and/or “Angry Friends” (I)

Writing of Camus, Susan Sontag once said that the most dangerous emotion a writer’s texts can evoke from the reader is love. That’s because, she went on, when we fall out of love with a writer, we feel betrayed; we feel that, indeed, we were fools ever to have been taken in by them in the first place… [O]nce we are through with a writer whose work we once honestly and directly loved, we really are through. If we do go back to those texts, it’s only to explore the more or less painful (or, indeed, sometimes charming; but always, ultimately, unsatisfactory) traces of our earlier vulnerability, naïveté, and immaturity. And that writer’s new works, to the extent they have not grown as fast (or in the same direction) as we have, return us to all the torture of our own earlier failings and blindnesses.

-Samuel R. Delany, 1984: Selected Letters, p. 224

Part of a letter Chip wrote to his friend Mog, in response to a letter she wrote saying that their friendship was becoming more painful than pleasurable and that maybe they should declare “a moratorium” on it. He had included her name in the dedication of his most recent book, dealing directly with the then-recent outbreak of AIDS, a book which had not yet gone to press, and she had taken issue with some of what he’d said in the book and wasn’t sure she wanted her name in the dedication.

His response is an impassioned and (true to Delany’s form) very lengthy sharing of all his relationships that have ended during his writing career, and how surprisingly violent the endings have been. The saddest, and the one that hits closest to home, was this :

Well, there were people who asked to be disassociated from Dhalgren too, because they Didn’t Approve. While I was working on the middle drafts in the Albert Hotel, I had one friend whom I saw almost every other day for nearly a year. He kept insisting – often when I would urge him not to, because I thought he was forgetting his own concerns for the sake of my book – on reading all my new pages, and discussing them, and being very supporting and offering many helpful criticisms. (I was using his last name as the book’s title, back then, though there was nothing of his character in the book, save an exchange he’d once told me about between him and his therapist, which I’d changed some…) One night, as I frequently did back then, I took him out to dinner at a little Greek restaurant above 14th Street. I thought we’d had a perfectly pleasant time. But the next morning, I found a letter waiting for me at the hotel desk. He wanted to break off all relations with me, disassociate himself from the book, and wanted me not to use his name as the title. He felt that I was sapping all his energies from his own life and his own work. Though I wrote a letter back, bowing to his wishes, I was very hurt. As I had often told him, I would have been quite willing to do without his reading and criticism, but the withdrawal of his friendship was wounding. For the next three-and-a-half years, he refused to see me again or speak to me – though several times, I later learned, when he found himself outside a mutual friend’s loft apartment door and he heard my voice inside (and several other times when he only thought he heard it), he turned around and left. (p. 219-220)

Among the rest:

A friend’s lover. The lover accused Delany of never having liked his work as much as the friend’s, and having always condescended to him. And as much as Delany swore, honestly, that he’d always found the lover to be the better writer, the lover would only believe Delany was lying. He and the lover still had no contact, despite Delany staying close with the friend.

Fellow sci-fi writer Thomas Disch. He stated after the publishing of a certain of Delany’s books that, if they were to remain friends, he needed to never read any more of Delany’s work.

Multiple editors and publishers. A recurring theme was people demanding to know, what, just what was this book (whichever new book it happened to be) about? People, usually people who had loved Chip’s earlier books, seemed offended by a newer work, could not fathom where he was going with his career, and often thought he was ruining himself, or becoming an arrogant navel-gazer.

After laying all this groundwork, he got to his point with Mog:

I don’t wonder if – I know that – rehearsing all this, here, now, is a self-protective strategy on my part. But to write about anything at all, Mog, is to risk losing people who are close to you – because you’re not writing the right things about it; while the new audience you get comes to you precisely because you’re writing about that and not something else, regardless of what specifically you are saying about it. Indeed, the new audience is as happy to disagree as to agree; that’s what makes you a rich writer for them.

I care, deeply, about the world; about AIDS; about language…; about art. And no doubt because of what I care about, I pick friends who care deeply about the world, AIDS, language, and art too. I write what I can, and I bust my ass doing it. And part of the ass-busting means being as honest as I can bear to be with myself. And that’s often painful. (Where you read “self-critical” in my various discussions of series stories, if you want, you can simply substitute “personal agony” and/or “angry friends.”) I do the very little I can do – write the very little I can write – because I care (and because I couldn’t stand not to); but because my friends also care so much, and because they would like to see it done their way (and often those would be very good ways), what I do has always been painful to them. Part of my own pain, if you will, is to listen to their angry and articulate criticisms and, the ones that I can understand down in my language pit…, try to do something about them, even if it means forcing myself to grow into a different kind of person… (p. 223-224)

Not all creative relationships are collaborations. I’ve known many artists and many brilliant creative people of other stripes as well, but in only one relationship has art, and the making of things, been absolutely central to our friendship. We rarely made things together, but we’d known each other more than half our lifetimes, discovered that we wanted to be creative people in each others’ presence, and shared everything we were working on with each other in a kind of peer review. I would say that the reasons we became who we are now, both in terms of being, both of us, artists, and in the rest of it as well, had much to do with each other.

