The other night I had one of those moments. Or I should say, in the interest of erecting a facade of honesty and getting my daily dose of self-deprecation, the moment had me, just like it always happens; these thoughts surfacing in the trough of some towering epiphany and overtaking my brain's regularly scheduled programing silently, effortlessly, like the scent of one single person rising above the sweat, polyurethane, perfume and god only knows what else imbued middle school dances with such atmospheric density. I'm not suggesting these ideas are beamed down to me from some metaphysically advanced dimension, but it would be an even larger pile of bullshit to chalk them up to my mental prowess or (ha!) authorial discipline. Despite my best efforts, I remain utterly ignorant as to who is piloting the skywriters that weave through my skull, have no clue from where they take off or what frequency to radio them on. The whole genesis situation is, to put it in psychiaspeak, outside my locus of control. Of course, as all of this is unfolding, there is no time to question things. I mean, did you ever see one of the resident marionettes in the Neighborhood of Makebelieve look up from his smoke break with his furry, oversized brow bunched up like yesterday's underwear and ask "hold up, where in the fuck does that trolley come from?" Because when the moment occurs, the yet-unknown, often unreached destination is far more interesting than the origins. So I just accept blindly and follow this dybbuk, this spirit of self-assurance as it leads me down dark and dusty synapses, holding my hand like a brother too old to remember. And then, before a minute has expired, these strange notions abandon me as suddenly as they had arrived. I suppose they are important, these moments, and because they are important they have other places to be, and therefore they are efficient, pausing like a bee alighting on a stigma and then gone, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, a quick fuck, "good night, and good luck."
But back to the other evening: that moment of flashbulbs, overflowing bathtubs or what-have-you commences abruptly and definitively, like the opening shot of a film, and on the back of a Tex-Mex menu I set off scribbling a introduction to this blog, a declaration, a mission statement, as Jerry Maguire would have it. You'll have to trust me on this, but at the time the ink was drying, it seemed pretty damn decent, a manifesto chock full of elegant rancor and nonchalant profundity. Of course, given enough turns of the hour hand, I could have, probably would have grown disgusted with it, with myself, with each re-reading feeling less Jerry Maguire on a hotel floor and more Tom Cruise preaching from plush t.v. studio furniture. This time, though, my hands beat my head to the prize of eviscerating my work when I unknowingly sacrificed the only copy to an industrial-strength washing machine in a Poughkeepsie laundromat, the folded draft stowed away in the back pocket of an inside-out, drunkenly removed pair of Levis. I guess it's ironic, and a bit poignant, to think that this is how all ideals dissipate, not in some melodramatic incineration, but fading, slow and taciturn, over the course of some cycle that is vicious or beautiful or both. At the time I realized my blunder though, I had nowhere near that kind of transcendent perspective, cuffed, as I was, to the present by my idiocy. All I could think was how I had never, ever in my life been able to re-write something, always cringing at my efforts like some deformed clone and eventually consigning them to the trash. And so a few surfaces were punched, in a manner more pitiful than threatening, and I let fly a few choice expletives before remembering that I was in an entirely public place, the echoes--"hit", "hit", "other", "ucker"-- bouncing off the tiled floor past mothers and children with all the ominous clamor and potential calamity of a runaway grenade. Now feeling two times a dumbass, I sat down and put my head in my hands in a pose I've probably struck a thousand times, like the slouched, agnst-ridden cousin of Rodin's Thinker: palms against my face, fingers straight up, thumbs out, a gesture of prayer spliced open from which I attempt to plug the frustration seething forth from its innumerable lairs, feeling the gusts from my lungs ricochet and explode back on me with the heat of my continuing existence.
