Narcissism and You

Not long ago, when you were in casual conversation with a group of friends, the judgment of narcissism was delivered about a particular writer.  You took this in with some interest because days earlier, you’d heard the same judgment rendered about yet another writer.  The judgment came from a literary agent who’d spent years in the saddle as an editor for major houses.  Two such references could be coincidence, but when you’d had similar thoughts about a writer, you had some hard questions to ask yourself about yourselves.

Because of his well-identifiable behavior, the designated narcissist from your group of friends falls into the no-contest category; his regard for himself radiates from his regard for himself as a writer.  He is argumentive in his pursuit of himself as a superb craftsperson, no less an advocate for his complete modesty in reaching such a state, content to let the facts as he sees them speak for him.

The other two candidates are persons you know at a closer degree, prompting the need for this disclosure to yourself:  You have not been able to bring yourself to finish any of the works of Narcissist Number One.  You are fairly comfortable with many of the works of Narcissists Numbers Two and Three.  This leads you to Plateau Number One, which is that you can and have enjoyed works from writers known to you to be narcissists.  In the logical bargain, you have encountered among students and clients unpublished writers whom you would classify as narcissists on the evidence they provide, which is in essence the superiority of their editorial judgment and storytelling ability.

This paves the way for you to examine yourself as a candidate for an advanced degree in narcissism.

You pretty well are comfortable with the way you see story.  A diverse enough number of editors and readers have found dramatic integrity in your vision.  The worst disagreement with such a person, himself a fine storyteller in his own right, was over a single matter in a single story, your heavy-handedness with the objective correlative.

Even though your last book was nonfiction, it was about story.  You took at least ninety percent of your editor’s suggestions without so much as a blink.

You are particularly open to notes from your agent, and you are as of now committed to following your editor to another publishing venture.

Such narcissism as you carry about it leavened by your willingness to listen to sources you respect, nor are you one to set such a high price on “sources you respect” that they cannot be found.
As a writer, a tad more than a person, you are willing to listen to suggestions in the service of making your dramatic and existential visions more acute and penetrating.  You have no problem with the construct that your ideas and visions are better served when they are vetted.

That said, you cherish the notion of independence, of being able to be on the alert for ways to be the most reliable person you know, the person you most enjoy spending time with, the person who, aware of his shortcomings, is neither afraid to admit them nor to educate himself to better cope with them.

You have two spectacularly close friends, the Yalie and the Brit, and a number of dear friends, women and men, among whom to exchange the gifts of self and closeness.  You carry plangent souvenirs of parents and sister, you have two mentors, Rachel and Virginia, and you have the ongoing gift of a relationship with Swami A, whom you served as disciple and as editor, as neat a give-and-take as you can imagine.

So you see where this is going, do you.

You are, with all these riches, and with all the riches of everything you have read and written, and all the music you have listened to and often hear in your sleep, without a significant other.  Do you, you ask yourself, need one?  Could you survive nicely without one?  The answer to either question evokes as much fear as your questioning your narcissism quotient.

You would not ask such questions if there were not someone you had feelings for any more than you would ask yourself if a particular piece were ready to go off without being edited.

Writers need editors.

Persons need friends.

Musicians need instruments.

Actors need a role they have interpreted.

Can you be productive and comfortable among your trusted selves?

Are you a self-delusional narcissist?

You think you know the answers to all of these.

The best editor for them all is your most vulnerable self.

In the Soup

In the kitchen and the writer’s work area, surprise explodes upon the scene with the power to cause a spectacular gamut of possibility.  One ingredient—surprise—introduced by accident or deliberation, transforms an entire cosmos from the bland predictability of recipe or formula into a memorable and radiant chemistry.

As a particular stock becomes a promising basis for a soup, conflict becomes a spawning ground for the rich texture of story.  The analogy continues:  Some soups, a gumbo, say, or a cioppino, are rich enough to stand alone as a one-dish meal.  Well, perhaps a ficelle or loaf from a fermented dough, to serve as a complement to the soup. Other soups are by design or from kitchen disaster rather thin, amuse bouches at best, not intended for a long haul much less a serious haul.

Some conflicts are complex and provocative enough without added ingredients to provide momentum for a long story.  In story, much as in soup, after a certain point, you want to be careful about adding ingredients, lest you cause a chemistry of the cancellation of effects rather then the symbiosis of ongoing adventure.

Surprise works best if you do not see it loitering about as some throwaway hint, buried within a laundry list of ingredients, brought out as if by accident or last resort.

Under the most ideal circumstances, something you have set forth in the soup or the story, almost without conscious deliberation, calls itself to your attention.  Perhaps the trigger was your tongue, perhaps one or more of your characters.  Whatever the device, it is a useful tool, a transformative, magical trigger your secret selves were keeping hidden from you.

