Fucking Quality

Dammit! “I wonder if I can sustain it,” I said last blog, and here I go with a blog entry that isn’t a short story. My post is already late, so I don’t have the time to work on a new story. I’ve been spending all my time working on the story I’m entering for the Edith R. Mirrielees Prize in Creative Writing. In a strange way, this relates entirely to Zen and the Art.

                During class discussion today, Nathan mentioned the importance of quality in writing. In his reckoning, if I recall correctly, writing quality matters because we want to temper our writing to the needs of the readers—that is, we want the quality of our writing to resonate with what they perceive to be quality writing. This came as a blow to me as I realized the weight of his argument. It’s not like something I haven’t thought about, but when the beast in me tried to call out “Fallacy!”, I had no rebuttal. If I want my writing to be worth anything, it seems I have to conform to whatever those with the money perceive to be good. Fuck.

                Now, prior to my entry into this competition, I have been seriously fixated on who might be judging it. The judges seem to be more important than the quality of my writing. I know which of my stories are decent and which ones are shit, but the general quality doesn’t really matter that much. Well, there will be a panel of judges I’m sure, so there might be some creative space for me to stretch my artistic limbs, but maximum, I bet there are 4. This is really not a lot of room for determining quality.

                This competition is a snapshot of a moment in time. The same judges, whomever they are, might judge the same entries differently a year from now. Man, my best bet is to get caught up in the current and let it take me forward. Conform!

                But then again, I think about how when film first came out, folks had trouble following certain narrative elements such as the flashback. If we just keep conforming, how are we to produce writing that reconfigures conventions and forces people to understand in new ways. I’m quite puzzled here as I ruminate on Zen. Like what’s the point of all this anyway? Why is killing puppies bad? Why is killing people bad? I have no answers. 

He'll Recover, But What Will Be Left of Him?

If I want to arrive safely at my destination, that is, the end of the course, I think this blog needs to take a wildly different turn. My destination is having shit published by the end of the semester, and I don’t believe I’ll be publishing reading responses anytime soon. The blog word requirement is 500, and that just so happens to be a pretty premium number for flash fiction, so I may make it a requirement for myself to pump out flash fiction on this baby. The pieces might relate to the text, but then again, they may not. I’ll let the story emerge/unfold of its own volition. These things have lives of their own. They shape me as much as I shape them. So here goes. Flash Fiction. Let’s see if I can sustain it. (Yes I did the reading. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Inevitably, I’ll borrow stylistically from Pirsig. This might be imperceptible, but it’s there.)

            

            His name is Joe, or Ron. It depends on when you meet him. I meet him when he’s Joe and later when he’s Ron. When I meet Joe, he’s dying from a heroin overdose at Chuck’s place. This is common in Bullhead City.  

            Bullhead City is kind of like the last place you madly needed to leave. Wherever it was, whatever the compulsion to go, that’s Bullhead City. It’s located along the Colorado River on the southernmost point of Lake Mojave about 90 miles south of Vegas, just close enough for some of that sin to ride the heat waves and bleed over into our city. A traveler may have stopped here, maybe saw a sunset over Lake Mojave—the hues of purple, red, and orange reflecting off the lake, the clouds dappled across the sky—but that snapshot of otherworldly beauty is an illusion quickly dissolved in the heat of the day. The city doesn’t reside in the landscape or the climate anyway. I’ve lived here long enough to know the real city resides in the people.

            So Joe is passed out, maybe dead, across the street. This is what Tootsie tells me. She stumbled lazily into my trailer after shooting up at Chuck’s, after Joe flat-fuck falls and goes into convulsions. She plops down beside me on my couch. “I can save him,” she says. “I save people all the time.”

            “You can save him? If you can save him, why don’t you go over there and save him?”

            “Ah, it’s a hassle, ay,” she says, sinking into the couch.

            I offer her a half gram of crystal if she’ll save him, and we walk to Chuck’s. Nobody picks like Chuck, and he has the scab to prove it. This scab covers the entire surface of his face where a beard should be. Greens, yellows, and reds color the scab at varying degrees of elevation like a topographic map. I once caught him picking at my place. He was in the bathroom tearing at the scab with duct tape. His blood was sprayed across the walls and floor. Chuck disgust me, but I’m drawn to the prospect of seeing a life leave or enter a body.

            Chuck kneels beside Joe, his scab-enveloped mouth pressed up against Joe’s, forcing monstrous breaths into his lungs. Just then Joe opens his eyes to see that scab looming over him, that flaky dying mass of flesh too close to his face. His eyes go wide and he runs from the house without a word. Chuck smiles so big his scab cracks.   

            I meet Joe again when I’m downtown with Barry. “I gotta talk to this guy,” Barry says.

            “It’s Joe, right?” I say.

            “No, it’s Ron now,” he says, and just then Barry hits him so hard he shits his pants.

            He’s out cold. I can smell the putrid stench coming off him. Looking down on him, I know that he’ll recover. I just wonder who he’ll be the next time I see him.   

Disembodied Parts

I’m working on a synthesis of disembodied parts. This is the question: Why live longer? And if the ghost of reason responds, “One lives longer in order that he may live longer” (85), and you believe him, “[t]he ghost wins” (67). The ghost is running knives through our lives and wants us to know the name for everything, but we’re not supposed to know a whole can be infinitely halved, that taxonomy is a singularity at the center of a black hole.   

Taxonomy began in the garden, where “the illusion that all those parts are just there and being named as they exist” (79), where the illusion took root and sprouted a stalk that “just goes on and on” (82), stretching like a skinny fist into the heavens, where the origin of names existed always in the creatures and never in Adam. This happened in the garden.

