I made a very heavy decision today. Plan B to graduate school was some sort of international escapade. The Mookfish came out here briefly and I was enchanted with the idea of losing myself out in the world. I wanted, and have wanted, and still do want craziness; seeing things so few from my square have seen; obliterate my language and perspective; believe in all new dogmas for just long enough to understand and discard them; see from many sides this addled machine we've created, the world. But, I've had goals for this year ahead of me, and I've slept over them long lonely nights, and saw them written out on the horizon from the peaks of equatorial volcanos, and wrote them on my whiteboard so long ago they can't be erased. And so . . .I'm staying in Boise. I'm staying in Boise and staying in my contemptuous job, because it is the best arrangement for me to write. Boise is the easiest place for me to conduct the research I need to really dig into my novel. It is now just scattered pages, missing some glowing factoid in the center that I can only erect by immersing myself in data for awhile. And Boise is the easiest place for me to finalize my short story collection and prepare for self-publication. And it is the easiest way for me to start a vigorous submission campaign to various journals and outlets. It is the easiest place for all of these things because it requires no energy from me. A move means up to two months lost time in preparation and unpacking and troubadouring and settling. And whatever I do I must work . . .here I can make a substantial amount of money with the monastic life I live and will only enforce more stringently. And that is part 2 of the new plan. Working part-time. THe absolute minimum required of me to recieve benefits, which works out to one fewer day of work each week. I will reapply to grad school, and this extended period of work will allow me to be unemployed for the entirety of next summer. This will be the least amount of time responsible to school or work that I have had since I was 15 years old.
So . . .this isn't a decision that I am intoxicated with. But I feel free now. The decision made. The course set. And all of it, finally, arranged to maximize my time at the keyboard.
I posted the above video because its logic has been long interred in my subconscious. A conversation with my brother recently resurrected it, and in the hours since its been swirling. Reading Nietszche at an age where it could do more damage than drugs, I read these words and vaguely understood them. And then marched out into life thinking my short servitude was already over. Raging out at the mores lion-hearted. But, Nietsztche's point is not to lash out and destroy what's been built around you. Not until you are ready at least. First is the long apprenticeship with burden in the desert. The camel phase. The willingness to be oppressed by whatever systems and theses are in place. And only in that conditioning, that battering load, do you really become strong enough to carve out your own space. To destroy so that you can truly create. My ego had me convinced that I had put up with enough, that I was in a position to start making demands. I realize now that is not the case. I have no qualms with further suffering.
(quote: Mark Borchardt video: Intro to American Movie)
Received the last, surprising rejection from Boise State and now will definitely not be attending graduate school in the fall. Still sort of reeling from all that. The absurdity of being "so close and yet so far", that weird exchange of e-mails, getting the news amidst a data entry marathon that had me looking for the appropriate excel tab to paste my disappointment into. There was no real plan for this. And now there are options to be weighed, an examination of priorities, a re-evaluation of what I require to be comfortable. And there are certainly things that can happen with a little will, ranging from fatherly advice to naked recklessness. But when I'm trying to sleep the only thing that seems important is that I make more time for writing. Make the most time for writing. Finals season has me all manic and dramatic and shivery, but in the coming weeks I need to figure out what of many options is most conducive to me writing this big project I've just started to chip away on.
I got a year older the other day. The birthday sort of indistinct from the rest of the week. Long day of work, studying, running errands, going to sleep tired and waking up the next morning the same. I used to have anxiety about getting older. Feeling at 16 or 20 that I was enjoying life as it was, and getting older could only ruin it. And I still get anxious over wasted moments, amplified at landmarks such as birthdays. But I like getting older, mostly. Every day I'm getting closer to myself, getting perspective on all those things I've gone through. Feeling more experienced and capable. Feeling more accomplished and attuned. Feeling a touch more patient and kind. Really starting to see people for who they are, perpetually shrugging of the categories I was trained to think in. Experiencing ever more art in music and film and narrative and design. Evolving in what I see out there in the world, almost giggling when I read something I wrote a long time ago. Or getting shivers when I read the line next to it. The last ten years, if nothing else, have wrought a scattered corpus of words. All stacked up there on my shelves. The bulk of my meagre sentimentalities. On that note, something I wrote to myself five years ago today: "Go ahead and list for me the dozen reasons you're disgruntled, and start with the things you can change . . ." And something from a year later: "Rilke says that in order to be a writer you must first decide or uncover is you 'must' be a writer. Would you just as soon die as permanently discontinue writing?" . . . kids, ha.
