Home		Joan Connor On Writing and Telepathy
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		I approach this topic tentatively and with the risk of sounding New-Aged, but writing invokes a different, less willful form of consciousness than habitual and daily thought. It is more akin to dreaming than thinking. To demystify the process, writing is that rare occasion to listen to what I already know, a way of gleaning the golden straws of thought scattered by a day's activity. When I am in that listening mode, I am more receptive to different ways of knowing. This may be what the poets mean by the muse. I need to be still to receive my stories. I first became aware of this different way of listening when I was fifteen and writing poetry. I wrote a poem and set it aside. Later, I re-read it and realized that it was about a failed relationship. My first serious boyfriend dumped me the following Friday night. Was it clairvoyant? I have only perhaps to answer that question. Perhaps women, lacking male physical power, compensatorily train themselves to read people, their dispositions, their gestures. Perhaps my boyfriend had been uncharacteristically quiet when we were last together. Perhaps he turned his head slightly away from me when I took his hand in the theater as we watched Wuthering Heights. Perhaps the poem merely told me what I already knew but wished not to acknowledge consciously. And perhaps it was intuition, pure and unmediated. Whatever the explanation, I have had experiences since, while writing stories, which I cannot explain rationally. I wouldn't want to; it would disparage the serendipity, the synchronous experience, that moment of intimacy with something large and unnameable which Carson McCullers and Virginia Woolf described but did not ascribe a name to. A tiny, ephemeral, fragile moment of connection which makes life bearable. To name it is to lose it. Take this—I was in the mountains of Vermont writing about a fan obsessed with Ray Charles. I realized as I wrote that I needed another Ray Charles' lyric. At that moment on VPR a Ray Charles song came on, and I typed it simultaneously into my story: Baby, way down in my soul, I been a fool for you. Kismet. Or this—I finished work on a genre-bender piece about Tiny Tim the evening before he died. It was a little spooky. I watched his obituary on CNN, feeling as if I'd tapped into the universal computer, I Ching. But there it is. Or this—on the eve of the Oklahoma bombing, I finished an apocalyptic millennial piece about a bombing set in Manhattan, based on a news item I'd seen in the paper about a priest blessing an elephant. The following day I was describing it to a friend on the phone. "Have you seen this morning's news?" he asked. I hadn't. I sent the story around to journals and no one picked it up. On September eleventh, I realized that the story was in the mail to a journal. The possibility that some editor might think that I was capitalizing on the Trade Center attack horrified me. The story of the bombing was set in New York. Ironically, the journal accepted the story. Well, it was sadly timely. But I asked that they print it with a disclaimer. The intuitive connection alarmed me. But perhaps I was only sensing something in the Zeitgeist, some Yeatsian sense of impending catastrophe come round at last. But the double timing of the story's composition and acceptance disturbed me. Oklahoma. The Twin Towers. This may be coincidence of course. It may be that I intuit some design, even some design of coincidence. As my colleague, Jack Matthews, smartly observed, "If you are looking for it, you will see it." But it felt more as if it saw me. Surely I was not looking for the Oklahoma bombing or the attack on the Twin Towers. But again some telepathic tint colored a story's composition. Anything that occurs three times, the magic number three, suggests a pattern, even if a pattern of coincidence. But that pattern, even if only one of happenstance, makes writing sacred, inviolable to me. It is a connection to the larger informing world, even if on occasion a terrifying one. Revelations. "And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise." During the same October in which I wrote the story of the bombing (not a usual topic for me) I was also researching and writing a story about William Miller, who led a doomsday cult in rural Vermont near the western border with New York where he lived in Low Hampton. I was struggling to find research on him, and I invented in the interstices of the facts the fictional details of his home and family. Three years later, I was on a lark with my buddy, Joe Citro, the novelist and Vermont folklorist who had been so generous with his research material on Miller. We were investigating a story of a haunted B & B. As we headed home around dusk, we spotted a sign that said, William Miller Cemetery. Could it be? We stopped of course and among the lichened stones I found Miller's headstone and his wife's, Lucy's. I had to rewrite the story then. In my version he had survived her. But the chiseled dates told otherwise. The cemetery led us to discover the William Miller Chapel, a bit down the road. On tiptoes on the ledge, sunlight draining from the sky, we peeked in at the tiny chapel. As we were peering in, an elderly couple wheeled up in a golf cart. "Would you like to see the house?" they asked. Did we ever. Stepping into the house was like stepping into a dream, stepping into my own story. I had somehow imagined the layout of the house perfectly as well as its accoutrements. It may have only been familiarity with the floorplans of old New England farmhouses, but it felt eerily more specific than that. The woman, who gave us the tour of the farmhouse which was in the process of being restored, was still a believer, an Adventist, which added to my sense that I was stepping backward into time, into my story's imagination and evocation of Miller's setting, his time, his place. When we reached the parlor, I said, "But where is the fireplace? There was a fireplace on that wall." She looked at me quizzically. "How did you know that there was a