The Answer I Wanted to Hear

NPR interview. Could have been me. Sounded like me. The writer’s struggle between the demands of life and the life of the page. The challenge of human relationships in a headspace where the art is all.

One of the most telling comments was in answer to the question about how the writer dealt with comments from those folks closest to her who read her work. Her husband, a writer, was the person whose involvement promised to be the most challenging. “You want people to be honest about the work,” she answered; “…to be honest and love it.”

A number of the readers with whom this writer shares her work understand that abiding need. A few do not. Some, like dear, wonderful friend Kay (who is reading for the first time) have the thoughtful good sense to ask how the writer wants them to respond; what sort of response would be the most useful. Others have the lovely consideration to tickle one’s vanity in harmless ways, knowing how much certain types of sharing mean. Some say exactly the wrong things. But they mean well.

Such foolish creatures, we writers are—like children presenting handmade valentines to beloved teachers. We want people to read. We want them to like what they read. Overly sensitive wretches we are, who listen too hard to what is said to us, interpret it too critically and react too strongly.

When we receive half the reaction we hoped for our pique fills the sky.

Sometimes we find distance and balance in what we hear and how we react. But not often. Our reactions are as unguarded, unreliable and uncontrollable as our tenuous relationships with life.

Our lives come complete with moments of fear. Some of those moments approach terror…realizations that real life is not what we think it is, what we want, what we know, what we’re comfortable with. The standing-outside-ourselves that casts a hard, harsh light on a spare, inward, dedicated, isolated existence.

A life of the mind is such that the outside world can be stark and ugly in comparison. Sometimes, we don’t hear the answer we want. Sometimes, we don’t even hear it from ourselves.

Moore, Oklahoma

I felt it in the days, the years, after 9/11. After Joplin, Katrina, Sandy. I knew the feeling after explosions and tsunamis and crushing earthquakes. And now Moore.

It is the true, deep feeling that no one who was not there can truly identify with the vastness of loss…that, in the face of the awful psychic scream that is the tragedy of sudden death, happiness, lightness of being, has no place.

A town is gone. Scrubbed off the planet. How do those of us at a distance dare to have a feeling humble enough to contemplate such ruin?

We live the moment of silence because no word is enough.  We honor lost lives with all the solemnity in us. Joy is irrelevant at a time like this. An offense. And, in a way, so are blog posts.

So. A hiatus. For a day or so. Until the dust settles. Until the body count is final. Until tears have had a chance to dry.

A Man Breathing

Writing is revelation. Is the telling of the deepest honesties. Writing is the soul laid bare. In these posts, sometimes, we offer the most secret parts of ourselves. Offer it fearlessly. This is one.

I believe, sometimes, that the sound of a man breathing is the most beautiful sound in the world. The intimacy of it. The awareness of the life that the breath is connected to, and all it conveys. The traces of that breath through life: its changes, its tells. An experience as magnificent as there is.

I have come by this awareness in a number of ways. But what I share here is not the warmth of a loved one beside me, but rather a more unexpected awareness raised during the course of an innocent act: a massage by a very fine, very spiritual practitioner.

These breaths had a measured awareness in them. Like a meditation that connected me to him. An announcement of concentration; of intention. A thing more ethereal than sensuality, yet made up of the same stuff.

As writers, it is our lot—our duty—to open ourselves to the moment. This is an assignment as instinctive as it is deliberate. To feel as much as can be felt; to be as ultra-aware as the organism will allow. Sometimes, it feels like a burden. Most of the time, it feels like joy.

It is not an exaggeration to say that, in the art-mind, a grain of sand is an Alp. A fish on the tongue is all fish on all tongues. An embrace is the ultimate expression of embraces. Love felt, denied, imagined, forbidden—it is ours to hold. And a man’s breathing, collected in preparation for the stroke, the touch, the anticipation, the incomparable everything…it is life condensed into an instant.

We do. We do without. We imagine gloriousness in the absence of the experience of it. And in the random samplings that life offers us—if we are willing to go naked before them—are indescribable joys that, if we are diligent, dedicated, lucky and open to our craft, are the moments of which worlds are made.

Ouroboros

The truth of the writer is a phoenix-truth: every day we rise from the ashes of the previous day’s shortcomings. In each new day at the page, we have the chance to get it right. To do it better. To find the small, exquisite alchemies that bring us closer to the ideal that keeps us alive.

Tough task, that.

Doubt is built into who we are. We are our own mythical serpents, swallowing our better selves whole, from the tail up. Grace is tough to come by when we have a mouthful of our own refusal. And it’s nearly impossible to find self-forgiveness when we’re choking on our shortcomings.

I’d rather write, I tell myself, than spend time crafting a letter to the agents who will take this burden out of my hands. In the limited time (and with the more limited energy) I have to fight for a chapter or a paragraph or a sentence after the workday is done, I’d rather craft a half-assed few words than the other, hated task. I’ll tackle the submission letter when I’m done with this book. Or the next one.

No.

