The Gift of Kaldi, the Goat Herder: Writing?
Why do we even know his name?
“How can you possibly write anything when you can’t concentrate? That’s pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.”
Michael Pollan, This is Your Life On Plants
Reading Pollan’s new book, in which he covers the influence of three plant-based substances: opiates, caffeine, and mescaline, I am struck by the ease of the writing. It is both personal and fluid, informative and compelling. The quote above, from his essay on coffee, tells of how he quit drinking it to see what happens (not good at all) and finds himself temporarily unable to write. The withdrawal creates a mental fog.
This fog was our natural state before coffee, and tea became ubiquitous in societies across the planet. There was basically no caffeine in Europe prior to the 1600s but once it caught on it changed society. Before coffee, most people spent their lives drunk because alcohol was safer to drink than water.
Fascinating, but the quote above really struck me, as a writer. The distillation of ideas and experience he describes is what we do. I think many new writers these days see it as an occupation rather than a calling. At least you’d think so scanning the lightweight stuff posted here.
This, to me, is a fundamental mistake, a beginner’s mistake.
The deeper you go as a writer, the deeper your life becomes
I am a firm believer in getting paid for your writing. But writing simply for money will not generate good writing. That kind of writer used to be referred to as a hack, someone who dashed things off for a buck or two. All of us do it now and then but it cannot be your reason for existence. There’s so much more you can take from it if you dive in.
Coffee, discovered by an Ethiopian goat herder around 850CE, when he noticed his goats were stimulated when they ate its fruit, changed society by giving us the gift of concentration. I would argue that writing and communication as we know it, would not exist…
