Some Fragments on Writing 1
A new self-indulgent thing I'm doing.
Opening remarks. Some personal news: I got accepted into an MFA program. Applying to such a program was a move I resisted for years, stubbornly, partially out of exhaustion with academia after having already gotten two degrees, but also, more than that, simply because they seemed so self-evidently unnecessary for the project of becoming a “good writer” – I mean, literature did just fine without them for most of recorded history, after all. I still believe this, but the fact of the matter is my life has been going nowhere fast, and I’m more tired of this than I ever was of being in school. Further, at a certain point you have to accept that if you’re serious about something (and I am serious about writing, as serious as I’ve ever been about anything, other than love), it might make sense to do the thing that the people with money and power in your chosen field expect you to do to demonstrate your seriousness, even if you’re skeptical of the necessity of that thing, and of those people. I believe I have reached that point. Anyway, I’ve always been good at being a student, and just because I don’t think these programs are necessary, that doesn’t mean I think they’re without value. Really, despite my circumspect tone, I’m very excited about this, and not just because it means I’ll be moving back to New York City. The fact is I’ve never had any sort of formal writing instruction, and only have the vaguest sense of what the pedagogical structure even is of, say, a short fiction workshop. I think it would probably be useful for me to remediate this, for professional reasons, but also to discourage creative incestuousness and myopia. And it’s not as though I chose where to apply at random: I’m not going to disclose where I got accepted just yet, because there’s still the possibility that external factors could cause me to rethink my plans (another school could offer me a financial aid package that’s too good to pass up, for example, or I could fall seriously ill this summer, and not be able to matriculate at all; I’ve learned from hard experience that things aren’t real until they’re real, and that they don’t happen until they happen), but I will say that it was my first choice, and seems by far the program most aligned with my practice. Anyway, the point is, all this has meant I’ve been thinking about writing and things writing-adjacent a lot the last few weeks (I mean, I always am, but even more so lately), and I’ve been trying to make a point of writing these thoughts down, developing them to the point of, if not absolute coherence or consistency, at least reasonably clear articulation. Since I basically can’t get myself to do this unless I tell myself I’ll publish it, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, on no particular schedule, with no particular goals in mind, whenever I think I’ve accumulated enough of them, and of enough substance, to not feel too embarrassed doing so. This is, of course, what you’re reading right now.
More poetry than concrete. I think what I’ve struggled with most, since taking up writing seriously, is coming to terms with the indelibility of voice – that is, with the fact that there is no narrative without a narrator, no language without a speaker (even a phone book speaks, just not with a human voice, but rather that of a bureaucracy, a municipal government, a public-private partnership). In my earliest published stories, you’ll find me stubbornly, ineptly attempting to circumvent this reality by writing almost exclusively in the third person, on the theory this would at least give me some distance from the problem, and getting nowhere with it. At the time, what I desired was to find a way to produce a type of fiction (and I do mean specifically fiction – poetry came later) which had nothing to do with people whatsoever, a fiction which was totally divorced from the personal, the individual, from human thoughts and concerns, from anything recognizable as “thoughts and concerns” at all, really – a fiction like the geomorphic striations of a cliff face, or the waveform emissions of a distant star. It wasn’t that I sought a “view from nowhere”, obviously I knew better than that, even at 25 – what I sought was, rather, no view at all, was “seeing” nothing, for the words to just be words describing a situation. But of course, any word I chose to actually commit to the page would instantly become saturated with meaning simply by having been chosen, by having been put into to this place in this text, by no longer being any-word-whatever. I recognize now that the fiction that could be what I wanted it to be, that could do what I wanted to do can only ever be composed of any-words-whatever, could only ever be potential, hypothetical, unobserved. Even the most severe concrete poetry always ends up being more poetry than concrete, a material which is infinitely more severe than poetry ever could be; the cat will either be dead or it won’t be once you open the box. I feel silly, now, for trying so long to write like this, denying its obvious impossibility. These days, you might notice, I usually write my fictions in the first person – this is because my working theory has changed. Now, I’m inclined to believe that the only viable strategy for a fiction like a cliff face or a waveform, which is something I do still desire to produce, doesn’t involve the suppression of voice, but rather total immersion in it. As in most things, the only way out is probably through.