So I don't pay attention to the news anymore, and every time I turn on the radio I hear nothing but how the economy is collapsing, and how we'll all be crushed by some tumbling spire. I just want to note: you'll be ok. I'm not saying you'll be happy or comfortable or things will be easy. That's never the case. But you will be alright. And for people in my age group . . . this is the sort of experience we need. Every great generation has its struggle, the thing that gives its people their wisdom, the thing that makes us draw new lines and say 'never again', the thing that helps us understand ourselves and inspires the great works of art. I'm still pessimistic. I still think we have a long way to go, and I still think in a hundred years we might be doomed. But let's approach it with some equanimity, some reserve, some appreciation, and a willingness to change. To revert if that is what's necessary. To give up things. To want new things.
(quote: DrunkO, video: a talk on Albertu Camus's notion of The Absurd)
Last night I pedaled to the other side of town for a party. It was in a shared backyard, the year's first bonfire and keg event with all the contemporary trappings. And I had good conversations and drank, and reconciled, and many of the transient drinking friends I've come to have in Boise showed up. Late, late in the night I'm sitting back inside. Chatting with this person or that, done drinking really but still in no condition to do anything but talk. And then Drunko shows up. He's this neighbor kid that no one really knows, but of course all are invited and while he's gregarious at first, something seems not quite right. And then he disappears and reappears with a half-gallon of JD, the bottle frosted and cold. And I sit in the chair, and surrounded by people who don't seem to notice, I watch DrunkO chug his whisky. Three gulps, four gulps, five, six. . .All told perhaps 7 or 8 shots of whisky without a breath.
And in moments he's gone from overfriendly to arguing with the host. About god knows what. And then he's in the backyard and those of us in the house sort of look at each other. And then someone comes in and says: "hey man, homeboy is out there swinging on people." We file into the backyard and DrunkO is on the ground, screaming at some dude there standing by the fire. And I coax DrunkO to go out into the front-yard. There is already a cut on his face where his face struck a rock, or a piece of wood, or the keg as he fell. And the small group in the yard laughs at him. He screams at them not to laugh, tells them he will destroy them, that he's so goddamn sick of this shit. And I tell him he has to go, that we can't have this here. That he's drunk and no one knows what he's talking about. And he looks at me, not seeing me as part of that collective enemy yet, and he says "you know I can't do that". Like I know his biography, the contents of his soul, the shit he has endured and cannot bear to go through again.
I haven't touched him with any violence, just a friendly intimidation, a voice like I'm taking care of him, but he must submit. And in the front-yard he seems as though he'll simply wander into his house and sleep it off. And the party starts to reform itself. I was too intoxicated to recall every detail, who all was in the front yard, how long it took him too freak out. But within seconds he was kicking the line of cars in front of the houses, pounding on the hoods with both fists like a gorilla desperate to escape. And I hustle back out and put my hands on him to make him stop. And he swings at me. And I grab him, pin his left arm to his head in a deathgrip, drive him into the ground under my weight. For a few moments, the people definitely collecting around us now, I talk to him. Tell him he has to chill out and go home, that he's making a huge mistake. And he says he will go home, crying now, calling out those bastards in the backyard for their bastardery. And when I let him go and we both stand, he starts to punch me again. And we repeat, my voice growing impatient. And we repeat again. Until we've finally wrestled our way onto his concrete porch and as he stands up he starts to punch the nearest person. I grab his arms, he falls to his knees. And that's when they started to punch him. Some kid I never met before, punching like a fighter, lands who knows how many blows to his face. The first couple at least while I'm holding DrunkO's arms. And I let go, and I try to push away this usurper. I get a punch square in the hand that is now swollen and stiff. And I try to pick DrunkO up and get him into his house. And he tells me "I can't . . he beat the shit out of me" and then I see the blood on the concrete. So much goddamn blood. And then someone else runs up and starts punching him, and I push him off. But there's maybe three kids I don't know working him over now, and I can't stop them. DrunkO lays on the concrete, rolling in his own blood, crying, invalid, wrecked.
