I value movies first and foremost as a source of images that give form to the inchoate sentiments fluttering around inside my mind, allowing me to gain mastery over them, to capture and then study them, to banish the harmful ones forever and put the others to work. The screengrab above, for instance, is taken from a scene in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) in which Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) uses a device called a “pensieve” to share his memories with Harry (Daniel Radcliffe). Although it wasn’t (presumably) intended to, this scene is a perfect representation of what the writing process feels like to me.
I didn’t realize this immediately; instead, this image sort of got stuck in my head, and my brain reacted to it like a pearl oyster to a microscopic intruder, adding layers, shape, substance. But that’s not right: it might have taken awhile, but I recognized this image, so maybe it acted more like a seed crystal suspended in a saturated sugar solution and attracted those thoughts that had an affinity for it and slowly grew into something big enough to be visible to my mind’s eye.
Whatever. The point is that this image helped me to transform the generalized anxiety that I used to feel whenever I sat down to write into a specific set of concerns that I’m able to cope with and work around. I can hold this image in my mind, consider it: rooting around in one’s head with a stick and extracting memories from it is, judging from Dumbledore’s expression, painful. It presumably entails a certain amount of risk: isn’t it possible that something could be lost in transit between mind and pensieve and become lost forever? And once a memory is shared it no longer belongs exclusively to its original owner: he has in giving up this part of himself surrendered control over it. But it’s worth it, yeah? The risks are far outweighed by the rewards? So why don’t I shut up and write? Or go do something else?
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