Borders (the un-bookstore kind) and Boundaries

When you begin a vision of self with a vision suggesting superiority or merely enlightened awareness at the expense of others, you are distancing yourself from forms of contact and interaction that support your basic instincts as a social animal.  This distance mechanism, if pursued, is a direct path to feelings of remoteness, where suspicions and loneliness may lurk, even be nourished into resentment, which represents an even deeper push away from contact and human discourse.

Frustrating and slow-moving as human engagement may sometimes be, it is nevertheless the wellspring from which insight, intent, and behavior emerge.  Could a person go it alone?  No question.  Could a person flourish and create alone?  Same answer; examples abound of productive men and women in quasi-hermetic conditions.  But were they happy at what they were doing?  Or did they somehow manage to convince themselves they were put upon, thus creating as they did in spite of instead of because of their remove?

Scant distance from these observations to one of your favorite and more productive working places, 3917 State Street, Santa Barbara, California, a coffee shop crowded equally in observation of free wi-fi  and superior coffee.  Whatever the motive, they often talk, chat, visit, all symptoms of their humanity.  You do not particularly need wi-fi access; there is your cell phone, if necessary.  And while you cannot match the foamy splendor of a Peet's latte, you have equipment at home to provide a good approximation of a Peet's latte.

Why then would you come here when you could just as well find the solitude you associate with you work for the lower reaches of Summerland, say, in the Greenwell Road Preserve?  You come here to be pestered and bothered, to need to focus beyond a strident voice or an engaging conversation; you come here because you are a city person who sometimes needs traces of city, if only as an avoidance mechanism.  But also, you need the sense of contact even if to create a wall about it.  You are one of many anomalies afoot on this planet, a writer who needs himself in solitude but must have people in order to write.  Perhaps if there is time, you will learn to write in solitude, where the only strident voice or engaging conversation is yours.

What are you trying to say?

Even were you one of those remarkable writers who plots out the twists, turns, and labyrinthine ways of a story, you would still not know in advance what you were trying to say when you began.  That is, you would not know consciously; your inner navigational systems would pretty well be on top of the intended outcome with the same kind of expectation as a youngster convincing his parents for a trip to Chuck E. Cheese.  "We don't even have to go inside," they'd offer, "just sort of drive by."

You pretty well know what you're trying to say in a one-on-one conversation, or the antic gatherings of your friends at various coffee houses, where there is no particular agenda.  Certainly, you know what you are trying to say when you flesh out lecture notes or when you write an editorial report for a client.  And when there is a review deadline emerging or the need for an essay overcomes you, there is some form of pole star to guide you to the destination.

A story is another matter; long or short, you require a minimum of two drafts to get used to the characters in action and the signals your emotions are sending you from the sidelines.  In some seemingly convoluted way, story telling works for you as a series of explosive discoveries.  On one hand, you are setting off to relate a series of events with some dramatic conclusion; on the other hand you are telling the story to see what you can learn from the way the characters behave.  The characters are in effect arguing with you, telling you to do as they do, not as you write.

Any logician can see where these visions go caroming off the walls, coming back to keep you off stride, particularly if you ride herd on the characters too closely, forcing them into so-called conventional wisdom which, you are increasingly learning, is not your wisdom.  For better of worse, it is not your wisdom.  Indeed, you may not have any wisdom other than the ability to listen and to wonder.

The Naive Narrator

The naive narrator steals into our fictions like a cat burglar on the alert for places where the valuables are stored, patient, calm under fire, observant, perhaps even sensitive.  This character's distinctive flaw is the ability to misunderstand behavior taken for granted by others or to be unaware of conditions conventionally thought of as compromising.

We may patronize such a character, even feel a tinge of being sorry, but we do not dislike.  More often than not, we even admire such a person.  After all, how could we not like Huck Finn or Seymour Glass or Nick Caraway?  How could we fail to feel empathy for Blanche Dubois?

A naive narrator will emerge from a story alternately fixed on a goal or in full pursuit of immature behavior, with the consequence that you as reader will be constantly vulnerable yourself to his or her actions.

Such characters are fertile; they are constant nudges in the ribs of our own naivete index, most correct in their behavior and assumptions when we have recently suspected the opposite of them.  Reminding us so vividly of undiscovered territory in our own naivete, we advance timidly forth, casting more naive shadows against the wall, hopeful our presentation and investigation will lead us to an awareness beyond mere confidence, extending toward the greater trait of acceptance.

Once we accept our characters for what they are, we have in effect allowed them to leave the house of our creation to fend for themselves, as they will rather than as we will them to do.

Vision Statement

You have been asked to provide vision statements for two different and disparate entities, leading you to suspect that you should have one of your own as a basis of comparison to any others you might produce in the future.

 A vision statement is an assessment of the universe in its most general terms and those specific areas where you have interest and intent.  What, then, is your vision of the world about you as well as the worlds within you?

You see the world about you as a seethe and boil of competing agendas, populated with strong, determined predators who are programmed to attempt survival against significant odds.  The competition and predation provide fuel for relevant, meaningful thought against the backdrop of reflexive behavior.  You are impressed by and aware of competition.  To a certain extent, some of it voluntary, you are a predator although you do not like to see yourself in that light.  Rather than the camouflage of the hunter, you wear the tee shirt of the reasonable man.

