Words Belong To Each Other

When I was writing my thesis, one of the books I found that was pure magic was The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard.  One of the memorable sections reflected on the amorousness of words, especially in languages which still retain masculine and feminine words.  Bachelard's native language is French and his description of masculine and feminine words in French sentences rolling about and cavorting in the confines of sentences was my first real understanding of the Eros of words and language.

Looking back, I wonder if some of my need to write and the prolific nature of my writing came from my unconscious need for Eros somewhere in my life.  I wanted to be fertile and fecund.  I wanted to love and be loved and if the only way was through stories then so be it.  I wrote of love in all its forms - parent and child, husband and wife, writer and story - but in all of them there was some loss, something incomplete. I had to write that, I think, because I didn't know any other way of being.

But what now, that Eros has entered my life?  I've done some writing this past year, but not anything like I used to.   There is a fear at the core of me that I may not write again, certainly not as I did.  Maybe my life will be my work of art now.  I'm not sure one necessarily prohibits the other, but it may for me.  I guess time will tell.  Maybe my words will find their own ways to come together again, not so much be design but by their own hunger for one another.  If so my writing will be different, or at least the process different, more collaborative, more wonder-filled.  It's past better or worse; it's just the writing and the words and feeling again the sparks between them.

Virginia Woolf wrote an essay on the craft of writing.  She captures it best, I think, the way words belong together, drawn by their own desires beyond our willful insistence that one follow the other.  "It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid."  It's time to go back to words and trust in their hungers.  It's time to write again.