Mojo Strumming: Musings on Voice

Mojo. Now I like the texture, the taste, the ring of mojo. Mojo sounds like banjo. Reminds me of a beat I can strum without thinking, a rhythm I can tap my feet to, a tingling that slithers and sways from my head to the earth.

By definition, mojo means personal magnetism, the magic spell or charm of an engaged soul.

Most writers know this mysterious quality as 'voice.' If all the planets align, mojo makes its way onto the printed page. At this weekend's Poetics of Place workshop in Taos, my  instructor and poet Levi Romero says that while I come through in my writing...yes, there is an aura... yes, there is a tone...no, it's not distinctly absolutely unmistakably Evelyn Rodriguez.

"There are thousands [I suspect though he really said millions - but somehow I remember thousands] of fabulous writers," Romero tells me. "But you want to do vueltas de campana over them." I should want to leapfrog, sail through the air in somersaults over other 'good' scribing. And so the words should somersault from the page too.

To the aspiring novelist in the line before me: "Voice is more important to me than content," says W.W. Norton editor Carol Houck Smith. "Send me five pages of your writing." Translated: Send me five pages - and if they don't leap over the Rio Grande Gorge (gente, forgive me I'm in Taos) then you need not bother sending me the proposal.

You know mojo when you feel it. You savor the juice spilling from the fruit, when otherwise you'd shovel the word-fuel straight into your brain.

I dig up a reference to voice I'd transcribed in my journal (I'm on a working vacation, so rest of my library's not handy) on best-selling author James Frey, author of One Million Little Pieces. James Frey is lauded for his distinctive voice.

Or is he? The Amazon Editorial Review says (excerpt here):

The rage-fueled memoir is kept in check by Frey's cool, minimalist style. Like his steady mantra, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal," Frey's use of repetition takes on a crisp, lyrical quality which lends itself to the surreal experience... The stylistic acrobatics (no quotation marks, random capitalization, left-aligned text, wild paragraph breaks) may seem too self-conscious for some readers, but beyond the literary fireworks lurks a fierce debut.

(Oh, and another question: Does style define voice?) If his memoir 'works' perhaps it's because it's just Jim Frey. Simply James Frey. In Greek, authenticity means acting in accordance to your own authority. The minute you start preening to set yourself apart, you become clumsy, nervous, self-conscious.

Frey talks about voice in a recent article:

One thing that occurred to Frey was that most of the writers he loves - Baudelaire, Fitzgerald, Rimbaud, Celine, Hemingway, Kerouac, and Bulowski - taught themselves how to write...

"I read all these people and started thinking about what they all had in common," he says. "And the most obvious thing was that, when their books came out, there was nothing like them that had preceded them. We read Hemingway now and people are just like 'Ah, that's Ernest Hemingway.' To this day, if you pick up Hemingway and read a page of it, you know it's him." - interview with James Frey, "The Transformation of James Frey", Poets & Writers, July/August 2005

I never asked Levi about my voice. So, this is totally unsolicited, totally startling advice. Startling as I'd been musing myself that while story is important I've been thinking it's secondary to voice in branding and marketing. Ah, but that's another story. (Or, is it?) But I hadn't personalized the epiphany nor applied it to art.

Si, si, yo entiendo, Mr. Romero. Pero, I don't want to force and contort myself into being unique. That's the challenge, ain't it?

The more you aim for a voice (hmmm, like enlightenment) the more you distance yourself from something right under your nose. I insist my best writing doesn't even come from me. I got out of the way. And a primeval, ancient, eternal voice envelopes everything. In that instant, I could care less if it is distinct. It is delicious.

Distinct sets us apart. That's the catch: distinct makes us far apart. Distinct makes us lonely. I'm in D.H. Lawrence country, and somewhere I've read this quote attributed to him although I cannot verify it online (either way, this unending land evokes the memory of this quote): "The opposite of love isn't hate. The opposite of love is individuality."

Thank god Annie Dillard is our reading assignment last night. She always jolts me to the present. I wish I could share all of it, but for backgrounder she has just petted her dog, sipped the coffee, watched a sun purple a mountain in such a way that no other moment has ever existed. (Here again Lawrence echoes: "The living moment is everything.")

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, the western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt...

I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing it's tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostaglia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing all religions recognize as separating us from our creator - our very self-consciousness - is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends. - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Sometimes I wonder, maybe, just maybe, a connected voice doesn't need to do somersaults. We are all real in our own distinct ways.

p.s. I'm at the Taos Summer Writing Conference through next Monday and thus am even more behind than usual on returning emails and phone calls.

Comments

[Marilyn]

I smiled when I saw the link to your "Big Sky Mind" post...I think that was the first post I ever read here. Enjoy Taos. We were hoping to get there this summer, having purchased a little plot in Tres Piedras which we still haven't seen. It's beautiful country. May your voice find its mojo there...and vice versa...

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Marilyn,
New Mexico itself is humming with mojo. What an awesome place to renew yourself. I only got as close to Tres Piedras as the Earthship community (see www.earthship.org).

[Romy]

"Sometimes I wonder, maybe, just maybe, a connected voice doesn't need to do somersaults."

The painter Ben Shahn said, "The universal experience is that private experience which illuminates the private and personal world in which each of us lives the major part of his life. Thus, in art, the symbol which has vast universality may be some figure drawn from the most remote and inward recesses of consciousness; for it is here that we are unique and sovereign and most wholly aware. I think of Masaccio's "Expulsion from the Garden", so intensely personal that it leaves no person untouched. I think of a di Chirico figure, lonely in a lonely street haunted by shadows; its loneliness speaks to all human loneliness. As an experience, neither painting has anything of the average; both come from extreme limits of feelings and both paintings have great universality."

My thoughts are that the voice of the artist can only be drawn from the more inward recesses of consciousness because it is there where he is more wholly aware. Wholly in the sense that he no longer perceives within the boundaries of opinions, conditionings, memories etc. These are the stuff of the outer layer of consciousness, that is called the "smaller mind" in Zen, the individual or outer self that Jorge Luis Borges once called the "other Borges".

I think that the more wholly aware we are, the more unique the configurations of our experiece would be. We somersaults into greater solitude. And yet the more universally connected we would be at the same time. This primal awareness is what we intimately share with everybody. And the artist proclaims this primal and universal awareness by mirroring it on the personal and unique expressions of his art. Allen Ginsberg was talking once about the mind but I think he was referring to this primal consciousness. He said, "If you can show your mind, it reminds people that they got a mind. If you have a vivid moment that's more open and compassionate, it reminds people that they have those vivid moments." I look at Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and I hear his unique voice and I also know that sometime, somewhere I had been aware of life in the same way too.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Romy,
This comment is so astoundingly beautiful. In the "smaller mind" I am fragile, scared, feeble; whole, "I" am vastness itself.

Thanks!

[passing through]

James Frey is a fraud; his memoir is a hoax. See http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html

Voice? How about "I am a Loser and a Liar and a Millionaire"?