a way of illuminating

martin zuñiga

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all contact is crisis

- anne carson

Everything starts with an idea. No matter what you want to write. A poem, a song, a novel, an essay and especially a shopping list for the market. There’s an intention, a desire behind that text. Take for example a poem; as with any text through imaging and acoustic modulation, an idea will develop. With that you’re walking around town, testing, re-creating, denying.

I started writing my first poem with the awareness that began to assemble a work in 2001. It was after a long illness brought me back to my father and his care. In those months of illness, I also wrote the first of many letters that would explain what I was going to do with writing. What I wanted to capture with words. Are the ideas behind the words what really matter? No, what matters are not ideas. What are important are the words. The words do not belong to anyone; we may treasure them but they always get used by others. All the words we’ve known and thought sniffed, chewed, digested, deconstructed, reconstructed, researched, analyzed and destroyed; we’ve traveled with them. They have taken over and they have lost their power. The words, each of the words, have their own secret history. A hidden life we’ll never meet: we only know the surface, like when you meet someone. Eliot said, “I never know what you are thinking." We always stay on the surface. Verlaine said that the skin is the deepest thing that exists in the human being, that skin with which we face the world and by which we apprehend. As members of the human society, perhaps the most difficult task, as Carson says, to which we daily face is that of touching each other, whether physical, moral or emotional. Ruiz says that every writer’s literary tradition is his skin. This "tradition" is being created through the readings a writer builds up, through his thinking and arguing. It transforms him.

Writing is in short a transformation. When asked why Keats corrected again and again what had already been published, he replied that when he corrected one of his poems he corrected himself. This transformation occurs with the idea that one senses will take shape in the text. You feel as if a bubble was born from the depths of an ocean struggling to stay afloat.

When you've used all the strands that make up your idea, you have to take sides; necessarily have to take sides. In all matter in the universe there are invisible strings. It is a theory, it is true, but it unifies almost all theories of physics. Among ideas there are these strings. They vibrate, giving life to ideas.

The Greeks, who already knew everything there was to know, knew how to develop an idea. First, know everything about the idea. Do you know what your poem is going to say? What do you mean by this idea? What is good and bad? Take sides.

Then write. So far we’ve been speaking in the abstract. These abstractions must become concrete.

After being cooped up in bed in Cusco for months, I returned to Arequipa with another idea about what I was going to do. I started writing about death. Never before had I been close to death but I had seen the death of people I loved. Accompanied by the presence of my dead brother, I became obsessed. I realized that our culture , our society as it as we know begins at the moment people start to ritualize death. When people left their nomadic wanderings and began to live a sedentary life, the first deaths occurred at home. Suddenly, something had to be done with the dead. People had to take charge, they couldn’t simply leave the dead in the place where they lived.

I spent many years learning to write. For me, writing is basically learning to write. The result of that was Gavia, my first book. That’s how this short manual on how to write came about. Concentrated on pages of Gavia are my hobbies, my fears, my fights, my little discoveries and my long tributes to each point of my life that have brought something for me to continue writing about. Because life is reduced to these meetings, these narrative knots.

And there appears tone; most important in every text is the tone. It's unique tone that tells the lover to the beloved what he feels for her. It's unique tone that leads the beloved to respond unfavorably to this claim, as there is something or someone that prevents it. It's unique tone evokes the mother mourning her dead daughter. It's unique tone when the father vows revenge on the dead daughter slayer. It's unique tone when the lover cries to about his dead beloved. Each character, who contains within them self the realization of an idea, it is made of shades.

The important thing is to find this tone, this metal, says Gimferrer. When you have the exact tone for your idea, it will shine like a firefly shines in the woods in the new moon. Dimly illuminating you reach the other: the potential reader. The syntax is lightning. Far is the bank on which the message is illuminated. As always, when you write, you think about that one: the reader, the unlikely reader. Think about your feelings, especially. Writing is also not only an aesthetic action, but an ethical one. And both, as we know, are personal choices.

Over the years, up to 2005, I wrote the first two books. I published some poems, some loose ideas that were mostly intended for training. Then I abandoned all formal study for many years. I left college, career literature. I knew there I was going to learn to write. There are certain things in life that you cannot teach. You can teach reading, for example. But to write, that's a lonely, monastic learning. With all the gods and demons in us as potential desires, learning to write is to found a religion in which you characterize each of these gods and demons, giving them shape, space, time, concreteness. A religion of their own with intimate, unique rituals. Vargas Llosa has such military demons. He gets up every day at the same time (I never know how he blocks the jet lag as he travels so much), then jogs in the morning and after shuts himself away writing for a certain number of hours when he cannot be interrupted by anyone, and then to lunch and. Onetti instead had Dionysian gods. He wrote when he snatched the idea, when there was something inside him, as if it were an alien, who gnawed and wanted, needed to be expelled. And franticly indulged that desire for hours, days and weeks, until everything was accomplished.

Both deeds are born of desire. As mentioned earlier, especially writing the shopping list in the market. You research in the cupboard and choose which things to buy. Then put those things in an order. And then you decide what actions you are going to carry out. First you go to the market for fruit or meat. How can I do everything faster? And along the way, enjoy. In my country there is no better place, for example, than the Spot market. And if you go grocery shopping, incidentally you should enjoy eating there. Give yourself the time for these pleasures of life. Because if you do not realize your desire gives you pleasure, you do not know your desire well. (And here, you can review that all literature basically comes down to theorizing the difference between what is pleasure and what is desire).

All this would be meaningless if not public. Between publishing and writing there is a big difference. While writing has to do with an idea to strip naked, publishing has to do with how that idea can be undressed faster. And faith can give better editors, those great writers friends, confidants and accomplices. I have been fortunate to have the best for each of my books, and as such may not have another opportunity to do so, here I want to express my eternal gratitude to them who have made given volume to my voice.

What makes it important to have the idea? Search this magic in the idea and find it, that’s what makes it special. Rip off the fear of the possibility of the idea. The possibility of what you can do with that idea. You know, a poem, a house, a gun, a toy, the news of a crime or the will itself.