“Something’s wrong with this blender. It won’t work. I think it hates me.”
“Why don’t you plug it in?”
“I never plug blenders in. My parents never plugged them in, either. That’s absurd. It’s possessed.”
“You could try plugging it in.”
“And completely turn my back on my family, my values, my religion? No, I’m not going to hell over a blender. This thing has a demon.”
“Usually blenders don’t work unless you plug them in.”
“You would say that. You live in a corrupt society. You’re indoctrinated with groupthink. George Soros wants you to plug your blender in.”
“George Soros doesn’t know if I have a blender.”
“George Soros has interests that benefit from the growth of the blender industry. The elites are in bed with multinational corporations. You can’t just use a blender. Now you have to run electricity into it? Let me ask you: what did great-grandpa do? We’ve forgotten how to live. We’ve abandoned our cultural values.”
“Ever read about Alessandro Volta, Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla? Maybe read a history book?”
“Your history or my history? You sound woke. I’m homeschooling my kids. In ten years, they won’t have blue hair and be living in Portland.”
“Okay, but could you please calm down?”
“No, I will not be calm. Next you’re going to tell me to trust the science. I don’t get my science from propaganda. The Overton Window has shifted. You want to kill me. This is a spiritual war for the soul of America.”
In a 1996 Esalen Institute workshop, Terrence McKenna is supposed to have said, “The truth does not require your participation in order to exist. Bullshit does.” This is amusing, given his preoccupation with “machine elves,” hallucinogens, existential singularities capable of being determined by the I-Ching, and UFOs. But the transcripts and audio recordings of the Esalen event don’t contain an exact match.
The passage is often cited as coming from various McKenna events, writings, speeches, and interviews, sometimes convincingly, given its close similarity to the McKenna material we do have. We want to believe he said it because it’s pithy and makes us smile. To be fair, he could have said it. But he probably didn’t, at least, not like that.
The best we can do is consider it a paraphrase or an apocryphal attribution of something he wrote, perhaps in The Archaic Revival—“The Truth doesn’t need your cooperation to exist. All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion do require your participation in order to exist.” This makes the former “bullshit” quote a small performative example of what it’s communicating, a fake passage (circulating primarily in online meme culture), which requires our participation for it to seem authentic.
This is something I tell my creative writing students, even though I know it’s not easy to hear. Words, though they are fluid, are still nouns with ostensible limits. They’re things. And when we choose to believe a thing is not what it clearly is or when we’re motivated to think a thing is something we wish it would be, we’re on the golden path to bullshit. And sort of thinking runs across the entire landscape of creative writing. Welcome, fellow traveler.
It’s a road with many sidetracks, byways, on-ramps, and roundabouts. We can spend large parts of our lives chasing, promulgating, justifying, and sustaining bullshit about writing, primarily because we have no idea what’s real and we’re invested in beliefs about it that, on some level, simply make us feel better. We’re taking everything on faith. Every sentence you hand me changes from you to me, just as it changed when it came to you, when the filter of your perceptions invested it with your preferred epistemological gravity. [1]
This provokes a certain amount of anxiety. Let’s try not to notice parity between the above McKenna quote and Philip K. Dick’s line from I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Can we hallucinate a disconnect between two things? Can we simply stop believing in a similarity, a linkage, a connotation, because we’re now uncomfortable? We can certainly try. Most things seem to go away, or at least radically change, when we believe or stop believing in them. The aesthetic rules that produced Adam Bede would not result in a publishable manuscript today. Conversely, the latest non-objectionable coffee table novel from Penguin-Random House would read like noise to someone in 1859.
And don’t say, as a pissed-off English professor once did when I told him I couldn’t prove any of my assumptions about reality in an absolute sense, “Step out in front of a moving bus and then tell me you don’t know what’s real.” Appeals to physical experience are misguided. You don’t know (and probably won’t know, if the object is moving at any degree of speed) whether that was actually a bus. It could be a catbus, a rocket-propelled angel, a sumo wrestler on a skateboard, a realization so profound it physically knocks you into the next life, or your mother’s heavy hand. [2]
You just don’t know. You take it on faith. Absolute bus-reality requires imaginative participation, i.e. McKennian bullshit, to exist because you can choose to stop believing it in and it will instantly fall apart. It’s not real. And, for that matter, neither is writing craft, and neither are you as a writer.
So then what are you?
The black arm of writerly superstition.
We have our methods. Rituals, habits, compulsive daily offices, practices arising from the implicit missionaria protectiva of our conditioning and the aforementioned hype (often of book marketing masquerading as taste). We think we know what good writing is but, more often than not, the publishing industry insists that we look for a horse in the meadow.