Relationships where creativity travels back and forth, one feeding on and into the other, are relationships built on a kind of tension. Between one person and the other, between friendship and creativity, and between what you make and everything else. You get your art into your friendship and your friendship into your art.

The breaking point is the moment at which you stop growing in the same directions, but keep growing.

I’m no expert, but I feel like these tensions are at the heart of some of the most famous creative collaborations we know, like Lennon and McCartney. Reading about how vitriolic The Beatles became during the Let It Be sessions, I see four brilliant people who used to feed off of each other, but somewhere they became less of a unit, turned into four individuals, and doing what they used to do became agonizing. They brought their wives and girlfriends into the studio for the first time, because those were the relationships that mattered to them now. Those bands that snap, years later they maybe have a reunion, and the only way the reunion can happen is with that tension gone.

At least, that’s a way of looking at it.

Objects under tension eventually (usually, maybe not always) break or go slack. Too many stories of bands that put out brilliant music and lead pained, miserable lives. The first album where they say “for the first time, it’s coming easily, we’re all getting along, it’s all coming out so fast and so free,” that’s always the album where something integral is missing from the music. They went slack.

Mine broke. And I felt like it nearly killed me.

Sometimes I wonder if I can still call myself an artist. Because I doubt, if situated again between what I make and who I care for, that I would choose the art over the relationship. And I feel that may be why I invariably work alone; when I’m in a collaborative situation I do not assert my perspective, I pick a subject that neither side is terribly invested in, and I try, mostly, to make the other party content with what we made together. It’s easy, because there’s very little at stake, and what is made in the end doesn’t have “my stamp” on it.

But I question whether I can go it alone forever. Something will probably have to change, and it will change when I accept that it may mean more breaks along the way. So the time would be now to cultivate a skill at maintaining a perfect tension, one that doesn’t break, but doesn’t bend.

(He wrote me a letter. He wants to come to Providence. We shall see how this goes.)

Play (H)

consider the generosity of the one-year-old
who has no words to exchange with you
and instead offers up her favorite drooled-on blanket,
her green rhinoceros as big as she is,
her cloth doll with the long blond pigtails,
her battered cardboard books, swung open on their soggy pages.

If you were outdoors, she would hand you a dead beetle,
a fistful of grass, a pebble,
by way of introduction or just because.
And if, a moment later, she wanted it back,
it would be for the joy of the game
that makes of every simple object an offering:
This is me. Here is who I am.

In the same way, sun
drapes a buttered scarf across your face,
rose opens herself to your glance,
and rain shares its divine melancholy.
The whole world keeps whispering or shouting to you,
nibbling your ear like a neglected lover,

while you worry over matters of finance,
of “relationship,”
important issues related to getting and spending,
saving and hoarding,

though you were once that baby,
though you are still that world.

–Alison Luterman

Addendum: Desire (H)

I stand in front of shelves of poetry and desire surges.
this has been a problem my whole life,
so much want in a body so small, an even hundred pounds,
with narrow shoulders, fingers small enough to
untangle without breaking the thin aluminum chain of a necklace, or disengage a piece of bread from a toaster without touching the
live wire inside
I open a book: Mary Oliver, Philip Larkin,
and the other Greats
and to read the words is not enough.
I can say them a hundred times over, recite them to
patient friends or sated lovers,
copy them down to feel that act of
creation but it is not enough
what to do with beautiful things!
or people: consumption is the nearest
approximation but ultimately fails: the aim is full contact, not destruction
so I take my lovers into me, or carve my
name into their skin as if possession could do
what consumption cannot
but there is no sating it that I can find
and standing in front of these books, like anger,
the desire makes my fists clench
like sadness, my stomach turns and pains
I forgot that words were my first love:
long before I put lips and other spare parts to my mouth to sample them,
I spent hours languishing with words,
feeling out their shapes with my tongue, testing their strength
against my teeth
flesh always gives,
or moves out of the way
but words keep their form, even against the insistent striking of desire

(Ian, can’t get the formatting standard – can you fix, please?)

Sense Memory I (H)

On the way to work last week, I saw a bird on the ground. Small, olive green, lying dead on its side. I went inside, got gloves, and went to find a place to bury it.

I found a tree stump with an overhang. I put it under there, and put leaves–only dry ones–over it’s body, excepting the head. I told it I loved it, and that it was safe, and it wished it well on it’s journey.

