Terry Tempest Williams Interviewed

Terry Tempest Williams is a writer I admire more than almost any other: for her inimitable and insightful writing, for her reverence and passion for nature, and for her courageous response to her family's heritage, a heritage we share and have similar reactions against, though I have never been as courageous as Williams in that respect.

Lorraine Berry has interviewed Williams at the blog Talking Writing, and here are some quotes from the interview.

"Time for a writer translates into solitude. In solitude, we create. In solitude, we are read. If we’re lucky, our books create community having been written out of solitude. It’s a lovely paradox. It’s the creative tension that I live with: I write to create community, but in order to do so, I am pulled out of community. Solitude is a writer’s communion." Terry Tempest Williams

"TW: In When Women Were Birds, you write that the biblical Eve “exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal.”" Lorraine Berry, reading back to Williams a quote from her book

"Art can transform patterned thinking. It shows us what’s possible. It brings us home to ourselves, quietly, forcefully. Art disturbs." Terry Tempest Williams

These last two quotes remind of a time I wrote a poem that I was frightened to read afterward. Every time I read it I got a sick feeling in my stomach, a feeling that I was going to hell, even though I don't believe in hell. I can read that poem now without such a visceral reaction; I have come to accept the feelings and truths I accessed in the poem that had been buried so deeply inside me prior to that time. That's the kind of writing I aim for, but all too often fail to achieve.

Resistance Quotes

Resistance is on my mind these days, for oh so many reasons. So today I offer quotes on resistance:


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"It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human."

Pema Chodron

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"The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence. It resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge. It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance. It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well."

Jennifer Moxley, from "Fragments of a Broken Poetics" (Chicago Review, Spring 2010)

 

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"The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self. The solution is to become one’s language."

 

Stanley Kunitz

 

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"…remember fear for what it is: a resistance to the unknown."

 

Terry Tempest Williams, from an interview on the NPR show “Being,” interviewed by Krista Tippett (who read this excerpt from a book of Williams’)

 

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"Art begins with resistance – at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor."

 

Andre Gide, in Poetique

 

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"The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully"

 

Wallace Stevens  (CP, 350)

 

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"Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love." 

Simone Weil

 

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“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.” 

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Leonardo da Vinci

 

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“Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds. ” 

 

Dan Millman

 

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“Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.” 

 

Donald Miller

Resistance

The nature writer Terry Tempest Williams wrote "Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does." Another way to say it is "Pain in inevitable. Suffering is optional.," which comes from Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I was reminded of these quotes the other day when a colleague was talking about her new way of handling jet lag. Instead of returning to Japan at the last minute and pushing through the jet lag, with discomfort and suffering, she decided to return to Japan a week earlier than her responsibilities began, and to experience jet lag by sleeping when she was tired, and waking when she was awake. This time, she enjoyed her jet lag and simply let it be. Jet lag doesn't cause suffering; resistance to jet lag does. (Obviously no children were involved in this experience, and more particularly no children with jet lag, but even if there were, what could be done to reduce everyone's resistance?)

Obviously there are things that require resistance: evil, manipulation, unfairness. But I for one waste a lot of energy resisting what is and what cannot be changed. If I need good weather for an event and get a typhoon, instead of hunkering down and enjoying the quiet day of being stranded in a typhoon, I tend to struggle against the rearrangement of my plans. When an extremely difficult relative calls or visits (or I even hear her name mentioned), I immediately begin to resist without even hearing what she wants, from long practice of suffering through her unreasonable demands, constant complaints, and general meanness. But I don't have to do that. I know she has her way of looking at the world, and I can let her have it without letting it affect me. I don't have to suffer just because she has decided to.

I was wondering about resistance in my writing. I sometimes resist sitting down to write, finding all kinds of chores to do instead, and meanwhile I suffer thinking about how I should be writing and am not. Instead of resisting writing, I can merely sit down with my notebook and wait. I also tend to suffer through fallow periods in my writing, when I try to write and nothing comes at all, or nothing of use, even though I know that fallow times are almost always followed by extremely productive periods in which problems that had been plaguing me in certain projects or in writing in general are resolved. So instead of resisting fallow times, I can just accept them, sit with my notebook, and know that my subconscious is doing important work.

It's a good reminder for me (again) to notice when I feel resistance and to see if it is really necessary, and to notice when I am suffering and try to identify what (if anything, and more particularly if anything worthy of such a struggle) that I am resisting.

Fear of (fill in the blank)

So last night I was reading a book of interviews, in which Coleman Barks quoted the following of his own translation of Rumi:

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

When I read that, immediately I realized that given the issues I have been struggling with recently, I have begun to do exactly that: move the way fear makes me move. So how exactly do I escape that impulse, I wondered. Then I remembered this aphorism from James Richardson's Vectors:

121. The worst part of fear is not knowing what to do. And often you only have to ask What would I do if I were not afraid? to know what to do, and do it, and not be afraid.

So that's the new plan. Again. 

And since I was thinking of fear, I looked up a few random other quotes about fear that have been meaningful to me over the years. Here they are:

Let go of grief. Let go of joy. Let go of hope. Let go of fear. Let go of history. Let go of coming and going. Let go of culture. Let go of waiting. Let go of letting go.  
Rudolph Wurlitzer from Hard Travel to Sacred Places

I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear.
Anne Carson from "The Anthropology of Water"

 ...remember fear for what it is: a resistance to the unknown.
Terry Tempest Williams

When I was in my 20s, a friend said to me, "You are fearless. You'll try anything." I had to explain to her that in fact I was consumed with fear. Getting out of bed in the morning caused great anxiety in me. But since everything made me afraid and anxious, I didn't distinguish between experiences that made people with normal fear responses feel fearful and everyday situations that caused worry in me. Since on any given day I had already overcome 58 other fearful situations before being asked if I wanted to do something that would make a person with a good grip of reason feel fearful, I would think, Yeah sure, I'll try it; what's one more terrifying thing to try today?

Somewhere along the line I lost that ability to manage my distress. But I've got to get it back. Fear, my one constant. You think I'd be better at this by now.