Rhetorical Evidence

Today's discussion got me thinking about how, as writers, we attempt to know more than what we really do, imitating knowledge itself. The art of mimicry and deception is perhaps the greatest weapon in the arsenal of the poet. We talked about the author who was so in-depth about the brain surgery present in his book that he seemed to have actually been one. Earlier this week I handed one of my colleague a short story that I'd written, and he had asked me if I had lived in the house my narrative was describing. I assured him it was just a house I had imagined, on the spot.

He said that my description was such so that he thought I had grown up there, or perhaps at least seen it before. I was able to, as the unnamed singer of the song to the sea in Wallace Stephens' poem, create an almost existent world through mere rhetoric. My obsessive compulsive nature helps me as a writer, allowing me to not just imagine a house, but a corn-yellow house with brown siding and flecked and chipping paint, browned by the North Carolina sun. He said it painted a perfect picture of Carolina in the hot summer. I have never been. The ability for words to do that, to paint so vivid a picture in the minds of other, is the reason I love to write. That and the chicks.