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the manuscript, the wind, and the train
Feb. 11th, 2010 10:28 amI've been working on my manuscript again, balancing my netbook awkwardly on my lap as the train trundles between my home town and where I work, in Baltimore. It's a document built up from back-up copies and archives from about six years ago, when everything turned upside-down, because in the brief stretch of my career liberation where I should have been able to finish the thing, something went haywire in my head and all I managed to do was make a huge chaotic mess of the thing. You think you grow and learn and mature as a writer, but you can fall back, too, and I had a run of that, too, when every time I'd pull up an essay from the manuscript, I'd end up hacking at it like a surgeon trying to excise moles with a chainsaw.
What happens to me might be something familiar to all artists, but I shouldn't project. There are just these times when I sit back, looking at what I've done, and ask myself why bother with this? It's true for me with my writing, my music, and my performances—the same old sensation of complete futility that comes in little waves, lapping at my feet when the tide's coming in. Maybe it's a highly-localized form of depression, targeted solely to the tools of production, or maybe it's something more. I do best when I stop reading, if I'm intending to write, or when I stop listening to music, when I'm compelled to make some, and I stave off the feeling that way, creating a tiny and contained cosmos where I can just do what the muscles and sinews of my hands want to do.
People say I think too much, and that's the stigmata carried by all the people in the world who can't stop themselves from building things, the tails-face to the coin of genetics and upbringing that fills me with this jittery, itchy urge to scratch out a navigable path through the churning landscape of thoughts caught in a hurricane. You beat out the plowshares and cut your furrows, and the drives and impulses carry on even when you just want to stop for rest and live a settled life for a moment or two. You set this machinery in motion and it's got a lot of mass to carry it along even when it's finished its job, and so you build whole lifetimes and wreck them in the same motion, trampling the ruins over and over until you run out of steam.
My poet friend died, almost a month ago, and I've suddenly become the interim guardian of his lifetime of work, something like fifty shaggy cardboard boxes of his writing, his tapes, and the raw materials of his unfinished projects, and it set the gears in motion again, just being there in the room with all of it, in a quiet room lost in the Baltimore skyline. I'd always chided him for being as much a master of self-demolition as he was an artist, but that's not entirely true. He was a genius, a brilliant synthesist of language with the delicacy of a bonsai gardener and the bravado of a street wrestler, and his work is stunning, at times, just…stunning.
He was a misery to work with, of course, and a real expert in generating states of distraction, but it's not hard to go off course. You can be the best driver in the world, but turning your steering wheel a sixteenth of an inch the wrong way for a fraction of a minute will send you into the grille of a B-flat, double-clutchin' semi every single time. It's so easy to do this, and the people in the world who are happiest as the consumers of the product of the makers seldom understand that it's not hard to write. Really. It's easy. Give me my headphones, a good mood, and a seat at my writing desk without distractions and I'll pound out ten thousand words without hesitation or particular effort, because those stories are always done long before I put my fingers to the keys.
It's the rest that does me in. It's the distractions, the whims and impulses, and the forbearance of the weight of the everyday—the bills to be paid, the leaky faucet, the dog pawing at me to play. It's the doubt, the uncertainty of motivation, and the complexity of trying to answer why should I bother when the answer is because not bothering isn't an option, unless I want that roaring, unkempt energy to find another way out, and legions of artists have found out the hard way that that's the worst thing you can do. It's that strange flash of hopelessness that comes from the intimate disjunction between the real and the invented, when you're sitting there on the cusp of discovery and the everyday intrudes, making you wonder why you're not applying yourself to something more rational, and to tasks that can be conceived, executed, and completed without leaving behind mountains of fragments.
I'm a fascist at heart, lusting after completion, symbolic integrity, and a skyline of architecture that fits together like puzzle pieces, and this is a fault that feeds the doubts, so I find my way around the rigidity of my intentions by enforced exercises and the introduction of chance processes and random oracle systems when I feel the old urges to unite the masses coming over me. I'm arch, pretentious, overly clever, and smug, too, and these things creep in when I'm drifting out of balance and overwhelm the subtlety of what I can do when I just unclench and let things happen as they will. I have to acknowledge the things I do wrong and the bull-headed instincts I have towards self-defeating processes—not to deny them, give them more room than they deserve, or worse, to seek to eliminate them in a sickly rush to purification.
