Uncle Fiction...?

Gus. Frustration is a lot like friction. And if friction never was there would never have been motion. And if friction were to not be there would be no stillness. Thanks then to frustration we have poems, spaceships and diamonds, and you too, Gus, becuase isn't copulation just specialized friction. And words to the wind would be but deadweight without friction, which is really, a lot like fiction.
I think that my avuncular advice will always be, "do as i do, not as i say."

*Athaliah

Athaliah -Jean Racine
What I love about Racine’s drama is that it is very contrived. Deus Ex Macchina all across the board, almost to the point of post-modernism, but four hundred years ago, which boils down to purposeful. Unabashed purpose drama. And very emotional.
Living unto the promise of God, these characters steadfast, purblind in their faith.
The idea of God’s chosen. Is it the choice of God or is it how we call and deal with being individuals that are not God? Is there one to admit that they are not chosen by God? It is the inculpable tragedy again. There is no perfect foe.

“What cannot panic do to mortal minds?”

*Phaedra

Phaedra -Jean Racine
A true tragedy, as no character is singularly true or evil, the guilt, the opprobrium lies in the form itself, as Melville would put it, the interstices through which we communicate. The guilt lies in the emptiness between us. Rather than in the vileness of humanity, true falsity and odium is in the listlessness of humanity, the will to not do, instead of to do.
“Not only have I spoken; but my frenzy / Is noised abroad.”
“Venus implacable, am I confounded / Enough for thee?”
“My heart / Can be unbosomed only to the gods / And you.”
“Then on the liquid plain arose / A watery mountain which appeared to boil.”

*Suttree

Suttree -Cormac McCarthy
Of breathing writers, Marquez, Dellilo, McCarthy, Pynchon, Cixous, Roth, Xingjian, Naipul, Salinger (?), this is the best book that I’ve read. Uplifting in only its ultimate sense. Tears of the gut. Tears of tears from the gut of the gut. I feel taught. Thank you. Thank you.

“An opaque smoketarred lightbulb that looked like an eggplant screwed into the ceiling.”
“He was struck by the fidelity of this earth he inhabited and he bore it sudden love.”
“He passed his hand through his hair and leaned forward and looked at the old man. You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.”
“I feel like an angel, he told an old lady with a bucket whom he passed.”

...I think Logic is coming on to me...

...but logic can deflower the word, all that remains unassailable is the

Because thought can never be God and word is the child of thought and is no Christ. The deflowering roue Logic is beautiful in his lechery because he reminds us that our language is human, that it contains the methods of its own deconstruction, and that flowers and fruits are meant for scattering seeds.

"The question driving me mad is: how can one manage to be simultaneously inside and outside?

...

Yesterday I made Promethea the sincere promise that I would sincerely do my best to write what she wants.
It is a promise.
Which is an even newer, even greater difficulty than all the others.

...

It is how serous translation is that torments me. Translating oneself is already serious - I mean putting life into words - sometimes it is almost putting it to death; sometimes dragging it out, sometimes embalming it, sometimes making it vomit or lie, sometimes bringing it to climax, but one never knows before beginning whether one's luck will be good or bad, whether this is birth or suicide. But translating someone else - that requires extraordinary arrogance or extraordinary humility. Extraordinary arrogance is something I don't have. And extraordinary humility - I don't know who has that."

Helene Cixous, Book of Promethea

help with my statement

this is my "Statement of Purpose" that i want to submit for applications. I accept all comments, reactions, hate-mail, inspiration, and anything else. I have to ship it off next week. So... what do you think?