Cut to a basement a few blocks away from the University of Missouri, long enough ago that I can name the place but not the lit professor sitting on the other end of the couch. We were avoiding the English department party upstairs. I wasn’t drinking and I’d brought a case of Mountain Dew Code Red to keep others from putting bottles in my hand—a soda sufficiently sugary that I was sure I’d have it all to myself.
My couch companion wasn’t much of a drinker, either, but she’d just smoked a shovelful of weed. As such, she was determined to deliver her aesthetic philosophy to me, even though it was pretty clear I didn’t feel like talking and was planning my exit.
“I’m so sick of decentered, pretentious, fragmented narratives with some defensive self-obfuscating voice that lets the writer off the hook. Give me a simple story about men and women in bad situations. You know?” [3]
Oh yes. “Actually,” I said, “self-obfuscation is the only thing I’m into now.”
I thought I was being funny, but she nodded like it was the bitter truth. “I know.”
She was one step away from saying, “You MFA people” and I immediately started to worry that she’d read my first book and was already accusing me in her narratology class of the sin of writerly self-obfuscation. I felt like I should keep talking to her to suss this out, but just as quickly, I thought: fuck it. I’m getting my Code Red and going home.
There’s no accounting for someone else’s faith, for someone else’s bullshit. Participating in that reality, even arguing with it, is what allows it to exist. She was asking for workmanlike creative nonfiction or autofiction, something ostensibly transparent enough that she didn’t have to feel anxiety about interpreting its essential fictional lie. I couldn’t blame her for that. Being a lit professor isn’t easy. At the same time, I thought of my own creative writing students, how frustrating it was when they thought I was hiding the right answers.
Later, I was not surprised to discover that her scholarship was mostly in the area of literary biography—getting to the truth of just who these darn lying writers were, based on critical sources like letters to their sweethearts, wine-stained revision manuscripts, memos from agents and publishers, and crumpled grocery lists found in the pantry.
It’s a living, I suppose, but it showed she couldn’t accept one of the fundamental yet self-contradictory facts at the heart of the English studies industrial complex: there are no right answers. Beyond a baseline degree of coherence, there is only performative taste, viral trend, publishing hype, and what people like my couch companion have to say. The only criterion is personal and completely subjective: did it move you? The rest requires your participation in order for it to exist. It’s a catbus packed with bullshit.
It’s alright to cry.
In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron flirts with neurological determinism in order to explain why we keep telling stories:
We think in story. It’s hardwired in our brain. It’s how we make strategic sense of the otherwise overwhelming world around us. Simply put, the brain constantly seeks meaning from all the input thrown at it, yanks out what’s important for our survival on a need-to-know basis, and tells us a story about it, based on what it knows of our past experience with it, how we feel about it, and how it might affect us. Rather than recording everything on a first come, first served basis, our brain casts us as “the protagonist” and then edits our experience with cinema-like precision, creating logical interrelations, mapping connections between memories, ideas, and events for future reference. Story is the language of experience, whether it’s ours, someone else’s, or that of fictional characters.
It sounds pretty good; though, whenever we use brain architecture as a way to definitively explain anything, the explanation begins to seem a lot more half-baked and ascriptive than descriptive. Cron’s theory threatens to fall apart as soon as we stop believing in it. But I was willing to make that leap of faith in my PhD program when I discovered her book, still desperately searching for something approximating the truth about what good writing should be and too wounded to accept that there was only one place I could find it—in myself.
“How we feel about it” is basic to our experience as writers and readers. It provides a basis. It’s the emotional undercroft that won’t cave in no matter what hallucinatory structures have begun to collapse above. As a basis, it might change, but it will remain present. For example, whenever I read Lorca’s poems, I feel moved. I may not feel moved the same way every time, but I know there will be emotional movement.
I think a lot about the medieval alchemists, who annotated their manuscripts with, probatum est, it works, it has been proven, as a way to differentiate successful experiments from the unverifiable or the wholly allegorical. There can be only one probatum est in fictional narrative. Did it make you feel something, however slight, however delicate?
I want to cry because I feel like it— the way children cry in the last row of seats— because I’m not a man, not a poet, not a leaf, but only a wounded pulse probing things on the other side.
