Reading time: 7 minutes
For reasons not worth detailing, in August 2018 I cooked three meals a day for eighty people for six days. It was exhausting work. It gave me respect for those who dedicate themselves, let alone to the culinary art: to washing dishes in the back room of the banquet. Since then I cook two or three times a week. With mediocre results, but with a lot of vocation, Borges would say. It is partly a family matter, because my son Arturo studied gastronomy and this practice came to unite us in a new way. But there is also an aesthetic aspect. During the six days I spent working in a kitchen from five in the morning to eleven at night, I remembered a lesson that literature had already taught me before, but that perhaps I forgot at some point: rather than dedicating yourself to putting things in the stove, to cook you have to chop and chop, peel and peel, wash and wash. Doing seemingly simple and somehow absurd things over and over again. You need, of course, a method. But, above all, you have to practice until you’re sick. Build a routine. The idea of cooking has made me travel to a couple of stories. The first has to do with music and the second with Zen.
They say that when he was a professor of musical composition at a New York university, John Cage taught his classes by taking his students to the forest to collect mushrooms. The class consisted of learning which mushrooms were poisonous, which had certain properties: the delicious ones, the ones that can be prepared in multiple ways, the ones that you can only try two or three times without dying. Asked about this peculiar way of instructing new composers, Cage stated that, for him, the core of the creative experience was not technique, but observation. And it is a suggestive opinion, because an artist can master this or that technique, but the only way to put them into practice is by finding everyday mechanisms that allow one to stay in permanent contact with the aesthetic matter. aesthetic matter is a notion coined by Luigi Pareyson and later developed by Umberto Eco in his book The definition of art. Eco proposes that the work of the artist (in this I include the work of the writer) is of a factory nature: one works using certain materials (linguistic materials in our case) to which he must apply a force of elaboration.
The second story, the one that comes from Zen, speaks of the non-transferable nature of routine.
In the 13th century, Eihei Dōgen, founder of the Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist school, wrote a short manual titled Instructions to the cook. It is a reflection on the importance of daily habits and the following of certain norms, forms and structures focused not only on the monastic institution, but also on inner work. The document describes what are the things that the cook has to do, starting significantly at night: how he meets with the spiritual directors to agree on the menu for the next day, when they will give him the supplies so that he can start cooking, what are the their specific responsibilities. One of the things Dōgen insists on is that the basic work of cleaning the rice must be done by the cook himself; It is not a practice that can be delegated. The author expands on this point by narrating his arrival in China, where he would spend twelve years devoted to the study of the Chan of the Southern School. He says that, while staying on a ship tied to the port, unable to disembark due to a storm, he had his first encounter with a Buddhist monk. He was the cook of a temple in the mountains; he was there to acquire Japanese goods. After talking for a while, Dōgen asks the cook monk to stay on the ship and instruct him, taking advantage of the storm. “I can’t,” the monk answers, “but come visit me at the monastery whenever you want.” “Why can’t you?” Dōgen insists. “Because I have to cook.” The young Japanese man, who at the time believed that spirituality was something more important than cooking, insisted: “Can’t someone else do your job while he stops raining?” The cook monk laughed: “You can’t expect someone else to do what you have to do.” And he went out into the storm. I like to think that this story, which is of course a religious lesson, could also be adopted as a precept for any literary workshop: you have to learn to clean your own rice.
Something important that separates Zen from other schools of Buddhism mahāyāna It is the notion that meditating has no ulterior object, since it is, in itself, its own goal. This is an important discussion within Buddhism, most of whose traditions distinguish between dhyana“meditation”, and prajñā, “enlightenment or wisdom.” DT Suzuki says verbatim in a passage that «dhyana is prajñā»: there is no enlightenment other than practice. Dōgen also tells us that all beings have Busshō, “Buddha Nature”, we just don’t have the tools to make us perceive it. I don’t even know if tool is the right word, because when you start talking about Zen everything falls apart, as Master Nyogen observed: “The moment someone talks about his Zen, a couple of monsters appear in front of him.”
