Writing with Dirt Under the Nails

When the wilderness calls, desire follows, hot-blooded and unrepentant

Photo by Deva Darshan on Pexels

As a writer, I’m always looking for a new way to say something that already stirs inside me—a thought or feeling that resists articulation, lodged between synapses like a pearl in an oyster, too tight to dislodge. Some days are hard. The feeling is overwhelming, the urge is intense but the words just won’t come out. They are stuck. And so I go looking for inspiration. Thankfully, I’ve not grown up in the generation of generative AI, so I can still work my creative muscles and strain them through the end of a contraction—though maybe I need a better metaphor than one stolen from gym lingo.

I marvel at how writers unearth those rare earth metals of language—glittering turns of phrase buried deep in the soil of experience, memory, desire, pain, and landscape. As John McWhorter says of language and music, the magic lies in understanding “what precisely makes that song so pleasing, how the different elements work together, why they produce the effect that they do.” His students are lucky—they get to learn from someone as insightful and articulate as him. For the rest of us, that kind of instruction has come from time, experience, and the often rough terrain of living. Life itself has been our writing teacher.

To write, then, is to quest for clarity, for connection, for wholeness. It is to stumble through the forests of doubt and insecurity, hunting for that elusive, shimmering goblet that will hold the right metaphor, the right verb, the honest sentence. But writing isn’t just sacred—it’s carnal. It’s hot, sweaty, and lustful. Sometimes it rises not from thought but from the gut, from the groin, from that wild thrum under the skin. There are moments when the words come like a lover breaking through the door—urgent, breathless, insistent. The page is no longer blank; it’s a body you’re reaching for, trembling with anticipation.

The best writing isn’t polite. It bursts through with raw desire, unfiltered and alive, demanding release. It doesn’t whisper—it moans, claws, takes.

Jim Harrison understood this search deeply. His sentences carry a raw muscularity, a kind of animal grace, yet they settle into quiet meditations on longing, on nature, on the sensual life. “The danger of civilization,” he wrote, “is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.” Harrison knew that writing—real writing—is born not from decorum, but from desire: for clarity, for contact, for the taste of the wild. In Dalva, he describes the complicated passions of his characters against the backdrop of the vast American wilderness: “The moon rose, pale as milk. In that light, we stood naked, and everything human was forgiven.” That forgiveness—both human and cosmic—comes only when the language and the life it describes are in harmony. His work is filled with characters who move through nature and desire with the same reverence: “I sat on the porch in the evening drinking wine and watching the deer edge out of the forest. The body of the woman I loved was in my thoughts, as natural as the trees.” Harrison’s words remind us that writing does not shy away from the erotic or the earthy—it descends into it, draws from it, and transforms it into insight.

Walt Whitman, of course, made a whole theology out of this harmony. He saw the body as sacrament, the earth as lover, and the self as vast, multitudinous, and holy. “I sing the body electric,” he proclaimed, not as metaphor but as literal reverence. In Leaves of Grass, the relationship between man and nature, between flesh and spirit, is not separate from writing—it is writing:

Through me many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

Voices of the diseased and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs.

He did not write to decorate experience. He wrote to liberate it.

Whitman makes no apology for blurring body and soul, leaf and limb, tongue and root. He wrote,

I believe in you my soul,

The other I am must not abase itself to you,

And you must not be abased to the other.

In Whitman’s cosmos, the individual is both god and animal, voice and silence. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he declares—not as boast, but as ontology. His poetry pulses with an uncontainable vitality that seeks to touch everything: skin, sky, language, the lover’s breath.

That’s what makes writing a quest—not just for expression, but for transformation. The Holy Grail, after all, was not merely a cup; it was a symbol of divine understanding, of completion. For the writer, each sentence is a reaching hand, each revision a recalibration of the soul’s compass. We are seekers with pen or keyboard, hoping to transmute fleeting impressions into permanence.

The Holy Grail is not a literal object. It is the moment the sentence finally holds what you meant. It is the one paragraph that, for a second, redeems the chaos of everything before it.

But the chaos cannot be ignored. You see it in Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, where a dead pig thrown at a mosque becomes a spark that sets ablaze not only buildings but relationships, memory, and identity. The language is stripped of ornament, because what can be adorned when describing the unbearable? “He saw the sky was red… not with the rising sun, but with fire.” The character Nathu, who is manipulated into slaughtering the pig, becomes a tragic cipher: he does not understand the consequences, just as writers sometimes do not grasp the weight of what they’re birthing until it is too late. But write we must.