— Federico Garcia Lorca
[1] This is very reminiscent of Frank Herbert’s “Golden Path,” in Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune, where the emperor Leto II inherits his father’s apocalyptic vision—inherited from the novel’s sinister Jesuits, the Bene Gesserits, who religiously manipulate history by seeding it with messianic stories and myths. It’s not surprising that, in the Dune novels, inherited stories change and, by extension, change reality around them.
There’s a cockroach in my kitchen. We surprise each other in the mornings. By the time I get my slipper, he has maybe one, two moments to live. But he’s faster than me by a millisecond. Just that much and he runs under the cabinet. Gregor, I think, your time will come. Because it will. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day, one day my little friend, the party will be over.
I’m a rather clean person and I prefer a neat and tidy house. But I live by a stream in the tropics. That means the insect life is ubiquitous. So around me, insect death must also be. This is disturbing, of course, because I’d like to be a good Zen Buddhist. I’d like to harm none. And I’m not so arrogant that I can’t imagine myself in Gregor’s position. Wasn’t that Kafka’s point?
We have to be careful when we metamorphose human beings into something else. It’s an old, dark form of magic and, like all sorcery, comes with certain consequences. I think of Circe turning Odysseus’ crew into pigs:
She opened her gleaming doors at once and stepped forth, inviting them all in, and in they went, all innocence. Only Eurylochus stayed behind – he sensed a trap… She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs, then she mixed them a potion – cheese, barley and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine – but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs to wipe from their memories any thought of home. Once they’d drained the bowls she filled, suddenly she struck with her wand, drove them into her pigsties, all of them bristling into swine – with grunts, snouts – even their bodies, yes, and only the men’s minds stayed steadfast as before. So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast, common fodder for hogs that root and roll in mud.
(Odyssey, Book 10, lines 253-268)
She’s a sorceress, certainly, and in some readings an immortal goddess. But in Greek myth, even the gods are subject to the peregrinations of consequence and fate. For example, in later retellings, Circe herself falls in love with Odysseus, a love which, in this story as in life, seems more like a double-bladed sword than a sorcerous wand. Unrequited love is maybe one of the most poisonous, wrenching potions we can drink. And yet I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t voluntarily drink it—only the odd Eurylochus, waiting in the front yard, unwilling to enter, the voice of bitter fear that says, I’d rather feel nothing than go through that.
At first, we think Eurylochus is wise. But he isn’t. Perhaps his voice still echoes in language of post-millennial generations that seem to have given up on romance. But they probably haven’t, at least not as a broad demographic. This despite endless overheated magazine articles about kids not moving out and not developing the social skills of their parents. Say it with me: the kids are alright. Human psychobiology being what it is, they may just be waiting for the right potion in the right bowl, offered by the right sorceress in the right economic circumstances. Circe’s out there, kids. She’s on an island, not on Tinder. And she’s cute. Your destiny might lie more in the realm of sus domesticus than homo sapiens, but I believe in you.
Still, what love could be less requited than one that transforms a human into an animal? Were Odysseus’ men really pigs at heart? Was Circe really that powerful? In Madeline Miller’s retelling, the crewmen of Circe are swine from the start, in essence if not in form. It’s a bad trope that has been part of a long misandrist literary tradition, going back at least as far as John Chrysostom’s homilies on the book of Matthew: “[T]hese men are swine; even as when the pearl is trampled under foot, it is not so trampled, because it is really contemptible, but because it fell among swine.”
The tradition finds its apotheosis in Victorian phobias about men’s sexual needs and the simple binary that takes physicality as the natural province of the devil—the absolute scullery level of Christian morality. But it’s still around and we’ve seen genocidal war propaganda dehumanize people by means of this same metamorphosis. It’s undeniably black magic when political rhetoric transforms a human being into a farm animal or a cockroach to be swatted. Love becomes hate. Man becomes beast. Or worse.
Thankfully, unlike Madeline Miller, Homer leaves the romantic aspect ambiguous. But what do we do? In the transformations of our lives, in every segment of every day, what potions do we drink? What is our human proportionality, our inner ratio of person to creature, especially when love’s “wicked drugs” get involved? And how do we apply this calculus to others?
Literature and popular culture keep asking. William Gibson, creator of the cyberpunk genre, made it about cybernetic implants and the identity dissolution that seems to accompany an overly online existence. But he’s posing the same old questions about human emotion versus human intention. In All Tomorrow’s Parties, he wrote: “[Laney] had always taken it for granted that he possessed some stable core of continuous selfhood, but now he suspected that this might be another of those illusions the node [data] had enabled him to outgrow.” As the character’s humanity gave way to the ethereal grip of digitality, he became less than human. Laney’s desires had outstripped his willingness to acknowledge his own humanity. He’d forgotten himself.
