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.
(Quote: TVOTR, Video: Nietzsche's Last Days) [I've got a draft of a story here . . .I really don't like the title.]
Moving in coming months. To a one bedroom or studio that I'll furnish with nothing but my floordesk and bedframe and whiteboard and collage and cat. And my only dishes coffee cups and plates handed down to me from a mythic drugsmuggler. All this coincident with being as close to home in Boise as I ever thought I might. No retirement, but the bachelor herd here will be missed. And moving might mean diluting my socialization time, in these 5 unraveling weeks between semesters I've had too much fun to wake up with a clean conscience. I found the Dionysian riot here, it can't always be stopped by force.
I made a friend the other night, and despite her smiles and laughs she was afflicted with depression. To be treated with chemicals. And I said: "On September 4th, 2008 I am really very happy." And I meant it because in the barrage of streetlights and cigarette smoke and declamations of seizure and embrace I truly was. And ignorant of the rising waters and circling helicopters, I stacked up complications and distractions until the Sunday following anxiety bound my arms and legs and I laid fetal listening to the absurdity of Kool Keith thinking nothing was real and everything mattered. I have no time for this.
Each school of literary theory says something. Even when there was no school but one-man philosophers leading us of out caves, things still stand that were said. And even as thought fractured and its pieces grew spines, Structuralism said things, and Marxism said things and the Romantics said things that we can still discuss until you sober up. But, I've come upon the one that hits me hardest. Literary Darwinism is the use of Evolutionary Psychology ("the application of adaptionist logic to the study of the architecture of the mind"-Leda Cosmides) to further understand texts. The field is nascent and fumbling and promising there glistening in its afterbirth. One example is this: a common theme in literature (and in life) is the tension between "selfish" choices (a life of independence, even rebellion) and feelings of brotherhood and concern for one's community or family. In evolutionary biology, we understand that the individual is a survival machine weaponized to replicate the species selfishly. but behaviorally we see altruism as a foundation of society because it is an effective way to survive (cooperation is genetic technology). Selfishness vs. altruism is an ingrained tension that we struggle with our entire life (conservatism vs. liberalism). It only makes sense that great literature should recreate this anxiety. There are other examples. All similarly revealing. Im writing a paper that will partly analyze Heart of Darkness through the means of this criticism.
There is some evidence in Evolutionary Psychology that indicates that success breeds success (The Success Cycle) and failure breeds failure (the Maladaptive Cycle). That when we win, we relish the next fight irrespective of talent and capacity. And that when we lose, we tend towards depression and perhaps self-loathing. If true (and the genetic support for this is still murky to me, it has a whiff of group selection) this process led to difference amplification and thus accelerated the developments in men of RHP (Fighting Capacity). What is interesting are the results of repeated failure. We get sad and hopeless and forlorn. Or we get angry. Which do you think is the best strategy to extricate ourselves from the Maladaptive Cycle?
Writing: If I had not had my meagre measure of pain, I could not express it. And if I had lived hermetic and alone I could not name a character or depict expression. And if I had never been in love I could not explain warmth. And if I had never lost it I could not explain the cold. And if I had not screamed my share of rebel yells, you'd have no reason to turn your ear to my calls for philosophical riots or ignoring the rules. And if I had not seen trouble I could not commune with the downtrodden. And if I had not slept joyously after bacchanal and bleary-eyed passion, I could never pound a happy thing into this keyboard. I am a lowercase 'a' artist, these days more than ever, and the only lesson I could ever give to another on it: Be willing to suffer, be reckless at times, be withdrawn at others. Be embarrassed and proud. Be everything, all at once and sleep only to keep from falling down.
Had a saturday of dormant coincidence finding purchase in farewells and the pearlescent pre-dawn after them. Woke up smiling like you'd think I never do if you read this thing. Knowing: You cannot have your name on a dozen rosters and not be noticed by someone, or everyone. And every word you say is inscribed on some ledger, even if the subconscious. I've found a social niche in Boise, or rather a half-dozen of them to poke my head and speak my irreverence in. More and more people to miss with every pined-for weekend. Suddenly, my monklike existence has been dosed by grace like I have been toiling in some medieval cell inscribing bibles by hand, the wind and rain swirling through my window . . . and then one day summer breaks and I notice how many green things have grown at the foot of the monastery's door.
In Oregon there's a mushroom thousands of acres big. In reality it's neither one huge organism or millions of separate ones, but a network of function and communication. It knows if you are present, it reroutes the passage of nutrients and information when a node is broken. When conditions are right, a mushroom breaks through the surface like an inconsolable weed and sucks life from its environment. No real point here, other than I really want to stand on it and watch the puke yellow growth thinking and working and practically bubbling with activity out to the horizon.
"Sometimes you just need a two-day bender to clear your head." And of all the laws I've broken, trespassing somehow feels the best. To rework the environment to suit your needs. Not to destroy, but to undercut the very notion that we can own things and cordon them off and hold back. And so at 3am, diving from the high-board and splashing whiskey-laden into the deep-end like a gangly ape I feel both the ecstatic solitude of the village idiot and the swelling outrage of myself ten years ago clawing around for what it needs. I no longer feel that I have to justify my behavior in some teetering matrix of what would be acceptable "if every other person did it", that I only need to explain it to myself and retain consistency. Fix holes in my notions as I find them, and make up for missteps and going too far in the only way I really can.
The thing about love. Every time you've been mired in it and imagine some timeless definition of it . . .it becomes a different animal. And so you, scarred and adorned and maybe even a bit fortified and cautious, see utterly different dollar signs and cartoon hearts over things than your Sim did a decade previous when all the romance you knew was television and the only regrets were in songs.
Somewhere there's a lonely whale navigating the depths looking for his friends and family. To never find them. Cheer up, you're not dead yet.