fireplace there?" I could not explain why I knew precisely where it had been. She led me down the cellar stairs and showed me the outline of the old hearth. It was slated next for restoration, or, more precisely, re-creation. Oddly, I felt closer to Miller out of doors, on Ascension Rock where he waited with his robed followers for Jesus to appear, and among his outbuildings. I enjoyed walking through the quiet cathedral of pines with the carpet of needles underfoot, imagining him also walking there in a religious hush. But I knew that I had inhabited his home as I had inhabited my story fictionally, fully in its composition. I cannot explain this habitation, and I don't wish to. In part because it makes me feel as if there are stories out there waiting for me to find them, to write them, stories which I was meant to write. It makes writing a vocation rather than an avocation. And it gives me creative hope. The stories are already there, latent, abiding. Writer's block? Hah. All I need is time, the contemplative time, the writing time, the time and chance to notice what is there beneath this surficial, diurnal round of activity. So, yes, there is for me a mystical cast to writing. I have long thought that my Irish side makes me interesting, and my WASP side keeps me sane. I need them both, each to keep the other in balance. The Irish are notorious mystics, and part of my personal mythology is the belief that this is why the Irish drink: to make the universe shut up. When the world becomes animistic and trees and rocks clamor for one's attention, one longs for a little peace. Natter, natter, natter and hand me a double whisky, please. But this tidy bifurcation of my identity doesn't hold up. My Irish father is keenly rational, my WASP mother the telepathic one. She has an unfortunate gift for knowing when people die. It is an ability which discomfits her. But there it is. It is possible to know what one would prefer not to. But writing, serious writing, confers this responsibility: that one tell the exigent truth, however uncomfortable. "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." An Irish story gave me my most nightmarish of these inexplicable concurrences. I had been researching a story about Bridget Cleary whose husband, Michael, burned her to death before a house full of witnesses, claiming that she was possessed by fairies. In March I took my son to Ireland and we located her unmarked grave in the churchyard and her cottage on a dirt lane on a day, cold and slate-colored. It did not look like a house that had known fire, heat. I have to let stories rest awhile before writing them, much as I let dough rest when making bread. I suspect that I am prewriting stories unconsciously, working on them, shaping them before I set about the conscious task. They are rising the while. For me, the structure is the entrance into a story. I need the container before I can fill it. As the container forms itself around the material in dreams and in waking dreams, I near the moment of a story's imminence. The Bridget Cleary story began to make sense to me only if the sidhe had possessed her, because only then could she be redeemed from her historical horror, her burning death. Imagining her among the good folk renewed her life the other side of the veil, so I began to research Scottish and Irish folklore. And the wee people led me into the story. I was working on the story late at night. I had been reading about one particularly nasty incarnation, the Kelpie, who is a horsehead who, malevolent, lurks in swamps. I was at a particularly troublesome moment in the story, the one which always intrigues me, the fulcrum of belief. To what extent did Michael Cleary believe that his wife was possessed? To what extent did that belief prove a convenience to motivate the murder of an uppity wife who may have been having an affair? To what extent is possession a metaphor for female intelligence, mood, spirit, a screen for projections of male sexual paranoia, the desire for power over the other? To what extent might all these possibilities explain the multiple motivations of Michael Cleary? For three days after murdering his wife, Michael Cleary haunted the ringfort, wielding a knife because he believed that, in accordance with Irish lore, his changeling wife would return on a white horse and that he could restore her to herself and to him by cutting the traces on the fairy horse. Was he crazed with guilt? Crazed with grief? Or by belief? I was waiting with Michael in the story for the white horse to appear when I heard a thudding and rasping sound outside my window. It was August. Three in the morning. Moonless. A fox, I said, and returned to my monitor. THUMP, thump. A very big fox, I said. Then that rasping, crunching, tearing sound again. A horror movie moment, that moment when your hand is on the doorknob. Don't open that door. Don't open that door. But you do. You must. Because you must know or you cannot allay your fears unless you rise, unless you stare into the darkness to confront them. I took my flashlight from the shelf by the door, stepped outside, and scanned with its feeble beam. Two yellow lights sparked back at me. Sweet Jesus. I jumped backward into my kitchen, peeked around the jamb. A large white horse stood two feet outside my door, munching, a beard of grass dangling from his working jaw as he considered me. Munch. Munch. Then he shied and cantered, his hooves kicking up sparks. Kelpie. White spirit horse. I dropped the flashlight. "And I looked, and behold a white horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." Behind my camp is a rock outcropping which my father exposed while clearing a few years ago. It looks like a pagan altar. For his birthday I had given him a Celtic cross which we erected there. And after my equine encounter, I convinced myself that the cross had summoned pagan energies manifested in the glamour of fay horse. I sat up the night. By daylight, the horse had flesh, name, and owner. She had escaped from a neighboring farm. Her fairy sparks were glints from horseshoes striking flint, the granite ledge. But that does