A decade earlier, Mike Pondsmith, in the Cyberpunk roleplaying game, took inspiration from Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer, and created a game rule for it: “When a character installs too much cyberware, they lose ‘Humanity’ points. Drop too low and they succumb to cyberpsychosis—a dissociative state where they become violent, detached from human empathy, and essentially a mindless killing machine.” A clear example of man into beast in a world where machines are fetishistically becoming the object of all desires.
The replicant owl in Blade Runner. Expensive? Very. And perhaps a late-stage iteration of Uncle Bob. But we like the artificial owl better.
The implications are inherently Shakespearean. Lear says to Kent, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” (1.1.124), a transmogrification meant to justify Lear’s uncontrollable rage. In order to act inhumane towards Cordelia, he has to become something inhuman. And so Shakespeare poses one of his perennial questions: where do we locate our humanity? How savage do we want to be to each other by means of such transformations in the service of emotions we don’t fully appreciate or understand? Or, in High Pondsmithian: how many humanity points do we actually have left? How much of myself can I replace before I’m no longer me? And how does that make me feel?
Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is also deliberately ambiguous on this point, even if it’s central to the story. Did Gregor Samsa become a giant cockroach because of who he essentially was (like Madeline Miller’s men being always-already pigs) or because the importunities of life had slowly replaced his parts, altering his nature, detaching his human empathy until he reached the scullery level of cockroach-psychosis? Of course, Lear was a dangerous king. So naturally, he transformed into a dragon. Gregor Samsa was a lowly clerk, a technician, so naturally . . . Now I hunt Gregor in my kitchen. Though, to someone else, I think I must be Gregor Samsa.
But this was about unrequited love and the inner convolutions that cause us to behave in ways other than human. How much of Circe’s Pramnian wine can I drink before I become an animal? How much emotion can I endure before I forget myself? When do I reach the point at which I say, “I’d rather feel nothing than go through that”? I think most people reach that point sooner than they expect. Maybe the post-Millennials are right.
We think Eurylochus can’t be wise. At least, we don’t want him to be. We look in the mirror and say, “I believe in you.” We affirm the power of love. We like the taste of sorcerous barley wine and ask for seconds. But we don’t know how much we’ve already changed. We don’t anticipate the degree to which our “continuous selfhood” has already been displaced—not through a wraith-like transformation into a digital persona or through a royal draconic invocation, but through the very sad, very human experience of self-forgetting. Because if an immortal goddess can fall in love, she can suffer heartbreak. And if she can, so can we.
Now we wonder about new taxonomies. We ask, “What rough beast am I becoming? Who was I yesterday? And will I forget this pain in some timeless animal life to come? Do I want to forget?” There’s a man standing in the front yard with a bitter look on his face. He seems to know something. I wonder what it is.
Like many college kids, I was in a hurry to get my piece of paper. By my last quarter at UC Irvine, I was taking 18 credits, working multiple jobs, and feeling the accelerated decrepitude that comes standard with silly 20-something social timing. I had to hurry up and “start my life.” I don’t blame myself for feeling that way, but it’s funny to remember.
I’m not looking back through time and saying, as a depressed, middle-aged relative once said to me, “After high school, the best times of your life are over.” High school sucked. And college more or less also sucked. But maybe the suction toward the end of my undergraduate years—of intense work, full course loads, worry, and frustration—was a bit less. And maybe in that margin, I brought a lot on myself voluntarily, like taking art classes I didn’t need to graduate.
In a moment of prescience, I thought, after this quarter, I’m never going to have time to take an art class. This is it. I petitioned for the right to take credits past the maximum and got turned down. So I showed up at Dr. Ladaner’s drawing and painting classroom on the first day and said, “They won’t let me take your class for credit. Can I just pretend I’m a student?” He gave me a long look, smiled, and nodded at an empty seat. Ladaner was great.
This is what he taught me. You have to air your work out. You have to let go. You have to be messy. You have to give yourself permission to draw and not erase because the line you draw is the line you draw. You have to accept it. And yourself. It’s the only way to get better.
I still can’t draw. But I took that lesson, which often came wrapped in some pretty harsh language, to heart. It has helped me in everything I’ve written. You have to be willing to make a mess of things. Neatness in the creative process (or really in any process) is, all too often, an expression of counterproductive fear. Ladaner didn’t get upset when we created something that didn’t work. He got upset at pretentiousness and stage fright.
