[quote: Henry Miller, video: Doug Stanhope - Excessin Moderation]
So the thing has a new format . . .which might abruptly change again soon. I'm not an expert at this, and I'm lazy. But I realized my blog was the ugliest webpage I visit, so something's got to give I suppose.
-- Since I graduated, I've been spending 5 out of 7 nights and most of the weekend by myself. Really trying to get something done right now and enjoying it, so no lament. But, on the growing list of lessons learned in solitude is a big fat one: learn to enjoy the memory instead of missing the thing. Also, have a pet and talk to it. Have your favorite drank on hand once in awhile. Have tiny elements of routine but recognize when they don't work anymore. Own a lot of music and put it on random once in a while. Remember to eat. Sing a bit. Get some sleep. Just use the goddamn air conditioning. Have landmarks on your calendar that you look forward to, plan to have something in particular done by then. Don't miss the really important, biographical shit. It's really been fantastic, but I realized the other day that I have an inside joke with myself. I'm not sure what that means.
--
I figured out how to sidestep cliche. See, by focusing on some aspect of the cliche (in my case, I'm working on a piece with an amnesic in a supporting role) and making it as realistic as possible, beneath the simplification and convenience the cliche wields as a notion, you make it new. You subvert the cliche, almost make a commentary in it's usage. So, for instance, Amnesia is a widespread trope in narrative (after I had my basic idea, I accidentally came across two books and one film with amnesics). IN researching how amnesia actually operates, I found that it has not, to my knowledge, been shown for what it is. In movies and books it almost always appears as a loss of memory starting at the moment of brain injury. However, most commonly appears in real-life as both a loss of access to previous experiential/declarative memory and an inability to create new long-term memories.This has interesting side-effects: 'muscle memory' is retained and can be learned, a memory function called priming works surprisingly without experiential memory of the thing being primed, cognitive skills (problem-solving, playing music) often remain. Most intriguing to me is that the amnesic is able to remember sequence of events for as long as they remain highly engaged in processing ongoing causality (i.e. when they're in the 'zone' they can remember back to the beginning of the 'zone'). Anyway. It seems such a rich ground for narrative, so many aspects of it grow plots.
(quote: ATTN , video: snippet of a Cornel West interview)
I think the significance of an era grows in the years following. And I think that in 2009 we can start to see how this one sneaking out the door will be written in history. We'll look back on it as the time when technology really started to make us insane, extra-dimensional, and frenetic. And it will be remembered for violence in all hemispheres, just as each decade before it, but now we watch our craziness together in real-time and have to think about it and wonder what we can do before, alas, we realize nothing. And again we were fooled by hucksters and greedheads, and we'll never beat them because they work harder than us. And we remained enamored with silly contrivances and bad food and economic imbalances and ourselves, because that is all part of who we are. But there's a place for everything now, like there wasn't before, and our outliers and freaks and special people all get room on the crowded internet to seek their brethren. This is the year at which we might look back and see the beginning of technological saturation, not an end to further development of course, but a time when our telecommunications mojo became our over-arching human religion. How we came to solve problems and cause them.
This year is something biographical for me as well. I gained honorable discharge from another university, and having no classroom in the fall I'm poised to write more than I ever have in my life. This last month like 3 of my previous best combined. And I learned more about how to do it than in any class I could ever take. And if I could wrangle one piece of advice for a creative person, it would be 'work your ass off'. It will be so worth it.
Had a workshop for this story. Really good response and a worthwhile conversation about its problematic ending. The piece was filled with a few small experiments, techniques I had never really tried. One of these was an attempt to present expository information in as interesting a way as I could muster. Expository writing has always been problematic for me. It's a question of aesthetics more than anything, what is the perfect degree of information required for the story to have its effect? Clinical rehashing of past events is an overdose, it turns the work into some brief essay on a topic, makes the events impersonal and strategic-seeming. And flashbacks that are non-diegetic to the scene, segregated from the timeline, almost never work. They are clunky and out-sized and intrusive. But the information needs to be presented. And I think the only way to get it into the narrative without boring the reader to tears is to remember that everything is made up of narrative elements. 'It is stories all the way down'. More information can be packaged into sub-stories than a listing of details, and by conveying details through these smaller stories there are greater opportunities for characterization and development of an emotional disposition in the characters toward their circumstances. Anyway, interesting problem in the art of fiction.