What I want to establish through this analogy between Zen and writing processes is my personal conviction that the literary craft is more consistent to the extent that it has no goal. The “conquest” of the text or, even worse, the conquest of fame and social success or the-power-to-enlighten-and-save-the-masses-oppressed-by-capitalism seem to me to be secondary inclinations. in the mind of a writer. I do not propose that art is something pure that should be practiced from an ivory tower: all writing has an ideology and an evident social participation, a posture towards the world. But I don’t think it’s necessary to win a prize or pursue a doctorate in sociology for that condition to manifest itself. You write to understand, not to express. I consider that limiting this neurobiological impulse to field theory or post-autonomous exercise is, let alone naive: it is downright fallacious. I know that many (and also many contemporary writers) will disagree with me. I don’t have any problem with it.
A peculiarity of the routine of creation is that it is novelizable. Within the industry of the production of novels, poems, etc., there is a small sub-industry of know how: “ask the writer how he does it.” Perhaps we are looking for a magic recipe that allows us to perfect our writing experience. I believe that there is no such recipe. Returning to Zen and zazen (the classic position of sitting meditation), I would say that the only thing that exists is this: the position of sitting—in our case—to write.
There are, however, writers who talk all the time about their creation process. There are others who don’t; Maybe it’s hard for them, or they’re just not interested. I belong to the first group: those of us who obsessively break down the habit, building a poetics, deconstructing it, articulating it, disarticulating it, seeing it through one’s own work and also that of others.
A corpus that summarizes a good subindustrial base of this trade novelizable is “The Art of Fiction” section, compiled over decades by The Paris Review. This is a historic forum where some of the most suggestive interviews with writers have appeared since the 1950s. EM Forster, Eudora Welty, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, Heinrich Böll, John Cheever, Alice Munro, to name a few, have passed through there. Many of them talk about how they conceive the text or the technique, but also about something more basic: how they face the material process of their writing.
The anecdote is known that Hemingway wrote standing up. There are photos: a desk, the machine on some books, him standing upright. I want to imagine that this gave him not only a portrait but also a particular breath. But the writer’s routine is never static: there are also photos of the same author writing sitting down. Hemingway wrote standing up during some time in his life. The routine changes as the individual changes and, above all, depending on whether the process is satisfactory or not.
A perhaps less useful moment in Hemingway’s writing is the creative crisis caused by the reception of Across the river and among the trees, a novel with autobiographical overtones. Around fifty, the author had fallen in love with a very young girl with whom he spent a few days in Italy, and from that experience he wrote this rather cumbersome volume, if I remember correctly, with much—perhaps too much—devotion to the co-star And that’s how it went with the criticism. There is something that almost no writer is prepared for, no matter how good he is or how successful he has been or how young or old: the poor reception of one of his books. Not infrequently, one’s talent is devoured by a narcissistic and neurotic need for absolute approval.
Hemingway then retreats to his house in Cuba and secludes himself as a kind of hermit, an image very contrary to what the world had of him: a man of action who wrote books. In this kind of retreat he writes The old man and the sea; a book that, in some way, is also poetic. If one follows the autobiographical anecdote around the narrative anecdote, the character in that beautiful little novel could be interpreted as a alter ego of its author. A representation of the writer in struggle with the sharks of literary criticism (and, worse, with the shark-years, which will sooner or later ruin our feeling for prose), which deprives him of the fishing (call it literary glorycall greentail love), but whom he ultimately defeats from his stoic self-confinement in a boat or an island. Books are never about anything more than what they are about. Books are also sometimes about a radical change in routine.
Julián Herbert (Acapulco, 1971). He is a writer, editor and professor of Literature. His work is known for the constant experimentation of language and the crossing of genres, in which both historical references and literary classics coexist as well as allusions to pop culture and everyday life. Among his books are grave songto, Bring me Quentin Tarantino’s head and Now I imagine things.
The essays in the Interior Landscape collection analyze the reflective act as an event, as the precipitation of a subjectivity: it is thought, processed, materialized, remade. It is in that state of discernment that the ebullition of life—what is lived and what is read—is transformed into what will be created. gristormenta.com/paisaje
