Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

134
How in the act of writing itself to go through that tangle of bush—
or the tangle that is woven of the wills of the characters of a story—toward
what I know is waiting on the far side of it? Perhaps it is only the writing
itself that can find a way through as the writer lets go, for the moment, of
the far horizon he or she has beheld and simply follows into the bush the
words that flow from the moving of the pen:
My pen moves along the page
like the snout of a strange animal
shaped like a human arm
and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.
I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly,
intent as any forager that has nothing
on its mind but grubs and insects
that will allow it to live another day.
— Billy Collins, “Budapest”*
The lines from Rudolf Steiner’s meditation on language speak of
“the sense of language” that allows—persuades?—the world to unveil itself
“in image.” Can we also hear in these words “the sensing of language?” Is
language not only a means of capturing in images that which is known, but
also a sense organ capable of discovering and flushing out that which is not
yet known?
To take this question further, can what is already known, conceived,
imaged in and of itself ever penetrate the mystery of the will? Or do I as a
writer need to let go of—even risk the loss of—that overarching imagination
of the story in order to discover as I write what it is in the wills of the
characters that could move them toward that end?
Yet without that overarching imagination of the story as a whole,
the characters stand a good chance of wandering off into the bush and
getting lost.
It then becomes a matter of living within the tension between images
already beheld and images that can only be discovered as the sensing
word noses its way forward, line by line, listening even as it speaks, into the
mystery of the characters who will bring the story to life as they meet, act,
speak, die – and live.
The larger picture of hills, skies, open water can always be glimpsed
through the thickness of trees and bush in the foreground of the painting.
Yet the tangled foreground stands as a reminder that reaching the far shore
of that lake can never be taken as given, however clear and vivid my glimpses
of it.
Then there is also the mystery of my own will as the writer and the
human being to whom the writer constantly turns, asking, “What do you