My writing speaks for itself, but I, considering both my writing and this personal statement, obviously don't.
I remember reading on the creased back of a D.H. Lawrence novel that he is considered the most passionate writer ever in the English language. That same night I set out to relinquish his title.
It was a very hormonal, Sturm und Drang stage of writing for me. I was in a blitz, writing sometimes thirty pages a night, bouncing off walls like bats with their ears plugged, imagining myself arm-wrestling Proust, beating Cormac McCarthy to the draw, out-reading Borges and all the while trying to erode my keyboard into a blank, hyperactive, perfect encryption that would spew and spawn illimitable prose. That phase, after exhausting my post-teen angst, settled into a circadian, less panting, more livable life that didn't need to prove itself to survive and whose goals were never arbitrary, but now landmarks on the way to further watchfulness and exploration.
I finished my first novel a few weeks ago. It's called 100 Euphemisms for Mountain. It's a love story.
The most difficult part of my novel was not writing it. Dedication I have innately. Even deleting chunks of text, which were at one point in my life as purposeful and dear as organs, became a painless editorial task. Measuring my novel, or reading it as a reader would, was the most challenging part. As I am enormously influenced by certain authors, I tend to bend and flux my writing at the whim of my reading. When I pick up a Virginia Wolf paperback, or a Shakespeare play, or an essay by Helene Cixous, or Moby Dick, or a dithyramb from Joyce or Nietzsche, my life changes, I watch the world differently, and as surely as gossip will follow politics, my prose, like a dingy after a yacht, tacks faithfully trailing behind me. So, in the initial draft of the novel I dallied between six or seventeen different styles, depending on my variegated, myriad moodswings that took place in the eighteen months I was writing it. After I drove in the last nail and I began the beautiful, titillating experience of reading and editing a hairless new novel, I had to begin to sieve out my own voice, had to learn how to measure the rants against their pertinence, the neologisms against their disturbance, and the quirks against their poignancy.
As there is no dogma, thank God, for what is and isn't effective, subtle, piquant or maudlin, I learned by experience, intuition, and upshot.
Though I have dappled in the world of send your story here, there, writer's market, query letter, etc, writing always got in the way of licking stamps or bustling after the perfect journal. I was sadly and typically deterred from the dominion of the New Yorker and I, simply, wrote. And I would've gone on writing, happy, farsighted, and typing myself silly if I had not learned that community catalysis is frequently stifled, or negated, by the heavy-hearted solipsism that is often bred in skuzzy, dusty studio apartments. So I longed for academia, not out of loneliness or visions of tweed blazers and ascot ties, but out of my natural ability to thrive in the midst of thinkers. Like Spanish moss alighted in a virgin pine forest, academia is my dank, shadowed tree bark.
I started a publishing company, Eight and a Half by Eleven. In the first year we wrote, illustrated, designed, printed, and sold about two hundred copies of five different books. Independent publishing and indiscriminately organized idealism is a world that I love and that I won't give up. But my drive goes beyond the inde bookstore. Not in terms of mass distribution, or recognition, but in terms of exploring the ends and the antipodes, of climbing atop the shoulders of giants, of doing all I can to press the humpaday, lusterless gaze of mankind into the throes of passion, as so many authors have done for me. I long to go beyond the metaphor, bring fiction into the stomach, and the words into the throat. It is my drive and it is what I bring to you and your institution.

It was not until I began this officious, drooling, hypnotic binge of graduate school applications that I was able to truly appreciate the dry, extended witticisms of Kafka. What rigmarole and hoops I've been assaulted through to try to get four undergraduate schools to send you transcripts, or three professional men to send you recommendations, or one befuddled internet connection to complete an online application, and so I've had plenty of tongue-clacking, thumb-twiddling hours to ruminate my true artistic purpose.
I came up with three basic ideas:
To find a mentor.
To assist in the displacement of pop culture with jazz music.
To write closer to truth.

Thank you.

on specificity

dispensing with ambiguity...

"Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him. That was one sensation. Then up rose in a fume the essence of his being. That was another. She felt herself transfixed by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his goodness. I respect you (she addressed silently him in person) in every atom; you are not vain; you are entirely impersonal; you are finer than Mr. Ramsay; you are the finest human being that I know; you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness), you live for science (involuntarily, sections of potatoes rose before her eyes); praise would be an insult you; generous, pure-hearted heroic man! But simultaneously, she remembered how he had brought a valet all the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; would prose for hours (until Mr. Ramsay slammed out of the room) about salt in vegetables and the iniquity of English cooks." - Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

she just says it, says it exactly, and it sings. To join the modernists then? Pin down ephemeral thoughts, create a simulated mind on the page, a mind stretched out, wings and legs articulated with those pins, for careful consideration? Seems rational enough...leave God for those white spaces between the words...the ground to our figures etched into the page?

*A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Perhaps Dickens' diction puts some distance between my mind and his world, along with the years that have passed between us, but I like it. His fictive reality is never anything but on the page, simplified, crafted, but wonderful for it.

