Endless Distances

Admit it. You visited this blog, read the title, and wondered what blackberries have to do with my writing. Maybe you read the line about the "classic cocktail" and recognized that a Blackberry Bramble is a gin-based drink. Then you thought, "that explanation seems too simple. There must be something more going on with that name."

You were right. 

The cocktail line came first. I told my cubicle mate that I was going to start a blog, and she told me to bill it as a cocktail and pun on the word spirit. I liked her suggestion, and I started to look for drink names with personal significance. When I found Blackberry Bramble in a cocktail compendium, I knew I had a winner. 

You can't understand what the name means to me without reading a famous poem by Robert Hass. To find that poem, "Meditation at Lagunitas," click here.  

I could write so much about the poem. I'll ignore the part about blackberries for now and take the line that stands out most to me and probably anyone who has ever read the poem: "Longing, we say, because desire is full/ of endless distances." 

Writing is also full of endless distances. There's a distance between the author and the audience, a distance between the different ideas a writer synthesizes, and, perhaps most importantly, a distance between the blank page a writer initially sees and the text that eventually emerges. Good writing must bridge all these gaps at once. That's what makes it so challenging. 

As anyone who has ever set out to express a thought in words can testify, writing is an act of longing. 

That's why I named my blog Blackberry Bramble. I appreciate Hass's insight into the nature of language and cognition, which he expresses so elegantly in his reference to fruit. In the end, though, my Blackberry Bramble is not a grand statement about how humans use words. It is a simple reminder that each time I write, I take one more step towards bridging the endless distances in my life.