You have to get over yourself, like the nude models we drew around midterms. A few were vampire-exhibitionists, sucking up the attention. But most were highly developed individuals who’d integrated being an artist’s model into their own process. They knew: you have to be willing to let people see you. It’s not about sucking up attention. It’s about exchange. And it’s about knowing how to get out of your own way.
We went outside to draw the cars in the parking lot. Ladaner didn’t tell us anything beyond that. His style: “We’re gonna go out and draw some cars today.” Someone asked, “How should we do it? What should we use?” He smiled and said, “Let’s go.”
So we went. We drew some cars. He did, too. I snuck up behind him and looked. He was using a piece of charcoal, making a wobbly kind of grid. I thought, this doesn’t look like that Toyota over there. It looks like an oversized waffle that dropped down a chimney. But then I realized he wasn’t drawing the cars. He was drawing the negative space between them, the light on the windshields, the shadows of the tires.
He noticed me and said to take a step back, unfocus, squint a little. I did and it all came together. I was impressed. On the way back to the classroom, he tossed it in the trash. That made me feel even more impressed. And I got it. Ladaner always did the assignments he gave us, but he didn’t dwell on his vastly superior technical ability. He was just hanging out, hanging loose, participating. He said, “Draw every day,” because that’s what he did. But he didn’t get hung up on it. He was more like a drummer doing his rudiments.
Years later, I was a writing instructor at a different university and had the privilege of teaching beginning fiction writing to his very quiet, buttoned-down, organized daughter in order to help her fulfill a gen ed requirement. On the first day, when I saw her name, I asked whether there was any relation (this university was in a different state). She said her father was a professor of art at UCI.
After regaining the power of speech, I said to tell him hi from me, that I once sat in on one of his fantastic drawing and painting workshops. She just gave me a look. I don’t think she ever said anything of the sort to him and I didn’t bring it up again. By the 15th week, she had a solid B in my class, only because she missed two assignments. I treated her like everyone else. She was a good student but largely uninterested in creative writing. Still, part of me really wanted to tell her that a lot of what I’d come to believe about the writing process and about life began with her father’s concepts.
Don’t be afraid to draw a wobbly line or write a wobbly sentence. Maybe you can fix it in the mix. When the time comes, maybe you won’t even want to. And maybe, if you’re really into it, you won’t think about yourself at all. That’s when I know I’m doing it right, when I disappear.
I try to have multiple projects going at once. I try not to get too self-conscious or fixated on whether I’m writing well, even though I sometimes can’t help it. A writing teacher of mine put it like this: “A writer can be shy and afraid of anything in life except writing.” So I try to be brave and let the project move through me instead of getting in the way.
In The Creative Act, Rick Rubin points out that we have to approach it with everything that we are: “We begin with everything: everything seen, everything done, everything thought, everything felt, everything imagined, everything forgotten, and everything that rests unspoken and unthought within us.” But it’s better if we’re not conscious of this inner substance. We don’t think, now I’m going to write a sad scene. We write a scene. And if the scene is sad, it’s sad.
Genre fiction writers call this “pantsing” (writing by the seat of one’s pants). They often despise it because the publishing industry does its best to make them deeply anxious about whether their work is marketable. But it’s a lot like making love. You can’t make love if you’re afraid of letting go. You can’t make art if you’re afraid of letting go. You can’t make friends, either. And you definitely can’t make love to artistic friends.
I remind myself: you have to confront uncertainty. You have to allow yourself to get lost, step off the path, forget the editorial style sheet, fall off the outline. You have to disappear.
Actors understand this. Francis Ford Coppola described Gene Hackman’s performance in The Conversation as “the first time I saw Gene truly lose himself. He wasn’t performing; he was unraveling.” Hackman was so immersed in the role, he was able to go off script in a way that squared perfectly with the character. Many of the best scenes in that movie were more like channeling than acting. Then again, at the deepest level, is there really much difference?
In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.
That’s the thing with bucket lists. They end. If you’d asked me ten years ago whether I had one, I’d have said I thought they were stupid. I’d have called them products of an increasingly enshitified media-internet convergence, self-help waffle, and that one bad movie. The bucket list concept has always seemed like life-coach hype. But I did have one. I didn’t write it down or post it or engrave it on a thin sheet of marble to hang over my desk, but it was there, implicit, a coil of smoke always turning in my field of vision, a divination only I could read. And it said one thing: hurry up.