That's the thing, see—
A kite flies because of the tail.
It's all that baggage we carry that holds us upright, to orient us to the wind and the forces that can carry us, when we place it properly and give it the respect and understanding it calls for. The weight of the world isn't pinning us down, but it's hard to remember that when you're feeling nothing else but that weight, bearing down on you till it feels like you'll never get up again. We just need to shift the load, to find the balance, and to take a breath and let it go without feeling the hitch of uncertainty, doubt, and regret.
So I sit there, each day, on the train, the landscape rolling by alongside the rails, and I have another go at my manuscript. My friend's death happened several months into this revival, when I'd just barely managed to recover the original work from the gantries and architectural ornamentation I'd buried it under in that sad stretch half a decade back when I was working to become a prominent writer™, but it was just a distraction, another bow tied in the tail of my kite, and I'm working again, albeit in tiny steps. I page through 204 pages of narrative, correcting rough passages and typos, rearranging bits here and there and changing the names to protect both the innocent and the profane, and I keep it foremost in my mind to not know where I'm going. It's easy to make wrong turns when I'm working off a map, and impossible to do so when I'm just traveling, just following the impulses of the fine muscles in my hands and fingers that turn a story into an actual thing.
The result will not be perfect. It will contradict itself, follow erroneous instincts, and make egregious, humiliating errors in spelling, grammar, and typography. I will deal with those things when it's time to do so.
Sometimes, saying that and making it so is the hardest thing in the world.
The writing, though, is easy. It's the wind that fills the sails, a force that stays constant, whether it's tearing my house apart or carrying me somewhere. The craft is in the construction, the way we come to catch the force of it, whether we're smart enough to use it or frightened enough to let it knock us down.
I scroll down by a line or two at a time, circling in search of the loose connections and the half-assed engineering and showy excess that'll do the whole thing in, getting a little better all the time, and I challenge each doubt to prove its authority, at least when I can.
Every day, the train passes the same points on its way, following the old rails up and down the same twenty-some miles of track, and every day, there's something worth seeing out there, some little detail or some new event unfolding, and as long as that's true, I'll be writing and rewriting, even in the face of the biggest doubts of all—why bother? What's the point? Isn't this all just futile?
"Good morning, sir," I say, smiling at the conductor, and I climb three steep steps and look for a seat.
What happens to me might be something familiar to all artists, but I shouldn't project. There are just these times when I sit back, looking at what I've done, and ask myself why bother with this? It's true for me with my writing, my music, and my performances—the same old sensation of complete futility that comes in little waves, lapping at my feet when the tide's coming in. Maybe it's a highly-localized form of depression, targeted solely to the tools of production, or maybe it's something more. I do best when I stop reading, if I'm intending to write, or when I stop listening to music, when I'm compelled to make some, and I stave off the feeling that way, creating a tiny and contained cosmos where I can just do what the muscles and sinews of my hands want to do.
People say I think too much, and that's the stigmata carried by all the people in the world who can't stop themselves from building things, the tails-face to the coin of genetics and upbringing that fills me with this jittery, itchy urge to scratch out a navigable path through the churning landscape of thoughts caught in a hurricane. You beat out the plowshares and cut your furrows, and the drives and impulses carry on even when you just want to stop for rest and live a settled life for a moment or two. You set this machinery in motion and it's got a lot of mass to carry it along even when it's finished its job, and so you build whole lifetimes and wreck them in the same motion, trampling the ruins over and over until you run out of steam.
My poet friend died, almost a month ago, and I've suddenly become the interim guardian of his lifetime of work, something like fifty shaggy cardboard boxes of his writing, his tapes, and the raw materials of his unfinished projects, and it set the gears in motion again, just being there in the room with all of it, in a quiet room lost in the Baltimore skyline. I'd always chided him for being as much a master of self-demolition as he was an artist, but that's not entirely true. He was a genius, a brilliant synthesist of language with the delicacy of a bonsai gardener and the bravado of a street wrestler, and his work is stunning, at times, just…stunning.
