Maryanne
Stahl lives on a lake with her husband, son, dog, cats, ducks
and other wild creatures. She is an assistant editor at Web del
Sol's In Posse Review. Her most recent work can be seen
in Aileron, Pig Iron Malt, Ophelia's Muse,
storySouth, and Exquisite Corpse. Her first novel,
Forgive the Moon, will be published by New American Library
(Penguin Putnam) in June 2002. E-mail her at maryannestahl@hotmail.com.
"Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to."
—Henry
James, The
Ambassadors
ast
summer, I tripped and fell in the yard, and my cry summoned my
husband from our house. I lay flat on my back, looking up at him
and the sky, simultaneously laughing and crying. "I just
thought of the first line for my next chapter," I told him.
"Anna was accident prone."
He helped me
up. Then he smiled and said, "I pity you poor writers. What
you go through for one good sentence."
This was a joke
between us.
"You have
to be crazy to do it," he added.
He knew I wouldn’t
argue. There is no good reason to be a writer—or an artist
of any kind—unless one is compelled to be. But neither is
there a much more rewarding enterprise. Furthermore, though all
the divine inspiration in the world won’t forestall the inevitable
sweat labor of the work of making art, artistic opportunity
often knocks into one while one is crossing the yard.
What is the nature
of the creative impulse? Is it bio-chemical? A kind of neurosis?
Can it be learned? Can it be crushed?
The artist perceives—and
at some future point transcribes her perception—in a particular
and individual way, a way that resonates beyond the personal experience
to illuminate a human truth. Is the creative impulse born of a
way of seeing the world, a heightened awareness? Joan Didion wrote
that the writer is afflicted presumably since birth with "a
presentiment of loss", engendering the need to capture what
is transient. Does the writer hold a mirror to her awareness of
being in order to prove she exists? Or is the writer’s desire
to play God, to observe with an eye toward bestowing order—pattern
and form—upon chaos?
What inspires,
anyway? One might say everything, but that is as good as saying
nothing. And indeed, we are none of us continuously inspired.
So how is inspiration, that headiest of states, achieved? Must
we wait for the muse to strike or can we go in search of her?
Clearly, sometimes,
she strikes unbidden. I am not a strict enough Freudian to suppose
I deliberately tripped myself in order to come up with an opening
line to my chapter. However, I was quick to seize the experience,
to "use" it, as writers say. And that I think is what
mostly happens. Something trips us up, literally or otherwise,
and an electrical, Frankenstein-connection in the mind is made.
The light bulb goes off. We say yes, I see, this reveals something.
Can we go in
search of the muse? Not really, though we try. Michael Chabon
says writers will entangle themselves into dramatic situations
in order to write about them. And we are well versed in the traditions
of muse-searching by way of the bottle or the opium pipe or the
passionate embrace. It’s certain, as well, that as long as
the sun blazes and the ocean roars and the moon rises in the sky,
writers will be moved to write of them. And still, when it happens,
when we see the newly-imaginable take shape before our mind’s
eye, we are filled with excitement and gratitude, as for a gift—or
a miracle.
Now I am stopped
at a light on the way to fetch my son from school. In the left
lane in front of me, a woman driving a white Jeep flips her hair
with her hand. That gesture, the easy grace of it, the sleek fall
hair against cheek, reminds me of a friend from thirty years ago.
My husband’s first lover, in fact; we met through her. That
gesture releases a flood in me. I know if I were to meet that
woman in the white Jeep I would react to her largely out of my
associations with J__. I am back in the communal house we shared
with a half dozen others. I’m in her room, we’re smoking
cigarettes, she’s telling me about using a speculum to view
her cervix.
I take notes,
scribbling as the light changes. Will these words become part
of a story, a poem, a character in a novel? I don’t know.
Will I forget I wrote this and come across it some months, perhaps
years in the future? Very possibly. Or I might continue to play
with the image and the memory, their dynamics perhaps informing
a dream. If I write tomorrow morning, I may envision a scene in
which two good friends who are in competition reveal their boundaries
and the covert rules of their engagement.
That’s how
it works for me. In painting and photography as well. I tend to
go back and forth from verbal to non-verbal modes of expressing,
that is to say, from writing phases to painting/photography phases.
I used to worry when immersed in one modality that I had lost
the ability to perform the other. But I’ve learned my own
cycles. I approach them openly now, curious what will come, secure
that it too shall pass.
In fact, that’s
my basic approach to life, especially in these times. There’s
only one way to nourish the creative impulse, wherever it derives:
Live all you can! 