So I did. I wanted to publish a book of stories. I published two with a third complete manuscript still out there, tumbling through the maybe-someday abyss. I wanted to learn martial arts. I studied multiple styles. I wanted to teach university writing and wound up teaching it for over two decades, travel the world and live abroad for substantial periods (at least 13 countries to date), and get a PhD (2010, English). For these things, I feel only gratitude—mostly to myself for having had the courage to attempt them, but none of it was accomplished in a vacuum. What did the millennials say twenty years ago? Something, something, the friends we made along the way? I made a few.
But I’m Generation X, where the “X” evokes the old cartoon “wingding eyes,” which are supposed to indicate being “dead or asleep without dreaming. Comical depictions of corpses or ghosts will have their tongues sticking out as well as this. Sometimes, both eyes will combine into a single, longways X. May also be a feature in depictions of clowns.” Sounds about right for Gen-X. Dead. Asleep without dreaming. Corpses, ghosts, clowns. I’m all that, depending on which day of the week you encounter me. Come over on a Sunday afternoon and you get a trifecta. But one of them always has to be “clown.” And the friends I made along the way turned out just the same. Now they’re mostly ghosts.
In classical antiquity, sorcerers would burn sacrifices to gods and spirits of the dead, then practice capnomancy with the smoke, reading it like divine script. Καπνός (kapnos) means “smoke” and μαντεία (manteia) means “seeing,” as in divination or second sight. The bucket list I had was capnomantic in that sense. I was my own burning sacrifice, my own smoke, my own divine message from myself to myself. And the smoke always said time was short. So I needed to do what I needed to do. And it worked out, more or less. It wasn’t much of a list, unless I thought about it for a while and scared myself. But the bucket part ran deep.
And now? Now I peer into my bucket like a child afraid to dive in. Because it seems like I’ve come around, made a perfect circle to where I began. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, “I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.” A brighter flame for more powerful μαντεία, of course, but in the end it’s all the same. The smoke blows away. After mountains, more mountains. And if you don’t die a hero, you live to carry other people’s ashes, too. So many. A million metric tons of ashes, the remains of the dead that are now your responsibility, their memories, their ghosts. Quite a burden to carry up a mountain trail.
The rim of the bucket makes a perfect circle. Wobbling on the edge, I try to grip with my toes. The mountains are watching. Smoke twists above my head like a thin snake. You ask me what the gods and spirits said in its coils. And I tell you to be patient. Just wait a little longer. I’m still burning.
I finished a short story draft this morning before dawn. I don’t know if I’m going to post it here, but I’m definitely sending it to magazines once I edit it. That’s what it’s like to be a writer. You sit alone at a desk in the early morning or late into the night, making a world from the stuff in your head. You never know if you’re good. You never know if the responses you get (if any) are accurate or truthful. You’re completely alone in every way that matters. And, when you aren’t, you still are. Amateurs say “writing community” and the real artists give a little side-eye. Sure, sure, the writing community. That’s great. Now excuse me, I, uh, gotta be somewhere.
When you’re finished and the draft is as good as it’s going to get, you put it into the Submittable churn or email it to a magazine editor. If you’re a big deal or trying to pretend that you are, you send it to an agent or a manager, the beneficent industry parasites who are supposed to make everything easier but who can’t until you make it easier for yourself and don’t need them. Most of them don’t understand anything about sitting at the table in the dark.
And then your story, which is weirdly no longer connected to you, does its own thing out in the wild, cycling through the picayune innards of small-press publishing—the ugly Rube Goldberg literary digestion machine, glimpsed imperfectly at a distance and kind of stupid, mean, and silly all at at once. But by then you don’t care. You’re already on to another project.
A professor of mine once said, without early childhood loneliness, there’d be no one majoring in English. But I say, without lifelong loneliness, there’d be no one writing short stories or poems at 4:00 AM at the kitchen table. Or maybe I’ve got it backwards. Maybe without the stories, there wouldn’t be a cold, empty house. There wouldn’t be darkness and the need to imagine you are somewhere else. There wouldn’t be regret and the bitter absence of everyday joys that others take for granted. Because this is what you get, what everyone gets. This is the price for being able to make art.
Maybe I’m being melodramatic. Some days, I think so. On the worst days, not. Like when Vincent Hanna asks Neil McCauley in the legendary diner scene in Heat, “So you never wanted a regular type life, huh?”And Neil answers, “What the fuck is that? Barbecues and ball games?” And all Vincent can say, because it’s true, is “Yeah.”
Somebody asks me why I’ve been a wanderer all my life. Someone asks me what it is I actually do. And I have a variety of thought-stopping answers prepared. Because I don’t understand barbecues and ball games. I don’t understand normal life and day jobs, even though I’ve nearly always had one in which I wear a convincing man suit, function more or less effectively, and run a reasonable simulation of humanity.