If this seems histrionic, emo, insane, well, it is. I guess I should explain the gory details of my relationship with writing and with sanity, a love triangle in which I play part of the jilted, the scorned, the Lisa Nowak of the whole mess. Back in high school, I finished papers on time about as often as I celebrated birthdays, and to the same amount of fanfare from my friends. Once I shipped off to college, things went downhill in a hurry, anchored and propelled, no doubt, by my proficiency in the fine arts of procrastination and self- delusion. Even with all the extensions afforded an English major at a liberal arts college--and take my word for it, they are granted as easily and graciously as second chances to American politicians-- I came home from first semester with two incompletes and two unfinished tomes in my bag. I managed, barely, to knock both off over break, one a junior novella for Julie Rose (the writer, alumna, and amazing professor cut by Vassar Admin. at the end of last year) entitled "Orientation," of which a half dozen copies were printed and one very inebriated reading given, early in the a.m., to three humans and a throng of empty Miller cans squeezed into the living room floor of a friend's house in Hyannis. At first I attributed my struggles to a crisis of conscience regarding the morality and the use of writing. Back in September I had cornered Salman Rushdie after his talk in Rocky and asked whether it was better for a writer to focus on human relationships and risk being selfish (as relationships in any work of fiction are inherently the product of exhaustive, autobiographical self-examination) or to focus on the world, with all its sociopolitical calamities, and miss out on the reasons for living. He gave me that de facto response, the one every English major can always pull out of his back pocket (or deeper) when confronted with an either/or question about something he hasn't read: "why can't it be both?". Later on, after having been cut down one too many times by reading what I thought was my good or idea in an already great book by an actually great author, I began to wonder if there was any story that had been left untold, any sentiment untouched. After a reading by Rivka Galchen, author of the fascinatingly frustrating Atmospheric Disturbances, I asked whether she relied to heavily on advanced science in her writing because all the terrestrial metaphors had been hunted to extinction (I don't remember her answer, which means it was likely something optimistic and encouraging). The first time perfectionism and pessimism truly carried the day was on my final paper of freshmen year, which was titled, in a little time capsule of irony, "At the Altar of Possibility". Ever since then I've been working under the gun until someone is forced to pull the trigger out of fairness or mercy. Not finishing is the norm, no matter how things start or how they come apart. Sometimes I write the ending further and further away from me, like some sad space shuttle flying homeward slower than the universe is expanding. Other times I freeze up entirely after a page or so, unable to find the right words. In baseball, they call this the yips-- you just stop being able to throw strikes, to throw to first, for no clear reason (I can only hope I turn out to be more Rick Ankiel then Chuck Knoblauch). No matter how much logic and bravado I heap on the table to in trying to coax my fingertips back from their strike over some unspecified injustice, they hold fast for days and weeks in their picket line with their nonverbal chants and blank signs. After enough stagnation, the ideas lose their ingenuity or even tenability, wilting into the mundane and then the moronic like cereal left sitting out too long, to be dumped into the sink by any half-savy reader after the first soggy spoonful. They bother me still, this company of unfinished papers, now large enough in number to form a support group for abandonment, and the real cruelty of it all was that it was the ones I actually cared about which I ultimately walked out on; the more personal the arguments, the more crucial the ideas, the easier it was to be swept away in the tireless gale of my anxiety. I'd like to think I'll return to them someday. But I must first travel away from them, let them disappear entirely, before beginning to approach again; I must circumnavigate my own life. It's possible, given the pile of evidence you're currently slogging through, that I've already begun this very long trip (and look Ma, no drugs!). Still, there are many days when I believe I will never be able write in front of people, to meet deadlines, to reach a conclusion. If I were to be put to death by firing squad (my most likely manner of demise after being sucked into a jet engine or drowned in a sinking houseboat), I would be pleading with the soldiers dragging me off not for my life, but for more time to work on my last words.
So there I was in the laundromat, trying to round up every last crumb of composure every bit as pitifully and desperately as those restless nights when I have scraped the stems and surfaces fastidiously in an attempt to fill that one last bowl. Even with my face still in my hands, I sensed someone approaching, stopping, hovering; a fuming mother, to be sure. Yet after tentatively dropping the curtain from my eyes, I had to look down before I see who had disturbed my revelry: a little black girl with a bag of peanut M&M's clutched in her fist, scratching the heel of one foot with the toes of the other and peering up at me with the same confused yet interested look you see on every other face in modern art installations. I had noticed her before- who wouldn't have, the way she had who had been drifting around the place with a presence both sprightly and deliberate, attending to any minutiae which called out for her delicate corrections: detergent left unscrewed, a dryer door left open. Even the dead roach on the floor she collects in a dustpan, her limbs moving no less gracefully for her grimace. I had briefly imagined her as a middle-aged matriarch, the kind of woman who consoles the distressed or despondent no matter if their crisis be momentous or trivial, by sweeping them into her, two at a time if size permits, letting her floral dress soaks up their tears like a riverbank and all the while keeping her back straight and her eyes to the horizon. But now, in front of me in the laundromat, she was tiny, pigtailed, fluttering, a carpet bomb of smiles. She appeared to be looking me right in the yes, and yet it was equally likely she think was quietly appraising my crows' feet, which sometime during the age when boys should be sleeping and growing came to me in some time of candle burning and perched, and sat, and nothing more. Abruptly but decisively, she extended her yellow bag of candy towards me. "I like the green ones best," she said to me, and then immediately she resumed her rounds, collecting and stacking sheets of fabric softener into a little portfolio of cobwebs. Watching her, I began to entertain the possibility that this too, my fuck-up, my struggle with writing, even my life was another tiny thing which, in the eyes of a 7 year old, is easily corrected. And then there was the balmy, enveloping sense of freedom afforded by insignificance, of being a dust speck on the giant's shoulder. I felt easily yet convincingly fixed, like someone had stuffed my soul into a microwave and hit the express button. I sat for some minutes more, watching the colored shell begin to bleed and the "M" melt away under the furnace of my palms, and then groping through memories, trying to recall when I first realized that the only difference between the pieces was the dye.
