Story, Once Again

Once again your attention is drawn toward story, in particular the thematic aspect of why it is so attractive a medium for transmitting information.  No question in your mind about the “information” being emotional, the target the viscera or the heart, those two loci being the metaphor for emotional border checkpoints.  Thus the emotions become a crude political metaphor for Arizona and Texas, landscapes where there is fanatical response to the mere mention of the words “undocumented entrants,” and where, further, the metaphor between fanatical and religious obtains.
 
Story and its real-time analogs are the only places where those who are obsessive, compulsives, and/or control freaks have an opportunity to modify Reality. It is no metaphor to link obsessive, compulsive, or control freak behavior to writers; those are the things we do even better than narrative or dialogue.

By the act of doing something or not doing something, the character pries loose the clod of consequence from the soil of stability, nudges it into a rolling motion, whereupon it gathers more mass and velocity.  You cannot have much consequence in motion for long without a result of some sort.  Important to make clear that the prying loose of the material of consequence should be physical, demonstrable as opposed to being thought-based or in any way, interior monologue.  This needs the sensible shoes of straightforward declarative sentences, the tools of dramatic action.

Depending on the personality of the reader, a particular genre with its particular preprogrammed DNA will satisfy the reader’s inner cravings.  There is no right or wrong answer for the choice of genre.  To the vanilla fancier, vanilla ice cream is real ice cream; chocolate becomes a substitute, a poor second choice.

Your favorite genre is the mystery because you have been for so long a fan of the crossword puzzle, but also because it seems to you that things get done in mysteries; crises are endured, puzzled over, pursued.  A mystery tells you on some level that what you do has so many downhill consequences set in motion.  Some of these consequences will cause unintended damage or other unintended results that are nonetheless stunning events for their victims.  Mysteries tell you that one of the best motives for murder and mayhem is the simple motive of a character with implicit belief in his or her rightness.  Mysteries tell you that there is often no real pleasure inbeing right.  Mysteries tell you that you would rather be a writer than be right.  You are not writing to demonstrate rightness nor are you writing or thinking mystery from any sense of justice being done.

Story takes you away from some of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century stories on which you were raised; it tells you there are no formulas that work all the time, that crooks get away with things, racist and sexist men get away with things, con artists get away with things.  For you, the idea of story begins when a racist or sexist gets away with something, leading to the possibility but not the inevitability of a revenge-type fantasy.  You in fact are a strong opponent of the so-called Cosmic or Poetic Justice type story, where the individuals who have somehow been wronged are left to take their pleasures from justice being administered by a source outside his or her own abilities.  You recognize the potential for someone reading these vagrant lines, then coming to the conclusion that you are a Libertarian.  Hardly.  You are a drama fan; if it’s Jake’s story, you want Jake to trigger such outcome as there will be.

You have some control as writer; in real-time life, you are constantly tripping over the consequences of things that you have done or not done, of things that seemed good at the time, indeed of things that seemed so good at the time that you have taken a step backward to see why you are so obsessed with its potential.  This works best when the thing that seemed so good at the time is a story or essay or a topic to be pinned to the dissection board of your blog site.

Heartbrake

Your heart gets broken ten or twelve times a day, a potential sign of concern.  You may have hit a period of slowing down. Time to get up, stretch, look around for some targets of opportunity.

 Over the years, you’ve developed an increased potential for experiencing heartbreak.  Seen from a pragmatic point of view, Life is a steady succession of broken heart circumstances, which must be experienced, processed, integrated.  From a more personal level, if you are not attempting things that have the potential to break your heart, the things left to you for writing subjects go down like the stock market after a cautionary speech from a conservative politician.  You feel the need to keep looking for things and people to love, to be in love with.

All about you are individuals such as yourself, putting Self on the line, drawn along by that remarkable sense of engagement that comes after you have first ventured love into the equation.

It has been helpful to watch the parade of growth for the things, persons, and places you can love.  There are certain compositions of music, say, Maurice Ravel’s Waltzes Noble and Sentimental, where you invariably find something to get the passions flowing within you.  Then comes your joy and finding different performances of it, allowing you to see the energy and entryway for love from yet another perspective.

