Hey everybody, please check your inboxes (or Promotions tab, or wherever Good Ideas appears) for a link to Monday’s Zoom class! I hope to see a whole bunch of you. It’s fun, free, and it’s only 40 minutes—what do you have to lose?
Greetings, writers—
The other day I spent a pleasantly dissonant hour reading Rainer Maria Rilke outside a Forever 21 in Clackamas Town Center (which is a mall, not a “town center”). People kept riding by on giant motorized stuffed animals, and by people I mean actual adults, although a few kids were involved, too. I’d never been to this mall before, but the teens of my acquaintance claim it’s the best one (they know nothing of the 2012 shooting), and certainly they enjoyed running around buying pineapple-guava-strawberry perfume, watermelon lip gloss, and candy by the pound (on sale because it was “just a little bit past its expiration date”).
In between eating potato chips and people-watching, I addressed Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It’s one of those books that I read about somewhere and immediately put on hold at the library, but by the time it was available for me to check out I’d forgotten why I wanted to read it. I cannot tell you how often this happens.1
Rilke insisted the novel wasn't autobiographical, though it was originally published with the title Journal of my Other Self, and Malte, the narrator, is a poet meandering around Paris, which is exactly what Rilke was while he was writing it, and some of its passages resemble letters that Rilke wrote home to his wife.
Anyway, early on in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which Rilke called “the sketch of an existence and a shadow-network of forces astir,” Malte records the following journal entry:
Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It still goes badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.
To think, for instance, that I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. There are people who wear the same face for many years; naturally it wears out, it gets dirty, it splits at the folds, it stretches, like gloves one has worn on a journey. These are thrifty, simple people; they do not change their face, they never even have it cleaned. It is good enough, they say, and who can prove to them the contrary? The question of course arises, since they have several faces, what do they do with the others? They store them up. Their children will wear them. But sometimes, too, it happens that their dogs go out with them on. And why not? A face is a face.
A face is a face—sure, okay, but this is a novel way of thinking about them. It feels accurate and trippy at the same time (and it gets trippier when Malte describes seeing a face that has fallen off into its owner’s hands)2.
For today’s writing prompt, I offer a couple of options:
Begin a scene (or poem/free-write/whatever) with the following: “I am learning to see,” and then go on to describe what exactly it is you’re learning to see. It should be something familiar but described in a new and potentially destabilizing way.
Consider whether or not you have ever changed your face, metaphorically speaking. As always, “you” can be your character.
Write a scene in which your character sees something horrifying that may or may not be real.
Happy writing—
Emily
Yes I can: All. The. Time.
“I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but still I was much more afraid of the naked flayed head without a face.”