"she looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost man, that her husband could have looked at her as she was for hours"

Also what a novel! Not a scene wasted, tied up as neat as Christmas. I agree with John in his looking forward to finding a child to read this to. I am jealous of the storybook-ness of it: men that look suspiciously like each other, siblings that appear out of the mob, secrets waiting expectantly to be resolved, and that effortless telescoping of time.

"Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets."

*Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse

"When I read Metamorphosis, at seventeen, I realized I could be a writer. When I saw how Gregor Samsa could wake up one morning transformed into a gigantic beetle, I said to myself, "I didn't know you could do this, but if you can, I'm certainly interested in writing." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I am really glad I read this book. I know there's something a bit too uncomplicated about the clarity articulated, but the Magic Theater? Come on! That was perfect! The freedom of that idea is almost too much, the openness of it blurs into lack of clarity, but what freedom! For Madmen only! The gall of that. The gall of all of it, Hermine and Pablo, characters crafted in perfect compliment to a protagonist, characters that are otherwise opaque, and all this is excusable in the structure of first person, a first person that reads as unstable and brilliant and lost but so full of such wry, sarcastic hope.

"'Most men will not swim before they are able to.' Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what's more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown."

"After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps' but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, though all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and gold track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more. Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk."

"Humor alone, that magnificent discovery of those who are cut short of in their calling to highest endeavor, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts as in affliction, humor alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism."

Wanted: a purple-stripper, intellectually violate

"In my opinion, in fact, the key element in answering the question 'What is consciousness?' will be the unraveling of the nature of the 'isomorphism' which underlies meaning." - Douglas R. Hofstader Godel, Escher, Bach

Something about Heather's first post put my mind in a tizzy...I printed it out carried it around with me, searching for what it was that was bothering me. I have yet to pin it down...maybe its connected with everything of hers I have read...but I think it has something to do with this: How can the word be God? Because the word is necessarily not everything (I am thinking of the word in the sense that it is a sign, and in its sign-ness an arbitrary distinction that separates it from all other words), a word depends on its opposition to others of its kind for its very existence (And I know "the" word might be a beast quite different, but then why not "the" bubble-gum, and more to the point why write and not chew). And then of course Deconstruction complicates things, each signifier pointing to anti-signified as well as signified, but even then, those negative arrows aren't pointing to everything else, but to a finite set of anti-signifieds. And none of these arrows, positive or negative, are essential, they are arbitrary, cultural, historical, political. And then, I think, there are yet more arrows that to point to the sign itself and the thoughts that form it, not a web, but a recursive self-modifying loop. Those ones shift as we use the words, arrows that should not be ignored for their lack of solidity or their for connection to the personal, for it is on these arrows that all the others rest. Perhaps the world of these words is much like the world of our physical reality? Electrons that are but probabilities, with the potential to be everywhere at once, but more likely in certain spots? That which we touch not solid but the repulsion of invisible forces? I'm a frustrating chasm away from anything resembling coherence, but I think it's worth talking about. I know its hard enough just to write but I have the compulsion to pick at it...

"And then she kissed him on the mouth. It was one of those Russian kisses, the sort that are exchanged in that vast, soulful land at high Christian feasts, as a token and seal of love. But even as we record this kiss exchanged between a notoriously "subtle" young man and a charming, slinking, and still equally young woman, we cannot help finding in it a reminder of Dr. Krokowski's elaborate, if not always unobjectionable way of speaking about love in a gently irresolute sense, so that one was never quite sure whether he meant its sanctified or more passionate and fleshly forms. Are we doing the same thing here, or were Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat doing the same thing with their Russian kiss? But what would be out readers' reaction if we simply refused to get to the bottom of that question? In out opinion, it is analytically correct, although -to use Hans Castorp's phrase- "terribly gauche" and downright life-denying, to make a "tidy" distinction between sanctity and passion in matters of love. What's this about "tidy"? What's this about gentle irresolution and ambiguity? Isn't it grand, isn't it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love -from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its more sanctified forms, not is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is out sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay -caritas is assuredly found in the most admirable and depraved passions. Irresolute? But in God's good name, leave the meaning of love unresolved! Unresolved -that is life and humanity, and it would betray a dreary lack of subtlety to worry about it."
- Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain

Perhaps God is the word if the word is love?

