boccas

[boccas]

To me, an objective is to convey the most ethereal possible experience with the greatest possible clarity. To reach in both directions.

So if something’s unclear in the sentence, I’m going to purify it. And I can tell if something’s irrelevant. The world is mysterious, everything that happens is mysterious, and you can’t begin to approach mystery without absolute crystal clarity. Over the clarity of expression I have control. I make the words as amenable to understanding as I possibly can so that the true mysteries can fill up the pages.

Deborah Eisenberg

[boccas]

Art, itself, is inherently subversive. It’s destabilizing. It undermines, rather than reinforces, what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda. It ventures into distant ambiguities, it dismantles the received in your brain and expands and refines what you can experience.

Deborah Eisenberg

[boccas]

But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.

Deborah Eisenberg