A big part of the price is alienation, is becoming a weirdo, but that might be a chicken-egg thing. Would you have accepted this lifestyle if you weren’t already weird? When I was a kid, I spent most of my time alone, even when I was at school, especially when I was at school, making up stories. In college, the same. In law school, the same. In graduate school, the same. In fact, stories were what yanked me out of law school and full-on into the world of creative writing. Was I writing the stories or were the stories writing me?
James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” And that also seems true. But then I think, would I be reading so much if I hadn’t already walked away from the barbecues and ball games? Shit, man, I didn’t even go in the stadium. I didn’t even get through the parking lot. A weird goth bus full of theater kids got me and I wound up smoking weed on a rooftop, asking is this where it’s at? And concluding, no, this isn’t. This is just another ball game. Where it’s at was back home in my room in my imagination. And now it’s at the kitchen table five days a week a few hours before I have to go interact with the general population.
Loneliness does strange and awful things. When we can’t share who we are or what we do in a meaningful way, something starts to rot and twist. And it never untwists. It just keeps twisting and rotting and twisting. You look at yourself one morning, at the shadows in your face, and ask, is this what I am?A creature of the night? You think, I’d rather be a night-blooming flower than a cockroach. But it’s all of a piece.
You’re a member of the class of beings that takes meaning in absence, in solitude, in the unnatural silence of the world asleep. But you’re not asleep. In fact, it’s the only time you’re fully awake. And so one comes to understand, to see oneself, in the figure of the moth, the vampire, the possum, the spider, the blossom at the end of a branch nodding in the wind, all the carnivora that wait for nightfall while the wide world pounds by overhead. The moon is their sun. And yours.
As I sit at my desk, like I did this morning and the morning before that and the morning before that, building artificial realities out of words, I often wonder what it’s like to lead a regular type life. “No such thing,” someone said to me recently, but he doesn’t know. He’s a weirdo, too.
I got up last week and the words wouldn’t come. So I went for a run and wound up walking through the neighborhood, hearing wind chimes, looking at yellow rectangles of distant windows. I watched black water twist under a bridge and felt the first drops of morning rain. No one was awake. No one looked out at the shape of a man standing still on a bridge in the dark, listening.
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.
I once went to a prison in California with a public defender named Neil to meet with one of his clients, a murderer. Neil was about 55 years old and I was 21 or 22, his legal assistant. This was mid-1990s and, for me, a summer job. Neil was also one of the wisest people I’d ever met or ever would meet. And one of his greatest professional achievements was keeping this man off death row.
The client was a former physician and his crime hadn’t been sensational enough to merit more than a blip on the news, but he was going to be in prison for life (instead of executed, thanks to Neil). This was way before the federal court order against capital punishment in the state. Back then, people like this only had people like Neil. And we may think, as I did at the time, too bad. He did the crime. He should pay. But I don’t think like that anymore.
We talked with the client for about 30 minutes. I remember him being articulate and personable, if a little twitchy. He wanted to know how his ex-wife was doing (because she, understandably, never visited him in prison). He didn’t want to talk about his case (though Neil insisted) or prison life (though Neil insisted). He wanted to show us his pen-and-ink drawings, which actually looked good. None of them were violent or about prison. All were from his memory of a life before, a life he couldn’t manage, a self he couldn’t control. They were simple scenes, a young man sitting on a bench, a horse, a balloon caught in power lines, a fountain in the park.
When we left, I remember feeling a bit sad. Neil wanted to know what I thought of the guy and I said as much. I said something like it’s strange how one person commits a crime and another doesn’t, how one person winds up in a cell for life and another lives free to age 90. And Neil said that was exactly right. It is strange. And there isn’t an answer to that question or a reason why.
I remember him saying, “Anyone can do anything at any time” and “The only thing that puts him on that side of the glass and us on this side is he did the thing and got caught.” But lots of people do the thing and don’t get caught. And lots of people get caught but never did the thing at all. And that’s why Neil was a public defender. The legal system, according to Neil, is inherently asymmetrical and perverse. I think the term he used is, “really fucked up.”
We all know this, even those who do their best to maintain the system. The law is made up of words, good policy intentions, and best possible premises. We like to imagine it’s a divine mandate, but it isn’t. Words can change. Intentions can change. Premises can shift. So we need to think about what right and wrong really mean, about mistakes and imperfections, about unrecoverable errors and the people who commit them.
