Briefly

Pursuing 'the right words in the right order' and reading an example in the LA Review of Books.

"How could I ever catch hold of what I’m calling my relation to the world in a way that would give me access to expression? Or — or — is there something about the writing itself, about using language, that brings about that connection? I think of E. M. Forster’s famous question: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Here again we find the perspective of the language mystic, a version of the Heideggerian idea that “language speaks man.” Here is the most vexatious philosophical conundrum, one that the writer engages not through metaphysical speculation but in the dynamic act of putting words to paper. Are those words being thought to the page, produced in composition, or do they already somehow exist in resonant sequences? How could they? Do we know and possess more than we imagine we do? If not, why do the best writing moments have a power and necessity that feels almost separate. As if, to quote Rimbaud, “I is another.” And it’s true: to be frozen, blocked, kept from writing, is to feel marooned in the mere self...."

From "The Pump You Pump Water From," on writing and writer's block by writer/ editor Sven Birkerts.