Talking Tuesday: Show Me Your Hindquarters, Let Me Hear You Roar (part 1)

image via

I've written several times about reading Madeleine L'Engle's Irrational Season.  It is a very very good book, but not one to be rushed through.  I find I can manage a chapter at a time, at best, and then I have to set it aside to think about it.  I finished another chapter Sunday night and it was so good that I wanted to share some parts of it for today.  In this chapter, titled 'Show Me Your Hindquarters, Let Me Hear You Roar', L'Engle writes about doubt, and faith, and about writing process in the midst of messy motherhood.  The book follows a liturgical year, and this chapter happens to fall in the Pentecost season so it felt especially timely to me.

I especially liked her thoughts on writing, being in the throes of it myself.   I do so much reading in service of the book, or even for its own sake, and I sometimes think I could be focusing on other things, but now I know: reading keeps the instrument in tune, ready to play.  Having rich language at my disposal, acquired through the meticulous reading of good and deep books, gives my instrument complexity and tonality it would otherwise lack.

"A writer grimly controls his work to his peril, manipulates only in great danger (to be in control of your technique is very different from being in control of the work).  Slowly, slowly, I am learning to listen to the book, in the same way I try to listen in prayer.  If the book tells me to do something completely unexpected, I heed it; the book is usually right.  If a book like this present one, a strange kind of book for a storyteller, pushes me to write it, I have not choice except to pay attention.  All I can do, as far as activism is concerned, is to write daily, read as much as possible, and keep my vocabulary alive and changing so that I will have an instrument on which to play the book if it does me the honor of coming to me and asking to be written.  I have never yet fully served a book.  But it is my greatest joy to try" (160).

I have also written that my book has been a difficult emotional and spiritual journey for me at times.  Sometimes it felt like the book was writing me rather than the other way round.  Did I create the book in order to process the struggle, or was I struggling because I was writing the book?  Hard to say. 

"I concentrated on my work because it was what saved me....When I was working on that first novel I was genuinely and painfully unhappy.  But during the actual writing I was at play; I was completely thrown out of my subjective misery into the joy of creation, so that what might have been a totally destructive experience became instead a creative one, and a freeing one.  I was freed during the writing as my book wrote me, not as I wrote it.  And surely this was an experience of that special kind of unity which makes me understand the Trinity.  The pages which built on my writing table were not me, nor was I typewriter and paper; but we were, nevertheless, one.  The same kind of collaboration can come when I read a book; the books which matter to me, to which I turn and return are those which read me.  The music I play, or listen to, is that which actively participates with me in harmony or counterpoint.  The same thing is true in graphic art.  There had to be an amorous interaction between the work of art and the person who is opening himself to it, and surely the relationship within the persons of the Trinity is one of Love, Love so real we can glimpse it only on rare occasions" (162).

To this last bit, I say: yes, exactly.  I have a visceral reaction to the things I love: books, music, art, movies; they are the things that make me, move me, change me, tell me of the truth of the world and beyond.  These things are in me.  It cannot be otherwise. 

I have more to write on this book, even from this chapter, but will save it for next time. 

All quotes from Madeleine L'Engle, Irrational Season, NY: Seabury Press, 1977.