We need to remember that the killer was once a child who liked comic books and wonder what brought him from that to being the worst sort of criminal. We need to mourn the victim and try as best we can to redress the harm; though, we know some crimes cannot be redressed. And we need to levy pressure on the system to make it work right so that there can be something approximating justice.
Neil always said, “There isn’t much difference between him and us.” I had a hard time accepting that. But having lived a lot and having seen a lot of different people in my life, I’m beginning to think that we are all equal in the end. As the saying goes, at the end of the game, the pawn and the king go in the same box. When I think back to that, now I hear Neil saying, because he is us, even though I don’t think he actually ever said those exact words.
2. Useful Fictions
There’s no way to tell whether the things we do, feel, or become arise from internal or external causes. Ultimately, there probably isn’t much separation between anything. It’s almost trite to quote Yeats’ “Among Schoolchildren,” but he seems insightful when he writes, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
We can’t. Dancer and dance must always be one. And the circumstances of the dancer-dance. And the time it happened. And the cultural and historical moment and everything else. Nothing is separate. Everything emerges as part of everything else and recedes back into that all-encompassing whole. As some schools of Buddhism term it: “interdependent co-arising.” Dancer-dance, criminal-crime, dancer-crime, criminal-dance, dancing you, dancing me, one side of the glass or the other. We have to wonder about best possible premises and words and good intentions because, in the end, we cannot tell where one thing begins and another ends.
To have social order, there must be social accountability; however, in an absolute sense, nothing is truly personal. The mistakes we make are imminently human. And our achievements come about as much from an accident of time, space, and disposition as they do from intentional, willed action. Sure, we like to own our achievements and hide our mistakes. But in the end: the pine box.
3. Mention Me When They Ask You What Happened
If we become what we do, what we do must also circumscribe, interpenetrate, and inform us before and after we do it. That’s a convoluted way of saying there is no beginning, no end to who we are. Therefore, drawing distinctions between dancer and dance, between actor and action, seems like we’re creating a useful fiction—a way of seeing that helps us focus on one thing or another at the expense of the whole.
In this light, asking for forgiveness does no good. What happened took place because of us, because of everything within and around us, because of what came before us and what shall come after, and because of what is always emerging and passing away beyond our awareness but still within phenomenon of our lives.
Who can tell the dancer from the dance? Not me. Whatever happened is now an indestructible figment of all life everywhere and for all time. The error, the mistake exists. It is a fact of life. And you can’t make it un-exist no matter how much you wish you could. Forgiveness is pointless. Penance is a waste. Retribution must be, too. Where does that leave justice? Maybe it’s just another useful fiction, another way of keeping everyone as calm as possible while the minutes and days tick by.
Of course, we regret our mistakes when hindsight seems to make everything clear, but even that is a perspective trapped in space and time. If clarity depends on where we’re standing, it’s not true clarity, is it? Regret seems like that, a coin glimpsed at the bottom of a pail of muddy water. Do you see the truth? Are you sure? What’s down there, really? And why are you feeling this way about it?
We feel a certain way now because of what we think happened then. We can’t simply feel things in themselves; we never emote in a vacuum. Our errors, misapprehensions, insights, and revelations depend on context. Like folk healers who believed in the Doctrine of Signatures—essentially that divinity “wrote” the true name of a thing in its essence, shaping it according to its properties—we must believe that the world around us and the things moving through it mean something. Maybe we believe this just to stay sane in an insane world.
As Frankl might say, life asks us what the meaning of it is. And it’s our responsibility to come up with the answer. Whether our answer is mistaken or not is beside the point. How could we ever truly make a mistake if our perception of the world emerges from our experience, which is mostly out of our control? Like the Zen master who celebrated his long prison sentence because it was just like the monastery and provided time and space for him to practice, all we can do is bear witness to the moments of our lives and accept that even the act of bearing witness depends on who we are, where we are, how we are.
In this light, we might find that our thoughts are thinking us; our words are speaking us; our actions are doing us as much as we are doing them. And so we may find it far better to offer forgiveness than ask for it. With this insight, in order to pass judgment on anyone, we would have to acknowledge that there really is no separation between us and them.
If you understand the other, you understand yourself. If you understand yourself, you understand everything, which is another way of saying, judge someone and you judge yourself along with them. We are every criminal and every victim. We are the leaf that falls from the tree and the blade of grass on which it lands. As Luc Sante writes at the end of the “Unknown Soldier,” which is a prose poem about this idea: “Think of me when you run out of money. Remember me when you fall on the sidewalk. Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet.”
