May 2011 Archives

For podcasting purposes: It's All Material.

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.

David Foster Wallace

Let's begin.

Life--that wonderful solar-powered accident of proteins and amino acids--is naturally bounded by its beginning and its end. Before its beginning and after its end, the intricate chemical processes that give rise to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, love, and sonnets are mostly atoms going about their nanoscale business. Bonds are created and broken, first during the anti-entropic dance that eventually bursts into the actuality of consciousness, and later during the complex decay of substances into other substances, all of which will eventually be reused, like that molecule of oxygen you shared with Buddha just now.

Now, there's a groove that happens when the processes that govern our various physical substances are all crackling along, smooth and fine, molecular machinery with atom-toothed gears all whirring with the precision and regularity of the thermonuclear fusion that propels the shine of starlight into our living eyes and perceptive minds. The intangible processes by which we contemplate the world around us tend not to notice the tangible processes that power the pumping of our blood and the rumblings of our guts.

However, the central fact of our existence is that this smooth and swinging groove must inevitably falter and cease. Physical injury can disrupt its beats, disease will interrupt its melodies, and eventually our ability to perceive and process the sensual input of the world around us will end. The intangible processes of our consciousness will vanish, and only the tangible stuff that hosted those processes will remain.

It's a simple thing, in one sense, so ubiquitous that it borders on the banal. So very common. We know how the music ends: all beats stilled, all of the ephemeral processes that comprise individual personhood dispersed into silence. I think it would not be too presumptuous to suggest that it is not death itself that most people fear, but a bad death: a painful death, a lingering death, a death alone or surrounded by strangers, a death bereft of dignity.

Everyone has to confront that fear. However, it's one thing to do so within yourself, and quite another to bear witness to that confrontation as it takes place within someone else.

Fifteen years ago I wrote a short story, titled You Can't Go Back, Mr. Mountain. It was about a man who had chartered a small single-engine plane to fly him over the San Francisco Bay, so that he could empty his mother's ashes into the air above the Golden Gate Bridge. The title was a reference to the idea that the death of a parent is a milepost that, once passed, creates a permanent demarcation.

It was an okay story, as far as it went, but I never submitted it for publication. It lacked a certain verisimilitude, a subtle depth of tone and imagery that could only be gained, I thought, by actually experiencing the kind of deep loss that the main character had experienced. I didn't know very much about loss then, deep or otherwise. Perhaps I wasn't giving myself enough credit--maybe, if I had submitted it, what I saw as a lack of depth wouldn't have been apparent to someone else. I put the story aside, telling myself that I would come back to it. My mother was still healthy, and the notion of passing the milepost of her death seemed far in the future.

It's not so far in the future, now. Her health has been declining precipitously for the past three years, the result of a progressive and chronic illness, a twenty-seven year-old surgical error, and a bad roll of the genetic dice. I can see that milepost now, and some days it seems very close indeed.

During times of unusual or intense life-drama, I used to joke--in the way that one jokes about that which isn't a joke at all--that it was "all material." That is: the strange and traumatic vagaries of life form a deep well from which to draw inspiration for fiction. I still believe that, more strongly than ever, and these days, I don't pretend to joke about it.

I don't intend to turn the events of my life into the crass bones of my stories. I'm not going to be writing a melodramatic tale that centers on a young man whose mother is dying of a progressive chronic illness. I'm not taking mental notes so that I can write manipulative, tear-jerking scenes. But I am aware, as my mother and I progress through this experience together, of an expansion and deepening of my emotional vocabulary. I am gaining insight into the subtleties of incipient loss, and this experience is transferable to my fiction, because it's human.

I've written about my overt intentions for my current project. But without genuine human experience beneath the exotic and flashy narrative, there is nothing to bridge the gap between me as the teller of the tale and you as its reader. It becomes cold and sterile, a product to be consumed rather than a story to be experienced.

I believe we have enough consumable products in this culture. I'd like to believe that I can create something a bit less disposable. To do that, I'm willing to use the entirety of my human experience.

Good and bad, ugly and beautiful, meaningful and pointless. It's all material. It's what draws a reader in, and it's what makes a tale worth telling.

I've been scarce around these parts of late, but if, for reasons known only to God and your therapist, you're craving exposure to my paltry little mind, I do short bits of this and that over here on the dreaded Facebook. It's where I post when I've got nothing much to say, so if you're interested in nothing, pop on over.

