Invisible writer

Occasionally, one would encounter a rare piece of writing, so rich and so deep, that it enters directly into your soul with its magic elevating force.

Writing, a lonely silhouette at the dark night, talking to no one but by yourself, these acts and image juxtapose with each other, speaking loudly from Cynthia Ozick. I barely know her before this rendezvous, symbolically through digital media, and her family name sounds jarring to me. She must be very strong, mentally speaking.

It puzzles me a bit as I encountered another story about a female poet Bachmann yesterday. Intuitively, I guess they are the same type, extremely rare, with probability I guess less than 100 million to 1, but it just happened in this virtual world.I was moved by the story of both, although one is written in the form of a speech, another one is simply a report on a new biography.

Such a coincidence is worth writing down something, to capture this delicate disturbance of a peaceful mind of mine, which has absorbed too much information without truly being moved. After swallowing all these plain journalistic writings, reading the sentence like 'Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer – lauded, fêted, bemedalled – plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure?' suddenly gives you a refreshing literal sense, poetic and challenging, with a control of tempo and nuance of fine words.

Nabokov, Henry James, Rilke, all probably fall into the so-called 'the madness of arts', just like Ozick's insurmountable madness drives her through 7 years' austerity as an invisible writer. I don't know how such a life experience has changed her view, but her self-righteous feeling has been voiced loudly.

'Writers are what they genuinely are only when they are at work in the silent and instinctual cell of ghostly solitude, and never when they are out industriously chatting on the terrace.'

While a true writer is invisible, a fraudulent writer on the contrary is 'the visible one, the crowd-seeker, the crowd-speaker, the one who will go out to dinner with you with a motive in mind, or will stand and talk at you, or will discuss mutual writing habits with you, or will gossip with you about other novelists and their enviable good luck or their gratifying bad luck.'

How bitter Ozick's tone is! How unapologetic! What kind of solitude she has been living through before uttering such a strong feeling!

That was the moment that I thought about the tragedy of Celan, his complete and hopeless defeat in facing his lover's dedication to writing, the madness of self-devotion to poetry, which once engulfed Rilke.

The literal and poetic consolation I once retained from Rilke and Nabokov hasn't lasted long, someday I suddenly realized that all that had happened in my mind was just an illusion, since their flesh and blood had been long gone. The idea continues to inspire, like what it has done to Ozick. Its magic but dark shadow will cast spell on a writer until the moment the deadly solitude captures his/her soul, transforming flesh and blood into cold words, and waiting for some readers to pick them up, and being transfixed.

Chilling, warm, disenchanting but moving, Ozick's speech is marvellous.