Clink Your Glasses

Voice is everything.

There is not much difference between the strident, disagreeable voices you hear in coffee shop conversations or, indeed, in telephone calls soliciting news of your state of health before plunging into attempts at selling you things you didn't much want, nor even more to the point, many of the books you find staring out at you from the shelves of bookstores, the library book sale racks, or in the mere advertisements of forthcoming books in the better reviews.  All these things have voices, rely on voice, fly or fall on the conveyance of voice.

Factor in the audio book and you have ratified yet another way the effect of voice on result; a well performed audio book will impart dramatic quality to a mediocre text.  An excellent text, poorly read, has to settle for its chances at the lower levels of success.

According to our tastes and sensibilities, we embrace, put up with, or are put off by the emerging voice in a transaction, be it literary, political, romantic, or merely the occasional commercial transaction we must all engage.  We have some time in the past made the necessary accommodations with those we regard as friends--as they have with us.  The live quality in the voice of a friend is love.

If a story has no discernible voice, most readers will give it one resonant with their own taste, which is an acknowledgment to the writer of a loss of control of a major sort.  A writer can ill afford a neutral voice or, for that matter, any tone suggesting passivity; the tone of a story must reflect the feelings and attitudes of those who are plucked from the comforts of the Sunday afternoon doze to confront the incessant needs of drama.  These needs, as insistent and yet notional as a cat, wanting either ingress or exit, do not allow the character any more leisure than what has already been taken.  Persons in real life situations have distractions, moments, priorities, perhaps even individuals for hire or emotional blackmail to do their bidding.  Persons in stories have no such choices, rather they face the Ben-and-Jerry menu of consequences, things that we readers know will happen to them down the line no matter what they do.

The thing that keeps us at our reading is the suspense of seeing what those consequences will be, how smart we are to have avoided those consequences in similar situations, or perhaps the envy of imagining a consequence we dare not hope for (because we know we have done nothing to earn the outcome, because always in the back of our mind is the intent to do the things we hope will provide consequences we can not only live with but enjoy).

By the time we have reached a certain age (which varies among us) we have heard voices of parents, teachers, clergy, politicians, scientists, prognosticators, sales persons who tell us we look way groovy in a particular item of clothing we have serious doubts about.  We have heard friends telling us in the particular voice of for-your-own-good that something we are contemplating is the equivalent of a major magnitude train wreck.  We have heard silver-tongued orators and professional actors declaiming lines in which wisdom and understanding and love dwell.  We have, if we have been at all fortunate in love, been compared to a summer's day and come out the better for it.  We have been warned by favored waitpersons off particular dishes at particular restaurants--"The chef is having a bad day."--and we have been reminded by students of our effect on them even while the voice of an administrator from the same institution is plangent with the need for more careful articulation of teaching goals and their results.

The cumulative effect of this experience has given us a sensitivity to voice in all its permutations, even voice originating in us and our written expression.  We are wary of how a thing will sound, acute to our opportunities to say the things we have to say, eager for the right note, that ebullient clink of sound that is as a joyous flick against the side of a crystal wine goblet, resonant with the cheer of the moment and the awareness of the wonderful fluid within it.

Status Reports

You've been given any number of notices, ranging from acceptance to eviction.  These included such last-minute instructions as the need to cut entire sections from a novel appearing serially, the need to add another ten minutes to a speech already underway that you were just rounding up, the need to cut at least ten minutes from a reading, and indeed, the need to prepare a keynote speech for a writers' conference on fifteen-minutes notice because the scheduled keynote speaker, a noted author you'd come to hear, had slipped away during dinner and instead of going to the men's room as he'd announced, was two blocks away at the Elk's Club, knocking back double shots of bourbon while telling various of the local Elks to go fuck themselves.

Another notice that came unexpectedly your way was the one informing you of a vote by the academic senate which accorded you the rank of adjunct professor, which had the almost immediate effect of causing your daytime employer, a PhD in history, to refer to you in his inter-office memoranda as Prof rather than the less sarcasm-laden SL by which you had previously been addressed.

There was a notice from the Sansum Clinic informing you of the results of a test citing a III-2 lesion on a body part you had come to take more or less for granted along with other body parts, and yet another notice some years later delivering you from any lingering consequences after the removal of said lesion.

There were notices about you sent to your parents, proclaiming you to be insufficiently endowed with the qualities of cooperation and responsibility thought necessary to perform successfully at the third grade level in spite of having earned respectable grades in all your subjects, causing your father to ask of you, "What are you, some kind of wise guy?" to which you had no recourse but to answer, "I guess so," at which point your father was left to observe, "That's a rough road to take."  But he never tried to talk you away from it.

Notices.

Some informed you of under- and overpayment of federal and state taxes, the need to renew city or county dog licenses, California driver's licenses (with reminders that being licensed is a privilege, not a right or entitlement), subscriptions in danger of expiration, notices that your services were no longer required at the publishing company where the president referred to you as Prof; a notice that someone you loved had better things to do in her life than see you again, signed with a shard of poetry in French that let you know the notice was being dictated by one or more parents; notice that you had won a contest; notice that you had not won a contest, notices to cease and desist; notices of forthcoming celebrations, notices that rights in particular stories had reverted to you; notices that novels had earned back their advances; notices that novels had not entirely earned back their advances and thus would you modify your prose to a greater sexual explicitness; notices that a particular book of yours had violated contemporary standards of sexual explicitness; notices that a review you'd written had taken a well-worn trope of disapproval; notices that your contract to teach was being renewed, notices that you had once again failed to submit the rubric of teaching goals as they related to learning goals; notices that your resignation had been accepted; and notices that someone from your past was on the Internet, hopeful of contacting you to pursue a romantic relationship once you subscribed to a particular service.

In addition to notices, you have had offers, one of which was for a free cremation, another for a burial at sea complete with a hand-calligraphed Oriental prayer scroll.  Offers also extended included having portions of your body elongated, others reduced, others still rendered free of arthritic pain.  There have been several offers of free admission to seminars in which you would learn the secrets of the financial universe, opportunities to sell any time-share participation in ski-lodge areas, and yet another offer of a trial size vial of pheromone extract which would presumably draw women to you who might otherwise not be interested in you in any slight degree whatsoever.  A freelance editor in Los Angeles will tell you exactly what's wrong with your prose, and a former lady friend is willing to teach you the ins and outs of Argentine tango in exchange for editorial services on a novel.

The landscape bristles with notices, offers, and opportunity; such things are the smorgasbord of life.  You have only to decide on the ones closest to your priorities, then place the choice ones on your plate while studiously avoiding temptations that might seem attractive but which would ultimately distract you from your purpose or cause you to prematurely be buried in a metaphorical sea of temptation,  the teacher of Argentine tango coming to mind in resounding fashion on that score as indeed she had in the past.  Even at this remove, you recognize the attraction has nothing to do with tango but rather the flurry of activity that surrounds attraction, whether it be words, visions of imaginative mischief, or the articulation among entities who appreciate and truly listen to one another.

Transformation as an iPhone Application

For as long as you can remember back into your reading past, there were frequent times when you browsed the shelves of used and new bookstores alike, searching not merely for some entertainment or touted classic but for the one book that would so alter your perceptions and understanding that your life would have been transformed, as of that reading.  Titles long since forgotten have passed through your brain much as an ice cream cone passed through your intestinal tract, your life interesting, at times dramatic, even entertaining and meaningful to high degree, but not transformed.

