Soaked in Honey, Pinned Against Time

To those who don’t know, we just started Chapter Seven (Chapter Seven!) of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s a good time to jump in, or jump back in!

First, I’ve been meaning to do this, but I I wanted to remind everyone that we have a library of more than 1,000 posts here at Writing in the Dark, and they’re full of writing riches for you, any time you want.

Five Foundational Exercises Including One for Paying Attention

Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things

Absolute Attention is Prayer

Exercise for Attention

Shimmers & Shards: A Practice of Paying Attention to Concrete Details

What Close Reading Really Is: A Practice of Attention

What I Mean By “Aboutness”

A Surprising Tool For Finding Your Story’s Aboutness

How to Actually Become A Better Writer (& the problem with “workshops”)

And okay, back to Making from Relationship. It’s gonna be fun, and it’s gonna be messy, because, well, relationships are messy. And fertile. And poets know all about this.

I’ve been sharing and teaching Ellen Bass’s glorious poem, “If You Knew,” for about 15 years. Bass opens that poem with a question that commands some attention:

What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone?

Then sets the poem firmly within the ordinary and often annoying transactions of daily life, reminding us of the clerks who don’t say thank you, the men walking too slowly with the wheeled suitcases at the airport, the drivers who doesn’t signal, etc. What, she wonders out loud, might we do differently if we remembered, in those moments, that the person in front of us is going to die?

At the heart of the poem is a story of a friend’s aunt. When the friend takes the aunt to lunch, a waiter—with plum black eyes—jokes as he served the coffee and kisses the aunt’s powdered cheek as they leave. Then, after they walk half a block, the aunt drops dead sidewalk—and Bass uses language, “dropped dead,” which is exactly how my Nana always referred the death of her husband, Henry, who died by heart attack. Or, as Nana put it, dropped dead. It must feel just that way when someone is standing up and alive minute, and on the floor, dead, the next.

At the end, the poem takes what’s called a leap—in this case, a leap into metaphor—asking:

What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?

Bass is, of course, writing here about the intersection of mortality and attention—about how the knowledge of impermanence, if we could ever actually hold it steadily, which can’t, might make all of our encounters precious. But she’s also writing about the brief encounter as a form of relationship in itself. She’s implying, correctly, that the waiter’s kiss on the aunt’s powdered cheek meant something. It was the last human touch that woman experienced. It mattered in a way that neither the waiter nor the aunt could have known in the moment, and its brevity was irrelevant.

Often, we tend to rank the importance of our relationships by their duration. The long friendship seems inevitably more significant than one that lasts a season, and we celebrate the weight of a decades long marriage over a summer fling. But this isn’t always how meaning works in the span of a human life. Daniel Kahneman, whose work I love and whose book Thinking Fast and Slow I refer to often, found in his research on memory and experience that we remember experiences by their peak emotional intensity and their ending—not, in fact, by their duration. A brief encounter that reaches an emotional peak can leave a deeper impression than years of unexceptional connection. That’s because in a brief encounter, everything is compressed. Instead of gradual revelation, there’s a flash of pure intensity.

Today, we get to make and writing something from a brief encounter that ended up mattering—maybe it was a person who touched your palm only once, but left something lasting behind.

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 54, Dreams! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 54. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are just ending chapter six—Making from Darkness—today (it started here with this introductory essay and invitation), but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

Today I invite us all to think about various people we knew only briefly. Maybe they passed through our lives in a week, or maybe they spent a summer, or a school year. Or maybe we knew them for the duration of only a single conversation on a train or at a party or in a waiting room. But somehow they left enough of an impression that we remember them still—which begs the question: