How long is long?
Sometimes I cannot compartmentalize my life enough; I so rarely spend the time set aside for writing doing that work. Usually I just relax or gather wool, winding down from another ten hour day at work, another wrestling match with needy customers and needier employees and the--neediest of all--management. I know work affects my relationships, my ability to spend quality time in the other half of my life, and instead of trying the way I work--caringly, fervrently, even for the MAN (the man wants you drunk)--it was time to change my life and find something worth doing. Like my work.
This means taking a risk, believing in the project at hand, and dedicating my time and efforts to it. Back to the big grind. Back to work.
These names: Sam O'Meara, Cody Muster, William Musselman, Pablo Bordin.
Walking up the hill to work--looking through the grey into a world of grey--and everything slows down enough, while I wait for a light to change, that I can see the mist settle on the sidewalk, and I can see Sam watch as the ball rotates on it's way to the plate. He can see the sticthes. And he can see the people sitting in the stands. And he can see the clouds overhead. And by the time the ball is hit back to him, his life has changed.
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant--no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.
A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism...
Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions...
Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous effort keeps Fiction on her feet.
The first book I didn't finish--that I willfully put down and stopped reading--was Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. I stopped reading it because he used a simile I did not like. I remember why I started the book in the first place--he had reviewed Pynchon's Vineland in the New York Times Book Review and I liked his review.
Time goes by so quickly. It hardly seems possible that at one moment it's November and then it's February. The work stops, the writing stops, everything that seems important about this life stops, to make room for everything else in life. Imagination doesn't so much take a holiday, as a hiatus in a gulag, where it aches and waits to return to its rooms with windows and electric lights.
But calling "it" imagination, is only a dodge, a lie about a me that comes in parts-- a way around the more horrible truth that I am the jailer and the jailee, the escapee on my my towards freedom, and the hounddog with my nose to the ground, not to mention the walking boss with a cannon for a gun, x-ray eyes and a coal furnace for a heart. Split in two, but always one--making a mockery of desire, and desiring, lusting for mockery.
And I am the warden--crafty enough to leave the window shimmed open, or build cells out of cardboard--inviting escape--in case I should grow used to my surroundings, start finding comfort in a pillow stuffed with grey snow and cinders and meals flown in from France. The horror, the wonder-- oscillating between escape, capture, freedom and creme anglaise.
Back to the burlap mansion. Open the granite office and unleash the squall of providence.
Characters come from everywhere
It's amazing to me how once I begin to understand the characters, the structure also begins to take shape. This isn't always the way. Several years ago I was on the subway in New York, and saw a bug run out from under a sleeping woman. "What if she's all bugs?" I wondered. I conciously turned that scene on a subway--and my friends who traveled with me at the time (to a reading of Dante no less)--into a scene at a wedding. But it also reappeared as a very short story called "Ants."
The novel grew from this scene--a group of men and a woman made of insects in a subway, became a wedding party (a group of men in tuxedos) outside a church (in a city) who push away a woman (is she homeless? who knows? she asks the groom for money) on their way into the church. There are the men, these friends, a city, a marriage, and this strange woman--who is real, of course she's real, while everything else is a fiction--who intersect in this scene. So many crooked roads to follow.
Time
Always a distraction, or worse, not a distraction, but life. I get
up at seven, go to work at nine thirty, spend the day at work, then come
home, then have dinner with my partner, then get a call from friends, then
go out, and at 1:30 a.m. Then I get out of bed at seven, head rich in idiocy,
try to work, then it's nine and...
Always there are seven other things, whether it's the laundry, or housecleaning, or the touch of my lover, or just quiet time to read a newspaper, or the work I do to pay the rent, and then there is the work--that other thing that I do for nothing, and which takes more effort than anything else I do.
And I always feel that writing is the best thing I do-it is, somehow the thing I always do. No matter what else happens, my thoughts are always there, always pulling me toward a pile of words and phrases. Given a quiet moment, they settle like dust in still air. And then stirred back up.
And that's the trick, stirring things up, letting things settle, stirring things up, letting them settle--always both, keeping a balance. And never enough time, but always enough time for contact. With the work and the world.
Two things.
A new collection of Calvino stories called Numbers in the Dark arrived in the store yesterday. It includes some early unpublished stories from when Calvino was 20. They are wonderful reminders.
And--
On the way home last night a series of endings came clear in my mind. Two sharp images. I don't know what will lead me to them exactly, but now there is something, if not near, then over the hills, waiting like the thought of the end of the run.
It was my intention, as I now see it, to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the sharper lights I should have taken from the times and the duller ones I should have got from myself.
Kafka, Diaries 1914-1923, p.188
I struggle with quality when I write. I don't do this in any other aspect of my life--and more people see me day-in-and-day-out other places than see my writing. I don't terribly much care if I'm a jerk at work--I'm bound to be some of the time-but I don't worry about being, what, nice?--I'm bound to be most of the time. But being nice, or doing a good job at work is nothing like writing. Writing takes effort.
I don't write because I have something to say about myself--here's my goiter, isn't it cool, don't you wish you had one too?--and even though I write about the world, I don't try to tell the Truth about it--look at their goiters, what curious things, they got them because they didn't know how to dance, that and because they didn't go to my (church, school, store, game, class, rally, park, piano-lesson), now please pull up your pants--because I don't know that much. I'm sort of happy writing about the snow and the man who talks to his feet and a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, and a baby lying in a crib while all this happens.
Mostly it's just: goiter, goiter, goiter, goiter...;
"You already know me... "
One of the cats moves to a patch of sun on the couch. She grooms herself, licking a paw, then slicking down the fur on one side of her face with it. She's a greaser, all black, preening for no one at all.
Maybe there's a metaphor here about writing to stay clean, writing for no one else at all. If I believed either of those things I might move more swiftly from the dumbfuck cat on couch with its tongue on its ass to me, three yards away and at work, in front of windows that open to the backside of a six story apartment building. I look through windows at windows and half a block of cream colored brick.
My cat has been with me for years. It would follow me into the bathroom, first thing in the morning, brushing up against my legs as I stood pissing--its tail in the way. I balanced on one leg, using the other to knock it away.
That's more like it. The novel is a reminiscence of something that has always been there, but hasn't been yet, as if I could remember the future, and remember what will happen in advance. Like foretelling? Only if it is a prediction of the past.