Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” writer-friends Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Aarik Danielsen write The Blackbird Letters. This series of letters, penned to each other but opened for anyone to read, will look at 13 aims or angles of writing. Letters will appear every other week, alternating between Lore and Aarik’s websites. The third dispatch is below.
Lore,
I read your last letter three times; no doubt I’ll need to read it dozens more as the months pass. It seems to supply the language that’s been missing from my prayers.
If your words are true—and I am inclined to believe what you believe—I know both the substance of my thanksgiving and my asking. The becoming you write of is my aim when I am most myself.
I am not bold enough or foolish enough or whatever enough to presume I might convince anyone of anything on the page. I long to grow before—and grow with—readers till together we bear witness to the sweet, shaping presence of God. I so desperately want to enter others’ stories, just as the Savior did; this work seems far more satisfying than insisting on any particular story of my own.
If this has happened in my writing, even once, thanks be to God. And Lord, while you’re listening, let it be the work of my life.
Lately it feels as though even the most fundamental aims of writing prove elusive. The duty of the writer to observe seems inherent to the whole enterprise. And yet I keep asking myself how and why my observations take shape.
Flannery O’Connor famously said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Joan Didion voiced a similar sentiment.
Consider me duller by degrees than both. So much of what I write materializes because I don’t know what I saw, heard, touched or felt until I recreate it in words.
Perhaps the simple act of noticing comes natural to other writers. Perhaps I am too sluggish or my instincts fall short. But even as I slow my breath and try to soak up the smallest moment, the world blurs at the edges of my vision and understanding. I am always missing a detail, and the details are where God and goodness live.
Writing allows me first to separate one scene from another, then to seal the moment and grant it meaning.
I used to think observational writing looked and felt like that classic David Foster Wallace essay. The one where he catches a cruise ship for a week, then records the abundant weirdness of everyone on board. You construct an experience in which attention must be paid, then write down all the strange, fascinating things which engage your senses.
This sort of writing still casts a spell. But it’s the exception, not the rule. The work of another David—David Dark—has taught me so much about paying attention. He sees observation as a holy practice, or at least a deeply religious one. What we pay attention to forms a sort of catechism over time, he argues. Few pursuits could be more important than observing and marking.
“Being an ecstatic affirmer, a noticer supreme, is a full-time job,” this David writes.
And so I write to bear witness to the world God made and called good. To remember it when, paradoxically, so much of it begs me to forget. I want to notice what a John Coltrane melody sounds like; the taste of gin and soda becoming one on my tongue; the shape of my son’s smile; the quickening warmth of my wife’s touch; what it’s like to live inside a Brian Doyle sentence.
I write down these phenomena so I can never rid myself of them. And I write them down, as Dark would encourage, because these gathered observations form a specific picture of the world, one that bends my worship Godward. The more I observe—that is, the more I write—the more glory I have to give. And, at the risk of tying too much together with one bow, the more I become in all the ways your letter identified.
I long to go deeper still, to tune my capacity for observation—the true human instrument. Other writers become role models.
I know you love The Brothers K by David James Duncan, a gargantuan and humane work I’m about halfway through for the first time. I want to pay attention the way Duncan does through his characters—to the ways people and relationships evolve over decades, how they always become themselves no matter where they start and end.
We both read Ross Gay’s book-length poem Be Holding. It’s ostensibly about one split-second in the career of basketball legend Julius Erving. But it’s also about Blackness and the cosmos, architecture and love, soul music and moments that break your heart because they’re so damn beautiful. Oh God, let me pay attention like that. Let me observe until I notice the way everything ties together, a holy hand fingering the knots.
If a single sentence of mine is ever to Duncan or Gay what Moses’ backside vision was to the fullness of God, then I will count myself a faithful observer of the world set before me.
This whole correspondence was predicated on our hope of practicing faithful observation together. And, just maybe, modeling attention for our readers. I asked you if we could write because your words spark this holy desire in me.
Your sentences focus my eyes and sharpen my senses. I take more in, and write more down, thanks to you. All good work is ultimately a relationship. And what I notice in my reading—of you and others—frees me to write down the world I see, the world I love, the world that splits me open like a seed.
So thank you for that.
We both have more to observe and more to write, so I’ll say goodbye for now. Your last letter has me dreaming of swinging from one of the willows in your yard. I long to see the world from way up there, my body floating free.
And I pray for a chance to observe the way you and Nate make a home, then whisper a prayer of thanksgiving at the sight of it.
Much love,
AD