An Ode to Literature

And remembering Toni Morrison

This week I stumbled upon a copy of the Paris Review from 2015. The opening story was from Submission by Michel Houellebecq. Although the first line is “much, maybe too much, has been written about literature. (I know better than anyone; I’m an expert in the field.)” Houellebecq goes to write this about literature:

Only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.

Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave - a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we are facing a blank page, addressing an unknown reader.

I thought this passage so beautifully captured my writing experience. So much of what I have written in the past year has taken me by complete surprise - even if I had a detailed outline and what I thought was a road map to get me from A to Z. The way words appeared on the page, and the truths I have learned about my own story, I couldn’t have learned through a conversation, even with the most skilled therapist. Why that may be? Because similarly to Joan Didion,

"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means."

I may think that I know what I want to write about, but once I sit down to write it, it almost never turns out the way I imagined it. Because before the actual, physical act of writing, I didn’t have the full information, the full scope of the story that only the writing itself could reveal. While speaking engages my conscious intellect, most of the first words I put down on the page come from my subconscious - before my conscious intellect chisels them into something that can resemble art. But that first awkward discovery is always surprising, and magical. That is what I love about writing so much. The feeling of getting up early in the morning, eager to find out what happens in my story, even if it is a story that I have lived. My interpretation of it on the page is always a process of discovery. How many times have I caught myself saying out loud, ‘wow, I did not see this coming!’ as I stared at my own words on the page, processing the wisdom they had to teach me.

For example, last week I shared with you a poem that was inspired by my childhood growing up as a yaldat hutz (‘outside girl’) in the kibbutz. Until I wrote that poem I didn’t even realize how potentially harming that experience could have been for me - to spend three weeks away from home, and sharing a home with teenagers and no adult supervision after 3pm (Today, I believe this would be illegal, but it was the early nineties). Until I wrote that poem, I didn’t even stop to think about the meaning of the word yaldat hutz, and the constant reminder that this expression implied: that I was from the outside and could never hope to belong. Until I wrote that poem I couldn’t have known how much that experience has marked my sense of identity. In a conversation with my Israeli friend the following day, she remarked (I believe with some disappointment) that she thought I was “more Israeli.” And having written that poem, I could confidently say to her that I felt on the margins; an outsider who never fully belonged to any of the countries she’s lived in. But I acknowledged this with equanimity, and not the sadness, or regret that one may expect. I have learned to look at my ‘outsider’ position as challenging, but also as something advantageous. To be that pilgrim, as my friend David says, allows you to have a distance from the proximity that might be blinding, and therefore this outsider’s perspective can be often illuminating and insightful.

I spent much of my teens and twenties wanting desperately to belong. Where was my ‘home’ in the world? I kept asking myself. The subject of home is a recurring theme in my writing, and is most evident in my play “Someplace Else.” But somewhere in my mid-thirties, as I was writing my morning pages, I wrote this in my notebook:

Writing is the only home I have ever had.

I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. Tears (of joy and relief) running down my face. I no longer needed to be searching for home. I could stop. My home has been with me all along: it was my writing.

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What a gift writing is. What a gift to the writer, and what a gift to the reader. There is nothing that brings me more joy when someone tells me that they recognized themselves in my writing; that my outsider experience in the kibbutz reminded them of their outsider experience somewhere else. This is all the more astounding when that person comes from an ‘identity group’ that is different to mine.

I was reminded of this again yesterday, when I watched the Toni Morrison documentary The Pieces I am. My writer friend Aïcha Martine Thiam and I share many things in common, but most strikingly, the same favourite Toni Morrison line from Sula. Think for a moment about the unlikely odds of this: something that Toni Morrison wrote in 1973 resonated deeply with a girl born in Budapest in 1976 and an American girl born in 1994, who met at a Montréal University in 2019 and became soul-sisters. The thread that connects us? Literature. Words on a page.

Powerful words on a page.

When Morrison died I remember feeling a great sense of loss, as if I lost someone close to me. I wrote a short poem(-like) tribute to a woman and writer who continues to be a great source of inspiration and comfort to me.

Remembering Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison died today 
and in your favourite bookshop 
they put up a sign in her honour 
with her picture, and the reminder, 
If you wanna fly, you got to give up 
the shit that weighs you down.
You smile, but there are also the tears
of loss 
for a woman who did language 
like no other, and you go back
in your memory to that line from Sula
you love. My lonely is mine,
which is not the same as that secondhand
lonely that Nel has. Sula has her mind,
which is to say, I got me, as she says. 
You are smiling and crying, remembering 
Morrison and can almost feel
her gentle tap on your shoulder
and the laughter that says 
Hey, what’s with all this despair?
Don’t you know, your life is already
a miracle of chance 
waiting for you to shape its destiny.
You don’t need me. Write
the book you want to read. Write 
it now. Write it bravely, and remember – 
All important things are hard
to begin with, but then – 
Then you fly.

And you, what makes you fly? A writer, a piece of literature that resonates with you in particular? I’d love to hear about it.

And as always, thank you for reading me!