Oh what foresight! This rabbit of the fruit-world! Imagine: thirty-seven little pits in a single specimen, ready to fall every-which-way and create offspring. We had to correct that. She could have populated the whole earth - this little headstrong Tangerine, wearing a dress too big for herself, as if she intended to keep on growing. In short: badly dressed; more concerned with reproduction than with style. Show her the pomegranate, in her armor of Cordova leather: she is bursting with future, holds herself back, condescends...And, letting us catch just a glimpse of her possible progeny, she smothers them in a dark-red cradle. She thinks earth is too evasive to sign a pact of abundance.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I've been working on a post since the 19th of April which is apparently too loopy even for me, because although I know exactly what I want to say, the words have formed into a big crazy ball of Sufism and Hermeticism, with a bit of Theosophy thrown in for flavor, all wrapped around a core of love, romance, and the immanence of God, which is a pretty heady mixture for an atheist to be writing about.¹ I'll get it finished eventually, but first I have to figure out how to not sound like a loon while I do it.

Let's leave that aside for a moment to ponder the mystery of the Beeping Dumpster Device in the Night.

Friday night, while out for an evening constitutional that had nothing to do with tobacco, I happened to pass by the dumpster enclosure that's below my bedroom window. My ears detected a faint beeping noise. Curious, I opened the gate to the enclosure, and, lifting the dumpster's lid, determined that the beeping was coming from somewhere amidst the trash inside of it: dit-dit-dit...dah-dah-dah...dit-dit-dit. Repeated, over and over. If you know a bit of Morse code you'll recognize that as: S-O-S.

There was an electronic device of unknown origin in the dumpster below my bedroom window, emitting an audible distress signal.

I couldn't immediately think of any such manufactured device: even an iPhone isn't smart enough to know you've accidentally thrown it away and call for help. I decided that I had to discover the source of the signal, and went to my apartment, returning to the dumpster armed with a flashlight. I propped open the lid, and lifted a couple of packed white kitchen trash bags out of the way. The beeping got louder. I poked and prodded at more well-stuffed garbage bags, noting the dark fluids that mushed against the plastic, and although I could narrow down the general location of the signal by its sound, I could see nothing with the flashlight. It was likely that the device, whatever it was, was inside one of those gloopy-looking bags. After a few more minutes ineffectually moving bags around, I decided that I'd had enough of being mistaken for a vagrant for the evening. It was cool, and my bedroom window would be open, so I covered up the general area of the signal with trash bags, muffling the noise. Closing the lid dimmed it further.

Later, as I lay in bed reading, I could--if I focused my ears just so--still hear the distress call: dit-dit-dit...dah-dah-dah...dit-dit-dit.

Saturday morning, around 7AM, the garbage truck came, dumping the crashing contents of the dumpster into its back and carting them away. I thought of the mysterious device, packed somewhere among coffee grounds and papaya rinds, still earnestly broadcasting its signal in the darkness of the truck's innards. Eventually, the truck would be emptied. Would someone better equipped or more willing to sift through kitchen trash hear the beeping, and seek out its source? Or would the device continue beeping, on into a landfill, its signal lost in the roar and crunch of dozers and dump trucks.

And, more importantly: what was the device? What sort of device does that, just beeps out a distress call that wasn't yet in common usage when the Titanic went down? Was it already beeping when it was placed in the trash, or did it somehow start transmitting after the dumpster's lid closed over it? Did the person who threw it out know what it was? Was it, perhaps, a device intended to spark exactly the sort of weird little evening encounter I'd had with it? A speaker, a couple of chips, a 9-volt battery, all pranksterishly intended to entice the curious?

I'll never know. It's Sunday evening, and while I wish now that I'd had a bit more fortitude and searched a little more thoroughly for the device, there's also something to be said for the mystery of it as it stands. A forlorn call for assistance, transmitted from a trash bag, intended for...whomever.

¹My particular problem with today's fashionable capital-A Atheism is that at the popular level, a good deal of it seems to be a exercise in pseudo-intellectual hipster me-tooism, with people who want to be publicly clever setting up massive god-shaped strawmen, knocking them down, setting them on fire, and pushing them off a cliff. Yes, that's entertaining, but reducing a human language project that's been going on for over 10,000 years down to a belief in the Bearded Sky Ghost and then oh-so-bravely declaring you Don't Believe In That Nonsense demonstrates all the intellectual depth of a puddle in Harvard Yard. It seems to me that too many people have mistaken reading The God Delusion for full engagement with the subject. Also: if your shiny new rational belief system is accompanied by merchandise such as a "hard enamel lapel pin with a silver edging and back with deluxe locking barrel style clutch," you're playing on the same field as that yahoo in the Ford F-150 with the Jesus fish on the tailgate.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rome
May 14th 1904