Know Your Bone
artistic discipline for revolution
Two weeks ago I added a new tattoo to my collection: on the side of my wrist, Know Your Bone, part of a Thoreau quote that I repeated to myself over and over again while I was hiking through the wilds of Alaska: “Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master’s chaise. Do what you love,” he writes in Familiar Letters, “Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”
I might have just inked the words of Thoreau permanently on my body, but it was Annie Dillard’s interpretation of the quote in The Writing Life that really led me to do it:
“Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. ‘The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.’ Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this. Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone. ‘Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life… Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”
Like most artist-academics, my life has felt full of obsession, of idiosyncratic fascinations which it seems only I can feel this passionate about. I tell people I plan to write my dissertation about end-of-the-world environmental literature and you can imagine their reaction. There are things that feel deeply important that I cannot explain but I know—I know—to be true and I have accepted that I will spend my life mired in these obsessions. I know my own bone. It lives constantly in my head, even if my creative practice lacks the discipline to bring it to light. I have been writing and rewriting a novel draft for years; it has been 150,000 words and now I begin it again, with only 1,000 words to the document. Life starts over and over and over on a loop. I know my own bone. I must learn to unearth and gnaw at it, to find the joy in the mundanity of routine.
Artistry requires discipline, as much as I chafe against this truth. As a graduate student, the last few years have thrown my creative practice out of routine. It becomes something I think about—I am thinking about writing nearly all of the time—but rarely do I find the will to sit down and type. In inking Know Your Bone onto my body I am attempting to remind myself that I must not only know my bone but I must return to it day after day. When I was in Alaska, waking up each day at dawn to cook breakfast, gather up my tent and things and pack them carefully into a backpack, and spend the next six hours navigating to the x on my map, life became a simple, measured routine, and I thrived in it. Out on the trail, with no distractions, I thought often of the projects I would return to: a more regular cadence with this newsletter, long trail runs each morning, at least one book read each week. It seemed simple, plausible, and possible to know my bone in the wilderness; it is far more difficult, I find, to do so against the qualms of everyday life. And in letting my routine fall to the wayside, my creative practice has suffered. I am uninspired, left feeling I have nothing of importance to say.
I have been a distance runner since I was fourteen, going through long periods on-and-off of regularity with the sport. Both running and writing require routine; I think often of Murakami’s practice of both: “The more I ran, the more my potential was revealed,” he writes. “Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins. As soon as I notice one source drying up, I move on to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their source, they’re in trouble. In other words, let’s face it: life is basically unfair. But, even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness.”
This morning I came across the following slideshow on Instagram, from the account @gendersauce, whose posts I often deeply resonate with. I’m including below the screenshots of two images on a post about education as a radical tool for change:
Comments have since been turned off on the post, but the original caption reads:
“When they drilled through my bone to fix my shattered arm I celebrated that things could actually heal. But I was in so much pain and I had holes in my muscle and bone and skin. I grieved that they needed to break things further in order for them to become whole. Last resorts often ask for mourning— that things needed to reach this place in order to become treatable.”
My work is the work of a needle. I study what I describe as speculative American fiction, but what I am largely interested in are stories about the end of the world and the new America that emerges out of it. I agree that we are rabid for bloody heroism; we are rabid for a singular spring of change, for an isolated event that allows new threads of creativity—and with these threads, the blueprint for a new world—to emerge. But growth requires seeds; growth requires discipline, requires practice, requires returning each day to gnaw at the bone again and again. I am no knife; I cannot slice through and cleave something innovative, new, exciting. Like Murakami, both my creative and my revolutionary practices feel like pounding away at rocks with a chisel. As a Southerner working in Southern radical spaces, revolutionary work here also feels this way: sowing seeds we might never see bloom in this lifetime. That does not mean they are not worth seeding. I am the needle poking small holes in the social fabric of what we have deemed acceptable. I am the needle grasping at the threads of what I know to be important and pulling them taught. I am one of many needles weaving together the loose pattern for a new world, one which will require that we have discipline and vision and that we continue to hold both of those things close as we look towards the future.
I think of my grandmother teaching me how to sew as a young girl the same way her grandmother taught her: the needle held tentatively in unstable fingers, palms small and sweaty, willing to rip apart fibers of the existing fabric in order to reconnect them stronger, more resilient. I think of the needle moving the same way into my skin, over and over, inking these words into my flesh. First there is pain. And then, when it is over and healed, there is a type of smoothness and surety that only this kind of discipline can bring.