There are stories and poems, an eclectic patchwork quilt that cover you with the pre-explosion rumble of energetic connection.  There are individuals whose presence reminds you how fortunate it is for you to know them.  Instead of offering you a drink or some snack, perhaps even a meal, they are offering you the banquet of a conversation that causes you, sometimes in spite of your concerns for your time or their time to sweep away the insulating material, then allow the conversation to proceed with the spontaneity and passions required to give escape velocity.  The escape is from the conventional, blasting toward the revelatory, the unexpected, the discovery of which individuals are capable.

Sometimes, when you are working or even at the times when you are lecturing and caught up in the subject, you become aware of the driving voice, the narrative, speaking to you, describing the activity or the ideas.  This voice is the way the work sounds and lives, talking to you in its own, unaffected register.  It is someone you love, calling you to dinner or telling you to get serious, will you, or saying good morning or good night or no or yes.

None of this, you understand, precludes you achieving goals, winning cosmic equivalents of the lottery, completing a sentence that turns the previously jammed key in the previously jammed lock, giving you, for a moment, one glorious paragraph that is as splendid as an iris in a bunch at a farmer’s market.  This is why it matters to you to be on the alert for things and people and places to fall in love with, to scheme for a half hour over a cup of coffee with someone you can speak to in the same voice you use when you try out ideas and their consequences in your own head.  This is growing more dangerous by the moment; how many persons arethere like that for you?

There was a long stretch of time when you were hunting for something nearly at an inchoate level, a something you’d thought to find in one book that would transform you into the writer you wanted to approximate.  There were flashes of insight like lightening flashes in a summer story, illuminating the thought that you would have to write such a book; you would not find it because, until you wrote it, there was no such book for you.

There have been voices with whom you felt you could have conversations on that intensity of intimacy. Voices other than yours, reminding you in its way that you are still a guest in your own reality and invention.

Part of it is also listening, taking in the voice of the speaker, hearing not only her voice but also the music of her ideas.

You will get your heart broken a good many times, reaching for such things, but you must not let that fact stop you nor allow anything to cause you to settle for the ordinary. The ordinary will also break your heart in ways you least expect.  Sometimes in the early hours between night and morning, you will be awakened by the sound of ordinary, which will get you to thinking about the consequences of stopping, even for a day of ordinary.

It's all about You

In a narrow sense, every book you have read, every author your have known and/or edited has had some effect on your life.  Mark Twain, whom you know only through his writings and your own imagination, had the most profound of all, or at least you’d thought so until your friendship with the man who called you a son of a bitch more often than any other writer.

Even when he was calling you a son of a bitch or inviting you over for his favorite cake, the Sarah Lee chocolate-covered pound cake, and the gritty, acrid coffee he made, you were aware of his cantankerous nature, his exquisite use of the American version of what we call English, and the fact of him having had close personal contact with individuals you to this day consider pillars of modern American literature.

You are speaking of Julian Lawrence Shapiro, who at age thirty-six became John Sanford—John B. Sanford.  The year you were born, Julian Lawrence Shapiro had passed the bar examination imposed on law school graduates as a pre-condition to practicing law in the state of New York.

Riding on the wave of future successes at his chosen profession, Sanford was aglow with pride.  Until he met a longtime chum, Nathan Weinstein, who answered the What’s up with you? Question by replying that he’d just completed his first novel.

The way John Sanford described that meeting to you, it was as though Moby-Dick had turned over in his gut.  He was suffused with jealousy, envy, and the sense of having wasted his time in law school.  Nathan Weinstein soon changed his name to Nathaniel West.  The novel he’d just finished, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, was ready to be sent to a publisher.  Weinstein already had in mind his next venture, which he planned to call Miss Lonelyhearts.

When Sanford told you about this encounter and what his next move was, you could feel your heart’s cadence step up its tempo; you could feel if not your blood circulate then at least your enthusiasm stand up and shake itself free of water, much like a dog out of a bath.  Weinstein suggested they take a cabin in the woods, from which venue they would write novels.  All this was happening the year you were born, but you wanted to be there.  Over many cups of dreadful coffee and Sarah Lee cake, you were there, hearing West trying out dialogue through the thin wall that separated him from Sanford as Miss Lonelyhearts came into being and as well, Sanford’s first novel, The Water Wheel.

That first novel brought Sanford in close contact with another writer you’d begun to revere, the remarkable poet, William Carlos Williams, whose In the American Grain had had a near similar effect on you and Sanford.

