Arthur Frommer wrote this in his newsletter. Who knew it was our brains that made the diffference?

Lucy

Who are Writers?

Alice W. Flaherty, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, decided a while ago to find out what compels people to sit down and write, so she sat down and wrote a book about the subject. Using her Ph. D. as well as her M. D., she came out in 2004 with The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. Briefly, I think she wrote that there are actual differences in the physical brains of writers and nonwriters. Extra activity in some of the temporal lobes may compel us to write. These changes produce hypergraphia, the medical term for an overpowering desire to write. That area is also important for metaphor and the sense of inspiration, she says. This is rare, she says, but its opposite, writer’s block, is common. The bad news is, she says, is that writers are ten times more likely than the general population to be manic-depressive, and many great writers in the past have had epilepsy. Now the good, sort of, news: “If we are all a little bit sick, it is not all that sick to be sick,” she writes.

Well then, what of great travel writers, Herodotus, one of the first? He wasn’t perfect, as an early excerpt about a fifth-century BCE trip to Gaza shows:

“There is an inscription in Egyptian on the pyramid telling how much was disbursed on radishes, onions, and garlic for the workmen. I remember very well what the guide said as he translated it for me, it cost [about one hundred million dollars]. If this is so, what did the other expenses run to, the cost of the stones, the iron, everything else?” The truth is, no guide in the fifth century BCE could read Old Kingdom hieroglyphics any more than those who take you around the pyramids today. It wasn’t until Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt that French scholars found the Rosetta Stone (1799), by which modern man was able to translate those symbols for the first time. Moral of this story: don’t trust anybody, even guides, as people love to tell stories and make things up. Check any facts you provide, preferably from more than just one source.

when I was in college, ee cummings came to read  his poems. I’d looked at his work and wondered why he stripped out all capitals, all punctuation. Hey, I’d just spent 12 years in grade/high school getting PUNCTUATION drilled into me so what’s with not using it? The auditorium was packed. People sat silently. It was so quiet I hear a watch ticking nearby. Cummings sat on stage at a small desk with a green reading lamp.

Then he began to read a poem called springtime

“springtime

is  your time

is my time

is our time”

He lingered over the word “springtime”, drawing it out. I smelled flowers . The air felt pregnant with possibilities.

“is your time” he put the accent on the word “your” and I knew he was talking to me

“is my time” and “my” got the emphasis

“is our time” and he tied the knot with making “our” the strongest word. Ah, so romantic, delicious. I wanted to dance in a field of flowers.

I got it. He didn’t need punctuation. All those years of reading silently, I’d missed something. For the the first time in my life I realized words were music, lyrical things, meant to be read and said out loud, rolled around the tongue, drawn out, emphasized. To this day I try to read what I write out loud, and hope once again for the magic of springtime.