(quote: Cage, video: Robert Sapolsky's Class Day Lecture 2009)
For anyone in corporate environs, remember that they can't eat you. Today I got screamed down to by this fascist underachiever because I'd stumbled upon her fuck-up. And she wrote an e-mail to my boss calling me "arrogant" and my move "uncalled for". She is some weighty entity in the department of purchasing for our biggest client, and I spent all day hoping that everyone else would see the absurdity in it that I did. But the important thing is that I've come to a point where I can't muster concern. And I feel sad for people that need to attack ad hominem to feel valuable somehow. If she had ever created a piece of art in her life (and I'm not saying she should be an artist) she would understand that there is nothing so petty as small dominations, that there's little important outside of how well we treat each other, that no one ever really wins an argument. So, she can have her ignorance and frustration, and she can get up in arms and yell about something she doesn't understand . . .but she can't escape this little tyranny of hers and with each passing day she'll crawl an inch deeper into her bunker, and mount more guns for cutting down passersby. But some day she'll wonder why no one loves her, and she'll say that it is somehow the fault of everyone else
I'm the last person you want raising a kid. But, the admin in our office has this son. They've been long-hauling it through this incredibly messy divorce and he's going to be a senior in high-school and at least one end of the tug-of-war is pulling petty entitlements that end up encroaching on him. The poor kid's got no freedom. And this is his first summer with a car and a job, and that battered Hyundai ought to be burning up McDonald's wages and it's driver should be making one bad decision per night. Not felonies mind you, but something that his mother wouldn't advise. But his dad won't let him have the car when he's at His house, and reluctantly as his mother might try to push him out into the world it's difficult when he spends every weekend playing family with a step-mother he hates. Our admin asks me for advice and I preface everything I say with the same thing I began this with, and I try to say something reasonable. All the while remembering what that age was like for me. And I have to say that I was reckless and up-late and going to bonfires and learning to be myself in a world I now supervised. I made bad decisions that had consequences and rode in the backs of police cars and snuck in after curfew and there was a party if the folks were gone. I tried to live it up. But I made good decisions too. And I came out the other end of it battered and a bit wiser and enriched. Most of all I learned how to take risks, because I tested them and either failed or succeeded. So, I'm not sure if I could give any advice to my co-worker, but I think I could muster some for her kid.
--
Writers have a reputation for drinking. There are theories about this, how they set their own schedules or how they don't have the same kinds of responsibilities as others. Both of these are bunk, though they might help. I have neither of these luxuries, I work all week and hit the keyboard at 6pm every night after. Yet, I drink my fair share. And have for a long time. On my mother's yard stick, probably too much. There must be other reasons. There is maybe some slightly higher sensitivity in creative types, one that gives itself to anxiety and joy (the twin advocates of whiskey and beer), and there is maybe a desired dissociation from the myriad failures and tedium of perfectionism. In the last few weeks, however, I've become convinced that a writer mostly drinks so that they can maintain the absurdity that they are in fact writing. That they spend hour after hour sprinkling dust into the void. It is not unlike when in a movie theatre you watch two hours of imagination and buy every line, but this suspension does not end and it runs on booze.
You know a person is a hermit because they talk about their cat, animals that matriculate to their backyard, queer things they've noticed about neighbors. They carry very little gossip around with them, not out of strict disinterest but ignorance. They have inside jokes with an audience of one. They name things in their depopulated world, assign superfluous superstition to things to mystify what is otherwise routine. I'm gradually drifting that way and have been. My brain is being rewired to run on silence and the detritus of my third-eye. The extrovert that I was for my formative years waits for my free night of the week. It doesn't even tap its feet anymore, it has learned that its time will come. I've taken to saying lately that I enjoy getting older. That when people groan about their birthday they should be grateful, for each day that passes is a day in which they are more themselves. And maybe it doesn't work that way ubiquitously but I find that as I'm getting up there in years I am gaining some scant wisdom, a longer fuse, a realignment of my self-consciousness from paralytic to snide content.
