To begin at the beginning; you must die according to your coloring.

Times were different during the days of Djuna Barnes (aka Lydia Steptoe). From her deeply dark satirical piece “What is Good Form in Dying?: In Which a Dozen Dainty Deaths Are Suggested for Daring Damsels”

To begin at the beginning; you must die according to your coloring. For a blonde to die a brunette death is inexcusable; for a golden-haired lady to die  like one whose hair is Titian red, or silver, is not only an intrusion but a vulgarity. For a blonde to leap out of a window, to shoot herself, to drink poison, or to slash her wrist with a razor is quite unmentionably bad taste. There is but one way for a blonde to end everything, provided that she be small and delicate of bone, and tiny of tissue.

She must hang.

[. . .]

Let us now approach the case of the brunette.

For the cold, the cruel, the heavy-lidded vampire of the brunette order, for one who moves slowly, like a wolf-hound, what is allotted to her in the etiquette book of death?

Poison.

Fire is also permissible, but it is nowadays almost out of the question. She can hardly cling to the gas-log until she dies; there is no chic about a gas-log, and there are, in these times fewer and fewer fireplaces built upon the grand scale, and almost no bonfires.

So poison it must be.

at which point the need for endurance will eclipse your lack of bravery

The best hiding spots are the ones that keep you on your toes. Closets may be as cavernous as tombs or as confining as coffins, depending on the architecture of your house and fears, but they must in either case remain dark. Always remember: unless it also prevents your exit, a locked door will be a dead giveaway. Crawlspaces above and below the house should have at least as many cobwebbed corpses as cardboarded keepsakes. Even if not, they remain preferable to standing-room basements and attics. Shimmying under beds is appropriate only when the bed is not yours—even better though if is not your room—and you remain red-handed with blame. If you are on the run, areas purportedly haunted are always good sanctuary, though they become increasingly harder to find the older you get. Unfortunately, the more you believe to be possible after death, the braver you have to be in life. Eventually you will settle for known crime scenes, even if all you can find are those with a history of manslaughter and suicide. You will, however, find these are far more common than you at first thought, at which point the need for endurance will eclipse your lack of bravery.

The point being, you are never so invisible as when you are as terrified of the escape as you are of the capture.

bleeding blue, pickle preserved and fed to the earth

I don’t follow college sports all that much, but I found myself surprisingly invested in the opening four rounds of this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Credit / blame the unemployment. Many people it seems have been whinging about the lack of (a) instant-replay’d buzzer-beaters and (b) glass-slipper’d Cinderellas, but I’ve enjoyed the overall competitiveness of most of the games. Though I am from Kentucky, born a short walk from the center of UK’s campus, and raised to “bleed blue,” as they still say with macabre delight back home, I proved as much an apostate in sport as I became to be in things religious. Ah, but when I realized last week there was a very good chance of a University of Kentucky / University of Louisville semifinal game, I suddenly found my horses.

I don’t yet know who I will root for on Saturday when they play (I suspect brother blue will take the day — too many athletes, too much defense), but regardless of the outcome I’ve used the build-up to reflect on my irregular and increasingly infrequent visits back home. Can you, I wonder,  identify?

* * *

With each return he discovered something new lost. At first it was just simple recognition: what was once the fecund emptiness of a field had become the prolific squalor of a parking lot; subdivisions divided even and ever more; white flight neighborhoods now underfunded and Section 8; the metastasizing of a city into a metropolitan area  Then, memory: whether it was a right or left off the highway exit, which highway exit it was, or when his tax dollars at work had moved the exit to the other side of the highway. Then, emotional attachment: from hatred of things no more or still the same, to resignation that some things change and others never at all, to apathy that they ever were at all. Then, awareness: pickle preserved and fed to the earth, sustenance for those before and after, but now not for now, he became not unlike his old Kentucky home, a corpse, welcomed and observed, forgotten, and all the while unknowing.

there is no true choosing between a story being told and its being created

Though I’m not a particularly disciplined person, I’ve managed in recent weeks to maintain a a kind of writing schedule. Five hundred words a day, five days a week. As you might imagine, some days have come easier than others. That they are coming at all, though, is a wonder that I’ve not yet grown accustomed to. Unfortunately, at least in terms this blog, those five hundred words a day have all been locked under passworded key in a mysterious computer folder called “[Tentative Title of Novel],” and rarely in the form of anything to say here.

While I don’t want to make this space one of constant tease and promise of an unseen piece of writing, I also still value the exhibitionism of the medium. So, how about a few words on things I’ve learned along the way of writing what I think is a first chapter?