Your inner views are equally seething although you are often able to go about your days in a condition relatively close to calmness.  Your vision statement in this inner landscape begins with attempting as much as possible to project an authentic good will and respect for living, growing things.  This extends to your wish to understand as much of it as you can through the actions necessary to dramatize moral conflicts, their potential resolutions, and the consequences of their success or failure.  You see yourself able through your work to come out at the end of each month with a surplus of words meant to define aspects of the human condition and with some small surplus of funds necessary to secure your comfortable habitation.

At one point in your life, you could walk past most of the more ambitious newsstands of most cities, where you would notice as many as four titles you had written.  Those close to you were constantly asking you when you were going to settle into writing something serious, a judgement that rankled because of your belief that funny was serious and that your vision was to move as far from comedy and its physicality as possible, inhabiting the more lumpy terrain of humor and its ironic comparisons. This led your close ones to believe you were having too good a time, but you were not having a good enough time; you were miserable in fact, reaching for understanding and awareness that were not ready to be found just yet because you, instead of looking for the more genuine ore, were concentrating on iron pyrites, also known as fool's gold.

You are at the moment having a good time in the sense of being able to spend some portion of the day using the muscles you have developed since about age fifteen and toward which you were gravitating since about age thirteen, when a long forgotten friend of your parents gave you a book you still have, containing in one door-stopper of a volume a number of novels, essays, speeches, and short stories written by Mark Twain.  It was for an event exactly one month after your thirteenth birthday, on which you were formally received into the cultural community of your birth by virtue of having flawlessly read portions of the Torah and then from the Book of Prophets portion of the Hebrew Bible.  For the same ceremony, you were also given a copy of short stories by Jack London and, probably because it was inexpensive and looked literary, a collection of the short stories of D. H. Lawrence.  For all practical purposes, you were fucked because these books, written in English, by males who were anything but from your culture drew your interests away from documents written in Hebrew, in which you had no thought to write.  You were led into the places where the English language met Icelandic and German, Anglo-Saxon, and Dutch.  You probably have a larger vocabulary in Sanskrit than you do in Hebrew, and although you can remember some portions of the Hebrew you so flawlessly read then, you probably have more stored away from The Devi Mahamtamayi or Chandi, as it is popularly called.  Go figure.  You were fucked because there was a vector, a vision, if you will, an inertia that drew you as a secular aesthete through the corners and alleys of English rather than any other language.  Your approach to foreign languages was like your dealings first with girls, then young women; scatter-shot and too arbitrary or temporary to forge any serious involvement.  Your vision was to save yourself for English, for American English, for the rolling cadence of the teller of tall tales and the sharp, short sentences of the laconic Westerner, rolling a cigarette with one hand.

Your vision was much the same as Huck Fin's vision when he first boarded the raft, to get away and find some sweet life along the river, which at that time was as big as any boy's dream.  Your vision was to ride that river and indeed you have, through journalism and pulp novels and television, stopping off for brief visits to pick up supplies.  The river you'd seen in your vision is mythic, the language you see even now is mythic.  There is no such thing for you as sweet life but there is a sense of memory set down, much the way Twain himself remembered his river, The River, in his quest to be a riverboat captain.  Your vision is not by any means complete, there are tides and shoals and reefs, islets, snags, and rocky bottoms in the river of your vision and huge, clunking barges to be avoided, but it is your river and it is no small thing to be set afloat upon it.

Cowlick

For as long as you can remember, your hair has demonstrated strange, idiosyncratic behavior.  Segments of it have risen like an impatient audience at the conclusion of a boring lecture.  Entire patches of it seem to grow with no regard for its neighbors.  Brushes and gels have been recruited to serve as disciplinarians, but they all took early retirement.  Keeping your hair short helps, but as so many things connected with hair, shortness is transitory, leaving unruliness as a resident squatter.

As you careened into what at first seemed the apex of being adult and consequently "of age," which is to say the need for shaving daily, you discovered similar insurrection on your lower left cheek, just above the jaw line.  With a day's growth of beard in place, you are able to trace an anomaly lurking in the grain, like a beginning writer at a writers' conference,wanting to know how to get an agent.  It is the same anomalous behavior you note on your head, a complete willingness to boldly grow where more compliant hair had grown before.

"Some mess of cowlick you've got there," a favored barber named Roy observed as you sat in his Santa Monica Boulevard emporium, appropriately swathed in neckband and cover sheet.  You'd heard the word before, even experienced that splendid visual sense of a cow, licking a patch of stubborn hair into submission with an endless tongue.  Indeed, your mother had used a splash of water from the kitchen faucet in loco bovinis to accomplish that very task.  Before Roy's diagnosis, Mrs. Forthman, the administrative assistant of Hancock Park Elementary School 408 S. Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles CA, 90036, upon seeing you, would snort, say that single word as though attempting to dislodge a strawberry seed from between her teeth, "cowlick," then repair to her desk for a bobby pin which she would thrust into place in the mass of anarchistic hair you bore as a matador thrusts the sword into the neck of the fighting bull, at precisely the right place.  Wisdom would have dictated you avoid contact with Mrs. Forthman, but she was the then equivalent of Rahm Emanuel to Ruth Angelo, the principal, to whose personal library you had unrestricted access.  A bobby pin was a small price to pay.

