The Struggle for Self

Many of us are drawn to fiction by the unspoken promise of a layer of tension residing within, just below the surface. In a matter of moments, we are introduced to at least one relatively interesting individual who is faced with a problem involving discovery, moral choice, escape from an intolerable fate, or learning to cope with the consequences of social pressure.

As the work of fiction expands from short form to long form, the complexity of the problem expands in at least a mathematical proportion, with possibilities of extending to exponential.

Readers approach these dramatic existential options according to their idiosyncratic preferences, thus producing the concept of genre promise, the literary equivalent of The Social Contract, in which the reader who prefers a mystery is quickly presented with a puzzle needing to be solved, the reader who prefers romances is engaged in the plight of an interesting protagonist who is forced by her own goals and endocrine system to make a romantic choice among suitors or to chose between a suitor and a profession, and a young reader is presented with a young protagonist who has encountered an existential problem even more intense and complex than a similar problem the reader is now experiencing.

The unspoken part of the tension has to do with the number of filters through which the story is rendered, the point of view of narration, the I or he or she or perhaps even they of narrative voice.

As we trudge forth into this twenty-first century, at some distance now from the Renaissance, we have already unknowingly replaced the standard, bulbous incandescent lighting system of our communal awareness with the florescent lights of me-as-individual focus, taking us from such strictly oral presentations as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf, into a similarly open-ended written narrative such as War and Peace.

In a huge leap forward, landing at a place dictated by my own idiosyncratic senses of memory and association, we come to one of the early switches from multiple to highly personalized and appropriately focused I/me awareness of Franz Kafka, who gave his readers the sense that although he spoke for himself, he spoke for many of us as well. Nor only had he turned into an insect or had been tried, convicted, and sentenced relative to a crime of which he had no knowledge nor was any concrete evidence presented against him, we as well had the focus and vulnerability of these dire consequences impinging on ourselves.

Designed politically as a federation, we are still plagued by the tug of states' rights. Designed politically as an entity in which we were free to pursue such spiritual notions and beliefs as we chose or particularly did not chose, we are still plagued by those who clutch to their bosom a book which they purport to take as the literal paradigm of truth. Nor are they content that those who do not consider this book such a paradigm shall be allowed a voice.

A current novel, The Air We Breathe, by the estimable Andrea Barrett, has set me off thinking about the self and its implications in reading and writing, about the implications of our species' past before we developed written language and our evolution into a society with written language, about the implications of entitlement, such novels of confession as Robinson Crusoe, and about the splendid short story by Beckett in which a character regards with some serious introspection the fate of a lobster dropped into a pot of boiling water. Adios, Lobster. While I who will remain alive, will eat you.

Fail again, Beckett says, but fail better. We are doomed, he says, to failure but we can strive to better our understanding,our performance, our selves, reconciling purpose with who we are and how we function.

Barrett's novel, which I have not finished, and for which I shall soon have to do a review of, begins with a narrative voice and point of view approach that reminds me significantly of Madam Bovary, which is so skillfully set forth that we do not realize how many points of view there are in it. A man who did realize, and who wrote a splendid study of Flaubert, called The Perpetual Orgy, has himself produced a remarkable tour d' force on point of view, Aunt Julia and the Script Writer.

Did Mario Vargas Llosa intend this stunning novel as an anti-modernist trope, swimming beneath the surface of an hilarious set of personal circumstances in which Vargas Llosa was, at one time, married to his own aunt?

These are the asteroids and comets of questions flying about me after having devoted some time late last month to an examination of point of view and of the questions and associations coming from The Air We Breathe and from Andrea Barrett's considerable intelligence and imagination. We read fiction to lose self in the story and then, in the process, discover the failed better self, discovered after the exposure. We write fiction to fail better in our imagination after having failed existentially in the reality of life. We are optimists who want to live for ever because we fear the consequences of death, which is to say we fear, among other things, the consequences of learning the relative meaning and importance of I. Some of us wish to attach our sled to Soren Kierkergaard, others in our midst to The King James Bible. Some of us chose The Critique of Pure Reason, while others yet chose the atav, that lovely combination of the alef and the tav, which, the literal translation tells us, was there in the beginning. In the beginning was the atav. The word.

For some of us, there is The Gematria, a system in which the words have numerical values which help us decipher the deeper meanings of received narrative.