A story, or at least a a thematic thread upon which I can hang an episodic narrative, is ever so slowly emerging. That’s been the most delightful part of beginning with no plot in mind at all, only a setting. There have been moments of realization, though, of catching up with the story that have been tremendously encouraging in these early days. Now, I don’t think I believe that form is waiting, tapping her fingers against the dress, like an inconvenienced shadow, but she does have a way of making substance feel late to the party, doesn’t she, drinks & dinner served before the first guest is good-evening’d. This is unfortunate, though, because at the end of the day there is no true choosing between a story being told and its being created. This isn’t because there is some kind of pure improvisation — the only truth of such a thing in my view is that it is an idea empty of sense, a dulcet drone perhaps but one of a feverish delirium — but because the telling & creating of story are forever racing ahead and falling behind one another. The moment one has been left too far in the dust or away from the rhythm of the other is probably the moment things have gotten either very dull or ugly creatively.

So it seems anyway to me as I creep deeper into this. . . what is this? what metaphor is most fitting? This game . . . this dance . . . this roll in the hay? Probably all of them. Maybe none.

we shall feel longing, lust for one another; we shall share rage for the world.

You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attendance upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?

Old man Yeats knew what was true. If you have no anger at this world, anger at its willful stupidities, its grim indifference, its real sins: its murdering hordes, its smug myths, exploitive habits, its catastrophic wastes, the smile on its hyena hungry face, its jackal tastes, then you belong to it, and you are one of its apes — though animals should not be so disgraced as to be put in any simile with man.

Old age ought to know. Death will soon enough come to its rescue. Till the knowing ends, all that was wasted and wronged in youth — through ignorance, haste, competition, bad belief — all that was bored by middle age into one long snooze, has borne its juiceless fruit, and is now known for what it is: nothing has been righted here. Yet if desire can be kept from contamination, if it can be aimed, as one’s fingertip, at the root’s place, if it is not harnessed to the horses of dismal domination, but is allowed to be itself and realize life, then the flutter of an eyelash on a cheek will assume its proper importance; Wall Street may crash and the gods of money smelted back into the sordid earths they came from; yet, unfazed, our heads will rest at least on one another, a fall sun will shine on the sheets, your nipple shall enter my ear like a bee seeking in a bloom a place to sleep; life shall run through us both renewed; we shall feel longing, lust for one another; we shall share rage for the world.

– William H. Gass, “Lust”

Kafka shrugged.

Kafka’s writing had already resulted in unpleasant surprises for Brod. It was easy to communicate with Kafka about models: Goethe’s prolific universality and Flaubert’s sophisticated simplicity, that was the measure of all things, and one could expand the canon to other authors who merited study: Kleist, Hebbel, Grillparzer, Dostoevsky, Strindberg . . . not to mention a phenomenon like Werfel, who overwhelmed both Kafka and Brod.

But what purpose did these models serve? Kafka did  not want to set the bar low, yet he saw possibilities in the most unlikely places; he could wax as enthusiastic about a third-rate journalist’s apt metaphor as about one precise sentence in a story that otherwise failed to hold his attention. It seemed a miracle to Kafka that there were authors who always had an “inner truth” at hand. But they were not the only ones who achieved this truth, hence it did not matter to him what one was supposed to have read and what level of public recognition an author happened to enjoy at any given moment.

He viewed his own attempts at writing literature, his own work, in the same light. Sometimes he would write two or three pages with verve, only to discover that just a single sentence could hold its own because it conveyed “inner truth,” which was, after all, the aim of literature. Innumerable fragments originated in this way, including attempts that Kafka broke off even before he had reached the end of a sentence. Sometimes he would pull out a piece of paper during one of the weekly get-togethers at Oskar Baum’s apartment and read aloud a short piece of prose in which the words were as carefully composed as musical notes.

The process satisfied neither Kafka nor his friends, and Kafka was probably chided for failing to measure up to his potential. How could a “work” be measured in this way? Kafka shrugged. He knew that his inconsistency and vulnerability to the vagaries of mood had caused him to leave “Description of a Struggle” unfinished after years of effort. He looked to Brod’s work method as a model. Brod could produce presentable prose under the most inauspicious conditions — he once wrote a story while Kafka lay on the sofa next to him. It was amazing, but not what Kafka aspired to. He sought perfection. He wondered whether Brod was frittering away his talent by not making more deliberate use of his time and energy and by failing to adopt a more critical stance to what he wrote.

– Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years

Mourning and remembrance end long before one’s body does.