He was a misery to work with, of course, and a real expert in generating states of distraction, but it's not hard to go off course. You can be the best driver in the world, but turning your steering wheel a sixteenth of an inch the wrong way for a fraction of a minute will send you into the grille of a B-flat, double-clutchin' semi every single time. It's so easy to do this, and the people in the world who are happiest as the consumers of the product of the makers seldom understand that it's not hard to write. Really. It's easy. Give me my headphones, a good mood, and a seat at my writing desk without distractions and I'll pound out ten thousand words without hesitation or particular effort, because those stories are always done long before I put my fingers to the keys.
It's the rest that does me in. It's the distractions, the whims and impulses, and the forbearance of the weight of the everyday—the bills to be paid, the leaky faucet, the dog pawing at me to play. It's the doubt, the uncertainty of motivation, and the complexity of trying to answer why should I bother when the answer is because not bothering isn't an option, unless I want that roaring, unkempt energy to find another way out, and legions of artists have found out the hard way that that's the worst thing you can do. It's that strange flash of hopelessness that comes from the intimate disjunction between the real and the invented, when you're sitting there on the cusp of discovery and the everyday intrudes, making you wonder why you're not applying yourself to something more rational, and to tasks that can be conceived, executed, and completed without leaving behind mountains of fragments.
I'm a fascist at heart, lusting after completion, symbolic integrity, and a skyline of architecture that fits together like puzzle pieces, and this is a fault that feeds the doubts, so I find my way around the rigidity of my intentions by enforced exercises and the introduction of chance processes and random oracle systems when I feel the old urges to unite the masses coming over me. I'm arch, pretentious, overly clever, and smug, too, and these things creep in when I'm drifting out of balance and overwhelm the subtlety of what I can do when I just unclench and let things happen as they will. I have to acknowledge the things I do wrong and the bull-headed instincts I have towards self-defeating processes—not to deny them, give them more room than they deserve, or worse, to seek to eliminate them in a sickly rush to purification.
That's the thing, see—
A kite flies because of the tail.
It's all that baggage we carry that holds us upright, to orient us to the wind and the forces that can carry us, when we place it properly and give it the respect and understanding it calls for. The weight of the world isn't pinning us down, but it's hard to remember that when you're feeling nothing else but that weight, bearing down on you till it feels like you'll never get up again. We just need to shift the load, to find the balance, and to take a breath and let it go without feeling the hitch of uncertainty, doubt, and regret.
So I sit there, each day, on the train, the landscape rolling by alongside the rails, and I have another go at my manuscript. My friend's death happened several months into this revival, when I'd just barely managed to recover the original work from the gantries and architectural ornamentation I'd buried it under in that sad stretch half a decade back when I was working to become a prominent writer™, but it was just a distraction, another bow tied in the tail of my kite, and I'm working again, albeit in tiny steps. I page through 204 pages of narrative, correcting rough passages and typos, rearranging bits here and there and changing the names to protect both the innocent and the profane, and I keep it foremost in my mind to not know where I'm going. It's easy to make wrong turns when I'm working off a map, and impossible to do so when I'm just traveling, just following the impulses of the fine muscles in my hands and fingers that turn a story into an actual thing.
The result will not be perfect. It will contradict itself, follow erroneous instincts, and make egregious, humiliating errors in spelling, grammar, and typography. I will deal with those things when it's time to do so.
Sometimes, saying that and making it so is the hardest thing in the world.
The writing, though, is easy. It's the wind that fills the sails, a force that stays constant, whether it's tearing my house apart or carrying me somewhere. The craft is in the construction, the way we come to catch the force of it, whether we're smart enough to use it or frightened enough to let it knock us down.
I scroll down by a line or two at a time, circling in search of the loose connections and the half-assed engineering and showy excess that'll do the whole thing in, getting a little better all the time, and I challenge each doubt to prove its authority, at least when I can.
Every day, the train passes the same points on its way, following the old rails up and down the same twenty-some miles of track, and every day, there's something worth seeing out there, some little detail or some new event unfolding, and as long as that's true, I'll be writing and rewriting, even in the face of the biggest doubts of all—why bother? What's the point? Isn't this all just futile?
"Good morning, sir," I say, smiling at the conductor, and I climb three steep steps and look for a seat.