I'm shaking. Because I wanted so badly for this kid to be the only one among us all responsible for violence. I felt like the work I did to restrain him was in the interests of safety and defusing the circumstances. And then they had to beat the shit out of him, and me holding the poor dreck's arms for the first hard hits. I stood in the yard looking at him, everyone mostly silent now. Yells to call the police, people telling DrunkO that the cops are on the way. My new friend Tyler saying to me: "hey man, let's go to the gas station and buy cigarettes".
We walk to the Stinker, adrenaline and booze in my blood making me light-headed, painless, emotional but not sentimental, rather charged with being in the present. And we buy cigarettes and come out of the Stinker and two cop cars have arrived at the house. We can see them from the parking lot. And so we walk the neighborhood streets, 3am at the earliest now. Having a smoke, watching the fire trucks show up, more cop cars. And we walk until everything dissolves and tell our various police stories. A seemingly endless list of legal altercations between the two of us, feeling respirated like some sort of moonlit outlaws,going to the late-night pizzeria to swap cop stories with the kid making pizzas there. We all seem to have them. Sneaking a joint three blocks from the house watching the last cop retreat. And then we go back, having been away for an hour, close to two. Everyone is still up. The kid that pummeled DrunkO is in the kitchen, and it slowly dawns on me that only Tyler, DrunkO, myself, and this little piece of shit that couldn't help himself know the story. No one seems to know how he got his face bashed in, and the retard with the boner for hurting people doesn't respond to his friend when he asks "how did he get all bloody?". The police took DrunkO to the hospital, and I imagine that this morning was the worst morning of his entire life. We sat around drinking the man's whisky, all room-temperature now, until 5am. Wondering just what in the hell all of that meant. I've never seen anyone lose their mind from alcohol like that, and I've been drinking as a hobby for well-nigh a decade now. I think we all have some inner conflict, some rift between who we want to be, who we are, how the world sees us. And we mostly trudge along with this burden precariously atop our shoulders, silent in gritted teeth thinking we're the only ones that suffer. No solace for freak-outs amongst your peer-group. No airing of existential grievance or tolerance for sensitivity. No aegis for expressing the absurd, because no one wants to hear it. And I think DrunkO is just a sad, sad man. He drank like that to impress us, to show himself as some kind of rockstar Viking in the bacchanal. And we didn't even blink. I imagine how much that must have burned in him, wanting us to see him. Us only laughing. Some of us resolved to take our shots at him because he's an easy target. Some of us no better than him, worse even because at least DrunkO demonstrated some humanity . . .as fragmented and polluted and chaotic as it is. We laughed at him. We drank his whisky. I washed his blood off my hands in the morning, out of my pants this afternoon.
I've begun to take action towards moving to Turkey. The plan being to live and teach in Istanbul from roughly August of this year until July of the next. Following that, I will make another attempt to gain entry into MFA programs. The overall failure of the graduate school try stunned me for a a few weeks. It's easy to think that this lack of validation is the best measure thus far of my own abilities. But this is art. It doesn't work that way. It can only be done with no fear of consequences or failure, with an irrational belief that your work is good and that it will only improve. And to write with the discipline and stimulus I need, new surroundings and daily demands are a must.
