The Grasshopper Inbetweenie, 2/3/2023: You Can Quote Me
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." --Douglas Adams
“Jim Whittaker, the great climber, good friend of mine, said that “If you’re not living on the edge when young, you’re taking up too much space.”
Quoted by Wade Davis in a podcast* with Tim Ferriss
*I’ve linked to the written transcript of their conversation and it is remarkable. Davis is an ethnobotanist, a very prolific writer (23 books), a professor, and spent 13 years as a National Geographic explorer in residence, though as he notes, they were never in residence. This is a long interview but, as a writer, it offers profound insights and is worth taking the time to read or listen.
I could spend hours copying quotes out of it.
I love a good quote. To me they are like blasting caps for the imagination. A blasting cap is a small explosive that can be ignited remotely with electricity. The cap is attached to dynamite. And when ignited (picture those plungers you see in movies when things are being blown up) the blasting cap sets off a chain reaction igniting the dynamite.
This all happens almost instantaneously. And a great quote can trigger ideas in the same way, ideas that are a chain reaction of the imagination. Click, boom. And you’re off and running.
I like to stick a quote here and there in my articles in The Grasshopper. They don’t have to be related to the subject at hand, though it’s fine if they are. But their role, in my mind, is to serve as little triggers planted in places where they might startle or console or maybe just introduce a glimpse into the mysterious.
One great source of the unexpected quote is epigraphs, that is, quotations used in the beginning of a book by a writer to set some kind of tone. Here are two I used at the beginning of The Rememberers, my first novel, which is a story about entering the unknown:
“Magic is never destroyed– the most we can ever do is cut ourselves off, amputate the mysterious antennae which serve to connect us with forces beyond our power of
understanding.”
– Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi
“The edge…there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
The Thompson quote reminds me of the finale exhortation in The Heart Sutra in Sanskrit:
“Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, Bodhi Sva!
English trans:
“Go beyond, go beyond, go beyond beyond, hail the goer!”
The Pranaparamita Heart Sutra is a core Buddhist teaching on letting go of the self and reaching a pure state of compassion for all sentient beings. A very good interpretation can be found in Thich Nhat Han’s The Other Shore, Palm Leaves Press 2017.
I find that when the writing is going well, I feel like I’ve been on a journey outside of time, while I was writing. Going beyond is not a bad guideline for writing. Going beyond beyond is where great artists go.
More Wade Davis:
“Oh, for sure. I mean, nothing is accidental when it comes to that. When you’re with peoples like the Barasana and the Macuna, their most profound cultural insight, one might say, is their conviction that plants and animals are just people in another dimension of reality. So their hunting myths become kind of a land management plan dictating how people can live in the forest. So the shaman, he’s not just a priest or a physician, he’s kind of like a nuclear engineer who goes to the heart of the reactor to reprogram the world. So there’s a constant dialogue between human beings and the natural world, so no event has a life of its own.”
“It is achieved through sacrifice, which means in Latin ‘to make sacred from pure exhaustion’.”
“When I finally understood that creativity is not the motivation of action, it’s a consequence of action. If you don’t do, you can’t create.”
On money and writing:
"There’s also a paywall between you and the apple in the grocery store, or the movie that you go see in the theater, and we don't call those things a paywall. We call those the cost of buying an apple or going to see a movie."
~Cheryl Strayed interviewed at Beyond
Subtle pitch for joining my paid subscribers! Enjoy the weekend. Paid subs get the Sunday Money Edition and my complete and growing archive of writing about writing. This coming Sunday I deal with donation/pay it forward sites, the question of having your own website or blog (not on a platform like Substack), and I touch on two resources for self-publishing.
That’s a topic I’ll be going into in more detail in the future. Hope you enjoyed my quotation ‘blasting caps’!
Martin