As you taste the soup or read the story draft, you want to say of the surprise, “I knew that all the time.” as you connect it to its place in the scheme of things.  Truth to tell, you did not know it all the time.  Had you in fact known, your surprise would have to be enclosed in quotation marks, it would have been an irony; as well, it would have been a formula, a device, a conveyance.

Whether in the kitchen, the work area, or out in Reality, surprises of all nature come over you like the marine layer sneaking in along the coast.  Your behavior is your first clue that you are a participant in a surprise.  You have abdicated your role as the trained observer/writer, watching the universe play our its ongoing Bayeaux Tapestry of events.  You are now the embodiment of the surprise itself, playing out your role in the transformative drama that has you acting in response,  You are now an audience, watching yourself and the behavior of your response to this surprise.  As with your discoveries from your writing, this surprise is something to know about yourself, something you will undoubtedly wish to learn from later, when the surprise has had its way with you.

What are the chances for you and this surprise?  It is no surprise to you that it has changed your perspective.  You suppose you could try to effect some sort of pact with sensible behavior, but your greater experiences have left you with the awareness that you have already given up on that some time ago, favoring instead your chances with yourself outside the auditorium filled with sensibility, where platitudes and formulae are broadcast to roaring cheers.

This behavior is one of the many things you enjoy and accept about yourself.  Although surprises have the ability variously to disappoint you, knock you down, delight you, bowl you every which way, send you scurrying to capture the notion or insight before it escapes you, there is within you an eagerness to go serve as lightening rod for surprise, to attract it, draw it into you, and absorb its charge.

Take care. Take very good care.

Why should we care?

About your story.

About any story.

We should care if the story and its outcome mean something of emotional significance to one or more characters, and to you, the writer.

We should care if the situations within your story and the conditions within your characters resonate with a mythic anguish you understand on a verbal and non-verbal level,

We should care.

About your story,

If you are beset and it shows through your choice of events, outcomes, and characters.

We should care if your behavior in this time of exquisite crisis shows you in a posture we admire, might even wish to emulate when we are in such excruciating circumstances, whatever they may be.

We should care if you are not taken in by convenient platitudes you then attempt to fob off as realistic, workable solutions.  This is life we’re talking about, and what respect do we have for characters who think and feel in the shorthand of platitudes?

We should care—and we may well do so—if you care and it shows through actions and implications as borne out by your characters, with no stage directions or authorial interruptions.

There are not as many reasons why we should care as there are reasons for us not to care, which means we have our work cut out for us.  We must not be suckered in by false sentimentality, platitudes or gratuitous anything.

We should care because we are discovering something we hadn’t known when we began.

Outcomes

When curiosity begins to itch at our awareness, our early response is to consult some oracle emblematic of our individual quirkiness.  These oracles are multifarious, ranging from reference books and web sites to tarot cards, shamans, yarrow sticks, and religious rituals. Depending on the degree of specificity we’re given, the itch has been scratched for the time being.  If the curiosity edges into the mysteries of human behavior, the oracle may also be one versed in the more scientific approaches to quantifying, even interpreting human behavior.

It is the rare person who has not consulted more than one of these oracles at some time during the life cycle, rarer still the person who has not sought some form of resolution or other in fermented spirits or some cactus, leaf, or mushroom-based product.

Given your frequent curiosity about your own behavior and the behavior of others, given your added curiosity about so-called Existential or Cosmic matters, you have removed yourself from the ranks of the rare person; you have had some dealing with nearly all the oracles referred to here, the most extreme being your belief that Kool cigarettes, when dipped in Jurgen’s lotion, then dried in the sun to the point where they would burn like a normal cigarette—is there such a thing as a normal cigarette?—would produce a psychedelic experience.  (They did not.  The most you got from that experience was an infatuation with the young woman who assured you this Kool cigarettes and Jurgen’s lotion path was, as she put it, a heavy path.  And you suspect you would have become infatuated with the young woman under most circumstances.)

Yet another oracle was proposed for your consideration.  This was a large glass of Pepsi-Cola into which had been introduced one drop of ammonia and one ounce of Jose Cuervo tequila.  You were fortunate to have emerged from this experience with nothing more notable than a fierce headache.  This was, at the time, a small price to pay.  At the time, you were gullible to the extreme in your thirst to have your curiosity quenched.  You wished to know the secrets of the Universe, the Cosmos.  You wished to achieve in whatever manner possible insights that would make you better able to deal with the glorious advances of puberty upon your body and the challenges of existence upon your mind.  You did learn to avoid mixed drinks.

