The Rivering of Writing

Bachu, my river guide, near the Harishchandra Ghat
along the Ganges in 2004

Like the Ganges, writing is for me a flowing river, sacred and profane.

His name was Bachu and he was my river guide along the Ganges on a summer morning there in Varanasi. And he was difficult, to say the least.  For as he rowed, he haggled, pushing for more rupees. "I take you to the burning ghats. Everyone wants to see." And yes, I'd hoped to see the Harishchandra Ghat where ashes of the cremated were cooled and sent into the water. And so much more. But Bachu wrecked the still and quiet of the early morning river. The current, it continued, but Bachu stopped the flow.

We must seek out, we must protect, the flow of writing. The subjects we address, the genres that we ply -- they are but secondary to the primal flowing, the rivering of writing.

Aim First for Flow

To "river" writing is the very opposite of editing or polishing one's words. It isn't really drafting, either. No. To river writing is to focus on the flow, on keeping syllables advancing, come what may. The quality is secondary: quantity is first -- but not some giant mass. No, a steady quantity, a quantity content with mediocrity is what is needed first. This kind of writing isn't pretty. It's like a dirty river, a driving current dredging sand and mud and who-knows-what along its cadenced onward course. It's like the Ganges River, sacred to the Hindus.

Along the Ganges I saw pilgrims, knee-deep, praying in that river. I saw tea lights lit and ringed with flower petals floated out along the river. I saw early morning bathers, baptizing themselves within that river. And I also saw the children and the animals that urinated in the water. I saw the ashes and the waste dumped into it. I read about industrial pollutants far upstream that thickened up the Ganges with their poisons. Yes, the irony was potent. But in retrospect, I now accept that river's sacredness. That sacredness was not the water but the water's flow.

Writing in a flat in Deptford, London, 2016

For quite some time I have been writing daily, with a pen (a fountain pen), in cursive. The entries in my diaries and notebooks multiply, despite the fact that almost all this writing has no purpose fixed beside the habit. Not a deadline driving me, accountable to no one, I make time to write and I enjoy this time. The rhythm of the habit carries me along. It puts me into flow, a liquid state of slow but steady energies, propelling pen and pensiveness. I do not know where it is going. But I trust it. I trust it and I let it go where it will go. The editor in me, a pragmatist like Bichu, wants to interrupt, to count the costs. But I don't answer him. Not now. Not yet.

Such aimlessness is luxury, indeed, and not the sort of thing that suits a traveler. Most travel, it would seem, depends on destinations. We aim ourselves toward them, then arrive, or not arrive, but always there must be a there. Our destinations drive our traveling. They need not drive our writing.

But what's the project? What's the outcome? What, exactly, are you writing? When will it be done? Aren't you going to share it?

Be quiet, Bachu.

Writing as Streaming

The streaming of expression is the destination (not forever, but for now). So here I am, again in flow, in writing, pushing forward into blankness with my word hoard and without a map. The scratching of the nib against the fibered paper makes it kinesthetic, sensory, not so abstract as when I type in pixeled symbols on a keyboard. And yet that keyboard sometimes rescues me from cursive's curses -- not the painful ugliness of handwriting, but from the very sluggishness of writing things by hand. I want to write -- or better, to be writing, in that flow, not slowed and stopped by overthinking or by editing.

So mostly I am writing things by hand, to keep the running sense of prose, the flow that I am seeking. Doesn't matter if the ink is messy. Doesn't matter if my subjects blur and dart and circle back. I am not writing outlines. I am rivering my writing; writing rivers me.

The Ganges isn't sacred in its substance. The water isn't magical. What rescues it from refuse is its flow -- its flow and mass. And this is what I am discovering. Inertia builds. Energies awaken. Forces rise -- not from a plan or an assignment, and not because there is direction and a clarity of purpose. No. But when one's little stream acquires tributaries from a daily habit, broadening and deepening; as words grow unafraid and pages fleetly fill -- the surge is readying, the tide grows ripe, and sacred roars that river to an open sea.