Read Online Balzac's War: A Tale of Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jeff VanderMeer
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different reason: I couldn’t visualize the place. For some reason, without visualizing the organ bank, I couldn’t visualize the rest of the novel.
Some months into this writer’s block, Ann and I visited England, where I discovered York Cathedral (with help from friends Chris Reed and Manda Thompson). York Cathedral became my grand epiphany, perhaps the most visionary experience I have ever had while writing a story or novel. As soon as we entered the cathedral—a place older than Westminster— and I traced the path of the columns up to the stunningly high ceiling, the little hairs on my arms lifted, and I shivered. The columns, looking like multiple tubes tied together, were utterly alien to me. I’d seen nothing like them. My scalp was tingling. I could feel something rising up inside of me. The organ bank was becoming a reality right in front of my eyes. But it wasn’t until I walked around a corner and saw steps leading down to a door and a window set into the wall, wooden bars across it, that the back of my head exploded and I found myself hardly able to breathe. I could clearly see Shadrach walking around the corner as I had…and being confronted by a scene out of Dante’s Inferno in that room with the little steps leading down to it. In my vision, that room stretched out and opened up into a much larger space filled with body parts in various stages of decay. As I saw this spreading out before me, so too the rest of the cathedral changed, until the columns became conduits for blood and the sculptures of saints on the columns were bodies set into the columns and the design on the ceiling of the cathedral was instead a series of floating cameras and there, coming down the walkway, were two old women with purses; no, two old people carrying the body of a young girl between them, and behind them, Dr. Ferguson in his bloody smock, and although I’m not religious, this was a religious experience, the world transformed, the world’s surface peeled back to reveal the flesh beneath the skin. I stood there scribbling away like a slack-jawed idiot for long minutes, writing down what was being written into me. I couldn’t keep up with the images and ideas cutting into my head. I had to find more paper. I had to keep writing. It was all spilling out. It was all becoming real. I couldn’t stop writing. In every possible way, I experienced exactly what Shadrach experienced up to that moment when he saw his love buried beneath the mound of legs. Then it was past and gone and I was in the world again, and it was just a cathedral, and I was exhausted and speechless—spent.
If you’re lucky, you have three or four experiences like this in a lifetime. I can’t describe it as anything other than a vision, a transformation. Such a happening does not mean that the writing that occurs because of it will be any better or any worse than writing achieved through discipline and a slow grind forward. Anything I put down on paper could only be a shadow, an echo, a ghost of what I had experienced in the flesh.
But, on a grand scale, it does remind you why you write: for those everyday epiphanies, the little moments of sudden knowledge that occur when you are written. In my case, that half hour in the York cathedral saved Veniss Underground . It got me past the point of most resistance. A lot of hard work remained ahead of me, but I could see my way to the end.
Whenever I think of the novel, I think of that moment in the cathedral. But I also think of the relationship between Veniss Underground and my Ambergris stories, with their own, much more enigmatic, underground. While I was writing Veniss Underground , Ambergris began to colonize my imagination. In a way, this happened at just the right time. For very sound reasons—frustrating to the more direct part of my nature—I could not describe the subterranean passageways of Ambergris in anything other than fragments and conflicting glimpses. The integrity of the stories I was
Some months into this writer’s block, Ann and I visited England, where I discovered York Cathedral (with help from friends Chris Reed and Manda Thompson). York Cathedral became my grand epiphany, perhaps the most visionary experience I have ever had while writing a story or novel. As soon as we entered the cathedral—a place older than Westminster— and I traced the path of the columns up to the stunningly high ceiling, the little hairs on my arms lifted, and I shivered. The columns, looking like multiple tubes tied together, were utterly alien to me. I’d seen nothing like them. My scalp was tingling. I could feel something rising up inside of me. The organ bank was becoming a reality right in front of my eyes. But it wasn’t until I walked around a corner and saw steps leading down to a door and a window set into the wall, wooden bars across it, that the back of my head exploded and I found myself hardly able to breathe. I could clearly see Shadrach walking around the corner as I had…and being confronted by a scene out of Dante’s Inferno in that room with the little steps leading down to it. In my vision, that room stretched out and opened up into a much larger space filled with body parts in various stages of decay. As I saw this spreading out before me, so too the rest of the cathedral changed, until the columns became conduits for blood and the sculptures of saints on the columns were bodies set into the columns and the design on the ceiling of the cathedral was instead a series of floating cameras and there, coming down the walkway, were two old women with purses; no, two old people carrying the body of a young girl between them, and behind them, Dr. Ferguson in his bloody smock, and although I’m not religious, this was a religious experience, the world transformed, the world’s surface peeled back to reveal the flesh beneath the skin. I stood there scribbling away like a slack-jawed idiot for long minutes, writing down what was being written into me. I couldn’t keep up with the images and ideas cutting into my head. I had to find more paper. I had to keep writing. It was all spilling out. It was all becoming real. I couldn’t stop writing. In every possible way, I experienced exactly what Shadrach experienced up to that moment when he saw his love buried beneath the mound of legs. Then it was past and gone and I was in the world again, and it was just a cathedral, and I was exhausted and speechless—spent.
If you’re lucky, you have three or four experiences like this in a lifetime. I can’t describe it as anything other than a vision, a transformation. Such a happening does not mean that the writing that occurs because of it will be any better or any worse than writing achieved through discipline and a slow grind forward. Anything I put down on paper could only be a shadow, an echo, a ghost of what I had experienced in the flesh.
But, on a grand scale, it does remind you why you write: for those everyday epiphanies, the little moments of sudden knowledge that occur when you are written. In my case, that half hour in the York cathedral saved Veniss Underground . It got me past the point of most resistance. A lot of hard work remained ahead of me, but I could see my way to the end.
Whenever I think of the novel, I think of that moment in the cathedral. But I also think of the relationship between Veniss Underground and my Ambergris stories, with their own, much more enigmatic, underground. While I was writing Veniss Underground , Ambergris began to colonize my imagination. In a way, this happened at just the right time. For very sound reasons—frustrating to the more direct part of my nature—I could not describe the subterranean passageways of Ambergris in anything other than fragments and conflicting glimpses. The integrity of the stories I was
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