Village Explaining

Talking this way, I risk earning that most famous literary pejorative: "village explainer". The epithet applies more easily to Americans than it does to writers from other countries, which seems mysterious to me. Why isn't Gombrowicz a village explianer? How do Milosz and Kundera and Brodsky escape the title, when their non-fiction writing is no more acute than Pound's was and in most cases much less? Is it something national, something inherently cranky in the American non-fictive voice? And if so, should I really try to avoid it?

But a question like this really is nothing more than a placeholder for a larger one, isn't it? Why am I doing this? Why am I waking up at four o'clock in the morning and engraving my "thoughts" (more like moods or weather patterns) onto the unruled palm-sized electronic notecard that blogger hands me? What do I get out of this? Fame? But surely you realize that I might be writing all this down on the back of a beer coaster for all the people who will ever read it? My own patient passage through the Vale of Soul-Making? As if Keats would have written a line without the promise of someone, somewhere waiting for him on the other side...

Bloggers are the New Crusoes. You remember the story? If you do, you don't, since the real book happens in the gorgeous, green-green valley between Crusoe's arrival and when Friday shows up. Not that I don't like Friday: I do, especially after reading the French anthropologist/aspiring-vampire Michel Tournier's translation of him. But his arrival transforms Crusoe's redolent solitude into a society, which means conflicts, motives, and, eventually at least, plot. The Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky titled his book on plot in Tolstoy "The Energy of Delusion", which as I understand it is meant to equate the conviction required for story-making with the kind of whipped-up and blinkered myopia we might find in someone wearing a sandwich board. Shklovsky's own book is frustratingly plotless: a whirlpool of lines that seem to be less arranged against their margin than clinging to it, like iron filings on a magnet or arrows from St. Sebastian's side. This is frustrating at first - but the further you read in the book, the more you come to see that Shklovsky is in fact attempting his own kind of literary mimesis: mimicking the peripatetic and searching adventure of Tolstoy's drafts (hundreds of them on AK - entire rewritings even!) in his own investigation. The result is an unending digression on literary creation, a fractal fable:

"I'll repeat what's important for me: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy said that he didn't know how to draw a circle; he had to close the line and then correct it.
He knew how to think by juxtaposing words, by awakening them, in a way.
When he wrote his major novels, he would begin with something plotted, i.e., something that was happening or had already happened, and sought the relationship between the incidental and the inevitable.
He studied the thoughts of a child and how cunning emerged at its first stages.
The so-called draft version is not an adaptation of a text to the norms, not sorting through gems, like jewelers do when making necklaces or crowns.
Drafts weigh the essence of events. The scenarios, which the hero of the work goes through, they should be called 'hypothetical circumstances.'
This is the analysis of how man was created, i.e., his sensation of the world, and how through the movements of scenarios, experimented and tested hundreds of times in fiction, the truth becomes clearer.
This work is like that of a captain who navigates by the stars and moon, using his chronometer to verify and make sure of their hypothetical place in the sky. The captain is testing the ship's course." (p. 134)

Shklovsky's dedication to the search ("The purpose of my search is art", he says) was so great that he scrapped the more recognizable generic forms ("The only genre that interests me is film itself" - Tarkovsky) for something ragged and messy-looking. His book is, at times, almost viscerally embarrassing. But failure or no, it is also something infinitely valuable: it is sincere. An outmoded and abused virtue these days, I know....but how striking! How amazing, to watch him flail and attempt and then finally hit on something that you know he simply could not have said in a 20-page letter to the academy. Why couldn't he have said it? Simple: because he couldn't have seen it. As he describes it being for Tolstoy, writing for Shklovsky is a sea-voyage - a discipline (or ecstacy) of perception, wherein the calcified generic modes must be stripped, Blake-style, from the organs of perception, so that the truth of the world (truth, which likes to hide) can be glimpsed and revealed.

Does this actually happen? I'm wondering. Whatever good news I have to bring, I'm bringing; but I'm wormy and skeptical, especially when it comes to the rhetoric of vision. Blogs, luckily, let you do this. You can backtrack and undermine, revising your own assertions as you go. What won't you get by doing this? Well, among other things, you will never write Anna Karenina. Make peace with that right now: stare yourself down in the mirror, sure in the knowledge that your beard will never dangle, nor your t-shirt stretch into the peasant blouse that you so sorely desire. Your eyes will go unhaunted by that revelation of ordinary life that is Levin and Kitty, or the romantic pyre of their dark, ridiculous shadows, Anna and Vronsky. Not for you.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out here (what a village-explainery sentence!) is: what am I writing? At the same time, I think I'm trying to forget that: forget "novel", forget "blogging", forget "Tolstoy". No wonder I feel the need to explain myself so much.

Earwig Art

The relative "storylessness" of blogging is, to me at least, simultaneously one of its most terrifying and attractive features. In order to understand this, please put yourself for a moment in the shoes of a young man with literary dreams. How do you begin to pursue those dreams? More importantly, how do you articulate what the realization of those dreams would look like to you, were it to happen?

The simple answer to both these questions is probably quite similar to the one you'd give a young person pursuing any other type of achievement: you model your life after your heroes as best you can and then hope, wish, pray that your own talents fit or perhaps refit the world. For a fiction writer, at least as I have understood it, such a mimesis basically boils down to an apprenticeship spent accumulating notice, then the big breakthrough (novel), then, ahem, the rest of your life, which is both a continual trial and a sort of Swiss dale, over whose daisy-covered fields you twirl like James Franco in a habit.