You also learned that there was a greater probability of understanding to be achieved through the reading of fiction.  More so than history or theory or critical theory or, for that matter, any of the social sciences, you came to accept that there was a chance you might gain a better notion of your emerging selves by a close reading of fiction.  Trouble is, you did not yet know how to achieve close reading.  You were still not certain how to tell what the meaning was in the stories you read, much less in the stories you were writing by then.
Oracle by story is achieved by incessant reading.  Close reading is achieved by rereading what you have previously read.  Understanding the significance and code of outcome is achieved by incessant writing, followed by incessant rewriting of what you wrote earlier.

Outcome is a pure abstraction until you bring it into a personal focus for yourself, to the point where you experience the feelings of competitiveness and verbal combativeness with someone who has read the same thing you have read to the point of taking from it an outcome that does not jibe with your own assessment of the outcome.

By a commodious bend of logic, you have been implying here that outcome, whether in Reality of Story, places you at the perimeters and margins of your tribes and per groups. At first blush, this might seem a lonely, detached life, but it is no such thing; you have accorded yourself a prime vantage point from which to watch the parade, gathering momentum and dimension just down the road from you.  Instead of balloons, sparklers, or skyrockets, your pockets are stuffed with pens, note pads, electronic devices.

You are alert and prepared.

Here comes the parade.

A Little Closer, Please; to the Story, That Is

When a pal emails or phones with the expressed purpose of making sure you read a particular book, you tramp down to Chaucer’s to see if it’s in stock or see if you can find it used on Amazon.

So Wolfe calls from Albuquerque, still munching Braunschweiger and pickle sandwiches, to commend the Harvey Fergusson title, The Conquest of Don Pedro, which, unknown to Wolfe, embodies one of your favorite essential mythic themes, the fall-out when a stranger comes to town.  He is still chortling while he enhances your anticipation by a brief teaser of the book’s thrust, particularly its New Mexico locale and the stranger being a Jewish traveling salesman.  Wolfe knows a thing or two about teasers, having at one time introduced you to the concept of the choking Doberman, which you then co-opted as a long entry in your latest book.  Wolfe also knows a few things about humor, having written any number of comedic and outright humorous works, none so humorous as his descriptions of his earlier life, when he, as a stand-up comic, was the lead act for the early performances of The Beatles.

As you read The Conquest, you quickly discover Don Pedro is the name of the small town to which the stranger, Leo Mendes, comes. Except for one thing, your enchantment grows.  As your reading continues, you resistance begins to emerge, then make itself a full-blown pest that you have to more or less read around.

The pest is the narrative voice in which The Conquest of Don Pedro is cast.  Such stunning first-person narratives as Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn to the contrary notwithstanding, your preferred narrative form for the novel is multiple point of view.  This approach allows us to experience story from the inner workings of a select number of individuals, allowing us to experience the rich ambiguity and potential conflicting visions of witnesses who have some interest in the outcome.

The Conquest of Don Pedro is omniscient.  “The town of Don Pedro stood,” it begins, “on the eastern edge of the lower Rio Grande Valley, where it spreads out more than a mile wide and the silver river loops and wanders through the lush green of growing crops and the bosques of cottonwood, willow, and overgrown mesquite.”  You would yourself describe that as authorial intrusion.  You would also begin to suspect the author of having “and” as a habit word, a suspicion that is born out in subsequent paragraphs and pages, making you blame the omniscient point of view and a lack of closer line editing as culprits for the resistance such prose evokes in you.  Harvey Fergusson is by no means aclunky writer; his visions and sense of rhythm tingle with clarity, but this narrative is, in its way, like the wallpaper in a rented room, a bit faded from the sun and from general exposure to human occupation.

You do not wish to be told what Leo Mendes felt.  You want to be with him as he experiences such things as his lunch; you do not wish this omniscient intelligence to explain how well he cared for his burro, you’d like to infer that from the treatment Leo accords the animal.

You have stayed long enough to have concerns for the developing story; you will stay to the end, but it is a severe distraction visited upon you when you find yourself more or less translating the narrative into your own preference here, a straightforward third person.

What you’re experiencing here is the equivalent of wanting a front row seat in a small theater; you wish to be close to the individuals in the story.  You do not wish to have the story filtered through a disembodied intelligence.

Eliminate the Middle Man

Not until you find yourself immersed in a progressive muddle of events, where the dominoes of causality have begun to fall in relentless cascade, do you appreciate story as it ought to be experienced.

At such moments as these, the Cosmos has become personified for you.  Events are no longer random or freeway pile-up, they cry out in a chorus of conspiratorial voices, a four-part harmony of the unthinkable, dropping in for a visit.

This is the nature of story for you.  At first, there are questions or attempts to get somewhere or, conversely, attempts to get away from somewhere.  Perhaps there is a quest or some puzzle to be solved.  Individuals in want or fear, in reach or repel, dislodging an unintended chunk of Cosmos that takes on a momentum of its own gravity, careening, bumping, possibly bouncing.

