Jill Krementz has spent her life capturing photographs of famous writers.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Profiled in an erect posture, hands over the high-top typewriter, Welty was an immovable fixture of the room.<\/p>\n
On each page of Jill\u2019s book I look into the spirit of authors seated at their writing desks, their hands and minds frozen in a thought:\u00a0 Amy Tan, Kurt Vonnegut, Russell Banks, and over fifty others.\u00a0 Tied together in the spirit of creation, these authors are prepared to write their souls into their stories for me to later read.\u00a0 On the written page, they trust strangers like me enough to take us into their confidence.\u00a0 They love us enough to share of themselves.<\/p>\n
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I wake at 2:30 a.m. and rise to move through the house as a lost writer.\u00a0 Pictures of these ‘real’ writers return in the darkness, and I hope that they might understand me, if no one else is able.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 WordPerfect is ready.<\/p>\n
In front of the bright screen, I sit and close my eyes, top eyelids barely resting upon\u00a0 lower lids.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Years ago, I struggled as a senior in high school to memorize the positions of all the typewriter letters.\u00a0 Yesterday, using Meavis Beacon’s computer self-teaching program to improve my accuracy, I got lost.\u00a0 The typing instructions broke apart words and forced me to think,\u2026one\u2026letter\u2026at\u2026a\u2026time.\u00a0 In full concentration my mind worked hard.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Now in the early morning darkness, eyes closed, I submit everything I am to my fingers.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Had I really been sleeping?<\/p>\n
We think we need to be awake to direct our brain, so that it will know what to think.\u00a0 Yet, asleep, my brain works through the night, without my ‘wisdom,’ and it wakens me, telling me to move:\u00a0 \u201cPut it down on paper.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n
I am truly only a bystander.<\/p>\n
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?\u00a0 Am I the only one who hears your footsteps as I work?”\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If I allow myself to write my own question on the page, will the fingers take it away with the delete key?<\/p>\n
Maybe I should take over the keyboard from the ghost within.<\/p>\n
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?\u00a0 Dr. K on television called my God a myth, with a smirk, dismissing him as the fiction of small minds.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Maybe if Dr. K could place his fingers upon mine, he would feel the presence of some other greater mind.<\/p>\n
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<\/span> you?\u00a0 Have I let my ego, my own cleverness, take control?\u00a0 Have I sent you away by trying to be more of me than you wanted?”<\/p>\n I let the question hang in space.\u00a0 My hands grow still.\u00a0 Vic and the kids breath silently in rooms down the hallway.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I sit quiet still, hands poised and waiting, my mind empty and tired.<\/p>\n Then, unbidden by me, the fingers start moving again, and I let them.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n It’s over.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I feel the arm of God around my shoulders saying, “It’s all right.\u00a0 You can sip your tea.\u00a0 There’s time to rest for a minute or two. \u00a0\u00a0Go ahead, open your eyes and read.\u00a0 It will be all right.\u00a0 I promise.”<\/i><\/p>\n Here in the darkness, in an unbidden trance of words, how much of my soul have I released onto a white page?\u00a0 What kind of picture would this make for Jill?\u00a0 And if God understands, will anybody else?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n