“It’s the rush of invention when you can’t control it, that’s why we write.” A voyeur, by nature and by trade, expounds upon the various powers to the imagination for a writer…
by: Thomas Belton
The need to write, the fantasy, the loss of your soul into something bigger within you, an ever-expanding cave that illuminates brighter and swells with scenery, with every itinerant thought. There is no there there, nor here here. There is everywhere and nowhere all splayed together in a tapestry of invention. The dreaming is easy, but the craft is hard, it takes years of discipline. At times, the dreaming runs past the craft as your fingers rush to keep up, spilling inarticulate words upon the page. And it’s only by going back that you can decipher and understand your thoughts. That’s when objective nurturing takes place, the re-spelling; additions and deletions, seeking mellifluous elisions, replacements of clunkers with synonyms and metaphors. That’s the conscious mind talking to you. But it’s the rush of invention when you can’t control it, that’s why we write. It is as if there is an immense opening in the universe, a pipeline to somewhere distant that feels like no other place, the unfolding of the story like no other sensation. The drone of the clock is lost, the aching feet numbed into submission, the flabby muscles grown larger, eyes cooler and dispassionate, until the two of you are open; the unconscious mind dream creating while the conscious mind hovers over all, shuffling back and forth, making minute changes based on rare thought associations. It’s like an acrostic puzzle where one word leads sideways, perpendicular, to another incongruous thought, word, or idea, where one word fits, or is rejected, the conscious mind fileeting, weighing, and jettisoning, sometimes jeering at your creations or cheering on as the story unfolds. And once it’s over, you go back and read through your prose and marvel. Did I write that? I don’t remember! Yet the impetus of the poetic thought is all around us.
Strange thoughts brought on by the day I spent rifling through boxes of my old paper files going back to the 1980s. Mixed in with the lists of publishers, agent letters, and magazine marketing info, I found mounds of writing I’d scribbled down over the past decades. My life in snippets: an idea for a short story, an op-ed for a newspaper, an incomplete essay, or one that I’d published and forgot about, or left half-finished and undone. The writings struck me as slices of my life that edged out of my psyche as written thoughts while I was working, living footprints of the time of who I was back then and perhaps signposts to what I was to become.
Is that all we can really do, I thought, to preserve ourselves in time? Take the visceral impressions that rise above the mundane moments at work or play, the neuronal images of something more, a subjective moment of joy turned into a bit or narrative, images left in fleeting passages between idle moments at work, or at home, or play then reiterate them as fictional fantasies? Because if it is, I’m glad! Because I still have them and when I read these lines, I’m alive again in that moment, thirty years ago, living that emotion as I wrote down my impression, as young and as fresh as I was back then, no regrets at the lost seconds of living in the moment, loving the fantasy that filled the detracted day dream that became my written word. Here is one of those experiences and impressions.
And the Sopranos Answer: Bivalve N.J. (5/7/82)
One of my first projects as a research scientist for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection was to study the effects of arsenic contamination on the Maurice River in Cumberland County, New Jersey that flows into Delaware Bay on the extreme southwest corner of the state. A region of New Jersey that I’d never experienced before. A number of Jersey’s southern counties are below the Mason-Dixon Line and thus officially part of the southern states. Linguistically, its citizens speak with a drawl like Delawareans on the other side of the bay more than the fast jiving and smart-tongued suburbanites to the north near Philadelphia or New York City. Demographically, the land is the agricultural breadbasket of the Garden State augmented by the long riverine coastline where fisheries offer a good living for the baymen including oystering and commercial fin-fishing along with pot fishing for blue crabs, which are brought to market in Wilmington and Philadelphia.
My research project was to see how far downstream the arsenic contamination had traveled on the river and where it deposited in the sediment and whether any of the edible fish and shellfish had bioaccumulated arsenic to the detriment of the humans who lived along its shoreline and ate its wildlife. To that end, we toured an oyster shucking plant and a crab-packing house at the mouth of the Maurice River in Bivalve, NJ. Bivalve was an eighteenth-century town filled with Victorian buildings next to the oyster fleet on the river with its lovely catboats that sailed out every morning to rake oysters from the hard reefs at the bottom of the bay and then haul them ashore to the shucking plant for chowder or live-ship them whole in their shells in ice-filled railroad boxcars to Philadelphia and Wilmington for that evening’s super.
Bivalve was a metropolis compared to the African American neighborhood in the town next door called Shell Pile, a brilliant mound of calcium carbonate built on a century’s worth of discarded oyster shells that housed the smaller shacks of the Black community who served as servants in the mansions upstream or labored in the shucking houses and fish factories. Always a voyeur to the varied ways of human nature, no matter what my employment, I carried a marble notebook about and recorded the things that people did to get by. Personal experiences to an alien environment are power to the imagination for a writer; observing the commonalities in living and dying and sometimes the extremes, anything to broach the desperation of the inane commonplace that surrounds our lives, these are the peculiarities we seek as writers.
I came across a strange tableau in Shell Pile when I walked over a dune on the Delaware River’s edge to see a handful of fishermen and women sitting on the beach singing as they mended nets and baited lines. I watched and scribbled the following thoughts down as I sat upon a high sandy dune above the river in Shell Pile:
And the Sopranos Answer: Bivalve N.J.
Salt grass ripples under
an onshore wind
as birds skim the
water in flight,
the beach composed
of discarded shells,
oysters shucked and
turned to powder,
chalk white as
Black men and
women sit upon
paste buckets
singing casually
fingering trot lines
that run into the
river.
Baritone voices of
the men joke
and jive as the
women carol
in laughter, voices
fading on the breeze.
Abruptly the singing
ceases as the singers
board a skiff and
set off from shore,
rowers in parallel,
as a bowman sits
tensed, fingers on
the submerged trotline
pulled aboard in time
to the rowing, the trotline
filled with hooks
and bait pulled to
the surface.
Hand-over-hand
along the cat-line
they row, quietly
checking hook-after
-hook, pulling fish
from the water
on calloused fingers,
dropped into a bucket;
thick-headed catfish
whisker-flicking over
the gunnels into the
waist of the boat.
Deft fingers cranking
the hooks from hard mouths
extricating, re-baiting
then hand-over-hand
to the next sunken leader.
All the while the silence
only broken by the swift
slurping of the dip nets
onto surprised blue crabs
feeding on the moribund
catheads, unaware
of the slow draw
to the surface, then
sculp! into the barrel.
Minutes go by
and time dissolves
on the trotline
until its ends at
the penultimate
hook.
Then returning,
the skiffs faster as
oars push water
in bow waves like
clouds rolling from
their prows, all traps
and nets emptied,
the catch returned to
shore and deposited on
the sunbaked sand.
Catfish filleted and
dropped into an open
pot, oysters shucked,
blue crabs mollified
in their snapping
by the boiling water
as the silence is broken
by song and the baritones
laugh and the sopranos answer.
The writer in me is like a voyeur. That day in my life fashioned into a song immortalizing their presence. My writing like a songbird singing, a small voice in the wind, capturing butterflies of thought in a passing moment.
Thomas Belton is an author with extensive publications in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, magazine feature writing, science writing, and journalism. He is a marine biologist, an environmental scientist, and a public health official for the State of New Jersey. His professional memoir, Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State, (Rutgers University Press) won “Best Book in Science Writing for the General Public” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
