Probatum Est: Let Emotion Be Your Guide

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.

[2] Merci, M. Descartes, I never doubted you: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/#InnaIdea

[3] I have her exact words because I wrote them down later that night, thinking they’d be useful in a story, but I’ve never used them before now.

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be. I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing. I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness. And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep. I’m not proud of such feelings. But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care. It’s a hard world, Fluffy. Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago. Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke. At least someone still gets to enjoy it. But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine. I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat. I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance. Some writers really need to start drinking again. They’re not able to produce unless they do. Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.” That’s it. Light up. Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take. There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class. We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles). Of course, he had tenure. So he went on leave. Now it was almost Christmas. And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement. Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard. This is known. We were all trying to keep it together. Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees. There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester. Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive. But whiskey in Montana? Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy. She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant. I always ran into it because it was covered in snow. Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have. So I barked my shins on it regularly. But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot. Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember. I’d walk over and stand next to her. We wouldn’t talk much. The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift. Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school. This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness. No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift. But nobody knew anything. If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30. But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening. We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant. We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments. And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda. Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life. This was not real life. This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take. A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art. And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment. I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print. I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous. But she couldn’t write. Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten). But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors. Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages. I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.” Take that. Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah. Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea. After the program, we lost touch. I know Lauren didn’t publish another book. She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot. And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything. In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do. If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things. Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate. I don’t blame her. I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing. I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved. But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers. The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken. You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador. The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers. I hope so. Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in. At least I’m still working. I hope Andrea is, too. Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days. And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience. Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some. But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”

The Joy of Teaching the Research Paper, Part 3

A Fateful and Lonesome Journey to the Dark Heart of the American Library

After working with the students on developing personally relevant topics, you’ll have helped them sharpen those topics into specific areas of research. Then, on a cold day sometime in early October, you’ll all shuffle over to the campus library.

You will have written, “WE ARE IN THE LIBRARY TODAY” in enormous block letters on the board, but the two students who come late won’t read it, initiating a chain reaction involving the department secretary looking up the outdated copy of your syllabus on file in the office; a feverish exegesis of your original assignment sequence that has already been amended six times in class; and a multitude of calls to you which will go unanswered because your phone is off.

Meanwhile, the librarian’s assistant will be taking your students through an online guided tour of available resources for undergraduate research papers as slowly as humanly possible. Three students will have opened Facebook on the library terminals. One will be playing a bowling app on her iPad. It is important, at this point, to resist sudden irrational sadness.

The walking tour will then ensue. It will consist of the reference section, some of the book stacks, and the periodical room in the basement. The students will peer at the 1970s sci-fi microfilm readers. They’ll show a slight tourist curiosity toward the untouched literary journals laid out in immaculate columns on the shelves. Someone at the back of the group will whisper, “This is so intimidating.”

Class will be nearly over at that point. Everyone will shuffle back to the front desk. You will elaborately thank the librarian’s assistant who will smile and wave at the class as if he’d just demonstrated how to teach algebra to grizzly bears. Then the two late students will arrive with contemptuous expressions, but everyone will ignore them.

You’ll take a moment to talk about the value of working with physical books and the weird serendipity that comes from personally browsing the stacks. You’ll explain how it can sometimes result in discovering the perfect text, or an author of whom you were not previously aware, or a useful book that had been misshelved or miscatalogued. You’ll describe this experience as wonderful and mysterious—because it is, but maybe only to you.

Your students will be checking their watches, getting combos on Pro Bowler, and will often seem to be staring through your physical form at the gulf of infinity. But the librarian’s assistant will be listening intently as you describe this esoteric process. You are, he’ll decide, somewhat smarter than you look.

You’ll finish by talking about what the students should be doing before the next class meeting. A few of them will make sure you notice that they’re writing it all down. Everyone will be extremely tired. Of the 15 who shuffled in, you will count 11 shuffling out.

What happened to the other 4? Don’t ask.