Practice into Process

Unless you begin with a specific topic in mind, often merely an energizing word, your approach is to start with a list of random words, writing them down in a list as they come straggling in like kids at play,reluctantly heeding the call to dinner, wondering at first if there is some linking pattern between these words you have not yet divined. Depending on what sort of day this has been, sooner or later one of the words will land with a particularly loud thunk, like a baseball hitting the sweet spot on a bat. The sound of the word falling into place signals all at once the arrival of energy, intent, and purpose.

Now the momentum shifts into a higher gear, thanks to the sound of the inherent voice, at once beguiling and commanding; it is the perfect combination of force. Ideas are easily come by--until you want them, at which point you are in competition with parts of yourself dominated by judgement instead of those parts of yourself led by curiosity and playfulness. Playing with words in this manner is of a piece with a musician running scales, developing dexterity of execution and a sense of humor. You learn from practice what a sense of humor is, which is laughing at the judgmental parts of yourself.

As the scales provide a trampoline for the musician, playing with words provides the energy, intent, and purpose that provide you with paragraphs of meaning and with characters to carry those burdens forward as though they were lading the hold of a transport such as a story or an essay.

How much does it take?

Today you are in the process of talking about a character who appears desperately to want something, starting with Dorothy Gale, who desperately wants to get out of Oz and back to Kansas, then moving along to, of all individuals, Brer Fox, who in his search for supper has focused on Brer Rabbit. This is story-telling stuff right out of the Aristotle Poetics, a character desperate for achievement of a goal driving the story forth. In a blinding flash of recognition, you are so convinced that the Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit story comes right out of Aristotle that you forget the connection between Brer Fox and Wile E. Coyote, forgetting even to mention him as your selection for the patron saint of characters. There is such a splendid balance between the character who wants a particular prize, no matter what it is, the antagonist or individual standing in the way of the character achieving goal, and the humiliation available to fall on the goal seeker lest he fail in his task. Look at the stature Brer Rabbit gains merely by surviving. Look at the seeming invincibility Road Runner has. Look at the effect failure has on Wile E. Coyote and Brer Fox; each becomes more determined, more focused and thus more likely to appear undignified. How do your non-animal characters react in such triangles? Do they become more determined and, in the process, do they lose by degree any semblance of dignity?

There is a thin line between humiliation and mere undignified performance. Too much of the latter produces a measure of the former. How then to remove in slow plausible degree from an author his or her dignity? Start by having that character reassess the nature of focus and purpose. I will get up a half hour earlier and write before I do anything else. I will get up forty-five minutes earlier, I will get up an hour earlier. Seemingly, these are small enough increments, but in aggregate, they begin to undercut any trace of dignity the character may posses. When the character begins gambling with appearances, the risk is dignity, the result inevitably humiliation.

It is useful to keep these shifting boundaries in mind as you pursue the routine of a character bent on pursuing an agenda to the point where the pursuit begins to trump the results.

The Novel of Identity

In her first novel, Man Walks into a Room, Nicole Kraus uses amnesia to investigate one relationship, a marriage. The protagonist is found wandering in the desert outside Las Vegas, with no clue how he got there or why. Turns out he is an atomic scientist whose past has been wiped out. That past includes a marriage to a woman he finds attractive enough and agreeable enough that he is ready to accept the fact that he might love her and that he indeed had wanted to marry her, but these conditionals remain, do not return him to his original state, and finally the wife leaves because she cannot live with the fact that the man she loves has changed, is in essence taking her on appearance rather than remembered history.

Not a bad novel, but piddling in comparison to Kraus' stunning second novel, The History of Love, about as complex and staggering investigation of love as you will want to read.

Then comes Richard Powers, with the disturbing and compelling dramatization of what neurologists have termed The Capgras Syndrome. The twenty-seven-year-old rotagonist sustains brain damage in an auto accident. Comatose for some time, he begins to recover tended to by his one living relative, his sister. Trouble is, thanks to the havoc wreaked by The Capgras Syndrome, he believes his sister is an impostor, a suspicion that gradually extends to his close friends and even his dog. Someone, he says, has gone to a lot of trouble and obvious expense to secure these impostors, and to coach them about the details of is life.

In The Echo Maker, Powers takes on the entire notion of the self, demonstrating how everyone in the novel begins to experience the shift in self that comes when the scenery has shifted.

Digby Wolfe tells the wonderful story of two actors caught on stage in the middle of a performance, effectively stuck. The Prompter, hidden in the wings, whispers the forgotten line from the text of the play. Still the actors appear frozen. The Prompter repeats the next line, with similar results. On the magical, Aristotelian third repetition, one of the actors turns to the Prompter with some considerable irritation. "We know what the line is, you bloody fool. We don't know which of us says it."

I am drawn along on the thermals of fancy to that brilliant stage play and motion picture, more or less inspired by the late actor, Donald Wolfit, The Dresser,in which the principal character, a splendid and hammy actor, Richard Burton, Zero Mostel, Wile E. Coyote, and Bert Lahr, all conflated into one, speaks of the out-of-body-experience he sometimes experiences while acting in which he is projected into the cheap balcony seats from which he can see himself performing his evening;s part. In the same story, we see him costuming and making up to go on as Lear, only to be scolded by his dresser, "No, no, not Lear. Tonight you are Othello!"