The Observer Effect my metaphor for everything now. I've been researching the means by which we measure personality, a desperate urge for one of the characters in the long-form book I'm working on now, and it seems many of the methods involve self-reporting. The individual taking them knows they're answering questions intended to gauge their empathy quotient, or systemization style, or Autism Spectrum score, or Briggs-Meyer profile. And even if consciously every answer is honest, the fact that one is reporting on themselves introduces such margins of error as to undermine any credibility. Taking the test the second time is like not taking it at all. The basic unit of our personality is the individual choice, no matter how small, and even in the act of answering one simple question we are further defining ourselves. The measurement appeals to ideals and envies and disappointments. And in coming to further understand this, and realizing that my character would need to reach this same conclusion, it occurred to me that narrative is the only real personality test. Stories qualitatively define aspects of an individual, this function perhaps their primary value in the post-Survivalist world. And they are scalable: even your top drunken anecdote says something meaningful about the person you are. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a well-researched biography may be the best technology we could concoct to model the testee's brain. Fiction on the other hand designates archetypes, filling them in with conditioning that could only happen in the setting's environment, forcing decisions on them in unique arrays and documenting the results.
I've been studiously editing a couple short stories (and just finishing up a first draft and a finalish one of two pieces that comprise nearly sixty pages) and feeling the process become more careful and open-ended. I concern myself less with getting a few pages edited than I do spending a couple solid hours at it, whatever the results. And so I read a paragraph three times, or four, and change a comma or add an article or delete one. Or the whole paragraph goes out the window in favor of a new one. Recently a friend sent me a copy of a book self-published by a guy I know from years ago. A guy I'm happy has survived. It was a cool moment to open that envelope and read that first page. I haven't got to all of it yet, and can say little about the content so far. But there was a glaring typo on the first page that made me cringe. My anxiety over the typo (not in this blog so much, but in fiction) keeps me up at night, and I almost imagine them as I read. I plan to self-publish a book later this year, a collection of short stories, and I'm phobic about the misspelled word, or the poorly chosen comma. And yet the process seems interminable, like picking through weeds for broken glass.
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.
---------
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: The Judge, video: Black Moth Super Rainbow)
I'm submitting a proposal to the Modern Language Association for their annual conference in Philadelphia. The topic is the "Evolutionary Origins of Narrative". This subject represents the confluence of much of the extracurricular study I have done over the last two years, and upon suggestion by a professor multiple thesii immediately jumped to mind. Basically, evolutionary psychologists, philosophers of art, and kids with nothing better to do, are trying to understand what function art serves from an evolutionary perspective. If it is in fact a functional adaptation, in what way does it aid reproduction? There are generally about 5 theories that I am familiar with. Steven Pinker suggests that art has no evolutionary function, that it is a mere byproduct of complex brains. Others suggest that art is simply the effort of individuals to become appealing in the eyes of the opposite sex. Others proclaim that art is a survival strategy that benefits either social cohesion or mental organization. A fifth theory suggests that art began as a means by which to share attention. None of these is quite complex and holistic enough for me. None of them answer the fundamental four questions required to identify an adaptive mechanism (or in Pinker's case, show how art does not meet some of these requirements). The four questions for adaptation, as formulated by Niko Tinbergen are: 'What benefit does the adaptation provide for reproduction?', 'What is the mechanism by which this adaptation occurs?', 'What is the origin of the adaptation in human evolutionary history?', 'When does the adaptation develop in the individual human?'. Any theory for the evolutionary origins of narrative or art will be forced to handle these four questions. My proposal is to synthesize a new theory focusing on narrative specifically. Essentially, a sort-of anthropology or genealogy of the "Narrative Mechanism" in human behavior. In evolutionary psychology, every definable behavioral phenomenon comes from a 'mechanism', a system of actions, feedback, requirements, problematization strategies, perspective, and subconscious analysis. My paper would, more or less, begin to define the Narrative behavioral Mechanism. Essentially, I believe that narrative as a meme in cultural evolution have worked so well because they are aligned with the way that we sort information already. All of our myths are in narrative form, and the most efficient way to convey some idea is generally to have an accompanying narrative (anecdotes work better than statistics, even when they are misleading). It is a result of our biological understanding of time: we think everything begins, develops, climaxes, and dies. The world around us does this through the seasons, our bodies do this, most phenomenon that we observe seem to behave along the archetypal pattern of narrative. This way of thinking met up with the burgeoning survival value of symbolic language. As we became more complex philosophically, eventually narrative was used as a means of approaching existential anguish (an affliction that may be the true separation of man from beasts). And now in the bourgeois world we occupy, where survival is a given, the role of narrative has been displaced. The art and it's artist have been alienated from their homeland, the Pleistocene. Anyway, much more on this later . . ..
