Why Do I Write

Why do you write? …

In between portrait commissions, I’m spending the first half of August in a self-ascribed writing residency at a friend’s space; a home-based community initiative dreamed up by Rachel Joy Barehl called Joyously Create. I picked up a copy of Writing Creative Nonfiction at the Westerville library on my first day in town (another tale entirely). Each section begins with an essay or instruction and is followed by exercises and writing prompts. Below is my response to the first chapter by Terry Tempest Williams.

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I write because I know no other way to think. Walking through life, words come out in full sentences. My processing takes pause to tumble fragments around, rephrasing thought until the flow sounds perfect to my mind’s ear. Some people think in images. And can see visual impressions even with eyes pressed closed. All I can muster is black and maybe a reddish glow of sunlight passing through skin and blood vessels. Except for the rainbow of phosphenes that morph into abstract blobs during therapy sessions of vibrational sound healing. …and also save for the time I visualized a glowing third eye during meditation. For several minutes I was certain I’d tapped into some cosmic collective, only to open and close my eyes again and realize I had merely burned the bright oval of a nearby window into my retina. I accessed only the biological memory of light.

Could that be why I’ve been so drawn to photography? Am I making up for a lack of visual imagination? Just this morning I watched the sun stream through a window and wrap its golden fingers around a thousand crevices in a sugar-crystal skull, framed in my camera by tropical leaves and set against a glazed bokeh backsplash of green-gold Ohio trees. I can never call upon that image again, unless I look at the photograph.

But, spatially, I can recognize it. I can tell you the skull was positioned within the lower-right side of the frame and that a hanging basket of tall, pointed leaves altered the path of a white cotton curtain that now swooped over and around like a sleeve falling seductively over the window frame’s shoulder. I can tell you the shape and size and color of each plant and even describe the textures and patterns of their pots. Yet, I can’t actually see them. Rather, I feel them.

The photograph documents light at that moment. Often acting as a key that can unlock my memory of how it felt to receive that glow. The firing of endorphins. Reminding me of how I rushed to find a camera. How I worried when it wouldn’t power on while the path of light moved so rapidly that by the time I could make my first picture, the hanging basket had already fallen to flat, bluish shadows.

But what happens one day when memory fails? When all I can see is what’s before me with open eyes? When all senses and thoughts and contexts are removed? When the vessel has cracked and a photograph no longer carries a cache of recollection? Light on a page and nothing more.

That’s why I write. Words can see the unseen in fullness. Time-capsules of thought and feeling. Fluidity carved into stone. Words are immortal impressions of the ephemeral.