Mad about You

Over the years, you have had frequent opportunity to socialize with writers, either in one-on-one editing sessions, impromptu lunches with a group of friends, speaking engagements at writers' organizations, the unflaggingly raucous dinner meetings at the Cafe de Paris, when you were regional president of the Mystery Writers of America, and back in the day when the LA Times was a newspaper, at the yearly celebration for their Books-of-the-Year Awards.  In more recent times, here in that exotic bubble known as Santa Barbara, you have the options of the Tuesday afternoon Wet Words gathering, the Wednesday Round Table, the First Thursday Lunch, and of course the Writers' Conference, interspersed with your regular Monday and Thursday lunches with Barnaby Conrad, and the Friday Morning Coffee at Peet's.  At earlier times in Santa Barbara, you were invited to Ross Macdonald's (Ken Millar's) Wednesday lunch group, as well as its splinter group that broke the gender barrier by inviting women. In many of these gatherings, fermented beverages were/are available if not an outright staple.  There were also invitations from the Santa Barbara Screen Writers' Association, where for a time, and on the basis of having once financed a Volkswagen Bug through the Writers' Guild Credit Union, you were an object of envy.

 With such sterling credentials, you believe you understand the permutations inherent in the writer persona, even to the point of seeing aspects of it in your own comportment.  It is a particular kind of madness, a landscape inhabited by literary agents, publishers, Quixotic dreams, stunning disappointments and depressions,confrontations, accusations, celebrations, and moments of stunning revelation and insight.  Even such unseemly behavior as you are likely to note in a writer whom you hold a particular disregard will cause you in final analysis to conclude, But he (or she) is our writer.

This has long since caused you to suspect that each discipline, say music or acting or dance or photography or fine art, has its own landscape of madness, inhabited by and familiar to its denizens, and in that sense we are as patients in a mental institution, each in his particular ward, sometimes escaping into another ward, say the film studies ward, therein to try the cafeteria and perhaps mis en scene of that landscape as a vacation from our own.

From time to time we are nudged back into the ward of the normal, the un-mad, those men and women who have had to take jobs of some other sort to meet their living expenses or to cope with growing children or aging parents.

By dint of furious work and focus, we have bent the rays of perception and reality to the point where we see a different reality although not by necessity a better one.  It is difficult to imagine, for instance, that Franz Kafka could have enjoyed his landscape.  Although he may have appreciated it, recognized it, accepted it, yet it becomes difficult to envision him thinking this landscape of conspiracy and uncertainty was any sort of cosmic promotion.  Yet still he accepted his landscape and wrote about it, leaving us a legacy we may have, each in our own way, passed through, recognized, and took steps to keep on riding away from it until it was little more than a glow in the rear view mirror.

From time to time, events and persons in the real world will try to talk us out of our landscape of madness, asking questions, needing our help, wanting the comfort of our presence as friends rather than as writers.  We accept these calls, secretly aware of their potential for use in our work, but no less ready to be a friend.

Many of us are not recognizably kidnapped by our madness, yet as we spend time with one another or even on a first-time meeting, it is possible to tell.  One former student of yours, a remarkably empathetic and generous woman, recognized at some point in her life that her sexual orientation wasn't what she had led herself to believe and thus, like a politician changing party affiliations, publicly switched orientations.  She spoke to you of a gaydar, a resident awareness one gay person had for distinguishing not only men from boys and women from girls but gays from straights and bi-sexuals.  Writers, you believe, have a similar detector by which one can assess the degree a professed writer has progressed into his or her necessary madness.  She's off-the-deep-end-nuts you think of a particular writer, by which you mean she has progressed well along the path she has chosen and is recognizably haunted by her visions, this assessment in opposition to one that indicates she still has some serious hiking to do in order to catch up with her madness.

Fortunately for you, both your mentors were flat-out mad, each shrewdly able to appear in public with the patina of normality, which, you recognize fondly, was not normal at all but rather an uncommonly deep kindness and empathy.  Rachel and Virginia have pulled you along into madness in their slipstreams.

In recent weeks, you've been writing letters and filling out forms from various universities for students wanting to enter yet another form of madness, the madness of graduate schools, the on-going madness of the great asylum we know of as the university.  In each case, you have found yourself tempted to use a shorthand you know exists and thus in your recommendation numerically relate him or her to the density of nuts in a fruitcake;  he or she is in the upper two percentile of nut case students I have known over my career.  You forebear to do so; you resort to the quotidian vocabulary, reminding yourself as you do of a mere mortal who has perhaps had a mystical experience, trying to explain it to an audience that desperately wants to have a mystical experience.