I know that’s a procrastination, even though there is truth in it. And the procrastination is a knowledge as shaming as it is genuine. But how does one un-swallow one’s self? What happens to the writer if she succeeds, sadly, in consuming herself?

We do not vomit ourselves back into the world. We do not decide to untangle our lives as we seek to untangle the locked-in secrets of the story. We wish that someone were there to take the burden away. We are chewing on our own tails. And the bite sinks deep.

Sharing Words with Life

No posts lately. Between Commerce and tiredness, there’s been nothing new to say.

And then.

Was walking across the parking lot next to the beautiful building in which I live; thinking how grateful I was to be living there, how wonderful the architecture was, etc. etc. I felt myself trip. A crack, a frost heave on the pavement, and I was airborne. Headed for a very very hard landing. And yes, you do feel every second of it…the faceful of pavement, the cracking of bones and teeth, the leaving of skin. Not good.

I knew how bad it was when I saw the face of the man who rushed over to offer assistance, and again when my buddy Carlos at the lobby desk blanched at the injuries I hadn’t yet seen. The blood dripping onto my hands was a pretty good indication, the wincing of Emergency Room staff was another.

I’ve spent ten days recuperating. I got back to work four days after the accident. Stitches are out. I’m forming nice new skin. My brain is bruised. I’m better but not well. And there is a strange grace in this literally painful situation.

Question One is “How do I feel?” Question Two is “Can I give myself leave to not do all I want to do?” Question Three is “Am I up for writing?”

The answers are quite extraordinary. And they all add up to the same thing:

Permission.

I find myself forgiving the true awfulness that my appearance has been. Abandoning my concealing sunglasses and going barefaced before shocked and inquisitive eyes. And more. Sharing my passion for words, for the non-commerce writing with the demands of a finite, limited and physical self. Doing what I feel, even if it exists in conflict with what I tell myself—what I know—I want.

Life has some pretty bizarre lessons. Healing takes many forms.

The Glorious, Horrific Laundry List

This space has been a writer’s love song. To notebooks. And tape recorders. And self-created book soundtracks. And improvisation as a path to inspiration. Now, another way to find one’s way into a scene through the labyrinth of thought.

I’ve always done this technique, in a sense; collected notes scattered over pages, assemblies that contribute to the form taking shape in my head. And today, a variation. The lightning round of coerced innovation.

The laundry list.

A little background. In this scene, the main character turns the beautiful creation that he has come to love; remakes it into something dire. Vile. Fear-making. An inescapable “sticky darkness” that will be his self-defense, his weaponized wonder. The chapter—the experience of those foul creations—is written, as they all are, from the POV characters pov. A living of a bottomless dread, of the worst of a human soul.

Enter The Laundry List. And yes, readers, this is an open book examination.

Thesaurus.com is my cheat of choice: From it, I drew a list of words that described the abhorrent, the impossible, the foul, the unbearable. Already knew what the contributing categories would be…simply set myself free in word-wonderland to gather up the grandest, most horrific gems I could find. I let them fill me up inside, until my brain was afloat in them; until my thoughts foundered near drowning. A kind of total immersion method acting, with words as prompts rather than memories.

Did it work? At this moment, I think so. I’ll know with a re-reading, the perspective of distance. I’ll let you know.

Love and kindness are easier for me to write than pain and cruelty. At least, that’s what I choose to tell myself. An end-of-relationship scene in a previous book, drawn from a memory revived, laid me flat for two days. Not this time.

In this new technique, a strangely painless source of despair-memory. Something worth going back to when we need to write from the most difficult places.

Riff, Live

An experiment that led to an idea that led to a question.

I opened my head and let the words spill out. Into a tape recorder, during a wide-awake evening visited by no special muses. Hmmmm.

I often use the tape recorder for late-night visitations of phrase or plot or character. I am often found with my head bent over my desk, trying to catch some flitting thought with the butterfly net of my microphone. I have recited long, outlined sequences to get my head around their slippery substance. But opening the heart and letting fly, never.

Have I unearthed a viable technique? Riffing a scene without plan or forethought…then transcribing those notes into Word as the literal bones of the chapter?

Throwing and idea off the top of one’s head, to learn later whether it is real and writeable—a scary thing.

There are several asks in the task, I think; several requirements. The writer/reciter must be fearless. Like dreams written down in half-sleep, what is revealed in daylight may well be complete crap. Listening to what is spoken live and unconsidered is terrifying stuff.

To pull off this impossible feat, I think that one must be in love with the sound of one’s own voice. To hear one’s self cough up garbage, one must grow a thick skin. To listen to crap—as enthusiastic and well-intentioned as it might be—is to court shame. One must face down one’s own capacity for bullshit and stupidity; must be fearless in the very real possibility that we will discover how absolutely ordinary our brains are. Great notions aren’t always great—even if we convince ourselves that they are.

Perhaps the value of the exercise is in the exercise itself, rather than in what the exercise reveals. The on-your-toes of it. The open Chakras of it. The no-fear of it. And, of course, the off-chance that something surprisingly good will come of it; that we will indeed see some tiny brilliance that we struggle so hard to believe is alive in us.

