Why I Write
Of course I stole the title of this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:
I
I
I
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with the veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.
I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas—I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in “The Portrait of a Lady” as well as the next person, “imagery” being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention—but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down to Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of “Paradise Lost,” to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in “Paradise Lost,” the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want to what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.
Just as I meant “shimmer” literally I mean “grammar” literally. Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in you mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture Nota bene:
It tells you.
You don’t tell it.
Let me show you what I mean by pictures in the mind. I began “Play It As It Lays” just as I have begun each of my novels, with no notion of “character” or “plot” or even “incident.” I had only two pictures in my mind, more about which later, and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space. This was clearly the picture dictated the narrative intention of the book—a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a “white” book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams—and yet this picture told me no “story,” suggested no situation. The second picture did. This second picture was of something actually witnessed. A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through a casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. She crosses the casino alone and picks up a house telephone. I watch her because I have heard her paged, and recognize her name: she is a minor actress I see around Los Angeles from time to time, in places like Jax and once in a gynecologist’s office in the Beverly Hills Clinic, but never have met. I know nothing about her. Who is paging her? Why is she here to be paged? How exactly did she come to this? It was precisely the moment in Las Vegas that made “Play It As It Lays” begin to tell itself to me, but the moment appears in the novel only obliquely, in a chapter which beings:
“Maria made a list of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”
That is the beginning of the chapter and that is the end of the chapter, which may suggest what I meant by “white space.”
I recall having a number of pictures in my mind when I began the novel I just finished, “A Book of Common Prayer.” As a matter of fact one of these pictures was of that bevatron I mentioned, although I would be hard to tell you a story in which nuclear energy figured. Another was a newspaper photograph of a hijacked 707 burning on the desert in the Middle East. Another was the night view from a room in which I once spent a week with paratyphoid, a hotel room on the Colombian coast. My husband and I seemed to be on the Colombian coast representing the United States of American at a film festival (I recall invoking the name “Jack Valenti a lot, as if its reiteration could make me well), and it was a bad place to have fever, not only because my indisposition offended our hosts but because every night in this hotel the generator failed. The lights went out. The elevator stopped. My husband would go to the event of the evening and make excuses for me and I would stay alone in this hotel room, in the dark. I remember standing at the window trying to call Bogotá (the telephone seemed to work on the same principle as the generator) and watching the night wind come up and wondering what I was doing eleven degrees off the equator with a fever of 103. The view from that window definitely figures in “A Book of Common Prayer,” as does the burning 707, and yet none of these pictures told me the story I needed.
The picture that did, the picture that shimmered and made these other images coalesce, was the Panama airport at 6 A.M. I was in this airport only once, on a plane to Bogotá that stopped for an hour to refuel, but the way it looked that morning remained superimposed on everything I saw until the day I finished “A Book of Common Prayer.” I lived in that airport for several years. I can still feel the hot air when I step off the plane, can see the heat already rising off the tarmac at 6 A.M. I can feel my skirt damp and wrinkled on my legs. I can feel the asphalt stick to my sandals. I remember the big tail of a Pan American plane floating motionless down at the end of the tarmac. I remember the sound of a slot machine in the waiting room. I could tell you that I remember a particular woman in the airport, an American woman, a norteamericana, a thin norteamericana about 40 who wore a big square emerald in lieu of a wedding ring, but there was no such woman there.
I put this woman in the airport later. I made this woman up, just as I later made up a country to put the airport in, and a family to run the country. This woman in the airport is neither catching a plane nor meeting one. She is ordering tea in the airport coffee shop. In fact she is not simply “ordering: tea but insisting that the water be boiled, in front of her, for twenty minutes. Why is this woman in this airport? Why is she going nowhere, where had she been? Where did she get that big emerald? What derangement, or disassociation, makes her believe that her will to see the water boiled can possibly prevail?
“She had been going to one airport or another for four months, one could see it, looking at the visas on her passport. All those airports where Charlotte Douglas’s passport had been stamped would have looked alike. Sometimes the sign on the tower would say ‘Bienvenidos’ and sometimes the sign on the tower would say ‘Bienvenue,’ some places were wet and hot and other dry and hot, but at each of these airports the pastel concrete walls would rust and stain and the swamp off the runway would be littered with the fuselages of cannibalized Fairchild F-227’s and the water would need boiling.
“I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not.
“I knew about airports.”
These lines appear about halfway through “A Book of Common Prayer,” but I wrote them during the second week I worked on the book, long before I had any idea where Charlotte Douglas had been or why she went to airports. Until I wrote these lines I had no character called Victor in mind: the necessity for mentioning a name, and the name “Victor,” occurred to me as I wrote the sentence. I knew why Charlotte went to the airport sounded incomplete. I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not carried a little more narrative drive. Most important of all, until I wrote these lines I did not know who “I” was, who was telling the story. I had intended until that moment that the “I” be no more than the voice of the author, a 19th-century omniscient narrator. But there it was:
“I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not.