And for others of us, there is the sound and intent and cadence of the words as we attempt to translate the feelings we receive as we observe the worlds about us. Such feelings are like the dust on a butterfly's wings, the thrum of a hummingbird, the flash of a salmony pink on the underside of a morning cloud. We fail in our attempts to get those feelings down in convincing form, then have another go at failing better.

Too Many Notes, Mozart

One of my favorite scenes from the splendid film Amadeus arrives when the ditsy emperor criticizes Mozart's music for having too many notes, which, when you consider the implications of Mozart's music, is like criticizing J.S. Bach for having two-part inventions when one would have sufficed.

Another moment came when, shortly after having set my earthly pole star on my aspiration of becoming a writer, the great American publisher, Alfred Knopf, announced with solemnity that too many books were being published. What gigantic hubris, I thought, the length and depth and breadth of his list notwithstanding. 

 Accordingly I rushed into print with reckless tantivy, contributing to the too many books footprint, dooming countless trees, a self-styled competitor to Joyce Carol Oates, thinking at one point in which I had completed and placed two novels within a six-weeks period, that I had made a dent. Indeed, a dent in the tree population.

But that, as Marlowe had a character say in The Jew of Malta, was in another city, and besides, the wench is dead.

Now, 2007, there are approximately three thousand new books being published each week. The aspens shiver, the editor groans, and the reader yawns. Too many books, indeed.

I am the happy discoverer of Barnaby Rich (1514-1617) a retired soldier and a popular writer of books for women. One of the problems attending Caxton's invention of movable type, Rich wrote, produced a sordid condition. "One of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world."

There is nothing for it but for us to find ways, modern ways to be sure, in which we learn to cope with the abundance about us.

One such way is to set forth the time to vigorously pursue history. As my esteemed blog buddies The Individual Voice and Ilana (aka Smiler) have pointed out, blogging allows one to investigate one's own history, which is to my mind as good a way to begin as there is in this electronic Talmud we have at our disposal.

A significant function of written language is the platform it provides us with which to initiate this investigation.

1. A politician--any politician you happen to favor--sends you an email explaining how "they," whoever they might happen to be, have really put an effort into unseating this worthwhile incumbent and thus this worthwhile incumbent desperately needs a contribution from you to help fight back. You email a tad more than you can afford, thinking somehow that your fortune will improve in time for the bill from the credit card on which you charged the contribution.

2. It doesn't improve, unless you can count some of the splendid things that happen to you in your day-to-day contacts with friends, students, blog buddies, and not to forget complete strangers.

3. Right after having made the donation, your mailbox is jammed with brochures from the very candidate you just contributed to. Having spent some time as a production manager for various book publishers and magazines, you have some idea how expensive these four-color, printed-on-glossy-paper mailers are.

4. Another day or two passes and you see on the internet or in a newspaper the very same politician vacationing in some surrounding you are currently longing to visit.

5. Another day or two and you discover that the particular legislative body of which "your" politician is a part has voted itself a salary raise. This comes on the day you discover the price of parking at your university has gone up and your HMO is increasing its monthly billing.

6. You have already felt singed--now you feel burned.

7. Someone from a worthwhile charitable venture calls to ask if they can send you the galleys of a new book about them which they hope to profit from and thus increase their charitable outreach. They are hopeful that you will think highly enough of the forthcoming book to provide a blurb. You say yes, of course. The package arrives and you fall to it, think it is rather nice, compose an appropriate blurb and fire it off.

8. The charity sends you a thank-you note that could have been written by Hallmark. Since you were not interested in being thanked, you shrug and figure what the hell.

9. A week later, you get a note from the Executive Committee of the charity, recognizing you as a busy and dedicated Civic Leader, therefore wondering if they could slightly edit your blurb to make it sound more enthusiastic.

10. Since you are not so much a busy person as one who procrastinates a good deal and who last-minutes a number of things, and since the least of what you are is a Civic Leader much less a dedicated Civic Leader, you send an innocently worded response as in, Depends on how your edits would read. Let's see.

11. Dear dedicated Civic Leader, they say, here it is. They show you the blurb which is unlike anything you have ever thought or written, along with the names of a few dedicated Civic Leaders on the national level whom you vastly admire, simultaneously wondering why, if the charity could have secured them, they would even want to mess with you.

12. Then you read the blurb and what was once a sense of nonchalant good will on your part renders you on the spot an Ahab in search of a whale. With the scent of singed flesh in the background, you respectfully withdraw the blurb and wish them well, pleased with yourself for not having--to continue the Ahab metaphor--associated your actions with a harpoon.