Praying for the crucible of argument,
Vinod

*The Autumn of the Patriarch

The Autumn of the Patriarch -Gabriel García Márquez
It really doesn't matter what I think, what I read, the words a-flow so, it might as well rhyme, it might as well all the world rhyme and the general sir, under the ceiba tree, swinging in his hammock and shaking the candy rattle to get a whiff of the school girls, it's sick, really sick of you general sir, to be so damn duped by the fascical lore of fiction and yet be authored by one dithyrambic, ego-bent peppermint drop spirit, but do as you will, hatch a chicken in a drawer, chase a cow down the stairs, in the linty carpet of my soul I know that in the toothache, mallow running of the tongue and disaster, that there is love in your rant, García Márquez, that there is the implacable, pane-throwing, dream-spawning, Homeric dawn freedom of love and old age and love in your mounting life by the girth and riding her through the inscrutable sea lore.
And I finish the book on a great day to finish the book, (Oh! The Symbolism!), as this morning I discover that I take over the position of President, sir, of the Union and League, and all of its tectonic repercussions, the world is blowing up, Mr. President, it is the Autumn of the old and the dawning of the hot-blooded, Down with Fascismo! the corruption collusion confusion is bygone, and what I'm trying to say, the President has eloped, but can't because I keep getting my tongue caught in the crankshaft, what would Archimedes say to internal combustion, General sir, get your head out of your throat, but let's not make a farce of this, it isn't a farce, General sir, it really isn't.

*Macbeth

Macbeth -Shakespeare
The interpretation of Shakespeare is his genius. Not interpretation like the variegated performances of his work, but interpretation, as in, he leaves us to glean as we please. Macbeth as the causality of prophecy. Poor ol' Macbeth, as soon as the wicked sisters spoke, as soon as they opened their gruesome worty mouths, “fair is foul and foul is fair,” the sucker was doomed. What bathos I feel for the sap who's all outta luck. Whaddayou expect Macbeth to do, it's the witches forced him to kill Duncan and then they forced him into delusion and madness and, finally, irreparable death. It was their prophecy. They killed Duncan in their wretched cauldron. Unless, prophecy is only prophecy as it is fulfilled. Cosí, like this, no veritable prophecy ever went neglected. And hence, veracity lies as much in fulfillment as it does in prophecy. And Jesus left no bridge uncrossed. And no bridge unburned. But what “choice” did then, Macbeth have? His scoundrelism resides in, what, his hesitancy… …..? …?

I wrote this in June. My double ellipses question marks, I see now, have been answered in my heart. The answer is yes. The hesitancy of Macbeth is deserving of his death. His misuse of instinct, resistance to prophecy, and living in the means is why Shakespeare hated him.

*Macbeth

"Thunder. Third Apparition: A Child Crowned, with a tree in his hand."

I find reading Shakespeare like reading an old dictionary...it makes me think of how words are changing/words have changed/we should change words actively.

For John: on those threads in your novel that don't connect to anything...do they harmonize at least? This scene from Macbeth has an "Old Man" who doesn't appear elsewhere and doesn't talk about anything directly relavent (strange for a Shakespeare side character...that's often where he puts his exposition):

Old man:...On Tuesday last/A falcon, tow'ring in her pride of place,/Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.

Ross: And Duncan's horses- a thing most strange and certain - /Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,/Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,/Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make/war with mankind.

Old man: 'Tis said they eat eachother.

Ross: They did so, to th' amazement of mine eyes,/That looked upon 't.

I know that's not really a profound example, but I think it's useful. It's from a play, and a short one at that, where there isn't really room for rumination (the asides are for the most part pretty quick). But it feels right...it chimes in good time.

I also think there's something to be said about fate as regards to this play but I'm not quite sure what yet...

other good lines:

...and nothing is but what is not...There's daggers in men's smiles...There's warrant in that theft/Which steals itself when there's no mercy left...We are but young in deed...I am in blood/stepped so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er...Then the liars and swearers are fools; for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them...I think our county sinks beneath the yoke;/It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash/is added to her wounds...the queen that bore thee,/Oft'ner upon her knees than on her feet,/Died every day she lived...Blow wind, come wrack!/At least we'll die with harness on our back...

Lady Macduff: Sirrah, your father's dead:/And what will you do now? How will you live?

Son: As birds do, mother.

Lady Macduff: What, with worms and flies?

Son: With what I get, I mean; and so do they.