Where this particular reflection on Sanford is going is point of view.  At the time you’d crossed paths with him, you’d grown tired of writing about yourself in your journals as I, had come to suspect the first person POV more because you weren’t sure enough about the skills to keep it from sounding like you than any other technical reason.  Accordingly, you began a long sweep away from the I, even to the point of switching your journal point of view to the third person, thus you had become he.  Sanford pressed a number of manuscripts on you showing how he was writing autobiographical material in the second person.  Pages and pages, volumes of you.  Try it, he said, and try it, you did, hence he became you, at which point you were immediately able to begin a novel in the first person.

You owe John Sanford that, as well as an abiding fascination for the Merriam-Webster’s unabridged Dictionary of the American Language, second edition, which he regarded with more fondness than his Remington standard typewriter.  You wish, oh how you wish you had his copy.  You owe John Sanford inviting you for Sarah Lee cake to celebrate his ninety-third birthday, on which he’d wangled a three-book contract.  You owe John Sanford telling you to forget all the times he’d called you a son of a bitch, and you owe him working well into his ninety-eighth year, scarcely taking time from work to die.

When you mention John, most cock their head in a questioning gesture.  “John Who?”

When you were editing a literary journal, The Santa Barbara Review, you asked him for a contribution.  “You son of a bitch,” he said.  “I was wondering when you’d ask me.”

You, the pre-Cambrian Sea, and Tide Charts

The Cambrian era is a paleobiological time from the distant past.  The pre-Cambrian era extends back nearly four billion years.  To speak of the ocean at that time is to include a stunning array of cell, plant, and mineral life, much of which resides within us today, in fact courses through bloodstream, carrying a replication of the pre-Cambrian sea.

With that lovely equivalent ocean circulating through your veins and arteries is yet another presence or, if you will, force; you are on some level reminded of it at least once an hour.

Your added gift from this ancient ocean is in some ways the equivalent of notes you placed in bottles, then case into the ocean when you were an adventurous lad.  Not that you are of diminished adventure now nor that you are sending forth fewer messages—rather more.  This gift is more primal:  it is the embodiment of the tide.

Sometimes you want to believe all human transactions are tidal.  Other times, you are certain they are.  Tides ebb and flow, enthusiasms ebb and flow, hormonal balances rush forth, then retreat like house burglars. A project that one day seems brim-full of the seethe of life of the pre-Cambrian sea retreats before your eyes on a second reading.  Material that seemed so lackluster that you were eager to set it aside now bubbles with the froth of enthusiasm, calling you back to it to add a word, a detail, a sensory trigger.

Recognition of the stages of the tides, within you and without, reminds you how perilous and yet how exciting the trek through life is.  You must learn to cope with the fluctuations, to recognize the feel of the high-water mark and the slick, sandy desolation of dead low tide.  It comes to you how, at times, you have tried to live as though life were always at that average point, where the water was somewhere on your shin bone between ankle and knee, the tide captured in some digital photo, halfway between wax and ebb.

Didn’t work.

The places where the insights are most valuable are where the tide is fuli in or long gone, when you have to scurry or you will be left trying to do the Australian crawl in the kiddies’ wading pool.  You buy into some of the vital lies that have been thrown overboard from many a passing civilization, noting how they clutter the coastline.  The tides allow you to see the wreckage of the propaganda and false premises for what they are.  Jetsam—things thrown overboard for the sake of better sea faring.  Is that a metaphor, or what?

 The tides and their incessant movements give you a chance to consider the consequences of what you have done and what you have not done.  Sometimes you have done what you ought not to have done; other times you have not done what you ought.

What remarkable things have you done when the tide was half in or half out?  Compare that with what you have done well on your way to being drunk or in love or on the edges of a new story or suddenly overcome with envy at the opening of a short story or poem or novel, all of which conditions are remarkably similar in that they are aspects of the tide of reason being full in or full out.

 

The Worm Turns

You live next door to a fire station.  As you were negotiating some groceries and Sally from the back of your car, when one of the firepersons who’d been working on the nozzles and dials at the side of a large engine called out to you, inquiring over Sally’s health.  After a few exchanges across the chasm of a large driveway, she approached, made friends with Sally, and began a conversation familiar to dog lovers.  The discussion spanned the years from puppy to adulthood, how quick those years seem to come.  We move on to the size and weight of dogs, how Sally, at a scant thirty pounds, has the advantage-but-not guarantee of longevity.  The fireperson takes that step of confiding that makes a conversation a transaction.  She speaks of the enormous emotions involved in having to put down a larger, older dog, how she always wishes she’d gone for a smaller dog, how her life as a fireperson and as a person person makes it easier to dispense with a human from her life than a dog.  You walk down your driveway, describing to Sally the dinner in store for her.