Story brings down the drapes and curtains, trips over telephone wires, dislodges the tangle of wires connecting computers to peripherals.  Story is conspiracy theory, a cascade of events, a—if you will pardon the reversal of fortune—cornucopia of misadventure.  Story is Brer Fox’s Tar Baby, in which all who come in contact are drawn into its sticky clutches.  When such moments happen in life, we say this concatenation cannot be real; when such events happen in story, we say the same thing, pause for a moment when deciding where to cut back for the sake of plausibility.

We use plausibility as some sort of measuring gauge.  How much is too much to seem believable; how much is not enough to be convincing.

If the events of a story seem too managed, we say of it that it is too plot driven, too mechanical.  If the story does not appear to have some personal agenda against one or more of the characters, we say of it that it is lacking in dramatic intensity.

The right amount, then, is exactly the critical amount the principal character cannot seem to bear, the one thing that puts her or him over the edge before allowing that one last thing, the thing we as readers or as writers believe will send the character over the edge.  Of course we require that one additional thing.  We need the character to be over the edge because we are not comfortable when we are not over the edge or feeling precariously close to it.

Our relationship with story is a complex one, half cynical, half an attempt to believe in things we cannot see or rationalize.  We want the reassurance of story to hold Life at bay, at the same time relying on Life to reassure us that story is the distillation of experience.

We are whom we are, individuals stuck on the fringes of life and of story, eternally vulnerable.

Big Ideas, Big Problems; Little Ideas, BigStories

There were numerous times during your earlier years when you had limited tolerance for ideas that were not grand, glorious, stunning in their reach and implication.  Such ideas seemed the only ideas worth entertaining. All others were banished to the upper balconies.  Then you graduated from the university,

Over time, the smaller ideas began to radiate with appeal; they seemed more approachable.  You could actually see yourself leaving a thumbprint or two on an idea of less grandiose scale.  There was no surprise to your discovery that the number of projects you finished increased as the size of the ruling idea shrank.  In due time, you were not merely adding to your toolkit by the act of finishing things, you were finding homes for many of the pieces.

As the number of placements increased, the concept of the ideas you favored in undergraduate years underwent significant change from overt admiration and reverence to skepticism seasoned with cynicism.  For one important discovery, you began to realize the relative difficulty of describing Big Ideas; they in fact began to seem more abstractions to you than practicality.  By increasing degree, abstractions became the enemy.  Many abstractions are nothing more than political slogans.  Yet other abstractions emerge for you as occasions of boredom.  Even more anathema to the writer than his material being turned away at a particular venue is the prospect of his work being boring.

You need to be careful of ideas and strangers who wish to give you ideas for stories.  Some ideas, like some strangers, have the ability to fool you with their manners or their clothing or your mistaken impressions of them.  Some ideas are not well formed from the start.  Others lose their patina after close examination.  Some ideas, like some strangers, are delusional.  In addition to their potential danger to themselves, there is the potential of their danger to you.

You have in the past few days come to recognize the potential danger of an individual of whom, because of past experiences, you’d have done better to approach with greater care.  But he approached you with an idea, which on it face seemed of excellent substance, so excellent that you allowed him to retain you to help him bring it to publishable fruition.  Such is the nature of delusion and such was the strength of his idea that you believed he could execute the work.  It truly was a good idea, with enough of a spine to be able to support it in dramatic form.

Train wreck.

This experience has not made you any the less enthusiastic toward amateurs.  You have yourself been an amateur and not an entirely gifted one.  As a result of this particular experience, you were skeptical and cynical enough to avoid sophisticated attempts to lure you into working with a man who’d earned a doctorate from a respected institution, answering his bewildered Why would you turn this project down? Query with the near reflexive naming of his doctoral degree as the primary culprit.  Some individuals with doctoral degrees are elegant storytellers and/or narrators.  This individual was not.

As for your own ideas:  When they first arrive, their presence is tentative, and you like that behavior.  They approach as though uncomfortable with their outer clothing, as though embarrassed by an unruly cowlick, in their way asking you for assurances that it is all right for it to be seen in public.  Soon, as a measure of familiarity develops, you began to establish a bond, see some potential, perhaps even to the point of jotting a few notes.

When the notes achieve some volume, say a page or two, perhaps even so little as an index card or two, there is some tingle of anticipation.  A sentence occurs.  Then another.  Soon, you’ll have written a paragraph, and now the idea is stretching, sprawling, beckoning with its quirky, kinetic twitches and engaging smiles.  It is projecting personality to you.  All the while, you are becoming besotted with that particular behavior.  It is still young, rambling, coltish, even leaning toward the awkward, but you do see potential for it, and so you follow it, still not sure how it will emerge as an adult, but no longer judging it by any standards of growth and development you have applied to any other idea or story or person or thing you have read.