13. It is not over. You are brooding. It was, after all, a charity, one you highly approve of even though you are not a dedicated Civic Leader.

14. It is a matter of principal.

15. What moral property of yours has been trespassed?

16. Thus doth conscience make cowards of us all.

17. Besides, who's going to know?

18. That isn't the point.

19. Age may not wither nor custom stale Cleopatra, but it sure makes you cranky.

20. So you are on your way to meet a client and there is one of those interminable, cheery Santa Claus types with the goddamned bell and the pot outside the supermarket adjacent your meeting place, and someone has apparently dropped a crumpled bill from his pocket before entering the market. You pick it up and call after the dropper, who has disappeared into the vaults of organic food. The cheery Santa Claus type with the goddamned bell has witnessed this activity, and also sees you shrug, then opt to plop the wadded bill into his goddamned pot. Ah, Merry Christmas, sir, the bell ringer says. How about adding to that donation with some of your own funds.

21. It suddenly becomes clear to you in a flash.

22. You are indeed a cranky man.

23. You probably have always been cranky.

24. You have the solution to the blurb problem. Yes, if they'll remove the last sentence in the blurb.

25. You have the solution for the goddamned bell ringer. Happy Hanukkah, you intone on your way past him.

26. You have the look of a happy man, your client says.

27. Goddamned right, you asseverate.

Post Hoc Ergo Proper Hack

Will, who posted on my Sunday 2 December entry, raises an interesting and potentially frustrating point which I will take up with him and the rest of the assembled host this afternoon when I collect final papers of the semester and deliver a valedictory lecture. Having been with me through two courses this year, Will is about to move beyond my assigned range of classes on is vector to a MPW (master of professional writing) degree. I have no doubt our paths will cross again because he stops by here and I visit his blog site. Also, I suspect it will not be long before I begin the process of receiving books Will has written. Indeed, there was one such book in my faculty mail box a couple of weeks back.

The point Will made in his comment is that after dealing with me over the arc of two classes, he found a few sentences in my Sunday entry that trumped everything he'd heard from me. At the time of writing those sentences, I thought they were pretty interesting myself and after the spell-check reread before hitting the post button, I was impressed by the vision I had evoked, impressed to the point of resolving to remember it.

That is one of my purposes in blogging: self-discovery. In this context, the difference between blogging and journaling is the willingness to engage in dialog and conversation in the former as opposed to the somewhat less transparent expression of the latter.Having journals and, now, blog entries to reread provides me with a pole star of locating myself on the emotional and existential sea, it also provides me with a source of material to fictionalize according to my whim. Some of these entries surprise me with their clarity of vision. When I am not berating myself by wondering when in my life I will ever be visited by an original thought, when I do not experience the severe buyer's remorse of having slept with a cliche, I sometimes see a yard or two of truthful insight in the hefty bolt of reality that has passed through me.

Early in the game, I'd hit on the notion of writing everything as though it were a letter to someone I knew and cared about. My ideal way of beginning a story was with the complementary opening, the Dear____, or My Dear_____. I even tried Precious____ once, but abandoned it quickly, myself finding it too precious.

Sue Grafton told me of her journaling approach, which I liked so much I promptly stole. Coming up alongside Joyce Carol Oates in her prolific output, Sue journals each day at the end of her writing time, discussing with her composite selves her concerns about the day's work, wondering if she went too far or perhaps not far enough, agonizing about the manner in which she layered in a clue, wondering if she sufficiently saw a particular character. She rereads this entry before beginning the next day's work stint. I very much like that. In effect, it meant writing the letter to me instead of whom I happened to be in love with at the moment.

Another big help was my friendship with John Sanford, who wrote almost entirely in the second person, making even his autobiography seem more personal and intense. From John I developed the notion of writing my journals in the third person to the effect that the I became a he and thus what I wrote about me became the they of me writing about the he of me. This focus made me acutely aware of how effective point of view can be and sent me beyond my tangible time here on earth to a time before I was here, wherein I slavishly reread Flaubert, particularly Madam Bovary, in which point of view clatters about like the tin cans tied to the rear bumper of a newlywed's roadster.

