Intimate acts
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Updated: October 07, 2009 1:10 PM
With Canadian Thanksgiving happening over the weekend, I began wondering what I might be grateful for.
And a surprising thing surfaced – this column.
The column is, in many ways, a mixed blessing. Each week, another deadline looms. Each week, I have to find another subject to write about; I have to marshal my thoughts, gather my research, organize my presentation...
Friend Doug Hodgkinson once asked, “How many times do you rewrite your columns?”
I don’t actually keep records of such matters, but I would guess about three times, on average. I write the first draft just to get some ideas out of my head and onto paper (or screen, nowadays). I rewrite, a second or sometimes a third time, to sharpen those ideas, to arrange them in a sequence most likely to move a reader, to refine the crude ore into something resembling precious metal. I rewrite a final time to polish the prose, to make it shine.
That’s a lot of work. And sometimes, to fit the column to its mandated 500-word limit, I have to perform emergency surgery on my favourite lines.
But writing the column is also a joy.
For about two years, while I was still an employee, I edited other people’s words but I wrote next to nothing myself. My mind stagnated. Unless my reading and my experiences connected with someone else’s words, I had little reason to pay attention.
Then this newspaper invited me to start writing a column. Suddenly I had a reason to pay attention. Everything that crossed my life became potential grist for the mill.
My mother once told me, “You need an audience.”
It’s a remarkably intimate relationship that we enter into, you and I, as reader and writer, as audience and performer.
Paula Simons expressed it well, in her column in the Edmonton Journal. “Whether you love my column or hate it,” she wrote, “you allow me to enter your mind.”
“I have to trust that you will make an effort to understand my words and engage with my ideas,” Simons continued. “And you have to trust that I will not waste your time or lead you astray. Our communion is utterly asexual, yet profoundly intimate.”
Our social culture tends to treat intimacy as purely sexual. Intimacy means that all the clothes are off, the barriers are down, there’s nothing between us, we merge as one...
But sex can also be a restrictive metaphor. There are other kinds of intimacy too. The most intimate moment I have ever experienced happened at our son’s death, when a small group of us stood with our arms around each other, sobbing. As with sex, there were no barriers. Emotionally, we became one body, united in grief.
When a column clicks, something similar happens. To quote Paula Simons again, “I enter, not your body, but your thoughts. And on a good day, perhaps your soul.”
That’s a rare privilege, and one for which I am indeed profoundly grateful.
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