Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

I’m impatient to get started, impassioned by the theme. So I look for the people who will tell me the story, the people who are going to live this story. And I find this uppity kid, this smart girl who goes from Earth to that world. I don’t remember what her name was, she had five different names and none of them was the true name. I started the book five times, it got nowhere. I had to stop.

I had to sit patiently and say nothing, at the same time every day, while the fox looked at me from the corner of its eye, and slowly let me get a little bit closer.

And finally the woman whose story it was spoke to me. I’m Sutty, she said. Follow me. So I followed her; and she led me up into the high mountains; and she gave me the book.

I had a good idea, but I did not have a story. Critics talk as if stories were all idea, but intellect does not make story any more than ideology makes art. The story had to make itself, find its center, find its voice, Sutty’s voice. Then, because I was waiting for it, it could give itself to me.

Or put it this way: I had a lot of stuff in my head, good stuff, clear ideas—but I couldn’t pull it together, I couldn’t dance with it, because I hadn’t waited to catch the beat. I didn’t have the rhythm.

This book takes its title from a letter from Virginia Woolf to her friend Vita Sackville-West. Vita had been pontificating about finding the right word, Flaubert’s mot juste , and agonising very Frenchly about style; and Virginia wrote back, very Englishly:

As for the mot juste , you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm . Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year.

Woolf wrote that eighty years ago, and if she did think differently next year, she didn’t tell anybody. She says it lightly, but she means it: this is very profound. I have not found anything more profound, or more useful, about the source of story—where the ideas come from.

Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention—beneath words , as she says—there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move; and the writer’s job is to go down deep enough to begin to feel that rhythm, to find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.

She’s full of ideas but she can’t dislodge them, she says, because she can’t find their rhythm—can’t find the beat that will unlock them, set them moving forward into a story, get them telling themselves.

A wave in the mind, she calls it; and says that a sight or an emotion may create it—like a stone dropped into still water, and the circles go out from the center in silence, in perfect rhythm, and the mind follows those circles outward and outward till they turn to words… but her image is greater: her wave is a sea wave, traveling smooth and silent a thousand miles across the ocean till it strikes the shore, and crashes, breaks, and flies up in a foam of words. But the wave, the rhythmic impulse, is before words, “has nothing to do with words.” So the writer’s job is to recognise the wave, the silent swell, way out at sea, way out in the ocean of the mind, and follow it to shore, where it can turn or be turned into words, unload its story, throw out its imagery, pour out its secrets. And ebb back into the ocean of story.

What is it that prevents the ideas and visions from finding their necessary underlying rhythm, why couldn’t Woolf “dislodge” them that morning? It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries; but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs; she doesn’t wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she’s a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else, things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important ideas… but she doesn’t wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word .

None of us is Virginia Woolf, but I hope every writer has had at least a moment when they rode the wave, and all the words were right.

As readers, we have all ridden that wave, and known that joy.

Prose and poetry—all art, music, dance—rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the beat, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it, the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a little while.

Some bits of this went into a piece called “Writer’s Block” for the New York Times Syndicate, and a small part went into Steering the Craft. It is a rambling meditation that I came back to on and off over several years, when I wasn’t writing what I wanted to be writing.

Just now I’m not writing. That is, I’m writing here and now that I’m not writing, because I am unhappy about not writing. But if I have nothing to write I have nothing to write. Why can’t I wait in patience till I do? Why is the waiting hard?

Because I am not as good at anything else and nothing else is as good. I would rather be writing than anything else.

Not because it is a direct pleasure in the physical sense, like a good dinner or sex or sunlight. Composition is hard work, involving the body not in satisfying activity and release but only in stillness and tension. It is usually accompanied by uncertainty as to the means and the outcome, and often surrounded by a kind of driving anxiety (“I have to finish this before I die and finishing it is going to kill me”). In any case, while actually composing, I’m in a kind of trance state that isn’t pleasant or anything else. It has no qualities. It is unconsciousness of self. While writing I am unconscious of my existence or any existence except in the words as they sound and make rhythms and connect and make syntax and in the story as it happens.

Aha, then writing is an escape? (Oh the Puritan overtones in that word!) An escape from dissatisfactions, incompetences, woes? Yes, no doubt. And also a compensation for lack of control over life, for powerlessness. Writing, I’m in power, I control, I choose the words and shape the story. Don’t I?

Do I? Who’s I? Where’s I while I write? Following the beat. The words. They’re in control. It’s the story that has the power. I’m what follows it, records it. That’s my job, and the work is in doing my job right.

We use escape and compensation negatively, and so we can’t used them to define the act of making, which is positive and irreducible to anything but itself. True making is truly satisfying. It is more truly satisfying than anything I know.

So when I have nothing to write I have nothing to escape to, nothing to compensate with, nothing to give control to, no power to share in, and no satisfaction. I have to just be here being old and worried and muddling and afraid that nothing makes sense. I miss and want that thread of words that runs through day and night leading me through the labyrinth of the years. I want a story to tell. What will give me one?