All the books on writing fiction had passed their way through you, some even leaving residue, but none of a transformative result.  When you began teaching a fiction course at USC, the then department chair who had pulled you in off the streets had observed, "Surely you'll use E. M. Forester's Aspects of the Novel as your text."  You said surely, then rushed to the massive, well-stocked student store, where you found and fell on the Forester, admiring it, in fact using it, but not transformed by it, either.  Nor were the books you had contracted as an editor nor the things you had written, nor the one notable opportunity you had to reject Lajos Egri's impressive-in-its popularity Art of Dramatic Writing (which a subsequent department chairman, discovering your having refused the opportunity to reprint that work, shook his head at you as though you were not so much his faculty member as a random scale of academic dandruff).

Convinced as you are that there is no one book of such a transformative nature, you nevertheless made lists of books you thought might be so, then undertook to read them, pursuing them as though attempting to secure the marrow from a lamb shank bone.  This led you to the all-or-nothing conclusion that only such a book as you might someday write would have that transformative effect on you, a challenge to produce, damnit, or forget notions of being transformed.  Settle for some level of mediocrity you could not articulate because even that would be judgmental.

Time has had its way with you and you with it, with an impressive amount of frittering in between.  You have written what you consider to be a transformative book which is indeed out in circulation and which has produced a number of explosive results including one now retired publisher from a major house vouchsafing his belief that you have achieved a state of senility previously unrecognized in someone so young as you are and another editor quitting her job and asking to take said transformative work along to her next position.

Being transformed has not done for you what you'd hoped; you still have enormous cowlicks, for instance, a nasty temper, an overly fond regard for Texas barbecue, and the absolute certainty that transformation only works one project at a time, which is to say each new project needs to contain its own qualities of alchemy whereby mere words take on that most precious quality of all, being interesting.  You are adrift in a mystery in which you are loathe to kill of any slight character much less any of the major ones, and you are toying with a fantasy which is, as you consider it, a revenge fantasy in which certain academic types of individuals and the circumstances they provoke are holding sway against your judgment that revenge is in fact trumped at every turn by imagination and fun.

What you appear to have demonstrated is that such transformative books as there are have largely come to you with their batteries on low, needing all your ingenuity to get them into operation.  Transformation is like a dropped iPhone call on ATT; if you redial and say nothing, perhaps the person at the other end will not notice, having come to expect dropped phone calls and dropped transformations.

Magic

Nearly everyone who has undertaken the writing of a protracted piece of any length or genre knows the finished product is at some remove from the original vision of the work.  It is a cynical argument to insist that those who have undertaken the writing and don't know the final version will be different are either rashly naive or perhaps academics.

It is also cynical to think that the process can be made any different for those who believe in the magical of formula or, for that matter the formula of magic.

Magic does happen in life and in writing but not from any of the advertised sources; magic comes from the ordinary, the fussed-over detail, the uncertainty whether there will be enough in the pot to feed so many guests, enough scenes in the story to satisfy any kind of reader who, if he or she is any whit of good in the first place, approaches things with a modicum of cynicism.

Magic comes when the performer becomes aware of the need for some element to complete an earlier vision or, indeed, illusion; it does not come from outside sources, from little people running around with benign smiles and recondite spells; magic comes from the creator's anguish that some extra something would make the illusion more satisfying.  Magic comes when the performer has run out of finite properties and must bring in something previously unconsidered, perhaps even something not at first thought worthy.  Magic comes when the performer infuses the landscape with a combination of need, necessity, and the unspoken desire to provide a memorable experience to someone the performer considers special.

Magic comes to a story when the writer has used up all the artifice and formula, intuits there is a missing beat, a lacking nuance, a curtain that has hung unnoticed, a risk not yet considered.  This is a perfectly luxurious story, the writer seems to be saying, all done up as nicely as possible, but which is still missing the touch that will make it a story that reverberates rather than one that is reprinted in some anthology of paradigm short stories.

Magic is a coffee stain on an otherwise clean shirt, an unnoticed crumb at the corner of a perfect mouth, one lock of unruly hair, standing forth in cowlick glory, a pair of socks that do not match, an unnoticed zit at the end of a nose.  Magic is the quality humans supply when they are anxious to offer perfection instead of the true humanity of their gift, which is a smile instead of a package, a story instead of a perfectly cut diamond, a bunch of flowers instead of a Faberge egg, a novel instead of a necklace.