Proof of life. To write credibly, you have to be able to insist that you are, in fact, writing what you are writing, and not anything else. You have to be able to remake the words in your image, and you have to be willing to let the words remake you in theirs. These things both have to be happening at the same time, in the same moment, and continue to flux for a while afterwards. And you can’t be ashamed of your scotch tape and staples and dribbles of wood glue – these things are how you’ll be able to prove, back against the wall, that you were alive, that you never came out of anything unscathed, and that, therefore, your work didn’t either. You need this to be able to prove you aren’t already dead. They’ll kill you otherwise, and bury you in an opulent grave under a name you don’t recognize, and the people who really did become what you wanted to be will all come and visit that grave, and spit on it.
Mutually unintelligible. The life of a tree, its existence as a living thing, is basically incomprehensible to us – or, at least, it is to me. Presumably, human life, human existence, would be equally incomprehensible to it. Calling it “comprehension” at all is probably a category error, so different is its state of being. Despite this, we have no qualms about using its pulped and pressed innards as a surface upon which to record our thoughts, or what part of them can be put into word and graphical mark. No one seems to consider the mutual unintelligibility involved in the process (that is, of the life of a tree to us, of our lives to a tree) a cause for concern – or, at least, I don’t. Really, this unintelligibility might what makes the whole arrangement tolerable at all. I don’t buy that it’s only a matter of expense that you don’t often see people writing on vellum anymore.
Another thought about phone books. A phone book is a kind of ambiguous map. It specifies a certain geographic scope, and presents a list of names and addresses known to exist within that scope. Thus, in aggregate, it describes much about the area itself – most obviously the names of streets, but also, from their street numbers, a rough idea of how many buildings are on them, what sort of buildings they are (i.e., apartment buildings, single-family homes, storefronts, offices, schools, etc.), and even a minimum threshold for how long these streets must be – if fifty or a hundred unique addresses are on the same one, after all, it’s probably not a single block long. Officially designated neighborhoods and similar municipal divisions are also often alluded to in these books, and, of course, all sorts of information can sometimes be gleaned from street names themselves (i.e., a street called “Crocker Market Drive,” or similar, implies the existence of a place called Crocker Market, which is probably a shopping plaza, and a fairly large one, if it has its own street), or from paid advertisements inserted into the text. But it is also, as I said, ambiguous – a list of addresses will generally tell you little to nothing, on its own, about their precise spatial relationship of their respective streets, whether, for example, one intersects another, and if so, where. Further complicating matters is the fact that while many addresses all on the same street implies something about its length, the same is not true about only a few: a street with, say, fifteen listed addresses could be a tiny suburban dead-end, but it could just as easily be a country backroad of isolated farms spread out across many, many miles. And this is all without even considering, of course, that phone books are not designed to be read as maps, and that extracting anything more than the most minimal of meaningful geographical information from a text arranged, first and foremost, alphabetically by name, and not even street name, but the names of, for our purposes, essentially random people and places, would be a ludicrously difficult, exhaustingly laborious project.
But the fact remains: it is a kind of map. It describes an area. And thus (and this is my point, finally) it is a textual form which could be used to describe an imagined place, just as much as a real one – that is, it is a potential vehicle for narrative fiction. Imagine it: a book which is identical to a phone book in all ways, except that none of the people, none of the places, none of the numbers listed in it are real. All those invented names, living on all those invented streets, in all those invented places, all describing a perfectly coherent and internally consistent geography, but through a form which renders it functionally impossible for us to encompass, for us to feel mastery over. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?
congrats yo. inspiring as always
Congratulations David!