Inspiración y decoro

Por falta de tiempo, inspiración y decoro, te y les dejo el exquisito, estratégico escrito de un demonio rojo que conocí y que debe andar por ahí. Escribe atormentadoramente bien. En lo particular, el único pensamiento que transmito hoy es que llegan a causarme un placentero pavor los momentos mortuorios de tal anotación. Por lo demás, prometo que si llegás/an hasta el final, no sentirás/an defraudación. Nada en estos párrafos tiene desperdicio, es magistral. A propos del Ars Poetica de Horacio, la Furia nos dice:

As to arrangement: its excellence and charm, unless I’m very wrong, consist in saying at this moment what needs to be said at this moment, and postponing and temporarily omitting a great many things. An author who has undertaken a poem must be choosy—cling to one point and spurn another. (Horace)

Ass Dents (a Confession 1)

Dear Horace,
What can I say? I read just a few pages from Ars Poetica and I have tried. Sitting on cement steps in New York on a summer day I waited for my friend and read your book, and tell you now I have tried. To the right of me a man was putting on a puppet show from behind a cardboard box. Beyond him people roller skated. That day and the couple days to follow proved to be quite harrowing. I will spare you most details, but the gist you should know in order to understand my dilemma, and so maybe put your finger on where I went awry.

The bottom line is that I was falling in and out of love all over the place (“love”). “Sloppy,” you would say, if you had seen me that weekend. Sitting in the back seat of a car with my legs up, staring at the backs of heads—anyone’s heads, really—my driver, the passenger, the heads in passing cars—fantasizing about a hypothetical man who could ride wheelies at 80 mph, then later throwing loves of a lifetime from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a gaudy Lichtenstein exhibit helped me to understand the preposterousness of my situation. A woman possessed, I drank hard coffee like water, and let it skywrite me in long looped letters: YOU ARE MINE NOW, I said from up there, my hands still shaking, my heart pounding from the Folgers. You have to understand that this was not lust. This was my lifetime, my old age dangling by a thread. By Sunday I’d become obsessed with hanging out in high places—Hitchcock’s Vertigo, you know, the falling metaphor—the Empire State Building, imagining myself drifting like a Kleenex to the sooty sidewalks I could scarcely make out from up there. It was my soul, sir. By the time I got to Bar Reis my heart had been broken by every person in that city. I drank 1.75 beers and chatted merrily to my man friends. This flavor of sadness I had never felt before, nor have I since. It is not that that this experience seemed unprecedented or unique. All the same, it lurked like a ghost in months to come—slept in bed with me and caught me looking out airplane windows. This bothered me.

So I took your advice (or tried). Having been especially moved by your description of process, of the precision and control necessary to convey decorum 2, I decided I would tell this story nearest I could infer to your way. I stayed true to realness—my characters, the things they would say and do because they were based on real people and events, real actions and reactions (loosely speaking—still, this was fiction). I followed your directions: plenty of conflict (a lady standing on a roof ledge); characters true to life (driver, passenger, passing heads all included); metaphors that responsibly gesture toward reality (I wonder if you will forgive me for the
“falling” business); lurid details (Manhattan, manhattans spilled, the ass dents, of course, how far you can fall without dying, etc.); and meaning. You may be pleased to know I wanted to show my reader a kind of love.

It was the scene-by-scene/ validity regimen—giving my story up to the most likely plot—that sank me. Having set the scene as described, I imitated nature, I thought, quite well—following whims to strange behaviors, dead ends, anything really that seemed organic (the thing about entropy, it turns out, is that for any one action, there can easily follow a hundred equally as legitimate but varying reactions—I think of the friend of a friend whose mother was killed on a highway, having dashed out to retrieve a windbreaker that’d flown off the roof; a driver didn’t see her and switched lanes—what are the chances of that? Versus her returning unharmed? Versus her running into the woods after a cat?)—and do you know what I had in the end? A very fractured, sometimes digressing stew thing that was very much like life and nature—stories overlapped with dull interstices between catches (where there were catches—sometimes, also like life, there weren’t)—at best, a handful of stories strung into one.

One thing seemed certain, sir. This was not art!

I keep grappling. You imply that sometimes one has to flounder—rewind and rewrite until the story is fully resuscitated. But where did I go wrong? How (strategically) should I fix it? And how does the matter of interest factor into step-by-step scene writing? What if trueness to life is droll? Say, if nature would (probably) have a person stare out a window and breathe, but fancy would have her float up out of her chair? Is this you (your best guesses at causal chains) versus the Muse (less explicable, less probable whims)? Would you have us two cooperate?