Destinations

Not all destinations are geographical; some are imaginary and striving to define themselves; other destinations are emotional landscapes, shrouded in awe or perhaps misanthropy or, better, the blaze of enthusiasm.  Yet other destinations are rhetorical, forcing expectation to share accommodations with outcomes, provoking surprise perspectives and responses.

Each time you approach a novel or short story, whether written by an author unknown to you, an old literary chum or, indeed, your own work, you enjoin it:  Take me somewhere I have not been before.

Your subsequent reaction to any work at hand is measured in proportion to the quality of the journey on which you were taken by the reading of it.

If your inertia of skepticism and studied disinterest was at all penetrated, you melted into the characters and their goals, assumed the landscape was now yours as well, proceeded against their challenges, gloried in their victories over circumstance, learned as they learned and realized how in fact you had not learned so well in reality when you had the opportunity but saw the light, the discovery through the immense journey of reading.

The commonality you share with those readers and writers you care about is the legacy of loneliness.  You join your role model readers and writers with the recognition that although you are in this alone, you have at least these two things to share, the idiosyncrasy of the aloneness in forging a tangible voice and the wish to achieve the goal of forging a language that will help you describe not only how you feel but how the entire universe appears to you in those moments you are fortunate enough to get close to it to the point where you can see one anomaly of structure that is in actuality beauty and truth revealed to you because of your effort of looking for it.  This anomaly may be something as quotidian as the awareness of toyon berries appearing at a greater height than they ought or of the sudden appearance of a mocking bird in a territory overrun with ghastly, squawking crows.  Nor is it all about nature; it may be the surprise appearance of a word you had not dared to use, appearing in a paragraph you had written without regard for the propriety of using words that might send some scurrying toward a dictionary, or the expression of recognition when you find yourself locking eyes with a person who appears suddenly beautiful to you beyond all reasons of standard, outward beauty.

To have any hope at all for a life in the arts is to be fucked in the conventional sense of having rendered yourself second best at anything else you undertake.  Perhaps there are some grace notes; perhaps you can have a moment of connection with teaching or editing or merely being able to call to some one's attention some small wonder of extraordinary worth and beauty.

So there you are, cheerful about the price extracted from your day-to-day existence, the price of being the landing site on which ideas and impressions may or may not chose to land upon when you are in their vicinity.

Gustave, I Hardly Knew You

All of us who set our course by the writing star, blazing away in the night skies, have a common link in the metaphorical splendor of Gustave Flaubert's short story, "A Simple Heart."  The principal character of the story is Felicite,whose name itself is an invitation to metaphor because she is a drudge, doing drudge work, is relatively unnoticed and alone in the world, whose entire life is the life of service and her belief in the mysteries of Christianity, and of course her one living luxury, her parrot, Loulou.  In her dying moment, Felicite conflates a vision of her beloved Loulou with the Holy Ghost.

The story had a profound effect on you when you first read it, while in your teen-aged argument against the accouterments of religion--any religion.  It had an even more profound effect when you chanced upon Julian Barnes's remarkable novel, Flaubert's Parrot, in which a modern day incarnation of Charles Bovary set about becoming a Flaubert scholar, then yet again as discussed by Mario Vargas Llosa in his The Perpetual Orgy, which was meant as a study of Flaubert but which, as such things go, was also a study of Vargas Llosa.

Over the years since you first encountered "A Simple Heart," you have variously tried to orchestrate in imagination your own dying moment, thinking about all the wonderful and not-so-wonderful possibilities of vision, one in particular coming back to haunt you in the form of a television infomercial.  If you had your druthers and because it is so personal, so about you, you pardon yourself in advance for neglecting dear animal friends such as Sam, your first real introduction to what it meant to have an animal so much a part of your life that future times in your life you always did have an animal confidante; you similarly move beyond parents and sister and close, irreplaceable persons, landing instead at that entry into Huckleberry Finn.  Not so much because it was even close to perfection; Huck Finn is in fact flawed but it is also your own equivalent of "A Simple Heart," the place where you would spend your last moment because of that voice, that remarkable, knows-more-that-you'd-think voice, and because you might have had some moments of approximating such a voice but had not delved the secrets and mysteries Twain delved and understood long enough to sustain such a voice.

