Standing up

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Now. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

It’s evening, and I’m on a flight back to New York that was delayed all afternoon. (After the tardy plane from New York arrived and we’d finally been seated, a crew member announced that there were “one or two small maintenance issues.” Quite some time later: “Changing the lightbulbs up here has turned out to be a little more complicated than we thought.”)

But I keep thinking about the stand-up paddle board that my mom brought when she and my siblings and I went to that mountain reservoir the other day—because mastery is so elusive but beckons even from a first encounter, because big ambitions often seem most doable when they first occur to us and less so from there more or less until they’re done, because being expert entails having honed a sense of all within your expertise you’ll never grasp. The first try is an exquisite threshold.

The staging ground at Smith and Morehouse Reservoir.

Learning to stand up on that board, for me at least, was a picture of embodiment that had been Auto Enhanced to the brink, highlights and shadows and sharpness and saturation exaggerated to a satire of life-likeness. All movement had to be derived the way it was in the beginning, from a chaos of sensory data with no base layer of experience or theory or linguistic structure. I’m grateful, actually, to have gone into the experience so cold, because doing so conferred a few minutes of infancy—at least until I fell into the lake, and had to remember to swim.

Which makes me think about another innocent day, when I started working on my novel and spent an atemporal morning on the couch, idle like on some ancient summer break under a blanket fort in the backyard with a Hardy Boys from the library, but now wondering what it was that someone writing a novel would do. And then the day that I tried improvising the text longhand. And then the day that I tried pairing that with improvising on the piano. And then, at some point, the day when I sat down at my computer and opened it without a fuss and typed a few hundred words like it was my job—any job I’d ever done, an exercise in acuity and consistency and conversation and fluency and invention. And then the day when I realized I needed more, and different, predetermined structure to keep going—or, to not keep going forever. And now, when I’m back in the weeds of research, even though this is conceptual, distantly history-derived, mythological fiction that does not concern itself with what Joseph Smith ate for breakfast on the morning of February 26, 1831, or in what permutation of rough syntax he asked for it, or how it tasted, or whether he left any part of his plate untouched, and if the plate survives somewhere, unwashed perhaps, in a storage room behind a diorama at the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum.

We talk about this stuff in terms of thinking, but when I look back on my project so far it’s one overwhelmingly of the body—because in the scene of the writer sitting on the couch puzzling, the tangible and irreproducible part of the scene, the state like which there will never be another, is the sitting on the couch, in the dryness of the radiator and the cold reverberating from the windowpanes, in the silence of the piano, in the stillness both taut and languid of one’s first working morning in years without a meeting or an expense report or a home screen to look over for misdemeanors of style. It’s not a sexy birthplace, just the one that reality delivered. And everything in it is relevant. Fiction, like memory, obscures this, or edits it. But writing is a spasm of embodiment, a seizure of it—the total scene converging, through the single point of the body, in what it produces.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram or Threads, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.