But you, of course, deride the Muse (as thing)3. Admit it, sir—there are certain things your consciousness will not afford you. There are holes you need to fill, if you are honest, in your description of process—where the groping, “seeing,” intuiting, and definitely knowing cannot reach. Still, there are beautiful (if perfect) novels. The holes can patch. How’s this, would you say, if you had to speak in specific terms? Is it chance? Zeitgeist? Circumstance? Id? Impulsivity? Forces outside your control and anticipation, at any rate?

Here is my confession: sadly I believe in the Muse. Worse, I trust it and need it like a drug. An
amalgamation of (whichever) forces external to a writer’s consciousness, for us believers it can forge certain outcomes from esthetic material. And while I would prefer to parade as omnipotent when it comes to my stories, I admit that often when things go best, I have not put as much thought into them (as I did for this story). Sometimes a thing can happen with no conscious thought at all. A Force, I think, brings me to my product. It patches said holes (skeptic spaces—things I cannot know or foresee, as well as fantastical spaces—instances that should defy probability or science for story). And it surprises me, which is why I call it “outside my
conscious volition,” and why I’m willing to name it.

This brings me to what I think went wrong with the story I described to you. By trying to let go—let the physical world and willful creatures fling about where (I thought) they would—I exerted too much control. By binding them to my conception of the physical world (and what good is that, given I’ve officially bought into skepticism—which stipulates that I can’t know this anyway, no matter what I do), I bind them to my misgivings, biases, hand-me-down beliefs and (potentially flawed) body of knowledge. I like the idea of something apart from me seeping into that, which might gesture toward the very truths I can’t know. Yes, we both believe in absolute truth. Our difference is that while you may trust yourself alone to derive it—to plunder through your words until you find it, and recognize it—I do not. The stories of mine I like best feel
mostly mine—my decent judgment, but partly something other, upon which I am willing to depend 4. So what do you think? Will my Muse-riding impede my professional development? Too risky? Untenable? Capricious? Should I condition myself to adhere to the validity regimen?

Am I hopeless? Anyway I just wondered what you thought. Ars Poetica was pretty sweet but I could do with a panacea.

Sincerely.

1 Dated late July, written after the night at Bar Reis in Brooklyn: “If I extract my contact lenses, I think my corneas will stick to them. The night is still with me: smoke on my skin and hair, mosquito bites on my legs from torturous hours on icky Kai’s porch, the way my eyelids start to close and my whole body startles when I catch myself falling. Grit is under my fingernails and I look on the whole halfway dead. These, too, are left: eaking beds all through the house, photographs black and white of sun on water, disappearing ass dents from a black leather couch, the fiber-optic slowly rotating defunct hair machine that we watched sweep over Bach’s bust and head, splotches of manhattans on N—’s tan pants, trash piled in lines leaving walls between me and my jaywalking, long-legged man friends, wind that bent the tree trunks down to us, fingerlengths away as we sat clutching coffees to ward off the rain—those ass marks rippled right out from the cushions down arm rests in separate directions they crossed the floor to our tapping feet and boom boom music up the walls to corners where they finally sat fragile as cobwebs (I was talking to Kai, meanwhile, about variations on his creative process—he says that the best songs (he writes songs) bubble up from somewhere inside, and there’s no way to beckon them, they just come, et voila!), and the electric blue swimming pool with the one skinny gray raft that floated in circles and banged on pool sides when it caught in streams from the jets. We stared and prayed it would take us away until W— jumped in, foxy jeans and Puma sneakers and all, leaving the rest of us on Kai’s deck to drink on and listen to the quiet clacks of water freezing to ice deep in the freezer.”
2 Recall: “My advice to the skilled imitator will be to keep his eye on the model of life and manners, and draw his speech living from there” (131) v. the fish/horse/woman, et al.
3 “Men of sense are afraid to touch a mad poet and give him a wide berth” (134). My intention here with some regard to Blood Meridian is to show that the caliber of meticulousness that Horace suggests—you know, muselessness— is probably NOT responsible for the total lack of seams, the continuity of this novel.
4 Admittedly, this could be my immaturity as a writer talking. While I agree that trueness to life is every bit necessary for a story to carry through, I think it can be discovered in various ways. Horace’s way is so systematic; sort of grueling when you think about the conscious step-by-step “would that happen” regimen (for droning on re: this, please see my rhetoric entry, where I respond to this sort of thing). When I tried that, my story lost its dream quality and its aesthetic. While I don’t ignore my conscious understanding of the physical world when I write—in fact, I depend on it as much—I don’t trust my rightness like he does, and I think this stilts my story. I feel more willing (than he seems) to be whimsical.