Something about a rainy winter day fires up the imagination. For some.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
I have long admired the work of a fighter pilot turned writer. He wrote under the pen name James Salter. James Arnold Horowitz volunteered for combat duty in Korea and flew more than 100 combat missions. Secretly aspiring to write, he chased Mig-15s in an F-86 Sabre. The words that inspired his writer dreams? They traveled by train.
“I sat in the compartment of a train as it swept through bleak German countryside . . . Points of rain appeared on the window. In the bluish issue of a women’s magazine a curious article caught my eye. It was a tribute to a plumpish Welsh poet. Dylan Thomas. It was Under Milk Wood, roguish, prancing, with its blazing characters and lines. The words dizzied me, their grandeur, their wit. The drops of rain became streaks as the dazzling voices spoke . . . in that Bundesbahn car that had survived the war — within me — was a certain grain of discontentment. I had never made anything as sacred or beautiful as the poem, and the longing to do so rose up in me. I gazed out the window. It was 1954, winter. Could I?”
Salter was 29 when he gazed out that rain-glazed window. He resigned his commission to write full time. His commanding officer called him a fool. “You have no idea what you’ve done.” Salter went to his room and wept. Still, in writing, Salter found “ecstatic melancholy”—the best two-word description of writing I’ve heard. You who seek heart-throbbing loneliness, when you smell rain coming, slide a table against a window. Gaze, imagine, and write. That window might open to a new world.
I was four when I spoke four words, a tale my mother told more than once. As winter rain fell, it streaked my mother’s bedroom window. As I looked out at impressionistic rain-washed woods, I did not say “it’s raining.” I said, “It’s raining iced tea.” My mother’s tea pitcher had given me a memorable image.
Other things leaped from my mouth. A few years ago a back-road journey led me to Danburg, Georgia, and the grave of Cousin Clara Rhodes Blackmon. She was born in 1897, which would make her 58 by the time I was six. Mom said Clara liked to be firm with misbehaving children and she always got the last word. Having been in a blackberry patch, I had picked up chiggers. And chiggers were giving me a hard time. I did what boys do. Cousin Clara upon seeing my shameful behavior reprimanded me. “Boy, just what do you think you are doing.”
Without missing a beat I responded, “I have a little bird here that goes tweet, tweet, tweet. Do you want to see it?”
Cousin Clara, mortified, said not one word. Looking over her headstone that rainy day I could see her hand over her mouth, stunned into silence she was.
From boys to men. Here’s a rain passage from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. “All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils of cloud across the peaks and the light was the color of a blind man’s eye. Lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off.”
I’m not here to refer to rain-inspired majesty such as McCarthy’s, rather I focus on how wintry, rain-spattered windows set the longing to write afire. For some. Something about rain-streaked windows ignite the marriage of images and words. For some. James Dickey’s view of inspiration? “A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning”.
No evidence confirms that would-be writers experience rainy-window eureka; they may get struck by a bolt, but something is at work here. Rainy days foster reflection and introspection. Fewer distractions. When winter rains come and they always do around these parts, sit next to a window and imagine iced tea washing down it. As you do, reflect on what James Dickey told me about writing.
“Turn your imagination loose. Sit down with a piece of paper and put down anything you can think of, anything that crosses your mind no matter how foolish. Some of it might lead somewhere but most won’t. But some might.”
He’s right. Some rainy day inspiration will encourage you closet writers to step into the sunshine and share words glistening with yesterday’s rain. You may fail miserably, but you’ll be better off than those who didn’t have the courage to try. Might they have created something sacred or beautiful? They’ll never know. You will.