I’m a materialist. I think post-mortem organ donation should probably be compulsory. But if someone found me on the dead on the ground, I’d like to be put under the lip of a tree stump.

That said, I don’t think the dead have rights. That entire negation again: there is no one to have a certain right. There is no such thing as a dead person–just being, and nothingness.

Re: Deepest Darkest Secrets (I)

To re-posit a quote Hope shared a while ago:

“If we each told each other our deepest, darkest secrets, we would laugh uproarously at our lack of originality.” – Stephen Levine

The tubes are already buzzing about it, but Letterman just put this idea to the test.

What’s fascinating and, yes, funny, is that the big revelation is the climax, but it’s not the revelation itself that is climactic. In fact, he can’t help but make it funny, and after a good 8 1/2 minutes of buildup it’s so simple, such poor theatre. What’s makes it a big emotional release is the fact that he’s telling it at all.

Telling the truth can be very deep. I’ve been revisiting this feeling of having one’s ego destroyed. Sometimes I feel my pride annihilated, after playing an open mic or after a crit in college. It’s terrifying but it feels very cleansing once the adrenaline releases, and I get really friendly with other people. I got the same feeling the first time I showed a group of people my last film; I wonder if the openness is just a rush of endorphines or if pride and fear are what keep me sheltering myself. Facing a fear and wrecking the pride makes everyone my buddy.

I discovered that telling the truth can do the same thing when it’s a big truth. When I called my best friend one day just to say “look, I want you to know all the reasons why I love you,” suddenly I loved everyone in the world. It was easy to get drunk on it, and I started telling everyone how I really felt about them. Seems most often my deepest darkest secrets are affections I have for people, that I’m usually afraid they don’t want to hear. Strange how sometimes paying someone a large and sincere compliment can be the most selfish thing you can do.

But it’s okay; it’s nonzero.

Addendum: Humiliation (H)

Sharon Salzberg talks about how in our culture, when we’re in pain we feel humiliation. As though we should be able to control (and stop) it at will.  As though pain means we’ve failed.  As if it is weak. And Buddhism (not to mention common sense) teaches that pain and pleasure are simply part of life, not your fault, often not in your control, and even when it is–sometimes it just means you’ve got your heart open.

Yet–there it is. To be seen really suffering can make you feel small, ashamed, seen in all your failure. There is a sense that these things are not to be shared, that suffering is a kind of weakness one should only indulge in in private. Andwhen when you are in pain and someone receives you with kindness, that kindness can feel humiliating. In The Problem of Pain, Jack talks about “the intolerable compliment” of being loved unconditionally:

“God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.” (p.33)

“That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.”(p.47)

Something about being loved generously, openly, is at times shameful. Maybe it’s that we know we don’t deserve it, and the fact of the kindness, the glare of it, only reinforces the knowledge that we aren’t big enough to be kind like that–which only makes it more difficult to be gracious enough to accept. I write that and have  a flash of my favorite (okay, and only) hymn, “The Servant Song”. I always liked the line, “Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.”

As Kierkegaard notes in Fear and Trembling:

“He has not even grasped the little mystery that it is better to give than to receive, and has no inkling of what the great mystery is, namely that it is much harder to receive than to give, that is if one has had the courage to go without and did not prove a coward in the hour of need.” (p.129)

I don’t have any neat synthesis of this yet; but I think of P. telling me, “No one can blame you for taking a drink when you’re thirsty.” I remind myself that I don’t think less of people when they’re suffering, that they aren’t belittled in my mind. In fact, knowing the depth to which someone can feel can give me a sense of awe for the person, and makes the person seem like a comrade, and trust-worthy. Humiliation can only come from pride, so my guess is that the thing to do is figure out exactly what that pride is, or is about, so that it can be let go of.

Making the Darkness Conscious (H)

Noah Levine says, of being a Dharma Punk:

“I feel like it’s important in the path, at least in this path, because what we’re asking is to know our greed, hatred and delusion with such intimacy that we become free from it. It’s a very humbling project. And I can say in my practice, beginning my meditation, mostly it was relieving, but it was also deeply humbling.”

There are two parts of this that speak to me. One is the commitment to seeing the truth of ourselves, even–especially–the parts we most want to turn away from. For after all, as Jung says:

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Anne Druyan has a similar commitment to truth:

“The whole idea of science is to trust in reality and to interrogate nature so you can get answers, can step right up to the mirror–reality itself–and not turn away from it.”

The other part that speaks to me is about the relief we can find in letting go of ego. As Jack writes in The Problem of Pain:

“Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue.”

I think the Buddhists would agree.