If you believed in the particulars of sentimental myth, you’d be convinced the emotion of grief had been a designer emotion, something to come out of a story conference.  Sometimes, when grief has sneaked up on you and you are left to break emotional bread with it before sending it on its way; you try to imagine a plausible scenario for it being such a complex, invasive aspect of the human psyche.  Sometimes grief is like a particular worm that infests us, a tapeworm or round worm, some invader that climbs on board, waiting for an opportunity to make its presence known, which is bad enough for an uninvited guest, but, worse yet, it seems to thrive on causing in its host the sense of abject helplessness.

You have grown attached to a pair of denims.  You’ve shared some good times, both social and working.  Soon now, you will part company.  You will be sorry but not grief stricken.  Any number of mail order or online sources will be able to supply a new pair with the promise of good times until the seams shall part or the knees wear thin or some other defect sends you back for yet another pair.

Grief is the sense of loss of someone or some thing you consider irreplaceable.  No wonder you were assuring Sally of her forthcoming meal, which she ate with the considerable gusto she appends to everything she does.  You were whistling through the graveyard, putting off an event that in so many ways is now like the landing pattern at LAX or O’Hare.  Sometimes an individual will, with the best of motives, remind you how much he or she cared for your late Anne, expressing sympathy and concern for your loss.  Up to that moment, you were doing well, but now you are reminded that you aren’t.  You are comfortable with your life, happy, engaged, but of course different and now you are reminded of the difference.  Sometimes an event will take place that, under ordinary circumstances, you’d want to share with her or your sister.  Thus another dimension to grief:  the inability to share a pleasure, an insight, and a triumph with a particular person.  The pleasure, insight, triumph still remain, but you suffer that momentary loss of the one you’d so instinctively turn to share it with.  The worm has stretched to its full length within you, making itself known.

Grief, or at least the worm of it, can bring a parade of all the things you have lost, things whose memory extends well beyond the approaching threadbare denims which you can so easily replace.  In such moments, you are arm-wrestling with grief, which wants nothing more of you than to tip you back into the past, where you had access to the person, place, or thing you no longer have.

Sometimes grief interferes with your reading; you return to something that gave you pleasure at one time, but discover soon upon this reading that it is gone from you and you are left only with the ash of what it was to you once, earlier.

There are dozens of strategies you can employ when the worm turns over within you, wishing to remind you of the power you have lost in the transactions of being alive.  It neglects to tell you how important it is for you to not only have new transactions but to experience them, to learn to close read so that the details are imprinted on your senses to the point where they become living reproof of the gloom the worm wishes to install within you.

There are downward spirals, fanned by remorse, by an excruciating sense of loss, but there are an equal number of thermals, updrafts, breezes, supports for the merest, most fanciful of ideas and mischief to install as well in your sensory library.

Triangulation

 Bill Clinton caught hell for it, but there are few things Bill Clinton did not catch hell for. He even caught hell for leaving the legacy of a surplus, which so outraged many of his opponents that they set about co-opting and otherwise converting it to their personal use.

The particular “it” you are talking about is not budgetary, it is instead triangulation, which is a subject you caught hell for when you were in a course in map reading relative to the Reserve Officers Training Corps.  In an amusing irony you did not see at the time, ROTC participation was a requirement during your tenure at the University of California, Los Angeles.  One half a unit short of junior status when you switched over to UCLA, you were required to take one semester’s worth of classes, including the weekly drill, involving you to show up in uniform.  You could find your way in the bowels of the enormous UCLA library, with its vaunted million-plus volumes and its Library of Congress classification system, but you were not sufficient to the task of finding your drill unit.

Of course you failed ROTC I, or however it was designated, meaning you had to take it for the second time, whereupon you became acquainted with the means for locating yourself on a military map by the use of two other points of reference.  You may well have been helped with the concept of triangulation by your then studies in poetry and literature, as they focused on oblique references rather than direct ones.  Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Direct description of a character or thing can help produce an image—no question about it. Description of a character or thing or, for that matter, an emotion, can be accomplished as well by triangulation.  Even better.  You prefer the latter; a destination arrived at by the same kind of failure you experienced in your first semester of ROTC.  You had to fail and repeat your descriptions, even then not getting them to your liking.  You must also admit your liking—by which you mean your standards—were as slapdash then as your appearance in the dress khakis of the ROTC cadet.  Even so, you were not satisfied with what seemed to you the flatness or, if you will, journalistic effect of your accounts.  You wanted presence.  Edge.  Nuance.