---
I've developed a new hobby. I put a draft of something I've been working on in my jacket and walk the mile downtown and deposit myself on the worst lit chair in all of 10th Street Tavern, and I drink whiskey and make red marks on the paper until something adequate becomes something good. Then after a couple hours, in the dark, I walk back home. I take the most circuitious route possible, with something disjointed and beautiful on the headphones. Look for fences to climb, buildings to surmount, etc. The other night I . . .well, I'll keep that moment to myself. It was wonderful to just be cold in the dark alone. Seeing the life that we avoid with our houses and streetlights and televisions and cars.
(quote: Faulkner, video: Chimpanzee Problem Solving")
The woman that lives next door to me sometimes goes out on her back porch and screams. She screams at god, her children who do nothing for her, some entity that strikes me as The Man but she probably understands as misfortune. Today I was in the backyard enjoying the sunset, sitting on a cooler, having a smoke and a beer, reading. I heard her sliding door creak open, watched through the slats of our privacy fence as she sat down on her step. Heard her beer crack open. And for a moment we just drank together. I read a page of my book. And then she starts to cry. A stifled cry like a war widow. And then the vibrato of sob pooled, where the cry starts to make a whining sound. And then she says something. Then says it louder. Then yells "Why doesn't it work?". The question Camus would have asked had he been an Engineer. And then she scolded her grown gone children, they never help. And then she demanded of god to know why he did this to her. And then she cried, the way we don't think people cry; with that 'huh-uh .. uh-oh" getting loud in the black trees and pink darkening sky. Her shouts lasted longer than my tolerance. I went back inside. Finished my beer. Cracked the window open so I could just hear her. That inconsolable grief. I don't know what a person is to do with that.
Reclusive as the days get longer. Habits developed in winter now wincing at the sun, now demanding some middling interval. Punctuation that let's me breathe. Dwindling social interaction somehow makes every one of them more valuable. But it's only half on purpose, the other part the circumstances of grinding. I've got these two classes that demand a novel of reading and two days of writing per week. And my every opinion in them is contrarian, apparently.
I've been rejected by the University of Pittsburgh. I think that if I get rejected ubiquitous, I'm going to take the survival money I've socked away for grad school and move back east. Not Michigan, but closer; somewhere I don't know anyone. Get a job there working part-time (as much to meet new people as anything. Something physically demanding.) and write. Take two years working on the thing that I plan on doing as my thesis. The Ex Nihilo Creative Writing Program. Sign up now.
(Quote: MF DOOM, Video: Keith O. Special Comment on Prop. 8)
I've come to realize that my political perspective boils down to a theory of what government has authority to do, and where that authority comes from. The government is our agreement on how to operate, a system developed to collectively protect and promote one another's livelihood. As a consequence we have police and fire and health services and educational systems, and as economic cooperation we have roads and business regulations. I don't believe that any government has the authority to impose rules on anything that doesn't substantially effect the agreement. The government cannot tell you you cannot smoke marijuana, or marry someone of your own sex. It also cannot arbitrarily delegate huge sums of your money through deliberate and secretive strategization. It cannot tell you to protect yourself from anything. It cannot tell you where and when to work. It cannot make you change your personality. It cannot meet nonviolence with violence. We need to rethink what it is that our government does in the sphere of our life. Every government that distends our agreement, or degrades our humanity . . .is a usurper and a tyrant. I think of these things in light of two very recent legal anomalies. Pot took one small step towards legalization, and we will watch as the Federalies attempt to crack down on one more complex of nooks and crannies. This slow progress will make the war on drugs more ridiculous with each DEA budget, and more absurd with each $100 ticket that replaces jail time. Proposition 8, in CA, is a different breed. The most "liberal" state in the union rescinded its decision to allow gay marriage. Homosexuals are less free than the rest of us, even in what people think of as our freest state. This 'rule', outside of the bounds of our agreement, is a lie, an impossibility. The materialization of an ideology based to its core on lies and self-deception and pitiful hatred. We do not have the permission, the authority, to decide another's life like this. We do not have the right to take away that which we cannot give. A supporter of Proposition 8 is a fascist and a repulsive artifact of a past that I want nothing to do with.