The Bootstrap Theory (H)

Another from Seeing the Crab:

“I am in remission now, so there are days when I pass for healthy… To my horror, I find the self-assured and determined ideas healthy people have, ideas about what it means to be sick–about the right way to be sick–returning to me… I commit all the insensitive sins I railed against one short year ago…

I give a lecture to a thoroughly disabled colleague. ‘Call Social Security,’ I tell her… ‘Right. Do it. Call them.’

‘All these things they expect you to be able to do when you can’t think.’ she says. And then I remember. I remember that I could not balance a checkbook. I remember that I could not recall my mother’s address. I remember Jonathon calling Social Security to provide the forms for me…

But I give advice like this anyway. Stable now, and treatment-free, I regress into the bootstrap theory of serious illness. I give pep talks. I think of illness as something you get over, something to stop complaining about. I think to myself, ‘Oh, well, she doesn’t have it so bad,’ which is really a way to establish that no one has had it as bad as I. My disease, no matter what someone else’s is, is the standard from which I make all my pronouncements. I strut… I have an arrogant twitch in my ass as I walk down the hall. I am waiting for the applause. I, and only I, will be the polio victim who learned to walk and become the homecoming queen, the thalidomide child elected class president.”

This links back to a post I wrote earlier, in part about how easy it is to forget our own pain, and other people’s. How easy it is to resubscribe to the bootstrap theory of mental or physical pain, but especially mental, since it’s even harder to adequately communicate.

Maybe this is cause to be grateful that my pain is never too far: when I start to slip towards the bootstrap theory, that slippage barely lasts at all; my pain is always so quick to come back and remind me what bullshit that is.

Addendum: The Pain of Others (H)

I wanted to give him something after we talked about his son, but all that I could think of to possibly do is copy down the poem ”Kindness” and give it to him.  I suspect griefs of different kinds share things–like nausea, like the way it can freeze you, like the disconnect that can exist between you and the rest of the world, like magical thinking, like the sense of wrongness. Oh, I know I do not know what it is to lose a child! But I know enough about sadness and grief to have been moved to compassion and want to offer him some sort of solace. But how?

This is a vanity I have, the idea that I can sit with people in pain and not run away or turn away or tune out. I think it takes a type of a courage, a willingness to hurt, and I like these things in myself. It’s a labor of love, and I like some laboring for love. To prove to myself and the other person that my love is real and endurant. Maybe it’s about satisfying my desire to get inside of people, or rather, to see and feel inside of people. Maybe it’s trying to prove that I have a strength of some kind. I desire to be ferociously loving, unremmittingly loving, to give the kind of love that C.S. Lewis says that giving ”would be an idolatress offering to a man what belongs only to God”. Or, with people less known and less loved by me, I desire to be fiercely kind. I must be honest about it, with myself: there is a self attached to it, a self who wants to be these things, it is not just about being of use at moments in time; a knife of vanity runs through it.

I want power, but what does an ethics generally opposed to violence of the body or spirit allow except the option of power by being insistent in giving, with a heart you refuse to shut? But is this just the perverse power of submission, which is a power of giving and of endurance? What about a more creative power? A power that doesn’t have a selflessness that shares a border with self-loathing?

On Writing (I)

Purpose:

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

I. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

II. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

III. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

IV. Political purpose.—Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

-George Orwell, Why I Write.

Form:

A “perfect” sentence, if there is such a thing, ought to be both vivid and mysterious, lucid and unpredictable. Whether it shakes out like a bedsheet or rumbles like a locomotive, its cadence ought to reverberate in the mind’s ear with an unavoidable rhythm. Whether its images are designed to kiss the reader or spit in the reader’s face, they must be as fresh as new violets down by the hog creek, and they should be psychically charged. The sentence’s philosophical and psychological meaning ought to spread in ever-widening ripples like an echo circle. And, ideally, when the subject meets the verb, the verb ought to yell out, “Surprise!” I don’t know if I’ve ever written a perfect sentence. It doesn’t matter. It’s the pursuit of the perfect sentence that is the reward.

-Tom Robbins

Content:

A simple question: How can we recognize the truth? It is, of course, difficult. But there are a few simple rules. The truth ought to be logically consistent. It should not contradict itself; that is, there are some logical criteria. It ought to be consistent with what else we know. That is an additional way in which miracles run into trouble. We know a great many things – a tiny fraction, to be sure, of the universe, a pitifully tiny fraction. But nevertheless some things we know with quite high readability. So where we are asking about the truth, we ought to be sure that it’s not inconsistent with what else we know. We should also pay attention to how badly we want to believe a given contention. The more badly we want to believe it, the more skeptical we have to be. It involves a kind of courageous self-discipline. Nobody says it’s easy. I think those three principles at least will winnow out a fair amount of chaff. It doesn’t guarantee that what remains will be true, but at least it will significantly diminish the field of discourse.

-Carl Sagan

For my own part, sometimes I write because I don’t have a choice.