Skill can be vitally important. And so is the ability to distinguish between ‘reality’ and ‘story’: operating on a human being or piloting a passenger aircraft, say — there is surely no room here for suggesting that “all observations and interpretations are equally truthful.” The example often used is of the hunter depending for a livelihood on his ability to correctly ‘read’ the prints of his prey, and thus of making distinctions between fancy and fabrication. It is a fact that he needs to know this so as to bring home to family and affiliates the fat and the meat. They may not care a fig for his flights of imagination! Still, his reading of the traces will be informed not only by acquired knowledge and discernment, but also by the invisibles, by imaginings. Even a deduction based upon experience will still have a measure of imagination as locking device. We imagine in order to understand. By writing we enter a dialogue between fact and its fictions.
We know now that writing will change us and therefore modify our relationship to the world. We also know that it will be like throwing stones in the river in an effort to get across. This is a singular journey. There are dangers along the way: the stones may turn into crocodiles or they may have dissolved, or we may be side-lined into dreaming of just going with the flow as we study the patterns of swirl and froth and (mirror) nothing more.
What we are hopefully going to learn about is how to find passages through our fear of writing/change. We’ll look at strategies for wording the spaces between I and You. In so doing we shall be studying, as we always must, in close and critical reading of our diverse and multifarious stories, looking at both sides of the avenues of reflection, the concrete exigencies of composing a text: theme and its formulation, the choices the writer makes when he creates characters, techniques of representation and angles of intervention, structuring and texturing, rhythm and rupture and repetition, the tension between thought and image, etc. Particularly the etceteras. It may even help us identify the stones we’ll be eating.
NEW YORK, 12 SEPTEMBER 2001
“Then it went dark. Real dark. Like snow.”
words of a survivor
will the hand endure moving over this paper
will any poem have enough weight
to leave a flight-line above the desolate landscape
ever enough face to lift against death’s dark silence
who will tell today
the huge anthill of people remains quiet
somber and shrill, bright and obscure
as if the brown effluvium of sputtering towers
sweeps still the skyline with a filthy flag
who will weep today
today images wail for voice behind the eyes
planes as bombs stuffed with shrapnel of soft bodies
then the fire inferno flame-flowers from skyscrapers
human flares like falling angels from the highest floor
down, down all along shimmering buildings of glass and steel
fluted in abandoned beauty and fluttering
weightless and willowy and flame-winged to streamline
fleeting reflections in the fugitive language of forgetting
the hell-hound of destruction has a red tongue of laughter
who will tell and who will count
gouged eyes do not understand the blue of sky
through a dismal and chilly nuclear winter
people stumble people shuffle
stumble-people shuffle-people worm-white-people
where lie the faces
old before their end or their wedding
grayed in ashes from head to toe
as if clothed in coats of the snowing knowing of ages
beneath rummage and debris rosy corpses move and mumble
and in East River confidential files and folders float
with shreds and feathers lacerated human meat
scorched confetti for the dog’s feast
who will tell tomorrow tomorrow
where are the faces
will the tongue still think
still pulse its dark lair
with flamed memory of bliss
will words still drink oblivion
will any poem some day ever carry sufficient weight
to leave the script of scraps recalling fall and forgetting
will death remain quivering in the paper
I SIT HERE
I sit here with bent shoulders, eyes smarting from looking at the screen as if searching for the truth. The screen is a lit funnel giving onto darkness. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Writing this as a diary, slithery snake, knowing I will never be able to cover the days or foresee the nights. Writing is such a contradictory process.
Why do we do it? And why do we continue doing so, or have to do it over and over again? One knows there are many easier ways of drawing attention, of parading the self with its paradoxes and its pain. There are certainly more effective means of conveying information (though there seems to be ‘existential information’ embedded exclusively in the primordial need for making words). One also knows that the practice is not remunerative: given the effort and time consumed (for even at best one doesn’t produce more than two good pages a day) it is a singularly inept way for the human to make a living.
So then, why?
Ancient Chinese lore has it that writing evolved from magical signs, from runes and the ‘symbols’ or ‘depictions’ of the bones cast by diviners. It is said that on the day man started to codify the signs and their meanings by repeating them at will, and thus losing him / herself by beginning to trace the openings to the unknown, gods and demons wept because now there was no longer only Heaven and Earth. Man had manifested herself, interjected herself between reality and dream, and bared the cunt of creation. Now there was a go-between straddling the known and the unknowable and something autonomous (writing, conscious becoming) came into being with its own realness, if not ‘reality.’ A twin emerged. An intimate stranger.
Writing is a conscious attempt by the human to participate in his fate, that ‘story’ written from birth to death. Casting spells, exorcizing, whistling in the dark, inventing the textures and the structures of consciousness, keeping a backdoor open to memory, getting to know who and what we are, both reflecting what is and shaping the new. Memory is nothing but dead time, but death seeds the soiclass="underline" from forgetting new shapes sprout. .
For writing is a means to transformation: using words and their interacting combinations — the meanings, the feel, the sounds and the shadows — to broaden our scope of apprehending and understanding ourselves and others, and in the process creating new spaces and references. Sometimes looking down into hell.
REMEMBERING IMAGINATION
We will of course continue our discussions — looking at structure, point of view, voice, texture, etc. — always with our identical twin lode stars of ‘truth’ and ‘invention’ or ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in sight; we shall track the fictionalization of experience and the infactuation with story. How reality is invaginated by imagination, and thus seeded by understanding. Let the holy spirit do its duty. I suggested that it is inevitable for truth to be turned into fiction from the very moment that you start writing (or telling), that it is innate to the act of telling (perhaps even to language itself) to transform what is told — because of the techniques we use in order to fix consciousness: structure (selecting, discarding, shaping) and texture (using sounds and images and rhythms to convey emotions or thoughts), and these take on a life of their own. Perception of ‘pure facts’ linked to ‘instant recall’ gets slotted away in memory for later use (we do not write as is immediately), and there the material will be selected, discarded and shaped. Information and experience structure memory; memory structures experience and information. Only fiction can unveil reality.