Yves Saint Laurent was a writer

Marguerite Duras is my spirit animal. She spent many years living alone, writing. And writing about writing. I never tire of reading these essays and texts. She is a real toughie. She presents as having a degree of self-regard that is unusual in its nature. She is a natural genius of the self. If most of us are on a path of learning who we are and if fortunate headed toward self-actualization, Duras seems to have accepted herself early on and gone from there. In the best sense, she has no shame. Her selfishness is the same as a tigress—in other words, it exists is in the body, not the mind.

Or is it all writing?

She says “The most important experience you can have is to write. I have never had another experience so violent—except, yes, the birth of my child. In fact, I can’t discern a difference between the two. Writing is wholly equivalent to life.”

One of my favorite pieces is “The Sound and The Silence.” It is about Yves Saint Laurent and her vast appreciation of him. She says this: “I have always seen him as a writer. And as far from words as his work may seem, I have never been able to separate him from writing. He sees each person as the entire world and that’s how writing enters his work. It’s when intelligence is at the pinnacle of its power that it goes quiet. And that’s when the writing flows.”

This shook me when I first read it, and it still does. I am not sure if she sees him as a writer because of what she says here, or because she feels so much for him that she can’t think of him any other way. A person of such huge capacity is a writer, says the writer. She is grasping his vision. “He sees each person as the entire world.”

She supposes words into his creative process. “To make this departure, this movement, you need one or two words, for example the word hip and the word sway.” She connects with his creative process by supposing words. Writing. Can he make dresses without the words? Or are the words the first cut of the material?

I’m not sure. But I love to reread this essay.

What’s great about it is not only her thinking but her sentences. They are clear and simple yet they astonish. They do want Verlyn Klinkenborg discusses in his book Several Short Sentences About Writing. They say what they mean, and they do not say anything else. When a writer is able to say what they mean in a sentence, the writing is getting good.

I went back to Verlyn’s piece in the NY Times, Where Do Sentences Come From? He suggests practicing sentences that say what they mean when walking around, living the day. Compose a sentence in the mind, revise it and revise it and when it says what it means let it go and start another. “Before you learn to write well, to trust yourself as a writer, you will have to learn to be patient in the presence of your own thoughts. You’ll learn that making sentences in your head will elicit thoughts you didn’t know you could have. Thinking patiently will yield far better sentences than you thought you could make.”

I have been working with this exercise all week. It is not the same as how I write in my mind, nor is it the same as thinking on paper. I don’t know what it is yet, but I am doing it. I wrote this sentence: My mother wore a green dress and smoked. After moving words around and rewriting several times it became Even wearing her green Yves Saint Laurent dress couldn’t stop my mother from smoking.

I had found something. A character. A story. Not one I wanted to pursue, but that wasn't the point. I moved to another sentence.

I believe that all books are about one subject: writing. I’m surprised when people say they don’t like to read books about writers because as I see it there is no other book. I am always only reading about writing, no matter what a text says literally.

Is this Yves Saint Laurent dress writing? I can see that.