“I knew about airports.”
This “I” was the voice of no author in my house. This “I” was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went to the airport but also knew someone called “Victor.” Who was Victor? Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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p.s. Hey. Happy New Years Eve! I'll be posting tomorrow as usual, if you were wondering. Several people here have said they were going to make guest-posts for the blog, and if those plans are still in motion, and if you can get those posts to me soon, it would be a big help because I'm about to go to NYC for a week where I'll be busy and far less able to spend time putting together blog posts, so any input on the posts-front would be very useful in allowing the blog to continue without interruption. Thus, if it's easy to do, thanks a lot, and, if not, that's cool, and we'll deal. ** Misanthrope, Good news on the job/money front, obviously. I think Panchitos on my birthday is a go. I'll make sure, but the show that day is at 4 pm, I think, so that should put me in the clear come dinner time. Maybe Ish and Chris and some of the folk from 'Them' will want to join in, I don't know. Anyway, so that's the tentative word. Late Happy Birthday to Little Show! ** Alexp336, Ha ha, no, I guess you're just supposed to pick your fave slaves and either dream accordingly or go off in search of their ads and contact info. Yeah, exactly about the subjectivity of porn. That's obviously a key and interesting aspect of it. And how strict a form it is. You basically have five or so essential acts to work with and to embellish with a relatively moderate number of fetish acts, if you choose, and you have to energize them with lust, and that's largely an intuitive force you're working with there, at least in very good, hot porn. I don't know. It's a very interesting form. I've studied how it works a lot for my fiction, trying to find a way to translate its great power into non-sexual situations in fiction. I've had opportunities to make porn films, and I've written or co-written four porn scripts based on offers from people who produce porn films/videos, but then the films never happen because no one is willing to finance them since they're too 'unconventional', basically. One of these days. ** David Ehrenstein, 'Best in Show', right. What a wonderful film. The Trocs just performed here maybe two weeks ago. I was surprised that they still exist. I saw them a few times way back when in the 70s and early 80s. Happy New Year to you and Bill! ** Little foal, Hey, Darren! Thanks a lot for talking about the friendship stuff and the disappearing. I understand. I'm kind of a flake at times myself, although my flakiness doesn't really arise re: the blog for some reason, which is actually quite curious. The thing about this place is that people can come and go as it feels right to them. There are people who've 'disappeared' for long periods, and then they come back and, in a day or two, it's like they never left. It's interesting how that works. I'm not sure why that happens. I think that, for all the abstractness that comes with a group of friends who gather from the across the globe on a page on the internet, there's a bond and affection and sympathy/ understanding that forms amongst people here, and it's an amazing thing, and I guess for me the thing is to accept it as a kind of magical act and not try to analyze why it happens. I don't think I could. Anyway, I guess I'm saying that I think you can trust the friendships here, and then be here as much as you want or as works best for you. That was a gorgeous read on the slaves. I'm honored, man. A dream response. Thank you deeply for that. 666penectome was probably my favorite, no surprise. Are you celebrating this sort of auspicious occasion or rather eve of an auspicious occasion? ** Tomkendall, Hola to you, bud. I like that PhD sentence. Sounds like you're going to win the ivory guys' hearts to me. Ha ha, dude, a year and half is nothing. My new one took about two and a half years from start to finish, and that's pretty average for me. I know there are people who can write a novel in six months or less, but, man, how they do that is crazy ass confusing to me. Carry on at your own tempo, I say. Hope you have fun doing something tonight. ** Pilgarlic, Personal safety trumps good gig, no question. A handheld, shaky piece of the show will probably end up on youtube. Well, yeah, send that guy your chapter, I say. You never know when you'll find yourself in a marriage made in heaven. ** Amputaciones, Hey, man! How great to see you! It's been a while. How are you? What are you doing? No, I don't think I know Anatoly Zverev's work at all. It looks very interesting. I'll follow up with a google search and find more. Thank you, man! Everyone, courtesy of d.l. Amputaciones, here's a blog post about a very interesting seeming artist who I didn't know until right now: Anatoly Zverev (1931 - 1986). Check him out. ** Hayden Derk, Hey. Yeah, MrNotAwesome is a real human shaped S.O.S. At the same time, I detect a trace of humor in his chosen name, so who knows? I read the full excerpt, it's really wonderful! A sweeping ten gallon hat tip to you. 