This place gives me the...choose one: creeps, satisfaction, apprehension, secrets, expectations...

Although you had not thought to do so in today's weekly writing workshop, you spoke with more conviction than you thought you had about the need of a place to have a resident personality.  It began when one person, her story set in Los Angeles, wondered aloud about ways to infuse a sense of how people behaved in Los Angeles.  If, you observed, Beckett were still alive and writing, he'd set stories in Los Angeles, which led this writer to imagine what it would be like directing Waiting for Godot in the specific locale of Los Angeles as opposed to, say, Boston or Indianapolis.  Persons in differing cities want different things.  Having a lovely relationship of duality with Los Angeles, it was easy to observe that even though it has many amenities not found anywhere else, the thing that makes it what it is has to do with the fact that nearly everyone who is a resident of Los Angeles knows that the most bent commodity of all is reality.  Angelenos know they are there for the bent reality, not for the motion picture and television industries, not for the politics or weather but for the kinship of altered expectation and reality.

Residents of Santa Barbara are here for a different reason, the atmosphere of secrecy so inherent.  There are stunning views and weather.  But these are not the draw, although we will tell you that they are, hopeful of diverting you from the fact that we exist on a sense of having arrived here with a secret agenda, with a history of having done something or having come from an unusual family or perhaps the sense that such places as New York and Boston and Los Angeles and yes, even Seattle make for splendid visitation but somehow we could not survive in such places on an extended basis.

True enough, there are individuals who live in places such as Albuquerque or Portland or Santa Fe, or Dallas who do not wish to be there; they wish to be nearly anywhere else.  They fantasize about Toronto or Vancouver, trying to make do with what they have but not sure how.

There is a hidden sense of defining characteristic inherent in individuals who live where they do in some uneasy awareness that goes beyond the mere trope of anywhere but here, settling in on the notion that they are here as a way of taking their medicine or, to make it more chemical, taking their meds.

What is the unspoken connection between a real person or a character and the place where they go about the warp and weft of their routine, watching story unfold about them and coping with their own sense of story.

There should be a dotted line or dash or two-line space break here, a walkway into the questions you have been asking about your protagonist, the one who has taken up residence in a managed community, one you sense as being undershot with two seemingly antithetical qualities, affluence and secrets.  The secrets of Casa Jocasta, you want to write, are spread through the prime acreage of the facility like the blue, marbled mold in a wheel of aged Stilton cheese.

Some individuals have voluntarily moved to such places, individuals of differing demographic than those in your fictional place.  Some have nevertheless gone voluntarily while others still have been more or less left off for storage there.  

And, regardless of age, social status, and background, they have secrets.

Post Hoc

Without knowing why, I like these images enough to post them. This was discovered in a grassy sward in Stevens Park, just beyond the Museum of Natural History, a notional, upscale neighborhood on the east side of Santa Barbara. The second image, the hanging pinatas, caught my eye on the volatile, rapidly emerging Milpas Street segment of Santa Barbara, by all accounts a working class neighborhood with a number of restaurants, including the estimable Altamirano, barber shops and hair salons in the front rooms of residences, the inexplicably popular Super Rica Tacqueria, several sporting goods shops with prom inent displays of soccer equipment, and two groceries, the largest of which, Scolari's, is close to the variety store where the hanging pinatas are displayed thusly. Unfortunately, there is also an emporium where one might secure quick cash 'till payday, at exorbitant interest rates, a KFC, a Jack-in-the Box, and a Goodyear tire and auto of the sort that gives auto repair emporia a dubious name. Nevertheless. It is Milpas Street, resisting change like a states' rights conservative in election year. There are pinatas and Mexican beer, and if you ask politely at the panederia in the small strip mall at De la Guerra, they will sell you some of the damndest wonderful tamales para llevar, which you could then transport with such Pacifico or Carta Blanca to a nearby park and watch life turn into a party. Yes, I know; there are such streets everywhere, even in Solvang. The ethnicity changes, the cooking tastes and smells transmogrify, but the vibe remains constant. You simply have to know where to look.

I was going to stop with that last paragraph, but as I was spell-checking, it came to me that I liked this image, too, and so I decided what the hell, why not? And so here it is: