Well, the point I'd like to make out
of all sorts of possibilities is this.
Sometimes someone says, when you write,
do you do it with metaphors, figures of speech?
And my feeling is, about this, no.
No, I'll put it to you this way.
Writing for me is very much like talking.
That is the-- and we're all experts at this.
Among friends I mean, we practice all our lives
talking that novel we're living from morning till night.
And so we get plenty of practice, and we're experts.
And writing is just notation for the talk we're such experts at.
So if I start a sentence, even like this one
that I'm starting now, without ever having said this sentence
exactly this way before in my whole life,
I know because I'm such an expert speaker, the way we all
are, that I'll be able to find my way through this sentence
even if I keep throwing in all these modifiers
and hesitations.
And finally reach the end.
It's great, I don't have to plan.
That none of us would have to do that, if we're relaxed enough.
I was a little afraid in the middle
of that to lose the thread.
And maybe I did, but anyway, forgive me if I did,
but we forgive each other and we can do this.
But as you start, those words are not drafted.
They volunteer, I don't know where they come from.
They're there, they're just waiting.
And every now and then, you may hit a place
where you don't have exactly the right word or the phrase,
and you do a little side slip, because of the emergency.
And well, that's just what I did.
You just do a little side slip, that is you
use some kind of an image and it works out all right.
And you go on.
Now if you weren't in motion, if you weren't doing
that, you wouldn't meet the emergency
and you wouldn't have the inspiration,
or whatever it is that lets you do
these trivial things like side slips or metaphors,
or whatever.
Well, I thought there were other points about that,
but I want to go on to a--
I want to hasten on to something called
"At The Un-National Monument Along The Canadian Border."
"This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined
hands, where no monument stands and the only heroic thing
is the sky.
Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed or were killed on this ground.
Hallowed by neglect, and an air so
tame that people celebrate it by forgetting its name."
Now the point I would like to make about this
is, the trivial is writing is-- and I
think it's quite trivial like talking,
and we forgive each other for this.
Every now and then in our talk or in our writing,
we may find ourselves beginning to verge
into some kind of process that has a kind of feedback for us.
And it could be that we could find our way to formulations,
to interchanges with each other.
That would enable us to live, and sustain
ourselves and the feelings we like to have.
But without the kinds of feelings
that have those terrible side effects,
those fatal side effects, that some kinds of formulations
have.
Like declarations, and manifestos and constitutions,
but instead, some kind of immediate human realization,
words.