All these reflections are reflections on the fragile engine we call The Self.
What is self? Does it have a specific locale in the body? In the brain? Where does the Self go when the host body dies? Where, I might add, does the self go after the body has played in the National Football League for ten or twelve years and detective work, discovers he is a scientist.

The Self is strong enough to survive emotional and physical torture, only to slowly disappear with no apparent trauma or warning.

I sometimes find portions of manuscripts which I suspect have detached themselves from a student's or client's project. I read into the manuscript coming to the belief that someone may have mistaken my portfolio for his or hers and given me this remarkable document. Then it comes to me that the material was not written by a stranger, but rather by me, which translates out to being the most sneaky stranger of all.

What is The Self? What part of the brain does it occupy? Where does it go when we sleep or blog or otherwise make love?

Who was the me who wrote such exquisite or, conversely, such miserable prose, then left it, not merely as unfinished work but as a taunt to the future self, the Self I will come, the enigmatic destination at which I have arrived with no recall of the journey?

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for...

So says Gerard Manley Hopkins, only slightly out of context. Who am I has a lot to answer for, happy or sad, writing or reading. But Who am I is nothing, compared to What, you almost might say WTF is the self?

Against the Dying of the Light

Yesterday, Liz Kuball sent me a url with an attached urging to see the referenced site. Following the lead of the url, I came upon Zoe Strauss' memorable:

Thanks for nothing, Guggenheim!
I did NOT get the Guggenheim and I was MISERABLE when I received the letter. Right, FUCK YOU! Then I realized that I was out of my mind. As I was cleaning earlier this week, I found the paperwork for the 2004 discontinuation of my welfare benefits. So if I'm not getting the Guggenheim 3 years from getting off the dole, I should be ok with that. Within the time frame of the 95 project, I've done pretty well, I need to simmer down. But then... I just sit and stare straight ahead...why wouldn't I get it this year? What the hell? And then I've moved into, did I think I deserved the Guggenheim based on my recent accolades, or based on my work? Well, of course based on my work, I'm totally full of myself! But did think I had a better chance based on my sudden entrance into the commercial and academic art corridors. Now, that's yes. It's embarrassing but true. And I think that's fairly dangerous, considering that I judge my work to my standards without taking any institutional input into account. Also, I don't take rejection well AT ALL and I feel things deeply, good and bad, which means I've got to pay attention to expectations based on product and not on laurels.

It's now brought me to "what are my expectations?" Guess what? I'm shooting for the motherfucking stars like I'm riding Voyager 1 bareback! I will risk endless disappointment, with great ambition and hope. Unstoppable, baby!

which is simply one of the best blog posts I have ever seen, a bright, furious star burst in the heavens. It wrenched me over to another furious star burst, this one from Dylan Thomas, who on the occasion of his father's impending death wrote the now iconic poem, Do Not Go Gentle. Thomas urged his father--and us--to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Some years back, the informed preoccupation was making a dignified exit, having a "good death." Thomas puts paid to that notion for those of us who chose to light our way along the paths of artistry. And in her remarkable blog, so did Zoe Strauss, for whom, apparently, any dimming of the light of potential for her own art is so unthinkable as to cause rage. 

I vote for that. I'm for the vision quest, the seeker who will not quit in her search, who is angry at all the Fates and accidents that get in the way of, ta da, The Discovery, mindful that today's Discovery may eventually devolve into a mere discovery. But it may also remain a Discovery.

A few years back, I published a short story in which an academic whose specialty was Nathaniel Hawthorne, had occasion to recall a favored passage of his [and mine] from a short story ("The Intelligence Office") by Hawthorne. A character with the kind of reach I associate with Zoe Strauss (whom I know only through that remarkable blog), says in a state of exasperation:

"I want my place, my own place,my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime."

To hell with a good death or leaving the impression of understanding. In the class room, I make a point of trying to dehumanize rejection, which is indeed inevitable but not something to ignore. It is surely gratifying to get the letters of acceptance or, indeed, the letters inviting submissions. The sting is somewhat removed with a near-miss rejection, but sting there is, and I am happy to note the flare or outright rage with a generic rejection or a "Sorry." or a "Please try us again."

When we come to the part of class in which I hold up a batch of rejection slips and ask with a kind of professorial feigned innocence, "Does anyone know what these are?" I will have Zoe Strauss' response to rejection, her raging against the dying of the light, because in that rage I recognize my own and the sense of the thing we all of us bring to our work when we put it out there.

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," Dylan Thomas also wrote, "Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/ Is my destroyer. / And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose / My youth is bent by the same wintry fever."

It is the lovely accident of convenience that Zoe Strauss is a photographer and that the dying of the light is such a powerful metaphor. "It's all about light," Lizzie said after an afternoon of shooting images. To which I add: "The rage doesn't hurt, either, kid."

"You purchase pain," Alexander Pope wrote, "and all the joys it has to give/ And die of nothing but a rage to live."