Fair enough - but then what about blogging? Compared with such a solid, straightforward, though admittedly quite trying quest (for, as Rilke says, an artist is "In love with the difficult") it looks decidedly shaggy. Young and unofficial, it compares to the larger career-narrative the way waitressing or a summer hiking would - that is, as a diversion from, but also preparation for, something much more serious. People who spend too much time at it might enjoy themselves for a while, but their self-indulgence may put them at risk for that most dire of conditions, Unpaid Eccentricity. They may find their energies diverted, into tide pools that, while comfortable, will eventually force those same energies to adopt their own stunted proportions.


In describing the problem this way - as a choice between embracing one's plot or punking out (as my most aggressively-narrative teacher wrote in the margins of one of my stories) - I am of course being stinkingly American, which both means something and doesn't since these days anyone can become American by brushing their teeth. I am describing the plot lines of countless movies and books, which is both completely natural and also strange, since who says my life is ever going to look anything like what I've seen or read? But then how do I not think this? How do I somehow step outside the story I've been writing around myself without trading my status as hero for a bit part that asks me only to deliver my catchphrase once an episode and then leave, so that the real drama can proceed without me?

Blogging vehemently refuses to answer these questions, which is one of the things I find most appealing about it. There's no story to it yet; and because there's no story, there's nothing to distract me from the actual moment and act of writing. The sweet spot seems so much closer, my face so much closer to the page. Ridiculous, given that there's no page for my nose to be close to... but there it is. The world outside the story, before the story, nameless, which is to say utterly able to call names out of us. In David Malouf's beautiful novel An Imaginary Life, which I finished last night as lightning stepped around Portland like a giant looking for his dropped glasses, Ovid (imagined Ovid, real Ovid) imagines this state:

The earth, now that I am about to leave it, seems so close at last...Round the base of these roots, seeking refuge amongst them as in a forest, finding food, are the smaller creatures - wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death.

For me, Malouf here is describing the world beyond stories, or rather (as he perfectly intuits), the world beneath them. This is the world I need - not "want", but really need, since why would I open my mouth (which I am of course not really doing, any more than I'm putting my face close to a printed page) if not to name even the smallest part of it? Mimesis, which entails both imitation and, beneath that, attention, praise, generosity, remains the whole fucking point, no matter what the medium. Organs are useful insofar as they facilitate our part in that process, bringing us closer, not just to the literal earth, but to the shared and personal ground of lived experience.

But can novels still do that? Can blogging?

How?



Images: Publicity still for Circle in the Square production of Ovid's Metamorphoses; Publicity photo from New Platz's production of same; Poster for Whistler in the Dark's adaptation of Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid

Failure, or Why I Blog

My excitements about blogging are: immediacy, risk, invention and community. My worries are superficiality and failure. Especially failure, which I’m obsessed with and actually quite good at, especially on the internet.

Looking back, I find my success as a failure funny and even ironic – for like many great successes, I began my life hoping to pursue a completely different career than the one that has, apparently, become mine. The career I wanted to pursue was success; so, having heard that success is the opposite of failure, I set out to avoid failure at every turn. The resulting contortions – which cost me huge amounts of time and money, not to mention the respect of my peers and the love of those who had the gall to believe that really, failure was not such a terrible thing after all – were ridiculous and, I suspect, a little absurd: like trying to avoid the ground after you’ve jumped out of a plane. But when it comes to failure, I think I can say that I’ve succeeded, up to a point. Meaning of course that I’ve failed, at least at the success that I originally thought was my purpose and métier.

This may sound depressing to you; but the interesting thing is that accepting my failure has opened up many avenues of experience for me – at least as many as my attempts at success have shut down. For example, there is the diary that I have begun keeping ever since I realized that the chances of successfully getting anyone to hear or read about anything I did were slim, at best. At first, of course, I felt a slight twinge at having given up so easily on my dreams – at settling (as it is impossible not to feel that I have) for a less demanding, and therefore less glorious, and interesting medium. But then the truth is that, by keeping this diary of mine, I have really been following in the footsteps of previous failures the world over.

I will make a digression here, if you don’t mind – since I am apparently failing, once again, to keep on track – on the nature of diaries. Diaries have dangled for centuries from the foreheads of certain intense and observant young persons, as they walked down their streets or through their woods. Many times, these persons were simply trying to make themselves feel like less of a failure – but many other times, this attempt to make themselves feel less like a failure went hand in hand with the intuition that, even if they themselves were a failure, the world was not. In this, I find my own attitude in line with the classic diarists – for to me, the world is a success, meaning, so far as I can see, that a walk through the world, on any given day, can yield the kind of great lines and slow bits and effects that make you suck in your breath or grab yourself inappropriately that a successful poem, or novel, or movie does. If the diarist experiences enough of these moments, he or she might, after a while, decide that they are worth holding under other people’s noses. So said diarist might attempt, not to succeed, necessarily, but to report the world’s successes – which effort (the diarist’s, I mean) would look a lot like success, so long as the observer was not standing more than a few feet away from it.

In closing, I will say that of course, in keeping this diary I have also been somewhat of a hypocrite, since I’ve been trying to make a success of it, and so escape my fate as a failure. Will I do it? I pretend despair, but no matter how thoroughly I pretend, there is always hope. I hope, meaning that I think that the world I live in would be interesting to other men. More importantly, I think that the world I live in would be interesting to me – or rather more interesting – if I looked at it, not just as a success, but as a success that requires my participation in order to succeed. This is my hope, anyway, and the reason why, at the end of the day, I have failed even at failure, which I have heard described as “that most exacting of arts”.