Riffing, live. Fear and love. At the same time. The endless and essential challenge of being a writer.

Cat at the Glass Wall

Watching a cat watch birds through a plate glass window (as mine watch prey on the balcony of my 14^th-floor apartment, and at ground-level at the river house) is a remarkable thing.

The hunkering down…the stealth, the creeping…the careful concealment…one is seeing the instincts, the naked need, of the predator-born…the innocence of a hunted thing protected—whether they understand it or not—behind an invisible barrier. The cats know what they want. They know that they are supposed to want it. And yet, they seem to know that the wanted thing is inaccessible behind the glass; if they didn’t, we’d have an endless series of broken windows to answer for.

Birds—in this case, the house finches that sing so beautifully (and tormentingly) from the balcony railing> The birds that come closer to visit the small dish of birdseed I leave out for them.  Birds and the cats that desire them. Such a funny thing. Hunting is the art of stealth…no creature knows that better than cats do. But as they watch, the cats make little noises that would surely give them away. Or is it that they possess some arcane cat-knowledge that tells them these noises are something that birds can’t hear? Or do cats, to their own ears, sound like birds?

A hunting cat is a creature for whom the world has shrunk to two things: cat and Other. It’s much like a writer writing…except in our human self-delusion we convince ourselves that our ability to multi-focus is a sign of some intrinsic superiority.

It ain’t.

Writers stalk the world, oblivious (most of the time) to our separation from it. We watch from our perches of emotional concealment. We make little noises to ourselves that mimic the patterns of human interaction. And we’re very, very lucky not to run headfirst into the plate glass that marks the boundary between the rest of existence and ourselves.

We are cats at the glass wall. Wanting the thing we desire but never catch. Welcome to the metaphysics of the 14^th floor.

Elwood’s Rabbit

Can one love air?

No, not the breathable stuff, but an essential substance of a different kind: the beings that live in our personal ether. The creatures of our imaginings.

I’ve confessed before in this space that I am in love with a flesh-and-blood man I have never met. I admit reluctantly that I bear a great and impossible affection for a another breathing being of slight acquaintance. And, too, I hold close an enduring love for a being made of nothing more than the air between my ears.

I am in love with the man I am writing.

I do not entirely know this enigmatic being. I know only what he chooses to show me. And yet, I love what I see.

A cruel and a bizarre truth, this—carrying an imagined life; feeling as full of mourning and loss as if he were a mate far from me. And stranger still, this is, in all its cheerless truth, a relationship more satisfying than all the encounters of online dating so far.

And no, I am not insane. Is any writer?

If the writer loves an unreal being with all her heart, is he alive in the alternate universe of us? Can we, like Pygmalion, animate our beloved out of wish and vision? Can we, in the absence of real love, live in our heads and not wind up as pathetic life-wannabes?

I choose to believe so. I choose to believe that human interactions can and will live up to my imagined ones…eventually. I believe it, I hope it…but I don’t hope too hard.

Perhaps a better model—a less melancholy one—is Elwood P. Dowd, friend and companion to a six-foot tall, invisible rabbit named Harvey. Elwood was unconcerned about who might not believe in the unseen creature that walked beside him. He was content in a friendship, a love, that was real to him. The rest was interpretation.

So perhaps I’ll just continue to live my enduring, breathtaking affection for the creature of my creation. My Elwood’s Rabbit. At worst, he is an idealization of a never-to-be-known love. At best, he is an expressions of love for myself. I’ll take the truth, either way it comes.

The Hierarchies of Faint Praise

Someone reads your work. Someone you know well. Or not.

You wait for a reaction. You wait with carefully composed expression that (you think) will not reveal the anticipatory wreck you really are inside. You try not to let the reader know how desperate and needy you are for an answer. Sometimes you wait for a very, very long time. Sometimes you wait forever.

That a person has asked to read your work is not a request, it is a bond sacred and serious (in your head, at least). You have allowed someone to hold your precious newborn; you trust that he/she will not be so cavalier as to drop it on its head, or abandon it in the slush pile of personal indifference.

Good luck with that.

No reaction is a terrible reaction. It is a golem handcuffed to your hopes. It is a thing made of polite demur…or indifference—and either is poison.

In the hierarchy of faint praise, silence is worst. Interesting is not much better. Fine and nice are enough to send a dedicated writer into trembling fits. Not my thing is cause to search out a bottle marked with skull and crossbones.

Like…now we’re getting closer. Love and adore are squirmy-gratifying. Worship the syntax you walk on…is psychic food. And my absolute favorite (this one real and as recent as yesterday, thank you, Glorious): !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Each word of praise lasts in the heart for a precise nanosecond before the eternal perfection-Jones kicks in and the elusive quest for craft takes over again. And that’s exactly as it should be.

The act of writing is an unending effort to surpass our own expectations. It is the tail we chase but never catch, the emotional hamster wheel that never stops turning. If we must teach ourselves to live on the spare food of faint praise, so be it. Pining for affirmation—but being acutely uncomfortable with it when it comes—is part of the wonder of what we do.

Now, what was that you were saying? It sounded nice….