This happened in the garden, where Eve never learned that “[w]hen…the knife… is applied…something is always killed” (83), that a snake flensed can make some pretty elegant boots, that snake tastes better than forbidden fruit. Poor Eve never imagined slow-roasting Satan before he’d become flame retardant. This happened in the garden.  

            Let me fashion you a story, he said. “The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination” (Pirsig 42). Imagine you are searching for the knife, and “it takes a long time to realize [you] don’t need the flashlight, you need the machete, which is in plain sight” (63). Maybe “[you] get out a hunting knife” (63) and try to find that timber wolf to cut out of him that part of you you recognized staring “into the animal’s eyes” (88). Don’t forget that “it is important to concentrate on the knife itself” (79), that you can catch yourself mirrored in the metal of the blade if the light is right and you look long enough. And when you catch yourself, see that you didn’t fall, because your paws are grounded, and you’re a digit short of a handgrip, and there never was a knife at all, save for the one he holds, the one before you, the one who thinks this moment is “not physical and d[oes] not exist in time at all” (88). Take heart when he, applying the knife, sunders himself from you. Blade in your underbelly, unzips your coat, and you are born anew. Dismembered, remember “[w]hen…the knife… is applied” (84), something will die, but “[s]omething[’s] created too” (84).

Arteriosclerosis in Uptaught

            I remember writing a poem about arteriosclerosis in high school and showing it to a friend. He didn’t know what to make of it and neither did I. I had a little blue notebook in which I scribbled random thoughts and poetry. It’s somewhere else now. I hope no one finds it. I bet my name is written on the front page.

            If I read it now, I could see who I was then and compare him to me now. I didn’t know shit then, but I bet I wrote with more voice. I bet I didn’t think so much about repetition of the word “then” and its placement in a sentence. Whoever’s voice I’m writing with now is crippled.

            This is relevant. I’m following a thread and I feel it necessary to explicitly state that there is a thread. There is always a thread. The cardiovascular system is a network of threads, threads I can follow, threads keeping it all together.

            Maybe arteriosclerosis was a serious issue when Macrorie wrote Uptaught. I wonder how he died. If you want to know what I remember from the reading, it’s this: “You’re no damn good when your arteries get hard” (20), “Maybe he’s got hardening of the arteries or something” (106), “People’s emotions as well as their arteries harden with age, and they hide behind a wall of impenetrable insensitivity” (171). I wonder if my arteries are hard.

            Arteries carry blood away from the heart. I can’t empty my heart with hard arteries. I don’t know if it’s better to have a full heart or an empty one. I wrote a short story over break titled “The Emptying of His Heart.” It was about a lonely guy falling a tree alone in the remote wilderness who suffers anaphylactic shock after being stung by wasps from the tree he was trying to fall. I hear that emptying of the heart is one of the symptoms of anaphylactic shock. It’s called empty heart syndrome.

            I bet an empty heart produces dead writing. I bet a heart that can’t empty does too. Hard arteries slow the emptying of the heart. That’s why you’re no good with hard arteries. That’s why King Lear was no good. That’s why I feel like I’m no good.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

If I’ve learned anything from Ken Macrorie’s Uptaught, then I should write this reading response in an un-dead language—not un-dead in the sense that the language will rise from the dead, breaking soil with clawing fingers and dragging its corpse to the nearest source of life to leech its essence, but the kind of language that, well, isn’t dead. It seems I’m not entirely clear on what constitutes dead language and un-dead language. Maybe my language should leech the life from those who read it. Or maybe my language should just deviate from academic language. Alas, I am in an academic setting, so this is quite a conundrum I find myself in.

Macrorie says, “In the Third Way, which I stumbled onto, students operate with freedom and discipline. They are given real choices and encouraged to learn the way of experts” (27). In my reading, and maybe I wasn’t reading closely enough, I haven’t been able to uncover exactly what he means about the way of experts. He uses a ton of examples of student writing, but none of it is on par with the sort of expert writing we are accustomed expect throughout academics. I don’t see where free writing and expert writing intersect within his memoir, or whatever genre of writing Uptaught is.

 I can free-write all day, searching for my voice, but I don’t know how to put it into practice in all academia. It seems that what I’m doing at this very moment, blogging, is one of the only places where my un-dead writing can emerge unscathed by the demands of the academic setting. Continuing the un-dead metaphor, the soil through which my language must arise is loose and recently broken in the blog genre. Writing in other genres, a literary analytical essay for example, the soil has been much more akin to compact red clay. The language remains dead and the entire plot of land must be transplanted to transmit that dead and buried language. The whole process is a lot more work, and the product isn’t nearly as dazzling as a creeping mass of un-deadness leeching life. 

 It would be nice if I knew what kind of writing Macrorie is referring to. From the examples, I glean that he is focused on personal memoirs, short fiction, and creative non-fiction. These genres allow for a lot more freedom with language than do other genres. Maybe it’s more about restoring our authority as students, though. He parallels the academic setting at his time to slavery and civil rights, so it seems he wants to give back what has been wrongfully taken from us. I don’t know what has been taken, but if it’s out there and belongs to me, I want it now.

 I talk a lot about putting Macrorie’s ideals, as I understand them I mean, into practice, but then I puss out last minute and decide that I’ll edit out words like “puss.” Read closely, y’all, because it didn’t happen this time. I’m being uptaught, whatever that means. I think it means revolution, which will, by the way, NOT be televised. The revolution will be right here on your screen.