On writing, and a proto-blog

The greatest compliment any writer can receive from another, I think, is: "I wish I had written that!"

It's something I don't say too often, even just to myself as I'm reading a really clever turn of phrase or particularly engrossing story. I mean, c'mon ... I know I'll never be Ernest Hemingway. Or Tim Cahill, for that matter.

Most of the time I feel like Charlie Gordon; at some point in his progress, as I recall, he was just bright enough to know exactly how intelligent he wasn't. I thought, when reading Flowers for Algernon, that such a moment must be almost insufferable.

Yet, here I am: a competent craftsman, at least as good as perhaps three-quarters of my colleagues, but no genius. To scale that wall that separates simply "good" from truly "great" writing requires an exponential increase in effort ... or divine intervention.

I'm grateful for "good," most of the time ... for the opportunity to work at a craft that allows me to indulge my curiosity and to fashion something new, or at least slightly different, nearly every day.

My old friend Shannon Walbran from the University of Dallas is, naturally, an incredibly gifted writer. She manages "light" while avoiding "fluffy." She can do "lively" while being "informative." And, almost always, she's entertaining.

Half a decade ago, someone sent me a link to her journal entries ... I checked today and was happy to see they were still alive, and I realize now that Shannon was blogging before most of us knew about blogs.

Here's one, below. I wish I'd written it.

26 October 2000 - Calcutta - Diwali: sweetness and light

Today was the first of three days of Diwali (dee-VAH-lee), the festival of lights. Most shops on the streets near my hotel were decorated with marigold-flower streamers -- thick, orange garlands which take hours to sew together. People at open tables on the streets sold these streamers, heaps of candy, candles, sparklers, and incense to get ready for the night parties.

As soon as the sun went down, firecrackers started going off. They are allegedly banned, for three main reasons (smoke, noise pollution, and child labor), but I heard them from all corners of the city.

Just as I was pulling on my sandals and getting my camera ready, a hotel staffperson knocked on the door and presented me with a plate of Diwali sweets. I ate three of the six super-saturated sugar cakes and, wired on sucrose, took to the streets to see the lights.

Mimicking the marigold streamers, yellow Christmas lights cascaded from buildings and trailed from lampposts like vines. The street was massed with people buying things from the open tables and walking around to see the displays.

Some light formations were really elaborate. People had wound the strings of lights into wire mesh screens as big as the side of a garage, depicting gods and goddeesses as well as the
geometric symbols for good luck.

One of those symbols is the swastika, and it shocks me every time I see it, even when it's in yellow or green. Much older than the Nazis, who adopted it for their own use, the swastika is a good luck / health symbol often used here in India.

Diwali seems to be all about sweetness and light, until you catch a glimpse of the goddess being celebrated, Kali. She is one frightening creature! Her skin is bright blue, her big red tongue is sticking out of her mouth, and her kohl-lined eyes are bulging. Each of her eight hands is holding a weapon.

The good part is that she is wielding these armaments against an evil beast (and please correct me, someone, if I've got the mythology wrong) whom she is subduing under her vibrant blue foot.

The lonely planet guidebook says she is "bloodthirsty, hankering after battle and carnage." (!)

Shrines to Kali were set up all up and down the street, as big as a two- floor storefront, constructed from a bamboo scaffolding with canvas stretched taut over it. They look like permanent chapels and are very cleverly done.

Devotees paint the structure and apply detailed moulding trim around the front door, through which one can glimpse Kali leering.

To get a better look around the neighborhood, I decided to try a transport mode for which Calcutta is famous. Human rickshaws.

Yes, I had immediate qualms about letting a person haul me around - most of the drivers are skinny and look rather sickly, but I had heard that they love to drive foreigners. We pay much better than locals. And, I was just one passenger, as opposed to the whole families I saw crammed into a single rickshaw.

As soon as I thought the word "rickshaw," a driver found me. He had a grey stubbly beard and looked about 50, with strong, wiry legs sticking out from a plaid cotton sarong. We communicated with sign language. I showed him the amount of money I would be willing to pay to "drive around and say ooh! aah! at the lights." He understood totally. I climbed up into the carriage, he tipped the yoke over his shoulders and pushed us off.

One downside to a human rickshaw is that taxis and buses treat it like a car, but pedestrians treat it like a person, which leads to less-than- smooth traffic interactions. The positive aspects are: it can go down little alleyways which taxis can't reach, and it is extremely quiet. No motor.

Also, the driver was very attentive and stopped for me to take photos in front of every Kali shrine.

Calcutta looks a lot like the Quarter in New Orleans, if you've seen that. Calcutta might be a little newer, but the cities share colonial architectural attributes. On the wide avenues, buildings are brick and stone, two to three stories tall, and are graced with many balconies. On the narrow, crooked side streets, the houses are more like one-room storefronts, with a barn door that opens to the lane.

When we passed by one of these on the rickshaw, I saw a woman lighting clay Diwali oil lanterns and thought we had gone back a hundred years.

A strange thing happened about twenty minutes into the ride. Countless kids had called out, "Hello, hello!" to me, and I waved at some of them. I had about finished with looking at the shrines, and I told the driver to take me back to the big road we'd started from, just by saying the name of the street. He nodded. A university student-looking guy observed this short exchange and then said in a warning tone, "That driver is taking the wrong way."

I just smiled and waved at him, too, and we kept going.

Diwali is something like Halloween, too, plus Christmas plus the Fourth of July. Poor women and children go from store to store with bags or cardboard boxes, and shopkeepers fill their containers with sweets.

Ten minutes later, to my surprise, the very same student guy was walking alongside my rickshaw again, and he repeated his warning. The driver made an irritated face at being falsely accused, and the two spoke for a moment in Bengali.

I then stopped the carriage and explained, "Look, I don't really care if we are going the long way around, because I'm just out to enjoy the lights, but thank you."

The student, annoyed that I did not need to be rescued, stodd at a corner and watched us roll away.
The rickshaw driver broke into a jog, maybe to show me that he was hardworking and honest (which I already believed) and that I was getting my money's worth, or maybe just to ditch the knight errant.

Around the very next turn, the main street opened up - we were only thirty seconds from our original starting point. Radiant with fairy-lights and bursting with firecrackers, the street was shaking to a drumbeat as itinerant musicians played music for the goddess.

The driver and I ended felicitously - I gave him a good holiday tip and we parted amidst Diwali's sweetness and light.

As an afternote, I have to say that NONE of my photos from that night turned out. Of the 24 exposures, only a few from my visit earlier to an educational program came out clearly. The rest were smeared with a rainbow, as if the roll had been exposed to light or airport x-rays or ... Kali?

[For more of Shannon's travel journal, go here. To see what she's up to these days, visit: http://spiritguidance.net/]