Bukowski's tombstone reads "don't try", a summation of his philosophy of writing and of life. Morose as that might sound, Hank was actually laying some Zen on us, trying to liberate our minds just like Yoda did with Luke: "there is no try. there is do or do not do." That, in a nut-shell(and I insert that hyphen with boundless respect and affection) is how I will approach this blog: doing but not trying, continuing on even when blindfolded to quality and direction, producing in immense volume, not regimented like an assembly line by nebulous as a tangle of weeds, falling somewhere in between Stephen King and Lil Wayne; and when I someday pour it all down into to the vast digital netherworld, there may be diamonds in the drain or there may be quartz or there may be nothing. In part, this will be a testing ground of for my awkward attempts at poetry and flash fiction. But this will also be a place to herald, denigrate, and generally question the role and influence of fiction, poetry and its little brother music (now all grown up and respected, thanks in large part to songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and Steve Earle who have traversed between lyrics and fiction seamlessly). Just over a century ago, Yeats wrote that "poets and painters and musicians are continually making and unmaking mankind", and yet we now find ourselves in a place where such a sentiment is laughable, an era in which the past is ignored, new media dominates, minds grow more narrow and feelings more extreme. The written word is dying, both in quantity and quality. The chairman of the New York Times recently stated that he expects the paper will stop being printed some time in the foreseeable future. The average American reads 1.5 book a year and in 2009, competition for the attention of the masses was won by Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown and those false prophets, those Khomeinists remixed with crisp suits and sparkling orthodontics, Sarah Palin and Glen Beck. At the same time, bold and daring and true writing it which does not fit into a viable marketing scheme remains trapped in publishing limbo, as is the case with Kiese Laymon and his long-awaited (and long since finished, unless he revises James Joyce style) novel My Name Is City. I have stacked the Twilights and the diatribes for consumption myself, knowing that the publisher sees them as dollars and wondering if we are, in the pursuit of ever-shrinking profits, leading literature to its death, its light and oxygen and voice and spirit ever shrinking as it is walled in like poor Fortunado, bells jangling pitifully until the cool crush of silence comes at last.
And so the question remains as Yeats posed it way back when: "how can the arts", literature especially, "overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men's heart-strings again"? The quick answer is that writers needs to stop pandering and begin to challenge, to provoke. As Will Sheff of Okkervil River said of his approach to songwriting, "it's far more admirable to confuse people than it is to reassure them." Stories, songs, poetry should not be a solidification or celebration inherited, heirloom values, but a cross-examination, an interrogation and, if need be, an execution of the beliefs held by both reader and author, for truth is like a trick rubix-cube, impossible to solve but just as difficult to quit, and we must never stop turning the corner on what we thought we knew for certain.
Sheff has also said that rock and roll allows one to get away with idiocy, violence. and pretension. But this is not rock and roll, and so I must apologize in advance, for there will be idiocy, mostly of the myopic variety, and there will be violence (at least in the emotional sense), aimed at the temple or launched via apostrophy, and there will be pretension, unearned and unjustified; though I swear that nothing was written with intentions of martyrdom or implications of microcosms. There will be tangents, there will be parentheses, there will be infinite strings of severely disjointed similes and metaphors; yes, I will hit you with the kitchen sink, empty the chamber, blow my wad, throw the spaghetti at you and see what, if anything, sticks. There will be a near-endless stream of stereotypical suburban white kid experiences already beaten bloody by Bret Easton Ellis and American Beauty and the Arcade Fire; there will be Cape Cod, playgrounds, forests, ferris wheels, uneven keels, soccer moms, proms, the college exodus, diners, the sun and the moon. But it's all I have, and, in my defense, it was all new to me, so let's rip apart the glossy wrapping and see what we really have.