The concept of obliqueness was slow in coming, but as it arrived, you began to appreciate the fact of being able to experience the emotions you were writing about as you were writing them.  Hooray.  This meant a greater probability that the reader would get them, too.  You were at that pivotal state of being an arriviste; you knew what you meant to imply.  Now you wanted to make sure anyone else reading the piece would get it.

Even at this remove from those times, your concern is of the nature of triangulation.  Do you get it enough?  Do you give enough reference points?  Have you provided enough handholds for the reader to get it without a footnote or some description outrageous in its length?
In so many words, you are ROTC cadet Shelly, appearing in your Age of Pope and Dryden class in your uniform, already presenting the mistaken impression that you somehow intend to be an officer in the goddamn army as opposed to being a writer who at least doesn’t get lost in the library.

The world of the outer self—Reality, it is called—is a fraught world.  You are often comfortable within it, but it requires constant attention for the IEDs of Life.  Every one of those Improvised Explosive Devices has the potential to break your heart.

Full Bore Ahead

When you prepare for a classroom presentation of material, you get the kind of traction you seek by identifying four or five elements about the subject at hand you can approach with enthusiasm.  Anything else begins to gnaw away at you as having the potential for boring the audience rather than instructing it.  You know from long experience how dreary and sodden the material can be if it is a heavy lift, going in.  You also know how difficult it is for you to get material off the ground that is boring to you from the outset.  You know this because you have been at both ends of the bell curve; you have been bored, you have returned the boredom of others in kind.

A dear friend from your younger days, the splendid alto saxophonist, Sonny Criss, gave you a role model when, as a relative unknown, was invited to appear at an early “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concert at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, directly across the street from a university where you would ultimately teach for over thirty years.

Criss was invited along with some of the most talented and revered saxophonists of the time:  Coleman Hawkins, Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon.  “They so love their instruments and the music,” he told you.  “They bring the music to life.  What I have to do is love the music more and bring it to greater life.”  He did.  You once had an old vinyl recording of that time and would cherish a digital remaster now.  But you don’t need it.  You remember when the time came for his cadenza on “How High the Moon,” and the roar that went up from the audience scarcely before eight bars.

At the time, you thought it was his drive and energy, his great strength and technical skills.  You wanted to write like that.  Be in control in that exciting way where the feelings fit so well into lace, like laundered shirts that come folded.  

While Criss was still alive, you came to understand how much he already knew when he told you what he did about loving the music.  He was four years older than you in chronology, light years away in understanding.  It speaks well of you to have had such a friend at such a fragile time in your own life.  From time to time, Criss would give his saxophone a loving caress.  “This,” he’d say, “is my UCLA.  This is where I get my education.”  In your time, you learned that the work is the education. When you reach the point where you love it, you and it intermingle so that it is difficult to tell you apart.

When you set forth to write something, the original impetus will have exploded somewhere within and without, splattering you with drops of enthusiasm and audacity like dropped garden hose at full water volume, both of which you need in order to execute the plan.  You are buoyed by the knowledge that by the time you get the once wobbly craft back in sight of the shoreline, you and it will have gone through some change in shape and attitude.  What an excitement it is to know that if the project works at all, you will both have grown, traversing your way through a landscape neither of you had expected.  You do this with friends and loved ones all the time without articulating it, taking the process for granted.

The most difficult thing of all is for you to edit; frequently you are called upon to deal with things you barely tolerate, which sets you in arrears with your feelings and abilities.  Here, you are in a sense a translator, thinking to discover authorial intent where there might be none, reminding yourself of an actor taking a role for which there is mild enthusiasm if, indeed, any enthusiasm at all.  You are circling, much like Sally trying to smooth a spot on her already smooth bed, even to the point of moaning in frustration that there is no such place.  Yet.  You are circling to get a sense of the work, fretting until it begins to speak to you.  The sadness comes when it does not speak.  Ever.  And you are stuck with it; hopeless and helpless as you get these days.

They all meet in the recreation room of enthusiasm, which is of itself a circular thing.  You have to find the entry port so that you can simultaneously fill it with you and you with it.   When you are enthused, audacity and anarchy threaten, but never, never boredom.