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).