You have been with Maryelle, your present stylist--as though you had sufficient quantities of hair to style, for the best part of twenty years.  "You are a living display of cowlick," she observes each time she settles me into the chair at Salon du Mont, from which I can see the mall below and the stately Santa Ynez mountains in the distance.  This leads me, now that I have achieved almost simultaneously with male pattern baldness the tendency to reach for connections, to an inevitable equation.

Does your prose have cowlicks?  Are there anarchists dwelling within its murky syntax, eager to spring forth, all fustian and verbal Molotov cocktails?

You search early drafts nervously, perhaps even as alert for some mischief in order and control over chaos as Mrs. Forthman's concern for your appearance.  Or perhaps with the same exasperation your mother experienced when she remanded you to the custody of the kitchen sink tap, her last resort in keeping you neat.

The Insect and the Windshield

Not long ago, as such things evolve, you had the occasion to look at something you had written and, as such things also evolve, thought at first that it was something you'd copied from another writer, speaking in another source.  Since there was no attribution given and with the growing sense of familiarity about the vocabulary and manner in which words were strung together with a seeming exuberant spontaneity, you began to remember the material as well as the circumstances under which you wrote it.  This full arrival of ownership, responsibility, and emotional involvement brought you to the kind of direct impact an insect has with the windshield of a traveling car.

To care with passion and the wildly intoxicating mixture of uncertainty and overwhelming curiosity about a work you have struggled to get down in some form, editing, restating, perhaps even moving the paragraphs about with muscular bravado, is an exact and exacting metaphor for a romantic adventure.

Even the wonderful detail of meeting somewhere an old flame and the bittersweet recognitions the encounter sends rushing through your awareness is an apt part of the metaphor.  Looking either at the paragraphs of story or, say, the fine archipelago of freckles across her face and nose, you experience the fond comfort of intimacy, a state of heightened awareness to nuance, gesture, intent.  Allowing the pleasing association to take you where it will, you arrive at the discovery that another such state of the kind of awareness you describe resides in reading.  What great feelings and connections arise when you read something you care about.  Conversely, what outrage you experience when, in the course of some employment or duty, you are immersed in reading something flat, linear, perhaps even episodic.

Another metaphoric insect meets impact with the windshield of reality:  Your earlier associations with alcohol, then drugs, then a combination were not mere youthful angst and impatience; they were an attempt to find the awareness you found in romantic relationships, in writing, and in reading.  True enough, some downside aftereffects to be dealt with in either of the three but even those add to the dictionary of awareness you sought and still, Google and Wikipedia to the contrary notwithstanding, seek.  Your most poorly written novel, your most disingenuous romantic relationship, the reading you felt you had to pursue, these were all bringing you a kind of credibility and awareness you could not have presumed to appreciate much less understand as you engaged them.  As Graham Greene wrote in the first line of The End of the Affair,  A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
 (1951)

What do you mean?

When a friend or acquaintance ask you "What do you mean?" after you've made some stab at a relevant response, your answer is apt to be a more detailed answer because you've been conversationally alerted to the need for more specificity and/or relevance.  Your response tends to be reflexive because you're used to your own battles between specificity and its potential bed mate, boredom, and the earnest desire to be understood in as much dimension and nuance as possible.  This is particularly so because you are so fond of puns.

When a literary agent or editor asks you, "What do you mean?" a different response emerges, equally fraught with conflict between irritation with the questioner for not getting "it," whatever "it" was and your deep conviction that what you'd been questioned on was as rich with meaning and texture as a cheesecake from Junior's is rich in flavor and texture.  You mostly know what you mean and when you don't know what you mean, you have a sense of intent that pulls you along as you slap down a word at a time as though you were engaged in a competitive game of cribbage. slapping down strategic cards one at a time.

A sincere part of writing becomes engaged when you have not yet sorted out the complexities of the emotional wiring diagram that is you; the words and sentence follow, giving you some hope you're on to something, perhaps even that you'll be able to identify that something.

You've had too many occasions to respond to "What do you mean?" with "What do you mean, what do I mean?" delivered as a riposte.  You needed a new strategy, learned at great pain and thoughtfulness.  "Okay, what I meant was---" is as good a response as any because you now have a few seconds, perhaps even as many as ten, to collect thoughts and begin explaining your way along the contentious pathway of clarity.

It's been some time since you've discovered the frequency with which you begin writing something to discover your intent, then arm-wrestle the meaning out of it. And so the adventure continues.  Only in recent times have you felt such a connection to your characters, richer, more supple than before, where they were invented to serve some plot-driven situation that reeked of your attempts to concoct it.  Now there is the sense of, dare you use the word collegiality given your complex feelings about universities?  Well, you dare, and you have those feelings about characters that are all cognates of the verb to love.