Who was it who said that poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity? It's not just emotion, though, is it? Nor is it simply a process of recollection. (Tranquillity usually helps, though I'm typing this while eavesdropping on, among others, a full-on Yiddish conversation, complete with assimilated American vocabulary...) The thing about experience, as every writing teacher has to explain, gently or forcefully, according to (you hope) the temperament of the beginner writer, or (more likely) the temperament of themselves, is that it isn't enough. What makes experience craft or even art is the business of putting it through the sieves of memory, of experience before and experience after, the pitch and rhythm of words, their images and associations.
So, though I've got nothing much better to do at Newark NJ airport for the next hour or so, I can't turn in some nice philosophical point about the last ten days, nor a funny or heartfelt story. At the moment the best I can do is this:
aeroplanes: 6
non-duty books read: 5
pages of random notebook notes: 10
delectable, brilliantly painted little animals bought: 4
American copy-edits of A Secret Alchemy fine tooth-combed: 1
spectacular drives over mountains: 2
pyramids climbed: 2
delicious lunches/dinners with kind hosts: 10
taxis and lifts organised by same: too many to count
hotels slept in: 3
books signed to new friends: 10s
minutes of BBC World News watched: too many
press interviews: 3
lectures given: 2
really interesting literary/cultural TV interviews: 2
people lectured too: 600
life-saving post-lecture doughnuts consumed: 1
skeletons dancing: 100s
skulls grinning: 1000s
Dios de Muertos altars pondered over: 10
astounding, astonishing national museums of anthropology which have gone straight into my top ten of cultural experiences ever: 1
