me write better or faster.  It just ratchets up my anxiety, and I am not a big fan of anxiety. 2. I think I am a little bit slow by nature.  As a kid I was always getting left behind in museum exhibits.  I liked to amble and think and explore till someone came to scold me for lollygagging and herd me back to the rest of the group.

So, in light of 1 and 2,  I’m going to try to be okay with being slow.  Maybe even embrace it.  And though I’m impatient about wanting to see how this whole book thing is going to turn out, I’m going to try to pay attention to how it is to be in the thick of these green and growing leaves right now.  It’s not a bad place to be.

Gonna Fly Now…or 72 Steps

Posted on by Maia

Image

I have a picture of Rocky as my desktop image — a still from when he’s just run through Philadelphia in his gray sweatsuit and black wool cap, sprinted up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and triumphantly raised his hands in the air.  This is to make me believe I can do this.  I am working on a book, and I’m maybe about halfway through.  It came about as a result of winning a national non-fiction writing contest held by Glamour magazine.  Along with a 5K prize came a very fancy lunch (including a carrot marshmallow amuse bouche) with Glamour editors and some interest in my work from agents in NYC.  So I decided to keep writing essays, enough to put together a collection.  It’s going to be called The Saltwater Twin and Other Mythical Creatures.  (More on that later.) So here I am, about a year in and halfway through and it is sometimes hard to keep believing that I will make it up the steps. (And that’s just the writing the book part; then comes the publishing journey.)  So I have Rocky on my desktop.  Also my friend Lindsay who believes this will happen.  Sometimes it’s helpful to have someone believe something for you when you’re finding it a bit impossible.  And, I suppose, to be a little bit thrilled about the small achievements along the way…every step.