What's going on here?

בס"ד
ט"ו תמוז תשס"ו

Because this blog morphed recently from something slightly different, I never made one of those "mission statement" posts setting out what I was aiming to do.

You might say that I also morphed during the last year, and especially the last month. A course I was taking included a number of creative writing exercises, and after believing all my life that I had no skill in writing and nothing much to say anyway, I discovered an ability and a driving purpose that I was totally unaware of. I don't want to overstate this: I'm not deluding myself that I have become a Writer with a capital W overnight, but I have found a personal voice and a way to express ideas that matter to me strongly.

A lot of the time I use a style which is modelled on the classical Midrashim, but in parallel I have been trying to develop a more individual and contemporary style which uses the techniques of Midrash in a more modern way.

There is a dark side to this too: the sheer power of the compulsion to write can be disturbing, to say the least, and there is sometimes an expression of raw emotion that leaves me feeling wrung out for a long time afterwards. However, there is a feedback loop involved here: I can deal with the effect that writing has on me by writing about it!

I came across a few passages in books I was reading recently that express something of what I feel about this kind of writing:

First, the first epigraph on the blog banner: לֹא נִיתְּנָה הַתּוֹרָה לִדְרוֹשׁ אֶלָּא לְמִי שֶׁשּׁוֹאֵל "מָן הוּא?". This is my own conflation of R. Shim'on Bar Yohai's statement in the Mechilta, לֹא נִיתְּנָה הַתּוֹרָה לִדְרוֹשׁ אֶלָּא לְּאוֹכְלֵי הַמָּן, "Making Midrash on the Torah was only given to those who eat manna". I conflated this with Exodus 16:15, "And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another: 'What is it?'", and came out with "Making Midrash on the Torah was only given to those who ask 'What is it?'". I write Midrash by moving around the text until I find a place where my own thoughts and experiences resonate within it, and I can ask "What is it?" and hear the answer.

Secondly, from New Words by George Orwell:

"Imaginative" writing is as it were a flank-attack upon positions that are impregnable from the front.

Thirdly, from one of Tolkien's letters:

I have long ceased to invent (though even patronizing or sneering critics on the side praise my 'inventions'): I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself.

Lastly (for now), from Comfortable Words in Writing Home by Alan Bennett:

"One draws," says Lichtenberg, "from the well of language many a thought one does not have." A writer does not always know what he or she knows, and writing is a way of finding out.