But the decision to go to Turkey is motivated by many things. I am dissatisfied in my job and all the possible jobs related to it. I have purposely stumbled onto a time in my life with virtually no responsibilities. I have always wanted to spend enough time in a foreign land to be a citizen of it, to meet its people as an equal, to learn the language, to not merely observe but participate in its culture, to break the narrow views placed on me at birth. I am in love with the world. It's so tremendously big and so much different than you'll come to understand it through television. So beautiful that you can only look at it in small pieces. For all my nihilism and misanthropy and doomsaying, I love this place and hope to soak up as much of it as I can. And do my best to interpret this experience in words as I go. I've dedicated myself to narrative. And this isn't simply reading and writing, narratives are the things we live too. The story of people on this place and at this time, the story of your life starting at the moment you saw first light to the moment you see last. And just thinking of these billions of stories as they interweave and conflict and gyrate and come together and split apart, thinking of that hulking place just outside my window, a great human novel in constant motion that can never and should never be written . . .it's enough to keep me awake at night.
Also. The mookfish is coming out, for the foreseeable future. We will have a time.
The question comes to me now that it's real . . .what relation does the artist have to their parents? Some of us have bohemian 'rents that once tried their own hand in some art or at the very least hold up creativity as something with which to measure other things by. And some parents likely view it as an empty pursuit by which no access to the good life or happiness is granted. My parents are nowhere in this continuum. They barely listen to music, my mother reading glorified romance novels, my father reading nothing at all. They do not watch films, but popcorn movies with whatever actors they prefer. The production of even these instances of art are so mysterious to them that the thing they watch may as well have been dropped from the sky. And yet, I'm trying to include them as much as I can in my circumstances re: graduate school. And somewhere in these last few months it occurred to them that I am writing. A lot. And they wanted to see something. So . . .after they bugged me over the course of several of our weekly phone calls, I relented and decided to send them something. I thought over a half-dozen short stories that may be suitable. This one discarded for all the drugs done in it, that one put aside because the protagonist is too close to my father, a third overlooked because it would simply be too damn weird for them to ever look at me the same. And I settled on this one as it seemed the most neutral. And even it has vomit, and alcoholism, and swearing, and a man's pubic hair catching fire. They called me today after having read it, and said: "thanks', 'it looks good', 'are all those countries real countries? or did you come up with some of them?'. Now, I don't expect them to provide incisive critique. But I don't know how to talk to them about writing, it is so far removed from their world that I might as well discuss my love for some forgotten tribal rite. And yet I came from them. Somehow.
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A fellow student that I've had workshop classes with has been published in a contest wherein this work also competed. She has not been published before and in almost all cases I would be happy for her success despite my slim envy. But the nature of her work, and the small success it has been granted, disturbs me. See, in my inability to get things published or gain acceptance into most of the schools to which I've applied, I've suggested as one of my disadvantages the content of my stories. I've identified a continuity in the themes and characters and plot and perspective and aesthetic of the work that gains traction. And it is not what I do. I've told people that what is looked at as good in 2009 is work that is memoirish, sentimental, banal, depicting love as it has existed on television lo these many years. Work that when it strays from reality, wanders into magical realism and thus calms the chaos and confusion of living in the modern world. Magical realism is a cop-out, a boiling down, a superstitious response to those things not understood. And my fellow student's work is all of these things. I won't go further into detail about the work itself, but when I read it in class I recall thinking and noting that "this, this in front of me, is the opposite of what I want to write". Further, it is done badly. Sloppily, with cliched details, mortified progresion, warmed-over nostalgia.