It is questionable, given Twain's upbringing and experiences whether he had many moments in which he bored an audience.  This alone intrigued you as you followed him through his essays and sketches and novels and some of the most awful narrative known to mankind and some of the most sublime.  You learned first hand what it was to bore audiences; seeing it before you was so humiliating that you resolved when it happened to study the factors and tropes that produced it, caused the eyes to roll upward or sideways, the feet to tap, the fingers to fidget.  You were so ready to hear Twain set it all out on the page, detailing the ways in which a story could become an instrument to be played upon, showing ways story manifested itself and lived in persons you would not suspect as being tellers of tales.

More than likely, Life being as multifarious as it is, your final moments will be over before the recognition hits that they are final moments.  Meanwhile you will have said your farewells to Annie and Jake, to Pennee, to Anne, to Sam, to Blue, to Edward, to Jed, to Molly, to Sally; you'll have nodded toward your mentors Rachel and Virginia, to your pals, Barnaby and Digby, toward lovers and friends all in some litany, some theme of apostolic succession, not once but multiple times so long as memory and the resonance of their voices sound about you; they will be more in the nature of greetings than farewells because another of the joys of being here is that you have their voices so firmly in mind that you respond to them day-to-day without noticing they are away.

The Next, the New, the Promised

You've invested exercise and learning where literature and plain old story are concerned, taking and suffering the risks of boring yourself and others until, to some small degree, you found not only a vocabulary for literature and story, you had examples in mind and had written, among various other things, a dictionary of linking and cross-referenced terms.

This is not so much self-congratulation as it is a fact of accomplishment; you have done what you believe those who compose or present music must do, what those who carve things from other things, who compose and portray dramatic scenes, who compose story, all from vocabularies they have discovered within themselves as an analog to the vocabulary of the discipline in which they have chosen to work.  Those others with whom you would associate, even to the point of disagreeing with them and their vocabulary entirely, have struggled to invent a vocabulary of significant vigor and resilience to sustain story; they speak in this vocabulary, hopeful of being understood by others.

The book length work you have completed was some years in the making, its worth to you enhanced not only through the vocabulary of revision you have articulated but because you had somehow managed to have lost the entire project, then had to reconstruct it, day by day until you were satisfied of its completion.  Your original plan was to supply an edge to your voice that distinguished the material from anything similar, but thanks to the loss of the manuscript to the electronic fates, you lost that particular edge and found instead yet a more satisfying vocabulary.  There are by your count three hundred seventy-five separate terms, essays ranging from three or four lines to ten or twelve manuscript pages.  The edge is gone.  In its place, there is the fact of you having experienced at least three hundred seventy-five squirts of C₆H₃(OH)₂-CH₂-CH₂-NH<sub>2,which is to say dopamine, which is as good a reason for doing a thing, particularly a writing thing.  Many of the books of which this is a sort have in common the authorial I as a focal point; if you do as I say, if you follow my rules, my conventions, then you shall have succeeded.  You know a few individuals who have written such works, thus your confidence in you own vision, your own voice, and your own vocabulary.  One of the many things distinguishing your project from the others is the shift in pronoun so that the emphasis, although coming from you, speaks to the you of the reader, not the I of the writer.


You can live with the swarm of interest in the work, then the seemingly universal spread of uneasiness about it, the request for more time, the occasional questions about your intent, then the tin can of decline tied to the tail of the project, all because of those squirts of dopamine.  Somewhere, there will emerge a home for the project.  Meanwhile, you are seeking more dopamine from the next, the new, the promised.</sub>