not explain why, at that precise moment, the horse loped into my yard and story, a frightening felicity. It remains a mystery to me like Michael Cleary, but one like a plaintive tune on a penny whistle which has an ancestral, primal touch. A grace note. Writers' habits, their rituals and peccadillos, intrigue me. Some must have number two pencils sharpened and lined up across their desks. Others write in longhand on legal tablets. One I know only writes in coffee shops. Some authors write daily. I do not. To work well, I must have an uncluttered block of time. I immerse myself in the project. Fashion, food, laundry become incidental. I work obsessively, intensely, and quickly when I write. I am grateful to academia for its calendar, the summers off, sabbaticals, for the gift of empty squares in my engagement calendar. But the pre-writing, the less conscious writing goes on all the time, and it relates to my chronic insomnia. In half-sleep, on the verge of sleep, my brain censors less than it does during the busy daylit hours. In that hynagogic state, I begin to compose my stories, writing them from the inside out. In that way, too, when I finally do edge into sleep, I bring my stories into my dream-life and work on them in that dimidiated consciousness. I keep a notebook next to my bed. Yes, sometimes I coerce my stories into being, force them like forsythia in February, placing the bare branches in vases of warm water until the yellow blossoms pop. Sometimes I force myself to write simply to stay in the habit of writing. To keep the skill supple, I have to exercise it. But the stories which I arrive at in this fashion reveal the control freakery of their origins. They lack subtlety. They feel over-determined, willful, bullied into being. They know where they are going, and they head straight for it. They are more thought than sensed and hold few surprises for me, and, I suspect for my reader. They are less playful than the stories that I enter through the side door. Full frontal, they expose themselves. I prefer the filmy tease of a peignoir. Something is there. Something alluring, the form of which I can but dimly grasp. But sometimes intuitive knowledge is fuller than rational. I may be seeing through a glass darkly, but I am peering into a darkness into which I rarely peer, seeing with my second-sight rather than my first, illuminating the recesses of my imagination. Is this extra sensory deception rather than perception? Am I like Michael Cleary deluding myself? Is my ability to make these intuitive connections merely a function endemic to the human brain? What is metaphor but dissimilar connections? Is this reading of pattern out there simply an eversion of the organic wiring in here, a superimposition of the internal landscape on the external? It doesn't matter. By making (and by unmaking) patterns, we conjure stories. And I suspect that the best stories evolve when intelligence and intuition are holding hands, working together. I read once that we use only ten percent of our brains. I don't know how the author set about establishing this percentage. I don't know if it is true, but I know from my writing and reading that there are degrees of comprehensiveness which distinquish imaginative quality. If we are using only one-tenth of our brains, then I wonder what the other ninety percent is doing. I suspect that ninety percent is working overtime, but we don't listen to it. My mother is listening when she knows that someone whom she loves has crossed over. I am listening when I dream my friends the evening before they contact me by phone or mail. For some reason, I know instinctively when my friends are in trouble even when we have been long out of touch. It isn't witchery or wizardry. It's a neural form of love, (an engram?), a synapse firing in a part of the brain that's gotten otiose from disuse. We are accustomed to ignoring this form of thought. Genius is inimitable. As Ben Reed, who had the Humanities Chair at Mount Holyoke when I was a student there, observed, Anyone can imitate Eliot. No one can imitate Yeats. He was intimating that great art is the confluent consequence of complicated eccentricities. I do not share his authorial bias, but I ascribe to his aesthetic bias. Until an author writes as only he can write, he is not writing well, is not listening to the alleged ninety percent that goes unused. Perhaps this is what Barthes meant in his discrimination between the texts of pleasure and bliss. As a reader and a writer, I want bliss. Joseph Campbell advises, "Follow your bliss." It's good advice for a writer. What I love about reading is the invitation to enter another's thought processes, the associative connections of an engaged imagination at work. What could be more intimate than that? To think with another. It underlines this imperative: write the story that only you can write. I must as a writer, like Frank Sinatra, do it my way. And I want to encourage my students to find their own ways. One of the few intelligent remarks George Bush Redux uttered was in mourning the loss of the 9/11 victims: every one of them took with him a world. Yes, we contain worlds. It is what makes individual loss, insupportable, all those memories, the unique ways of seeing, the particularity of personality. Statistics obscure the loss. Body count doesn't count the vastness of any holocaust. Writing is a way of preserving people as person, as individual consciousness. It raises an architecture of light in the site of the former Twin Towers. While writing this essay I experienced the very kismet that is my topic. I opened the book to find the apocalyptic quotation from Revelations, but the page fell open to the chapter on the pale horse. Yes, I needed that. Chance? Perhaps. But I will take my solace in the divinity of coincidence. As Michael Cadden observed to me at Breadloaf, "God loves a plot." And so do I. The question of whether the teleology is divine or immanent in origin, there or here, bothers the story not at all. The story finds the pattern. Metaphor is my leap of faith. I genuflect.
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