In my previous post, I originally intended to write a fairly straightforward account of my recent frustrations. Not a tell-all sort of thing, mind you, but simply some musings that occurred as a result. Consequently, it surprised even me when my “once upon a time” kind of beginning ended up rabbit trailing its way through Bartleby, autobiography, and philosophy. Thankfully, it proved to be reasonably clear, as the post prompted a few people to email me with some challenges, reiterations, and just plain questions. I thought I might highlight some of the comments, and add some further comments.

• Hero

One reader wondered if I’d considered the notion that a hero is more commonly identified as such by the masses. I will confess, I had not. This is very much something I’d like to incorporate into such thinking. As it is here, though, I isolated that heroic element or figure as coming from those those who are not considered or allowed a part of the masses. Arguably, she might even be the product of a fever dream, a face in the crowd who lived and breathed, heroic to a daughter or son, this face suddenly with a familial body, but a hero to you, the stranger with an active imagination, for reasons perhaps only you could possibly divine.

• “come hell”

I was raised with a keen sense that my most natural destination the moment following my final breath was hell. Nothing personal, of course, it’s just the way these things go when you’re wicked. There was baptism and confessed faith, sure, but when you’re dealing with a monster as bloodthirsty as the biblical god, even the fundamentalist (especially the fundamentalist!) cannot be sure that the terms might not suddenly change. By and by, hell has cooled as the earth as warmed, and for us now without faith, we who at one point took the leap as well as those who preferred the solidity of the land, we now realize existence itself is its own incarceration.

• peace

It’s a nice idea, isn’t it, if a little simple? Certainly more simple than justice, which for me is nothing if not complex and creative. Mind you, I won’t discount the ability of peace to create, but creation implies movement, and movement requires friction, and friction, well, that always rubs somebody wrong. A real peace, it seems to me, would require a fairly constant state of negotiation, and I have a hard time imagining it ever being proclaimed as fully achieved but by those with a boot on the back of somebody’s neck. As a friend emphasized quite passionately, acceptance is not being the same as culmination. I very much agree. There is a certain sense in which I don’t even believe in culmination. There is always more to tell after our many self-described endings, those capricious and convenient. Even death isn’t a culmination in the strictest sense. Perhaps of one’s consciousness, but that’s such a small thing in the scheme of things. Mourning & remembrance end long before one’s body does. Indeed, for it is rarely so immediately eliminated, even when it’s turned to ash. The fundamentalists may or may not be right about fleshly wickedness, but even if so this wicked flesh itself is a fertile thing, as the wages of sin often are, for the earth and its beasties. Even when our bodies, and the consciousnesses they carried, are forgotten, the very molecules of the breath once breathed by me, were breathed long before by another, and will be sucked in again, repeatedly, elsewhere. This isn’t to say we don’t and shouldn’t pick our moments when to say “enough,” to name some thing by calling it peace,  and agree on its tentative use. This is language, after all, and is meant to be used. But these agreements we make, the acceptances we make even in the course of a sentence let alone a life, they’re anything but a culmination of all that could & surely one day will be.

• laziness

Don’t read too much into this. I started down a vaguely self-loathing path when I wrote this word, and even reconsidered its use, but decided instead to blaze ahead and find a break in the bordering brush. I do sometimes feel lazy, this is true. As my friends in academia have noted, I rarely seemed to want it as much as they. “It,” being the social role of professor. That, rather, I was more intent on doing what I liked, how I liked. And, yes, sometimes this meant doing very little at all. I didn’t apply for all the jobs I perhaps should have. I didn’t pursue the second Masters of Arts at a more reputable school, which surely would’ve done wonders down the line. I would claim those were more poor decisions than non-decisions, though. But I don’t bristle at the accusation of laziness, should I ever be subject to it.

• ambition – preaching, peace

As I see it, ambition is always bent on a value that exceeds all valuation, and thus is of no value at all. The example of Bartleby, to which I think I obviously allude, is a difficult one. The story describes the “no value at all” aspect quite well, as well where it leads (incarceration in the Tombs). But by my reckoning, we’re already in the Tombs, whether we prefer or prefer not. I don’t mean this in the sense that we’re all suffering equally—that is obviously not the case. I mean this only in the most basic existential sense. I’ve said this already without a lot of elaboration, and for now I’ll merely repeat it: existence itself is a kind of incarceration, in existence itself. Some are just more knowing of it than others, in their physical persons and/or states of mind. Indeed, I believe I could make a strong case that Melville’s narrator comes to the same conclusion.

