I have not read a better description of what it is to write than this, from Richard Wright’s lecture on his Native Son, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” (both works 1940). If one isn’t writing like this, physically like this, I can’t see how one is writing:

“That was the deep fun of the job: to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perceptions, making new and — until that very split second of time! — unheard-of and unfelt effects with words. It had a buoying and tonic impact upon me; my senses would strain and seek for more and more of such relationships; my temperature would rise as I worked. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant living.”

And then, the writer’s devil-and-angel appears — why Dionysus was god of wine and art:

“The book was one-half finished, with the opening and closing scenes unwritten. Then, one night, in desperation — I hope that I'm not disclosing the hidden secrets of my craft! — I sneaked out and got a bottle. With the help of it, I began to remember many things which I could not remember before.”

And all of this left the world changed utterly:

“True, we have no great church in America; our national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them; and we have no army that's above the level of mercenary fighters; we have no group acceptable to the whole of our country upholding certain humane values; we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals. We have only a money-grubbing, industrial civilization… if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.”

I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer. A new rebirth of wonder. Yours — E.K.