Jill Krementz has spent her life capturing photographs of famous writers. She was lucky to meet Eudora Welty, luckier still to capture her seated across the room at her desk in the early morning glow as it poured from the garden through the wide southern windows. Profiled in an erect posture, hands over the high-top typewriter, Welty was an immovable fixture of the room.
On each page of Jill’s book I look into the spirit of authors seated at their writing desks, their hands and minds frozen in a thought: Amy Tan, Kurt Vonnegut, Russell Banks, and over fifty others. Tied together in the spirit of creation, these authors are prepared to write their souls into their stories for me to later read. On the written page, they trust strangers like me enough to take us into their confidence. They love us enough to share of themselves.
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I wake at 2:30 a.m. and rise to move through the house as a lost writer. Pictures of these ‘real’ writers return in the darkness, and I hope that they might understand me, if no one else is able.
I zap a cup of hot tea without turning on any lights and let the computer wind its way through virus checks and automatic programs, opening window upon window, finally to stop upon a picture of a calligrapher’s pen slanted across a page. WordPerfect is ready.
In front of the bright screen, I sit and close my eyes, top eyelids barely resting upon lower lids. Ten tired fingers poise above the keys, knowing just the right feel of “j” and “f” that keep right and left hands in their proper spaces.
Years ago, I struggled as a senior in high school to memorize the positions of all the typewriter letters. Yesterday, using Meavis Beacon’s computer self-teaching program to improve my accuracy, I got lost. The typing instructions broke apart words and forced me to think,…one…letter…at…a…time. In full concentration my mind worked hard. But the thought required for me to push the proper finger down on the letter “d” slowed my typing, and my fingers tumbled out of turn making silly mistakes.
Now in the early morning darkness, eyes closed, I submit everything I am to my fingers. Hot tea within reach, I ask God to protect me from writing anything unworthy, and I simply let the ideas and feelings mix together somewhere up near my shoulders and begin flowing slowly and mysteriously down my arms, through my fingers one at a time in such rapid succession that I can’t even begin to think the words.
Letters appear like the ticker tape of Wall Street, picking up speed, and draining out the thoughts that were building in my mind as I slept.
Had I really been sleeping?
We think we need to be awake to direct our brain, so that it will know what to think. Yet, asleep, my brain works through the night, without my ‘wisdom,’ and it wakens me, telling me to move: “Put it down on paper. You aren’t smart enough to remember in the morning the things I want to tell you in the dark, and you aren’t brave enough to think them on your own in the light of day when you are awake.”
I am truly only a bystander.
When my brain allows my fingers to pause, when I am allowed to participate in this personal trance at the typewriter, I reach out in the darkness with one question only, “God, is that you? Am I the only one who hears your footsteps as I work?” I feel I hear them just as loudly as any of those ‘real’ steps that will begin to sound in the hallway three hours from now when the kids awaken. If I allow myself to write my own question on the page, will the fingers take it away with the delete key?
Maybe I should take over the keyboard from the ghost within.
When some stranger reads this, will he use the mention of God’s footsteps to prove that I have finally lost it, that I am crazy? Dr. K on television called my God a myth, with a smirk, dismissing him as the fiction of small minds. But Dr. K. doesn’t sit with me in the early morning hours, with this very small mind of mine, a mind of limitations, questions, an exhausted mind,…a mind too tired to choreograph ten fingers on a stage of computer keys. Maybe if Dr. K could place his fingers upon mine, he would feel the presence of some other greater mind.
When I finally reach the bottom of an idea and feel the last sentence wind its way upon the page, in fear I reach out into the darkness again, “God, is that really you? Have I let my ego, my own cleverness, take control? Have I sent you away by trying to be more of me than you wanted?”
I let the question hang in space. My hands grow still. Vic and the kids breath silently in rooms down the hallway. Traffic whooshes along the freeway outside in the night, people trying to make real progress on the interstate before the world wakens and joins them. I sit quiet still, hands poised and waiting, my mind empty and tired.
Then, unbidden by me, the fingers start moving again, and I let them. I turn off the questions, turn off the answers, and let them do their work alone, waiting for the last sentence to finish, the last word, the last letter, and finally the period.
It’s over. I’m tired. I don’t care what Dr. K says and what he might use from his world of science to prove I’m crazy. I feel the arm of God around my shoulders saying, “It’s all right. You can sip your tea. There’s time to rest for a minute or two. Go ahead, open your eyes and read. It will be all right. I promise.”
Here in the darkness, in an unbidden trance of words, how much of my soul have I released onto a white page? What kind of picture would this make for Jill? And if God understands, will anybody else?
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THE WRITER’S LIFE