• why family matters

I’m not very close with my family, so I can’t point to their presence as an influence. But they do form who I am, in the sense that I must react to my past. Are these reactions themselves a form of creating it? I think so. I could, I suppose, ignore the past. Move on, learn to write with with my left hand and speak a different tongue: create a new self. But I’m convinced nothing is created ex nihilo, and even these creative refusals are themselves affective reactions. I’d rather, at least, my refusals be knowing refusals. To be active setting asides, in trunks for future discovery, by me and by others. Forgotten, maybe, but never eradicated, for, once again, nothing ends.

Latter days tend to color those to come and those long ago gone

I grew up in a family of little ambition. Which isn’t to say mine is a particularly novel story. Suburban households seem built on the backs of men and women who work hard, in their various means and ways, but more often than not for the sake of a new backyard deck or popup camper—rarely used, both—or a new child, loved more often than not, one hopes—or a new home—the manicured green of our contemporary nihilism. Of course, many tired tales begin with the confessed hubris, “I was different from all those around me,” and while mine is not so different in that regard, I also insist on at the very least a twist. As I’ve grown older and seen the effects of my being different from my family—that is, having ambition, say, to once upon a time become a man of God, to pursue peace and justice in this world, come hell or jail, or more recently a man of letters and academy—I’ve discovered these all in some crucial sense are misplaced, and that I was not as equal to the ambition I imagined for myself. Latter days tend to color those to come and those long ago gone, so now I wonder whether what I perceive as laziness in my family is still very much rooted in me as well, but somehow, tragically even, not supplemented by their acceptance of life as an accumulation and enjoyment of value. Derived from a variety of experiences documented and accoutrements displayed, the valuation of life is, in my reckoning, its flattening into something more simple because it is predicated on its being attainable. And maybe in prescribed doses acceptance is even necessary, with this life’s promise of peace an effective threat to our most precarious refusals. The ones who prefer not, so I’ve learned, are heroes only in the most incarcerated sense. This is because ambition, no matter the commonplace synonym making of a Protestant work ethic, is not kissing kin to one’s dogged pursuits or trophied successes. It may actually be quite the opposite. For to see more in life than life itself is prepared or able to offer, which may be as good a definition of creativity as I’m capable, is to set oneself up mostly for failure, all on the off chance that occasionally, in glimpses, these often in hindsight, after the moment has passed, our moment of life even, in the vicariousness of another’s remembrance, a value that is no longer so simple as a wage earned or a price paid.

Yes, the word for this life-affirming failure can only but be the same as the many gestures of its unspoken sentiment, ambition.

 

Effects are born of agreements

Dear __________,

I apologize for the gaps between our correspondence. And though it will serve as no adequate excuse for such silences, your informant told you correctly: I am currently writing a novel. Or, if not writing, dwelling on the writing of a novel. Or, if not a novel, something whose ambitions are matched only by its remaining largely unread.

I’m holding out hope I can make my minimalistic plotting work. As you know very well, I’m far more interested in consequences (and the responses to consequences) than I am plots, which tend to be too forward-focused and linear for my taste. Consequences realign not simply our perception but our experiences of the past, as much even as they create an imagined future. Dare we go so so far as to say that the present is spent mostly negotiating the indistinguishable boundary between responding to these things past and anticipating those things to come? If this is so, could it be said further that consequences are a violence in & against the occurrence of the moment?

Once we get into the language of violence, and thus of conflict & of tension, we’re into the territory of story. If that is the case, how does one “tell” a story? We may tell of a story, much like we might read or write about conflict or violence, but I’m less sure our plots are up to the challenge they set for themselves of capturing (even as a journalistic snapshot) the experience to which it lays claim. This might be a more convoluted way of reiterating the idea that realist fiction is never as real as it claims.

Story, I am suggesting, is not told; it is experienced – and the only means of this experience, in writing anyway, is through the occurrence of language (which is to say, style). This is all quite abstract, I admit, and one’s stylistic efforts tend to require a bit of compromise if you wish actually to be read, but I firmly believe that when one’s reach too often meets one’s grasp, one’s efforts are likely not worth the time of others.

For my story, I’m interested in conjuring the Gothic South I never so much lived as I read & heard about while growing up in the domesticated suburbs of the New South. I’ve been re-reading Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner for inspiration in this regard. The tale at present consists of three brothers, with all their unspoken rivalries and inarticulate animosities. Each brother, though, separated in a variety of ways and degrees, are incorporated in & by the consequences of his siblings’ actions & inactions (those real & imagined, interpreted & anticipated). This tension between separation and incorporation is sharpened by a sudden act of physical violence with, at least in my present telling, no immediately discernible reason or meaning, to which the brothers must agree in their response. This agreement, I might note, is what we tend simplistically to identify as “effect”.