Partition literature (Sahni, Manto, Pritam)—bleeds on the page. Manto’s words stab with precision: “If you cannot bear these stories, it is because we are not strong enough to bear the truth.” His writing does not flinch. It stands in the middle of the street, naked, asking if we still dare to look. That, too, is writing’s burden—witnessing what others turn away from, because someone must.

Amrita Pritam, mourning the raped and discarded women of Partition, calls out in her poem to Waris Shah,

Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu,

kiton qabraan vichon bol

Te ajj kitaab-e-ishq da koi agla varka phol.

(“I call out to Waris Shah today, speak from your grave / And turn the next page in the book of love.”)

Even in devastation, she reaches for the Grail: not peace, perhaps, but at least presence. A voice. A word.

This is where writing meets prayer. Not in its search for answers, but in its act of attention. Writing, like prayer, is a form of presence—a way of standing still in the midst of chaos and saying, I see this, I feel this, I offer this. Jim Harrison, too, reaches toward the sacred—but he finds it through the earthy, the flesh-bound, the instinctual. In Dalva, he writes: “We fought, we fucked, we fed, we fumbled toward each other with a kind of desperation only those who have lived through enough death understand.” For Harrison, reverence doesn’t come from purity. It comes from immersion—in appetite, in grief, in sex, in landscape. His prose reminds us that holiness isn’t always clean. Sometimes it’s soaked in sweat and blood and desire. The body, for Harrison, is the vessel of the sacred. It is through the physical—the hunger, the embrace, the silence after—that something true and enduring is felt.

Abraham Verghese, in Cutting for Stone, gives us writing as healing. His descriptions of intimacy—emotional and physical—are acts of sacred tenderness. When Shiva and Genet make love, Verghese writes: “She climbed on top of him. It was a landscape he knew and didn't know, familiar and mysterious. And in that joining, something old in both of them was mended.” Writing too joins the familiar and the mysterious. It mends. In its most honest moments, it consoles us that we are not alone.

But before the mending, there is the tearing, the loneliness. That is the part no one sees: the blinking cursor, the discarded drafts, the notebook margins filled with questions. Some days, writing is like trying to kiss someone through a glass wall. You can see the feeling. You just can’t touch it.

And yet, when it comes—the sentence, the paragraph, the rhythm that lands—it is a miracle. It is the Grail on the desk, briefly full. But you know it won’t last. The next sentence demands its own pilgrimage.

James Fenimore Cooper, in The Last of the Mohicans, offers us a different kind of Holy Grail—not the cup of Christ, but a chalice of belonging, love, and dignity in a world riven by colonial violence and racial complexity. In a pivotal moment, Hawkeye declares, “I do not call myself subject to much at all... except the laws of nature.” His allegiance is not to empire or nation, but to the wild—to something older, deeper, and ungoverned. For the writer, this resonates. Writing, too, is a return to that primal law: the truth that rises unbidden from landscape, from passion, from uncolonized feeling. Cooper’s wilderness becomes a metaphor for the inner frontier every writer must cross.

There is something sacred in this struggle. Something devotional. Writing is rarely easy, never predictable, but always, in some deep way, transformative. It demands vulnerability, humility, and the courage to begin again. And when it works—when a sentence lands with the breath and weight of what you truly meant—it’s as if you’ve uncovered something ancient and necessary.

But the Grail does not stay found. Each piece of writing is only part of the journey. Tomorrow, the chalice will be empty again. The path must be retraced. The page, as always, will be blank.

This is the mystery and the madness of it: to write is to keep believing that language can hold what life pours into us. That if we shape our sentences with care, they might carry across the river of isolation and reach another soul. That in naming our own wilderness, honestly and precisely, we offer a map to someone else.

Writing is not about mastery. It is about faith.

This is why we write. Not for publication, not even for praise—though we may hunger for both—but for that rare moment when the words align and reveal something we didn’t know we knew. In that sense, writing is less expression than excavation. The writer is not the creator but the archaeologist, brushing dust from a buried truth.

The Holy Grail of writing, then, is not a single prize but a recurring grace. Each time we find it, we are reminded: language is still alive in us. We are not machines. The world—its trees, its aching bodies, its silences and regrets—still needs to be witnessed, one careful sentence at a time.

In the end, to write is to believe—foolishly and faithfully—that meaning is possible. That if we listen hard enough, we can translate the tremble of the inner life into something that touches another. That we can build a bridge from one soul to another, out of nothing but words.

And that is the holiest of quests.

---

Thanks for reading Insights ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.