The past two weeks I've been swimming in a head cold. I sweat in my sleep, I wake up with a broken nose, food is unappetizing. This gets in the way of everything.
I had the best workshop of my short career. This story excited positive comments from the full round of cynics. There is an old man in the class that seemed bewildered and frustrated about it, he spent 5 minutes articulating some dissatisfaction that no one else could follow. Though of course, that happens every week. I plan on putting the story in the above link in my graduate school application package. I'd appreciate any commentary. It is not of the MFA aesthetic, and that may be what I like about it best.
As part of the grad school application process, I'm currently studying for the GRE. I find myself using bigger words in conversation. Perhaps only my Marxists and Anarchists will see it, but the discourse, the subtext of the GRE . .the actual words they use to compose questions are oppressive and corroborate the dominant ideology. For example: "Fueds tend to arise in societies that lack centralized government, when public justice is difficult to enforce, private recourse is more brutal." and "However, the devious act of physically pilfering something from a record store is hardly present in the action of pressing a keyboard button from the repose of one's home." and an emphasis on the value of Organic Solidarity as described by Durkheim, and a dozen other subtle reinforcements of pragmatic American thought. Also, in the process of preparing for graduate school applications, I'm struggling to figure out what to submit. I like the things I've written most recently, but there is an inkling that these are not the ideal candidates in form or point or style. They are not MFA stories. I have written those too . . .but in the tail-end of this summer I've changed my game. I don't know which is best to present . . .
Everything is becoming very real. The latent precipitating and becoming the standard-bearer, the ache in my bones. Peeling off skin before it's ready, the musculature and capillaries raw and fresh to the air. I can smell it in my sleep. This move was another remove from what I remember. And now I'm a thousand miles, and one more reversal and negation from home. Nowhere is home. Everywhere is home.
I felt a twinge of fear. Good, resource-holding fear like some diluted perversion of what ancestors felt as the seasons changed. The financial crisis, coupled with lay-offs and money-troubles of those around me, engendered one lonely second where I reconsidered the wisdom of this whole MFA deal. And then radical reversion . . .security is a weakness, comfort is for hospice . . .sometimes we have to go into the cold with no jacket.
(Video: Terrence McKenna-Nobody Is Smarter Than You Are, quote: Virginia Woolf)
As I get older I see things that will not change for me: I will get angry at small things, I will feel tenderness and try to hide it, I will watch people and note their attributes, I will disdain the authoritative, I will revel in the arts, I will seek science to correct my assumptions, I will suffer and celebrate, I will write. And all these things are what comes closest to your soul, comprise your consciousness, hold the names of your ancestors . . . Almost everything else will change: you will learn new things, and meet new people, and scrape by in new places, and the winds of politics will change, and good times will precede bad, and you will cry and laugh. But the anxiety (in all senses) of what life will be like when we are older can be shouldered and absorbed: You are already who you are. There is no other You waiting for its time to emerge.
I do not believe in writer's block. This is not to say that I have never experienced a dearth of fresh thought; I'm often exhausted, hung-over, stressed, anxious, addled. But I've found that even in the most uninspired evening there is revision to complete, reading to do, dreams to interpret, conversations to have. See, sitting at the word processor is only one component, if the largest, of doing this thing. The processor in the head never, ever stops. [BTW, updated the Short Stories page so it contains everything legible from the last year or so. I've got another three stories in rough draft that will seep onto that page]
I told my bosses that I will be going to grad school next year, confirmed suspicions I know they had by the way they reacted. There was a relief in it, like when the unnoticed machine in the next room stops whirring and you suddenly hear every detail. I had been holding onto this scrap of dishonesty, grasping it close like I belonged to secret societies and my name on their roster spelled disaster. I let it all out, and not a word to mislead: my current gig was the best I could hope for when I graduated, I have enjoyed getting to know these guys, I am willing to accept whatever possible impact this might have on my 'career'. And then these middle-aged men, married, committed to jobs they neither hate or love, smart and insightful and prosaic, spoke words of encouragement. To them this became something I had to do, they tipped their figurative hats to my dedication and my "balls". They asked to read things that I've been working on. They lamented the day when I would no longer be in the office. Even now, they're considering keeping me on the payroll part time . . .so when I'm eating Ramen in some squalid flat god knows where I can plug into the Internet and make more money then I'm worth to anyone.
