"And here is what I, Artaud, think of thought:
INSPIRATION DOES EXIST.
There is a phosphorescent point where all reality is rediscovered, but changed, metamorphosed--and by what?--a point open for the magic usage of things. And I believe in mental meteors, in individual cosmogonies."
--Antonin Artaud
And when the rain comes down, my words are safe in my dry within. I flourish from inside my skull.
"Why am I writing this? I have no clear ideas, I do not even have ideas. There are tugs, impulses, blocks, and everything is looking for a form, the rhythm moves into play and I write within that rhythm, I write by it, moved by it and not by that thing they call thought and which turns out prose, literature, or what have you. First there is a confused situation, which can only be defined by words; I start out from this half-shadow and if what I mean (if what is meant) has sufficient strength, the swing begins at once, a rhythmic swaying that draws me to the surface, lights everything up, conjugates this confused material and the one who suffers it into a clear third somehow fateful level: sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, book. This swaying, this swing in which confused material goes about taking shape, is for me the only certainty of its necessity, because no sooner does it stop than I understand that I no longer have anything to say." --Julio Cortazar
The word is out. THE BOOK OF I is a dark novel. Like the waters of a river deep, or the night behind the moon. I take solace in Kafka: “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
Everyday contains a moment when you think you will touch immortality. What follows next is the stuff of novels.
According to E.M. Forster, "characters are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible." In traditional literature those characters are usually human. In order to introduce inanimate objects as characters we will need to learn about their secret lives, that is, their psychology. Can a violin have a secret life? Can a violin be wicked? I think it can, given the right amount of magic. Stay tuned...
Following a request from my friend Audrey Camp, here are my answers to some prickly questions:
1. What am I working on?
I am working on being alive. And between one breath and the next, I am writing the story of a lesser violin. It goes something like this: “My condition is nothing other than a wooden box that vibrates when played. ‘Play me,’ I say. And when their hands do, my ribs expand and my chest bursts. I sing. Sometimes I cry. But without the scratch of Mongolian hair on my neural cords, and the poking of finger tips on my neck, my words spill out of the case and die in silence.” –The lesser violin.
2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I write the books I have yet to read. In essence, I jump over the edge of tradition and throw my words up in the air hoping for the wind to take them places no one else has reached.
3. Why do I write what I do?
Because I am who I am. My writing comes from that white center inside my brain—the unconscious—oozing out of me every time I sit down to write.
4. How does my writing process work?
I write like a jaguar, to the neck, all at once.
I wrote and explored. Jumped over the edge of tradition. I learned not to be harmless.
A writer meets another writer who's ten years younger and has a kin eye for people on the street, but a drowned mind. The writer sees a tennis player meeting another tennis player who's ten years younger, but has reached stardom. The writer meets his friend from childhood and wonders, what took you so long? All within a writer's day.
For inspiration and discipline, I sometimes create a collage portrait of my literary genealogy and it includes particular works as much as authors. Some of those works, the ones I consistently return to include:
Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch
Marguerite Duras’ Blue Eyes, Black Hair
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives
Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury
Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories
The poetry of Neruda and Rilke
The House of Breath, by William Goyen, is a remarkably sophisticated book which invented a new form of the novel. In a 1975 interview for The Paris Review, the question of alignment with his contemporaries was raised:
INTERVIEWER
Do your contemporaries interest you now?
GOYEN
They really don’t interest me very much. I still feel apart and, well, I am apart from my contemporaries. And they don’t know what to do about me, or they ignore me. I am led to believe they ignore me.
Reginald Gibbons, professor of English at Northwestern University commented as follows: "Given all the travails and travesties of publishing in America, The House of Breath still remains a kind of fugitive, priceless, spangled fish, dating all alone amid the myriad, dull schools of books swimming in our sea, each with a price tag for a tail."
I am a writer, and sometimes I feel apart.
"Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair. I don’t want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar." --Pablo Neruda
There is plot, but I’m always more interested in situations. Situations change and that’s a kind of plot. Language is a plot, too, and so are mix-ups and nonsense. Really any situation can be a plot because as it changes, time moves forward.
"Realist literature is, to me, the least realistic, because it eliminates what gives the human his reality, his mystery, his power of creation, of doubt, of dreaming, of thinking, of nightmare."
--Reinaldo Arenas
"Why am I writing this? I have no clear ideas, I do not even have ideas. There are tugs, impulses, blocks, and everything is looking for a form, then rhythm comes into play and I write within that rhythm, I write by it, moved by it and not by that thing they call thought and which turns out prose, literature, or what have you." --Julio Cortazar