And of course there was--and still is--Rachel, she who was my mentor and who stressed the need for getting the truth down before the lies had a chance to form. Although I do not write to Rachel, I write as though she'd be able to see it and nod i approval as Will did, or shake that wonderfully shaggy mane and smile that piercing writer smile before she asked me, Shelly, are you sure this was the way it was?

There is no telling what anyone will like and so I must rely on their after-the-fact-of-reading responses, taking pleasure as I did from Will's response. It is impossible to know how readers will react. You can guess, but already this is setting sail on a dangerous sea, fraught with the temptation to add things for them, hopeful of securing approval. It is like the times you are at a gathering and someone tells a funny story, which ends on a tsunami of laughter. The teller of the story is so intoxicated that he or she repeats the punch line. The tsunami immediately dies, replaced with a sopping splash. We must learn to savor the tsunami and avoid the temptation to risk the sopping splash.

George Orwell's Why I Write is a pretty solid introduction to the process of defining the truth of self to self, but after we have read it and digested it, we must devise our own statement and not rely on his. It is one thing to have him looking over your shoulder; it is yet another thing to pander for his acceptance.

A Horse of Another Choler

Shelly Lowenkopf woke up from a night of uneasy dreams to discover he had turned into a writer. This put him somewhere between Gregor Samsa, who did not come out too well, and Italo Calvino, who had been abducted by a group of space aliens who dictated a rather strange novel to him.

As such things go, it was neither a bad thing or a surprise to Shelly that he should awaken in the writer mode because once again the events of his waking life had intruded into his dream life. All too aware of the pressing needs of two editorial assignments and the fact that this week, the first week in December, is the final week of the semester, which means all twenty-four of his students will be turning in semester projects of at least sixty pages in length. Under such circumstances, Shelly is used to the arrival of an idea for a story, an idea that grabs hold of him and makes of him more of an insect than was made of Gregor Samsa.

Elmore Leonard's warnings against recounting dreams to the contrary notwithstanding, Shelly's dream began innocently enough with him navigating a windowless hallway that grew progressively more narrow as he proceeded. Reaching the dream equivalent of a dead end, a wall with neither door nor window nor indeed room in which to turn around, Shelly was made to feel the impossibility of backing his way out of this hallway with any degree of comfort or certainty, ratifying his growing concern that this was indeed a tight squeeze, as convincing a trick of the dream mind as a trompe l'oeil is a convincing artistic trick of the eye. Nothing for it but to wake up, resonating with a clinging sense of dread.

Relieved at length to discover that he had not transmogrified to an insect state, Shelly whiled away the time necessary to return to sleep by considering the nightmares of various professions and types:

The actor's nightmare is forgetting lines.

Another actor's nightmare is remembering lines from the wrong play.

The teacher's nightmare is being buried under a pile of student papers.

The writer's nightmare is being offered a contract on a book the contents of which are completely foreign to him/her.

The crossdresser's nightmare is appearing naked.

The editor's nightmare is having to explain to the writer the need to cut five thousand words.

The lawyer's nightmare is being convinced of the moral strength of his opponent's position.

The artist's nightmare is being understood.

The mailman's nightmare is a block in which every home has a pit bull.

The bus driver's nightmare is a passenger who pays the fare in pennies.

The auctioneer's nightmare is conducting an auction before an audience of individuals afflicted with Parkinson's syndrome.

The psychotherapist's nightmare is a patient who sees the truth on the first session.

The lion-tamer's nightmare is a lion with strabismus.

The politician's nightmare is being asked a question where the answer is a simple yes or no.

It is enough to keep one up nights.

Stephen Foster, the American composer, had issues with spiritus fermenti to the point where his wife warned him she'd be gone if there were one more binge.

Foster couldn't help himself and came tottering home one night, whereupon Mrs. Foster said she'd had it. While she was upstairs packing, Foster hurriedly composed his most memorable song as a peace offering, "I Dream of Jeanie." Of course it didn't help. Mrs Foster's name was Florence.

The Trick of It

Morris is on his death bed, in the moribund tidal sweep of dream and momentary wakefulness. He has some hours back acknowledged he is now booked on a one-way passage out of this world and into whatever awaits. There is nothing for it but for him to wait out the details, the slow, inexorable shutting down for good of a system that propelled him these many years. But now a smell reaches him, lures him to alertness. He cocks a finger at the nurse, who leans in to hear his whisper. "Is it my imagination," he asks, "is it merely the delirium of a dying man, or do I smell my wife's splendid lemon poppy seed cake?"

