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.
(quote: William Saroyan, video: Alan Moore's advice to young artists)
For a minute there I was a nihilist. I came to a philsophical conclusion that I shirked away from telling people because it sounds so bleak and inhumane. The crux is this: that we can never achieve social stability or equality or sustainable prosperity or peace or freedom if our population continues to grow. The thesis, generally, being that a confluence of phenomenon (including but not limited to the Tragedy of the Commons, False Consciousness, the quantitative/psychological constraints of human interaction [i.e. how many people your brain will allow you to know/trust/etc], and a sheer logistical impossibility) strongly suggest that a group as large as, for instance, the United States, could never accomplish utopia. That is, there is no model for governance with a system this large that provides for satisfaction to all of its participants.
First, the Tragedy of the Commons is an observation that self-interest will cause users of a shared resource to abuse their privilege to that resource. In Hardin's original essay he spoke of common grazing areas in a village, but the best way to understand this (I am a transportation engineer after all) is to think of how commercial vehicles (big trucks) operate on our highways. Large, multi-axle trucks do virtually all of the damage to the publicly-funded (i.e. 'common') road system. They do pay higher use fees (above and beyond driver's licenses, fuel tax, etc for passenger cars), and yet without close supervision it would be in commercial vehicle operators' best interest to run the heaviest loads they could at top speed. Human beings cheat to get ahead, they use resources disproportionally, they leave things worse than they found them.
Now, this problem is mitigated in small communities. The home, for example, has many common areas and goods. And they are generally respected because of the authority of the household (complete) and the familiarity between the members. And it could work in a neighborhood, perhaps, where everyone knows each other somewhat intimately and their lives are crushed into shape by their public identity. But expand the numbers of the community to some threshold and people stop giving a shit. This number likely has some connection to the group-sizes that we spent much of our mental development in. Australopithecus hung out in very small groups. A few families. Even allow for a thousand and it might work. But,we live in a country of 300million, in a world of 6billion plus. We are not wired to give a shit about any of these people. The fact that we do is actually sort of weird.
Logistical impossibility doesn't have a link because I haven't heard of anyone who has done a great deal of work on it. The idea is that even in a purely-executed Communist state there would be no way to equitably distribute resources. The same amount cannot be put in each cup, because the things used to fill them are not distributed equally. Arizona does not have the water to survive, but if they are to use the water of some place else how can that water-bearing land be thought to have the carrying capacity of both places? Especially when we humans grow so densely and rapaciously. And live for so long. But further than the efficiency of moving resources around, there is a certain chaos in the economy of ideas when the numbers get this high. anarchists can conspire, religions can procreate, language can vary . . .and in the end you get smaller political communities. These subcommunities distrust each other, formulate nonsensical rivalries. Shun those of the other tribe. Anyway . . .I have many more thoughts on this that I'm going to discuss further in an upcoming blog on Terminalism (this is a name I've given to a philosophy that amalgamates Marxism, Darwinism, aspects of Existentialism, and Absurdism)
(quote: William Saroyan , video: Hard Time Killing Floor Blues)
Yesterday I recieved notice that I have been accepted to the MFA program at The New School University in New York City. Of the programs I applied to, this one was for me the most interesting, exciting, and attractive. The school is enmeshed with the writing community of NYC and the emphasis is heavily on writing. In the last semester you do not attend class. You simply write and talk about your writing with your advisor. This program in particular looks to provide the greatest degree of freedom. I can truly thrive in this environment.
And it came about as late as it could. I was beginning to get a bit whiny and dejected. 10+ rejections had shown up in my various mailboxes. Copies of the manuscripts I sent sat glowing in the corner, heckling me with their inconsistencies and chunkiness and shortcomings. I began to make plans to move to Istanbul for a year, intending to apply again. Creeping hints of failure assembled in this little pile of quality, off-white stationary. The familiar artistic questions emerge, enlarge, take on a severity they never had. The time-stamped question of "did I do that right?" stretches out over the last three years. And you think for just a moment that you went at it all wrong. That the way to do this wasn't simply working your ass off. It wasn't losing sleep to catch those last drunken thoughts as you drifted into the kaliedoscope. It wasn't soaking yourself with narrative, with exuberance and depression and anxiety. It was something you didn't get. And as a writer you shouldn't have nudged that line, or advocated the tribal philosophy that I did in that work. Expectation was to be honored. And then came the believing in the work and thinking, like Saroyan: "One of us is obviously mistaken". But this acceptance is that slightest of validations, that noteeth smile given by someone you respect. It feels like a punctuation in these long few years, like when I wake up tomorrow morning I can take a deep breath and look around without feeling as though time is wasting.
Moving to New York City is part of the American mythos. Children from the Midwest go alienated in the sterility and shrug off their lineage and descend into it. For the artist, the thing is rite-of-passage and crucible. A place so vast and chaotic any end-result is possible. You may emerge at the other end differently named, battered by a whole new arrangement of affectations and illnesses and habits. New York City is the surreal tragicomedy writ large. So, while I doubt I will spend the rest of my life there, going there is this instinctive pilgrimage. It is a visionquest.
My good friend Dale Eisinger will be attending CUNY for Journalism during the same period I would be attending the New School. This is one of those coincidences that make people believe in god. If I could take any one thing from Boise when I leave, it would be this young man. I look forward to the whole mess we shall shortly find ourselves in.
(quote: e'rbody, video: Gnarls Barkley Who's Gonna Save My Soul?
I don't have a lot to say these days. In a kind of limbo waiting for the other MFA shoe to drop, six rejections thus far. One waitlist. However, I'm still a writer. So here is something I just finished. I wrote the first draft of it over a year ago, and changed nearly every letter. It may be the last thing I write in past tense for a very long time.
(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 . . ..
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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.