Is, though, the committer of violence (in this case, one of the brothers) necessarily the cause of this violence’s effects? Vengeance, arguably, is no more or less an effect of violence than forgiveness. Or, for that matter, death is no more or less an effect than survival. Effects are born of agreements, broadly understood, and my story will be “about” such a coming to agreement. This “coming to agreement,” however, though certainly a part of the plot is also the very stuff that cannot be circumscribed by plot. As in my claim about the depiction of violence, this agreement, because it too is a kind of violence, is one that I hope readers might more readily experience in the language of its arrival rather than in its narrative depiction.

But I’m sure I’ve said too much. For you & me alike on the matter.

Yours,

B.

the next moment she plunged down into the flames.

Regular readers may detect in me a love affair of sorts with fine prose about fire. I confess, it is quite true:

It was late winter; the large heavy cover of snow, the result of a whole week’s uninterrupted blowing, was in the process of rapidly melting away. The air was full of sunlight and reflection from the white snow, which in large, shining drops dripped down past the windows. Within the room all forms and colors had awakened, all lines and contours had come to life. Whatever was flat extended, whatever was bent curved, whatever was inclined slid, and whatever was broken refracted the more. All kinds of green tones mingled on the flower-table, from the softest dark-green to the sharpest yellow-green. Reddish brown tones flooded in flames across the surface of the mahogany table, and gold gleamed and sparkled from the knick-knacks, from the frames and moldings, but on the carpet all the colors broke and mingled in a joyous shimmering confusion.

[. . .]

Mogens forced his way through the multitude. Now he was at the corner; the sparks were slowly falling down upon him. Up the street; there were showers of sparks, the window-panes on both sides were aglow, the factory was burning, the councilor’s house was burning and the house next door also. There was nothing but smoke, fire and confusion, cries, curses, tiles that rattled down, blows of axes, wood that splintered, window-panes that jingled, jets of water that hissed, spluttered, and splashed, and amid all this the regular dull sob-like throb of the engines. Furniture, bedding, black helmets, ladders, shining buttons, illuminated faces, wheels, ropes, tarpaulin, strange instruments; Mogens rushed into their midst, over, under it all, forward to the house.

The facade was brightly illuminated by the flames from the burning factor, smoke issued from between the tiles of the roof and rolled out of the open windows of the first story. Within the fire rumbled and crackled. There was a slow groaning sound, that turned into a rolling and crashing, and ended in a dull boom. Smoke, sparks, and flames issued in torment out of all the openings of the house. And then the flames began to play and crackle with redoubled strength and redoubled clearness. It was the middle part of the ceiling of the first floor that fell. Mogens with both hands seized a large scaling-ladder which leaned against the part of the factory which was not yet in flames. For a moment he held it vertically, but then it slipped away from him and fell over toward the councilor’s house where it broke in a window-frame on the second story. Mogens ran up the ladder, and in through the opening. At first he had to close his eyes on account of the pungent wood-smoke, and the heavy suffocating fumes which rose from the charred wood that the water had reached took his breath away. He was in the dining-room. The part of the house, now and then, almost reached up to the ceiling; the few boards that had remained hanging when the floor fell burned in brilliant yellowish-white flames; shadows and the gleam of flames flooded over the walls; the wall-paper here and there curled up, caught fire, and flew in flaming tatters down into the abyss; eager yellow flames licked their way up on the loosened moldings and picture-frames. Mogens crept over the ruins and fragments of the fallen wall towards the edge of the abyss, from which cold and host blasts of air alternately struck his face; on the other side so much of the wall had fallen, that he could look into Camilla’s room, while the part that hid the councilor’s office still stood. It grew hotter and hotter; the skin of his face became taut, and he noticed, that his hair was crinkling. Something heavy glided past his shoulder and remained lying on his back and pressed him down to the floor; it was the girder which slowly had slipped out of place. He could not move, breathing became more and more difficult, his temples throbbed violently; to his left a jet of water splashed against the wall of the dining-room, and the wish rose in him, that the cold, cold drops, which scattered in all directions might fall on him. Then he heard a moan on the other side of the abyss, and he saw something white stir on the floor in Camilla’s room. It was she. She lay on her knees, and while her hips were swaying, held her hands pressed against each side of her head. She rose slowly, and came towards the edge of the abyss. She stood straight upright, her arms hung limply down, and the head went to and fro limply on the neck. Very, very slowly the upper part of her body fell forward, her long, beautiful hair swept the floor; a short violent flash of flame, and it was gone, the next moment she plunged down into the flames.

– Jens Peter Jacobsen, “Mogens” in Mogens and Other Stories (1882) [trans. Anna Grabow (1921)]