The Pyjama-Clad Dragon Slayer
// December 22nd, 2009 // 3 Comments » // creativity, curiosity, poetry, reading
I was 8 years old when I had the most amazing reading experience I’ve ever had.
Deep in the middle of Enid Blyton’s ‘Five On A Treasure Island’ the five young protaganists were camping on Kirrin Island when a huge storm hit. They watched in horror from the cliffs as the huge swells lifted up and tossed a long-ago shipwrecked vessel onto the beach.
Engrossed, I could hear the smashing rain as wind gales rocked our house and flashes of lightning seared the pages of my book. I was actually lying on the hallway floor in our house in Brisbane, Australia, reading my book as the devastating floods of 1974 struck the city.
I remember going for a walk with my mother the next day. As we turned the corner a block away from our house and just a little down the hill,we stopped to look and just beside us was a small frog sitting in a puddle staring up at me, every thing turned slow and eerily quiet. I looked up and saw row upon row of houses underwater with nothing showing but the peaks of their roofs.
I remember the frog and the flooded houses very vividly, but I also remember the scene from the book just as, if not more, vividly.
That was a pretty extreme reading experience but reading has always been intense for me. Opening up a book and dissolving into the story nestled in the thin sheets of paper between the covers has always been a favourite past-time.
I have a similar deep love for visual art, but never seem to get the same intimacy from viewing a painting as I do from immersing myself in a book. There’s always an element of separation when viewing a painting. The canvas is there and I’m here. No matter how engrossing and inspiring the artwork it’s much more difficult to place myself inside a painting. When reading I become the canvas. I become co-conspirator and collaborator. The author needs me as much as I need her in order to get this piece of art off the ground.
Our innate capacity for creativity is made apparent as soon as we open up a book.
In my reading life I’ve hustled for gruel and survived frostbite in Russian Gulags, been stranded on tropical islands, roamed the halls of a 14th Century Italian monastery, railed at passers-by in the streets of 19th century Kristiania, hitched a ride to the restaurant at the end of the universe, joined the foreign Legion, stalked vampires, and slain dragons–all while wearing pyjamas and nursing a cup of tea.
Each of these acts relied on my ability to take in the writer’s words and use them as scaffolding to build entire worlds. After being given the address of the cafe, the beverage and the name of my companion it’s up to me to create the scent of coffee, the hub-bub surrounding our conversation, the sharp intake of her breath as the conversation takes a turn.
We’re amazing, us readers. Consider the millions of dollars and painstaking attention to detail that movies like the Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings series need to invest to come close to achieving what we can with our our imaginations and a twelve dollar book. Consider the amount of money James Cameron just dropped in making ‘Avatar’ (unless you think 250 million dollars is inconceivable).
Writers are my heroes, many are brilliant and they’re often treated that way too. What I find amazing is that while writers are so adored, readers are, well, just readers.While preparing this post I wanted to get some inspirational quotes on the creative act of reading and how awesome readers are. I was surprised at the Snark and Boo that google actually offered up:
“It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.”
Anthony Burgess (Didn’t he play the Penguin in the T.V. series of Batman?)
But a bit further on I found this:
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting”
Aldous Huxley
Finally, something positive about the capacity of readers. Actually, I think all people (not just male readers), share the qualities that Aldous Huxley mentions. I’m not saying that only people who read are wonderfully creative beings, just that the act of reading provides an illustration of the imaginative abilities we all share as a result of being human.
I love this quote from Annie Dillard:
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know ….Do you like sentences?”
After wanting to be a writer all my life, I read those words a few years ago and felt I had finally had been handed the starting point. That quote opened the doorway into writing for me. It also opened the doorway into a deeper love of reading as well. The way I read has become more thoughtful and rewarding since I started paying attention to the building blocks of writing.
But I didn’t put the quote in here to talk about writing. The thing I hear most in reading about creativity in books and on blogs, and what I heard so much of when doing Creativity Coaching sessions with clients, were different forms of the question “Can I be a creative?” One way I’d like to reply to that is “I don’t know, do you like to read?”
My favourite piece of writing on the writer/reader relationship is a poem by Olena Kalytiak Davis called: sweet reader, flanneled and tulled
It’s not a cheer-squad poem for readers it’s darker and more complicated than that, which kind of mirrors the nature of the relationship. But if you’ve read this far I’d like to quote the opening of the poem for you, in gratitude:
Reader unmov’d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’d
and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still
I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.