And, as counterpoint, what I try to write is what I think needs to be done, in this moment, in narrative. A sort of NeoNaturalism in that the characters, like us, are bound to lives they cannot control by forces of nature. And that the predominate element of that nature, in a postsurvivalist world, is the environment created by our own culture. And further, that the environment does not have absolute control over our fate, but that for our constraints to be surpassed we must be willing to accept the greatest risks. Death and its metaphors are the gamble one must tolerate to become something other than circuitry exposed to the weather. And I try to document this alienating environment we occupy, present characters with circumstances at the furthest edge of confusion and possibility and reconciliation. It is not science fiction, but the leveraging of the unusual to suggest how very little sense we can make of this nature that shapes us, and that we fight against, and that we try, riddled with anxiety and doubt, to understand. In this milieu there is no room for hokey magic to resolve complications, there is only the paucity of explanation and the unsettling discomfort of feeling alone and perturbed when everyone else seems calm and aligned. It may not be the materials that everyone chooses, but they are honest ones and they come from a life I have led that has been fraught with uncertainty and nervousness and frustration and ceaseless inquiry to little avail but temporary contentment. I do not traffic in memoirs, because no person can truly understand another and to fictionalize such an account is as if to say that the writer has feared to live the life they depict, and wishes for some other reality that is not true. So. Fuck your memoirs, unless they be your real life. And fuck sentimentality unless you've loved and lost it and accepted it and your scars will not heal. I have some that still raise pink and shiny from my skin. And fuck magic, go to religion if you wish the world to make sense.
Amidst many pages of scattered myth and deliberate metaphor and contradictions and the senselessly sanctioned and sacralized, Ecclesiastes is an existential lamentation. In this book there is no immortality after death, no promises of heaven to sate the ache of your drudgery, and no threats of hell to brand you in your misdeeds. You simply live for some period of time, and then die. And the fear of death emerges from the notion that this brief spasm will be all you have of experience: "Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labor. This also, I saw, was from the hand of God." That is, supplanting God with Nature, we are not meant to live in some expectancy of the afterwards. We are to enjoy this thing, and to find labor that feeds our soul.
Further on in the book, Solomon (or whoever wrote this, it isn't historically certain) finds a logic of meaning within the works of man (all of which are relegated to "vanity and grasping at the wind") that he builds out of aphorisms. "For a dream comes through much activity, and a fool's voice is known by his many words". The ideal dream itself is not named, simply what follies to avoid in its pursuit. He identifies things we know to be true about ourselves: "He who loves silver will not be satisfied with silver; nor he who loves abundance, with increase. This is also vanity." God here does not come into the equation. This statements of inerrant truth go on and on. I've read Ecclesiastes three times in as many days, and I can only relate it to Buddhism. But a cynical and hopeless Buddhism, one without proportionate consequence and balance, and without immortality.
I recently read an interview with William Faulkner. I find his attitude towards writing gratifyingly aligned with my own. No claims for parity in talent, of course, but he like me believes in the primacy of the work. Of the sole prioritization of turning thoughts into text. Believes that in the devotion, there is no good and evil:
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.
This is not something that will be perfected by dalliance. The thing that must be written can only be written under the desperate urgency to write it, the possession by some image that will not die until it has been perfectly depicted, the character that will not cease its pleading until it occupies space outside yourself.
Faulkner talks too about things that relate to the academic pursuit of writing. MFA programs did not exist in his time, yet he calls into question the usefulness of institutions in the path to creation. Nothing good comes from taking money from an institution, he says, and those interested in learning technique might find bricklaying or surgery more fulfilling. There is no learning to write, and this holds true for everything difficult, everything that requires self-sacrifice, there is only the doing it and finding the most direct route from one's imagination to their work. Trial and error ad infinitum, and the binding of a book no gesture that it's truly been completed in its perfect form. We all always approach perfection haphazardly, asymptotically, in awe. And yet all that is needed to engage in this thing is a pen and a pad, no security financial or otherwise, no comfort or appeasement will do the work. It is all on one's shoulders. And this is one part that appeals to me. The abstraction of art places the entire practice outside of human frailties, demands a superhuman convergence of impulse and memory and patience and sensitivity. And it is done by one person, however cobbled from the works of others, it is wrought by one set of hands alone.