The nurse sniffs, nods. "No," she says, "you are not imagining. I smell it, too."

Morris sighs. "Such a delight, that cake. Such ecstasy. I could go truly happy with a few bites of that wonderful cake. Would you mind terribly, going downstairs and asking my wife for a tiny slice?"

The nurse fluffs his pillow then departs for the kitchen, returning moments later with Rose, Morris' wife, behind him.

Seeing them, he raises up in anticipation. "Wonderful," he says. "The cake. Now I can die truly happy."

"What's the matter with you?" Rose says, shaking her head. "That's for after."


It is true that the three-act play of modern drama has retreated back into history but in its form remains the sturdy ghost of story structure. The set-up. The complication. The payoff, which is the unthinkable, come to pass.

If Morris gets his slice of cake, there is no story, only event.

In our search for story, we are often distracted by event, one pearl too many on a string; one note too many in a song; one syllable too many in a poem.

We live by event and wish for the intervention of story so that our life might be more dramatic.

There are formulas for stories and philosophies for order. In our search for these formulas and feng shuis of the mind, we are unknowingly setting things in our path that we will surely trip over in the dark.

American Eagle: Endangered Species

Way back in the dim reaches of history, the lofty, soaring, no-nonsense eagle won hands down as the spirit guide, the icon of America. To be sure, there were those robber barons and their ilk who saw this adaptation, this splendid rendition of semiotics, as an invitation to scope out manifest destiny with a sharp eye, a five-bladed beak, and fungus-free talons, the better to enrich their larders before Conscience caught up with them and coerced them into endowing philanthropic funding.

Simply put, the eagle is a splendid creature; even the sight of a drawing or photo of such grace and beauty is stirring. But it is time to retire the eagle as our national symbol, our spirit guide, our sense of lofty, unfettered agility and pluck.

Following the dictum that function determines structure, our national icon ought to be re-designated from eagle to, ta da! the mountain goat.

Mountain goats are almost entirely functional, which is not by any means a bad thing for a national symbol. Even at its Balkanized, screwed-up Congressional sessions and States' Freaking Rights best, America does manage to function. Mountain goats are shaggy, which is also a splendid protective coating. Mountain goats may not be as intelligent as eagles, but hey, they've been around for a while, withstanding the rigors of survival, flourishing at a time when individuals with serious ambitions to become the next President of the United States believe the construct of evolution had not been demonstrated.

All of which gets me to where I'm going.

Living on hilly tors and craggy outcroppings, mountain goats have learned the hard way to make precipitous, risky leaps. A mountain goat is a living embodiment of The Leap. Our current polity, many of our esteemed educators and guardians of public resources and other trusts, not to mention the men and women who ply the media also embody The Leap. The Leap is the leap of logic, allowing them to structurally alter the dimensions of the syllogism and otherwise create mixed-breed arguments that do not follow well-trod paths. They are able to start out with Proposition A, run it around the block of their agenda a few times until it begins to tire, then link it to a completely preposterous Proposition B, then come to the outrage of Proposition C, which was little more than their idiosyncratic agenda, whispering in their ear.

Our national motto would need some revision from E plurbus unum to something more on the lines of "I feel it in my_____,"with the various factions being able to democratically chose, providing a better national holiday than July Fourth, Name That Organ.

I, for one, feel it in my gut that we are living in the Age of The Mountain Goat Leap of Logic. Having lived through the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, which I don't think lived up to its billing although I don't believe it inflicted any particular harm, I am already more cynical than I would wish to be about the Age of The Mountain Goat.

One of the many internal versions of soccer hooliganism being enacted within the confines of my psyche is the battle of optimism versus pessimism. I quite understand some of the ways the aging process inflicts pessimism on an individual. Indeed, I am, to use the U.K. trope of the litotes, not unaffected. Nevertheless, it was my hope to drift into my dotage as a raging optimist. "Yonder before us," Marvell writes, "lie deserts of vast eternity/Thy beauty shall no more be found..." It would be fun to have Optimism as my companion through those deserts of vast eternity, but alas! before me now is a tsunami of Mountain Goats a leaping.

You might argue that seeing the absurdity inherent in all of life is a kind of optimism, a saving grace, and I would listen to that and nod. Humor, which is learning to cope with pain and humiliation, and loss, is a worthy companion through the Desert. It is a high-class problem. In the name, then, of the feather and the sin and the leaping goat...