'Glimpse into the color ...': nice. Well, an agent certainly helps, so getting one seems like an obvious first step. Agents aren't a requirement, of course, but, yeah, having one removes some of the irksomeness of the 'finding a publisher' phase. Let me know what happens. And, for now, a Happy New Year to you! ** Pisycaca, Hey, Montse. Yeah, it's kind of lonely here, but I go to NYC in a few days where I won't be lonely. The Larry Clark show was very good. Too small, though. Too much of the very familiar 'Tulsa' era work, and not nearly enough work from the 90s and early 00s, and maybe too many of 'Wassup Rockers' era photos, but, still, it was a strong show. Better, though, was the Basquiat retrospective, which was just electrifyingly great. God, what an astonishing touch he had. It was a really dazzling show. Sucks about the work stress, but, yeah, it's mostly excellent news that you have work! I'm really glad to hear that. Enjoy NYE and NY itself in London. Safe trip, and lots of love. ** Killer Luka, Thank you, meaning I'm glad you liked the slave batch. Brad Williams isn't his real name either. I know his real name, but I'm not at liberty to share it. He looks like he's about 5'3". Cool. I like that about him. ** Steevee, They did, didn't they. Ugh, oh well, into the shop it goes then. Time to haul out the typewriter or pen and paper for a couple of days. I feel for you. ** Toniok, Hey, and a very happy New Years to you, man. Doing anything mega-fun tonight? ** Allesfliesst, Hey. Wow, you've got a boatload of resolutions there. I haven't even thought about resolutions. Hm, let me see ... Buy more clothes. I hardly have any clothes. Help get Yury a US visa so he can finally travel to the US. Get firmly on the road to moving back to LA. Get a billion times better at answering emails. Spend some time in Scandinavia. Get my teeth fixed. Uh, I'll have to think some more to come up with some more. Yours are better. ** C.P., Hey. Thanks for the congrats on the novel front, man. Wow, you go to London tomorrow, right? Safe trip, needless to say. And I hope I'll get to see you over here before too long. Oh, Theophile Gautier, yeah, sure, he's great. There have been books of his poetry in English before -- The 'Poem of Hashish' book is great -- but nothing comprehensive 'til now, I guess. Strange, really, since two of his poems are in Oscar Wilde's 'Portrait of Dorian Gray', as you probably know. You would think that would gotten his poetry translated in bulk before now. His fiction is interesting. The 'Fantomas' book of stories, for instance. His fiction was especially revered by Proust and Flaubert and others. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I recommend the 'Fantomas' book by Gautier. It's very romantic, weird, gothy. Excellent news on the proper pipes. Here's hoping they stay glued together this time. I've only heard a tiny bit of Geneva Jacuzzi before, and I liked it. Nice video there. ** Brendan, I've stayed at New York, New York a couple of times. It's nice. Good location. The roller coaster on the facade is fun. 'Theme hotel' is the only way to go in Vegas, if you ask me. I don't see the point otherwise, but I'm way into ridiculous artifice. Don't stay at the castle/King Arthur one, whatever it's called. Ugh. Your difficult process sounds like a good difficulty. I relate. Artists should suffer, ha ha. ** Ken Baumann, Hi, Ken! Well, I hope the Malick talk is true. It's still just talk, albeit from reliable seeming sources. I think I'm starting 'Solip' today, whoo hoo! Happy New Year! How are you marking it? ** Sypha, Well, use the angst if you want to. It's your angst, not hers, right? ** Chris Cochrane, Hey. Oh, I guess I'll be a little late to the rehearsal on Tuesday. I see it starts at 1pm. I thought it started later. My plane arrives at 12:30 pm, best case scenario. But I'll see you there as soon as I can get myself there. How is Sarah's book about gentrification? An Acker re-read is a good read, I think. Which book? Have some fun tonight in some way or other. ** MANCY, I listened to a little of Moodring yesterday. Yeah, I like it. I'm going to download some, for sure. You partying tonight? ** Andrew, Good plan. I mean making yourself start something in January. I think that 'setting the tone' thing really works. It's an easy but seductive mindtrick. ** Creative Massacre, Hey. Cool, I'll wait for the tracks then. You're going to sing? Exciting. Yeah, like I was saying to Andrew, the best thing is to get right on making the art and projects you want to make in January to get yourself in the rhythm of being creative and making art straight away so it can take hold and evolve into a habit. It's great to hear you sounding so ready to go on the art-making front. You having an NYE fun tonight? ** Math, Well, here's one tidbit about greenlights. He's also an escort. I just found his ad yesterday when I was putting together the next escorts post. He's in Paris, and, if I see him around, I'll try to land an interview. Oh, yeah, if you're up for meeting in NYC, cool, and, if not, I totally understand, of course. $50 for a dj set. That makes 'Epic Mickey' seem like kind of a bargain. Hm ... Whatever you do tonight, do it in your inimitable style, pal. ** Okay, one last Happy New Years (Eve) to all of you. The post: I read that piece by Didion recently and thought it was very interesting, and I thought I'd share. Wow, I guess that's pretty obvious, isn't it? Anyway, cheers, *clink*, and I'll see you tomorrow.
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