You say that language will cease to be respected, will no longer move us. But we’re already becoming numb thanks to what you are afraid to give up. What you flood the market with.
Soyinka: “I am concerned about preserving a special level of communication, a level very different from Oprah Winfrey.”
Wish: that all talk-show fiction be put to bed now. Its fake psychologies, its “realisms.” Its pathetic 2 plus 2.
Language of course has an enormous capacity to lie, to make false shapes, to be glib, to make common widgets, three parts this and two parts that.
Wish: that all the fiction of lies be put to bed.
That the dishonesty running rampant through much contemporary fiction be recognized as such.
What deal must I strike in order to be published by you? What pose, bargain, stance, is it I must strike with you now?
What mold do you make of me to pour your elixir, your fluid into, and then reward?
The bunny mold? The kitten mold? The flower mold? The damaged flower mold? Pregnant at twelve, illiterate, but with a twist? The gay mold? The white trash mold? The battered child mold? The bad girl mold?
Paint me black. Paint me Latina. Paint me Native American. Paint me Asian and then pour me into your mold. Use me. Co-opt me. Market me.
Debase me and in the future I shall rise anew out of your cynicism and scorn — smiling, lovely, free.
I know a place that burns brighter than a million suns.
Wish list: that the business people who have taken over the publishing houses will focus themselves elsewhere and leave the arts alone again.
Not to own or colonize or dominate….
Despite all efforts to tame it, manage it, control it, outsmart it, language resists your best efforts; language is still a bunch of sturdy, glittering charms in the astonished hand.
A Utopia of possibility. A Utopia of choice.
And I am huddled around the fire of the alphabet, still.
Even though you say one word next to the other will cease to be cherished.
You say rap music is poison. Hypertext is poison.
Even though you call me sentimental — on the one hand girly-girl, on the other hand loud-mouthed bitch, on the one hand interesting and talented writer, on the other hand utterly out-of-touch idealist, romantic — it is you who wants the nineteenth century back again. When things were dandy for you, swell. You want to believe in the old coordinates, the old shapes. To believe in whatever it was you believed in then. You were one of the guys who dictated the story, sure, I remember. Who made up the story and now go teaching it all over the place. But even then, when you sat around making it up, even then, my friend, it had nothing to do with me. With my world. With what I saw and how I felt.
Wish: that all graduate writing programs with their terminal degrees stop promoting such tiresome recipes for success or go (financially) bankrupt.
Your false Crescendos. Climaxes. False for me, at any rate.
The future is all the people who’ve ever been kept out, singing.
In the future everything will be allowed.
So the future is for you, too. Not to worry. But not only for you.
For you, but not only for you.
Not to discard the canon, but to enlarge it.
No more monoliths. No more Mick Jaggers. No more O. J. Simpsons. No more James Joyces. No more heroes.
Everything threatens you. Hacks, hackers, slacks, slackers, cybergirls with their cybercurls and wiles, poets of every sort. Rock bands with girls.
You believe your (disappearing) time represents some last golden age of enlightenment, to be guarded, protected, reproduced against the approaching mindlessness, depravity, electronic states of America.
But maybe as you become more and more threatened, you’ll take a few more risks yourself. Who knows? Anything is possible in the future.
Wish list: that the homogeneity end. That the mainstream come to acknowledge, for starters, the thousand refracted, disparate beauties out there.
That the writers and the readers stop being treated by the mainstream houses like idiot children. That the business people get out and stop imposing their “taste” on everyone.
Wish: that as writers we be aware of our own desire to incorporate, even unconsciously, the demands and anxieties of publishers and reject them, the demands and anxieties of the marketplace.
That the business people go elsewhere.
Market me. Promote me. Sanitize me. Co-opt me. Plagiarize me. Market me harder.
Wish list: that the grade inflation for a certain kind of writing stop, and that the middlebrow writers assume their middle position so that everyone else might finally have a place, too. Be considered seriously, too. Be read, too.
Paint me black. Paint me Latina. Paint me Chinese. Pour me into your mold and sell me harder.
Fuck me (over) harder.
Those of us jockeying for position in the heavens, intent on forever, major reputations, major motion pictures and $$$$ $$$$, life after life after life after death, forget about it.
Wish: that straight white males reconsider the impulse to cover the entire world with their words, fill up every page, every surface, everywhere.
Thousand-page novels, tens and tens of vollmanns — I mean volumes.
Not to own or colonize or dominate anymore.
“Well, we’ve been kept from ourselves too long, don’t you think?” an old woman in Central Park says to a friend.
Two women in the park at dusk.
Turn the beat around:
The pauses and rhythms and allowances of Laurie Anderson. The glow of Jenny Holzer. The ranting and passion of Courtney Love. Brilliance of Susan Howe. Brilliance of Erin Mouré. Theresa Cha. Visionary P. J. Harvey. Suzan-Lori Parks.
The future is feminine, for real, this time.
The future is Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë and Gertrude Stein still. The future is still Maya Deren and Billie Holiday.
Language is a rose and the future is still a rose, opening.
It is beautiful there in the future. Irreverent, wild.
The future is women, for real this time. I’m sorry, but it’s time you got used to it.
Reading on a train by the light the river gives. The woman next to me asleep. Two plastic bags at her feet. Lulling, lovely world. And I am witness to it all — that slumber — and then her awakening — so vulnerable, sensation streaming back, the world returned, the river and the light the river gives, returning language, touch, and smell. The world retrieved. I am privileged to be next to her as she moves gracefully from one state to the next, smiling slightly. I recognize her delight. It is taken away, and it is given back. The miracle and mystery of this life in one middle-aged black woman on the Metro North next to me. The Hudson River widening.
Let all of this be part of the story, too. A woman dreaming next to water.
The future: all the dreams we’ve been kept from. All the things yet to dream.
An opening of possibility. A land of a thousand dances.
I want sex and hypersex and cybersex, why not?
The river mysteriously widening, as she opens her eyes.
We can say, if we like, that the future will be plural.
Our voices processed through many systems — or none at all.
A place where a thousand birds are singing.
“The isle is full of noises….”
A place without the usual dichotomies. No phony divisions between mind and body, intelligence and passion, nature and technology, private and public, within and without, male and female.
May we begin a dialogue there in the future. May we learn something from each other. Electronic writing will help us to think about impermanence, facility, fragility, and freedom, spatial intensities, irreverences, experimentation, new worlds, clean slates. Print writing will allow us new respect for the mark on the page, the human hand, the erasure, the hesitation, the mistake.