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Date Posted: 16:45:56 01/16/10 Sat
Author: celtgirl
Subject: Inside>>>>
In reply to: celtgirl 's message, "Here's more of my musings on the art of writing. This is about the other side of those obsessions I referred to in the Delerium Africanus piece, which is some ways down the page now. I will post inside the first reply." on 16:26:11 01/16/10 Sat

The Other Side of Obsession copyright 2010 Cindy Brandner

Writing is an obsession of sorts, if it wasn’t most of us would have no reason to keep it up. Maybe it’s a subject that becomes a passion, or in my case, a passion for a country and for writing itself that comes together in a fusion that seems the most natural and inevitable of events.

Some years back I was listening to a talk given by Jack Whyte and he spoke about writers needing to be deepsea divers, willing to go down through the dark and the cold, in order to bring back up the pearls. I recognized exactly what he was saying. Because the deep sea of which he spoke is of course the dark places of your own psyche, which is frankly, not always a comfortable place for a person to delve into. It’s only the dark places though, the depths, that truly do contain the pearls.

In my last post about writing, I spoke of the fun side of obsession, of getting lost in a subject, in piles of books, of indulging in slightly silly fantasies of what one might have been in another life. But there is a dark side to those same obsessions too, and it always costs in some way, not a thing that one can readily explain, but one feels the cost all the same.

It was one of those weeks for me. Going into the dark places in order to find the pearls. Such jewels are not easily found in the quagmire that is Northern Ireland’s history and political legacy. But I think I found one or two, because one has to always remember that history is a full tapestry and the people who lived it and died within it, are the threads that give the design meaning and form. Still by week’s end I was feeling wiped out, and found myself wide-eyed in bed at three o'clock of the AM, crying over strangers that died three decades ago. It was partly the book I was reading for research, a book that got under my skin so badly that I was dreaming about it, woke up thinking about it, and went to bed with it roiling through my brain like a nest of snakes. It still has me feeling rather dark, but I know it was an important book for me to read. The other part of the feeling was the immersion of one’s self, until one loses awareness of actually being an entity, into the world that I write about, and the characters that have decided, by whatever whim of the fates and muses, to take up their residence with me. I live through their experiences with them, and when times are dark for them, they are dark for me.

There are times, infrequent, but closer together as I head into the final stretch of a big book like the ones I write, that I begin to feel as if I inhabit a shadow universe- a foot in two places, but head and heart mostly in the imaginary one. Being taken out of this world, by the demands of the ‘real world’ feels rather painful at times. As if someone has snapped something vital to your wellbeing and brought you blinking and uncertain into a world that you don’t immediately recognize. It’s disconcerting to say the least. I read once that the brain waves of a writer in the full spate of creativity, are identical to that of a schizophrenic having a fit. I wasn't surprised by that news at all, as it's an altered state, though I would think far more pleasant than what the schizophrenic endures.


Many years ago, while struggling with the question of whether it was valid and right to pursue this passion of mine, without any guarantee of financial reward, or that of establishing (at that time) an unknown audience, I was sitting listening to a young girl singing, she had an amazing voice, and was just getting her footing in Nashville at the time. A voice spoke, as clear as can be in my head, and it said, ‘Is the creation of art alone, enough?' The answer came straight on its heels, in that same voice, that did not seem to really be my usual interior narrator/philosopher/two-bit psychologist- and it said, ‘yes, it is.’ The real me, the one that understands what is truly of value in this short life, knows this to be an absolute truth. The surface me finds the whole issue much more murky than that clear voice. But on the days when the writing really flows, or when someone tells me they understand Irish history and what all the fighting was/is about much better now, or simply says my books are the ones they reach for on nights when they cannot sleep, because they have become ‘those books’ for them, then I know art has a life of its own, that cannot be measured in numbers and bank account balances. In short, it gives me far more, again in ways I cannot fully explain, than it can ever take away.

My humble hope each day that I sit down to write- beyond hoping those flibber-de-gibbet, will o’ the wisp muses will show up ready to work- is that it gives something to the greater world that has a lasting value in readers’ lives. What that is, is for the reader to decide, but if it does indeed give something then I think, as art, it has done its job, and therefore I have done mine, and given a few pearls out in the process.

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