Thursday
Recently, I read and re-read Donald Murray's "Rehearsing Rehearsing." It begins:
The writer rehearses
A writer rehearses
A writer rehearsing
hearse: "A vehicle for conveying a dead person to a church or cemetery." To rehearse is to go back and forth to the cemetery.
Herse--Middle English herse, harrow-shaped triangular frame for holding candles, placed over the bier at the funeral service, from Old French, from Latin hirpex, harrow, rake. Rehearse from Middle English rehercen, from Old French rehercer, to repeat, orginally "to harrow again"
No
To rehearse, to rehear
To listenRehearsing is listening.
In a play rehearsal you listen to others and yourself.
In writing you listen to yourself.Yes, I hear what I am saying before I see it.
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And that, the whole of the article not just its beginning, lead me here, to this blog entry below.
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To write is to see, and I think of sea, an ocean, how writing creates oceans, an expansive process instead of a limiting one, one that opens up the writer to possibility-- to the infinite and the impossibility of choosing but one:one word, one choice for the character to make. That can be like drowning, this writing that leads to the sea, and yet the writer keeps on paddling, word after word, first maybe as a way to avoid drowning. Maybe it is that avoiding-drowning motion that, after awhile, becomes swimming.
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One writes to see, and what is it that is being seen? The scene, one would hope, rather than the summary. The scene is the world brought to life; it has a vital unrest to it, the idea of what is being seen rendered into scene so that readers might see it the way it was meant to be seen (the way it is being seen by the writer/author).
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Each word has within it another, the way world has within it word, and how the "ord" of word might lead one to order, and that is the thing, sometimes, not only the right word, but the right order of the right words. Didn't someone say that about something: all the right words in the right order. Hmmm...
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Silence. Punctuation is about silence and when I gave a talk to a class at Pitt one student asked me about my idiosyncratic punctuation--especially those dashes and I hadn't thought about them before as the entrance of silence into voice. I guess I did a bit. I thought of them as the places where the demands of flash, the idea of flash as a machine of compression, got rid of paragraphs and replaced them with a single punctuation mark, often a dash, kind of a mini strike through.
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Rehearse. I hadn't thought before of the hearse inside rehearse. I thought how it looked like rehash, and that re-, which always means do again, over and over and over and over. I do rehearse things in my head, write them in my head as if I were typing them into the "blank page" of brain first, and that rehearsal is sometimes about trying to get it rite/right/write, but other times about trying to get a sense of it, to know it.
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I am becoming more and more aware of how I write not because I know something, but because of my desire to get to know something, to figure something out. It is about discovering something I didn't know rather than what I already know. I wonder how to make language and writing always that; in other words, can the conventions of writing work similarly? Is there a way to unknown the comma, period, grammar, subject, verb and all of that and rediscover it anew so that it emerges as something else in one's writing each time?
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