(video: Paul Newman [RIP] in Cool Hand Luke; quote: T.S. Eliot)
Great stories end and are punctuated by death or departure. And, too, I think our lives are shaped by how we leave and how we die, as much as they are on how we arrive and are born. For the narrative of your live to be of any value it must be fragmented and broken upon hardships, ensconced and mutated by love, stretched thin and cultivated by your work, and fortified and weaponized by your willingness to allow it to change. I have asked for no easy things in life, and despite my fortune I've brooked no accolades undeserving, swiped no credit under false pretenses, assembled no houses of cards that I did not intend to leave to the inevitable wind. Like the myths of Oceania I've always felt my heritage, one I scrapped together from books and hallucinogens and frustration, was to move continually. Make land, and terraform and plant things and watch seasons change, and then disembark. From one island to the next; absorbing, seeing, taking, leaving, until the waters are untraversable and I have to choose sitting still or dying.
All this year I've been on course for one short-story draft a month. I've made it to October, perfectly on course even with a half-dozen things that were discarded on page 8 and mid-month. But now, I need two polished stones from the wreckage so I can mail it to a dozen schools around the country and cross fingers. So it's edit mode for a few weeks, redlining shit I wrote a year ago before I was who I am. As a writer everything that I did not write within the last 10 minutes feels amateur, inexperienced, naive. But the more I read things, and pick through the 120 pages I've committed as draft over the last year . . .there is this thing like pride glowing in my belly.
Seven hundred billion dollars, like some stultified proof that our money isn't real anyway. And then what does the time it took to earn it mean? In percentages, in appendages, in slack-jawed dawns peeling possessions from their packaging. And who are these people that may take it from you? In namesake, in descendancy, in half-solved puzzling over the taut sky darkening. There is no threshold for success, here. Debates pull teeth like 'existential threat', like war undermines our humanity. No advocating violence, but we've killed since time unreal . . .the philosophical catastrophe is that they've come to think our livelihood is their's.
Everything in flux, all ways. Le the universals splinter, spin me blinking, rattle the rented cage of my dented skull. Let the concrete ache in my sodden bones moan. The scalpel that cut me from the motherly carves out wooden identities and arcs dry lakebeds to rest in while storms gather. Only storms and thoughts gather, people collide and swarm. Water finds home where it is low . . .and I am destined to drown.
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.
( video: Ira Glass on story-telling, quote: Henry Miller "Lime Twigs and Treachery. btw: well over 200 posts now!)
Your children are the problem. It pains me to say that, and it hurts down to my very genes and spine to persecute perhaps the only purpose true in our swirl. Energy, war, terrorism, angst, exploitation . . . these fruits all see their source in too many fucking people. And perhaps we may just escape this terra damnata, but even in that we'll choose who goes and who stays. We'll excise some gleaming class of beings with no more right to liberty than the sons of oil profiteers and hotel heiresses. And who does not meet those thresholds in this long pause will squabble and legislate and recycle their soup tins and petition the gov't to kick down scraps . . .but no one will ever say: "dose the water supply with birth control", or "implant an IVD with every vaccination".
The burned landscape stands charred lodgepole pine as a warning and a relief. From this things can be recovered. And to create, the old must sometimes be destroyed. And the burn is a year or two old, the upstart forest clambering over itself for the new sunlight with deformed little trees and the splayed hands of ferns. I'm city-born and city-bred, but the shadows and rock and water so fierce you can almost hear it screaming your name . . .in it the most profound thought can be examined: no thought at all.
I had an irreal workshop with a new friend last week. He's read a solid fraction of the things I've written over the last year and thinks that this is the best. Following close-critique of the story we meandered into something a bit more philosophical. And I had to wonder how much calculation and generation I have going on subconsciously, he saw things that are clearly there and are tendrils or tributaries of what I want to say; but I have never clearly thought all those thoughts.
