Why is Cortazar writing this?

"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 violin a voyeur

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"I hear a prelude, words I detest for their familiar ring, a chord so rich bathing my skin, and the rings of Saturn, the breath of a long horn, the resounding drum of skin tight, and the butterflies, and the caterpillars, and the pizzicato of fractured fingers, I hear a voice woman and a voice man, the chorus of molten flesh, imprisoned flesh, and the melody of a bite, teeth puncturing, and the long, long whistling sound of air between lies."

--The Lesser Violin

Into deepest darkness

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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.” 

Touching immortality

Everyday contains a moment when you think you will touch immortality. What follows next is the stuff of novels.

This just in! Book cover for THE BOOK OF I

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Artist Liselott Johnsson created this phenomenal image as a conceptual response to central themes in the book: “I am water,” and the ever-threatening “Whiteness.” Here they blend into each other seamlessly. The image of the “I” impersonates Teaston as he straddles the vastness of the sea and the whiteness above. He is immersed in both, but the bold blue color indicates he has the capacity to rise above them.

The psychology of a violin

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...

Oscillating at will

"Mornings like this remind me I sing for others. A prostitute? No, not a prostitute. That is not what I am. Even when they touch my open body, even when they rip through me, I still sing my individual harmonic frequencies. They follow the score of a dead master, but I follow my own veins. And I oscillate at will, and go places they detest, for my voice is hoarse, luminous, and sometimes unreal. Who plays whom?" -- The lesser violin

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours

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.

What I did in the jaguar's literary den

I wrote and explored. Jumped over the edge of tradition. I learned not to be harmless.

Digging the Mongol hair

"That is when he plays me hard, digging the Mongol hair, roughing my cords. I sing off tune for the very pleasure of his frustration. And I fill the air with a small grunt, or a squeal, a screech for sure. He sweats then, and turning his left eye long down my neck, he wishes to strangle me. I know he does."

(From THE LESSER VIOLIN)

Literature = Music = Literature = Music

"Listening to the words, listening to the songs, listening to the inherent vibrations in every syllable, I come to conceive the literary world as a musical creation where every effort to mesmerize with text, every attempt to excel in prose or verse, is nothing other than a venture into musical composition. And if I were to sing a vida, or if I were to write a sonnet, I would be doing one and the same. And if I were to write a novel, or if I were to compose a symphony, my writing hand and my musical mind would be in unison. I open my mind to the world of sounds, to the world of words, to their communion. And I am happy." --The fat poet

(From THE ROAR OF THE RIVER)

A writer's day

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.

Literary genealogy

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

I feel violated

"He turns on the hallway lights and I hear his steps approaching. He will come to hold me, to watch how I glow in the faint light. Sometimes he licks me just to watch his saliva glistening under that light. He beholds me as a lover, as a body reflecting an amber light that excites him. And sometimes he ejaculates all over me, spasmodic, a whiteness he admires for a short while before whipping it away. All in silence, in the absence of music. I feel violated then. And during the next practice session, I turn into a dissonant beast." --The lesser violin.

A writer's writer

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.

I am water

I.

I am.

I am water, a restless fluid, a voluminous self that goes as deep as the inverted mountains underneath. My body does not hold me; it liberates itself into gutters. I do not run, I flow. And my body joins with the creeks, the rivers, the seas. I am like a drip, a drip that slides until it crashes making a puddle at the end. I am water and I should dribble down the cliff and join with the sea below.

I am not a tangible Teaston.

I am oceanic.

(From THE BOOK OF I)

Neruda on Cortázar

"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

A penetrating truth

"About doubt, much is known, but very little comprehended. When a finger lands on me, poking on a precise spot on my neck, I sense the intention, the very note he wants me to sing. But the smallest shift up towards the scroll of my head or down towards my belly, makes me think he is doubting. Either, he does not know what he wants, or even worse, he dares not listen to me, exploding, cracking the air on the third position of the E string. My E cord, grows out of nothing, now a penetrating truth." --The lesser violin

A plot, is a plot, is a plot, or is it not?

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.

Flight from reality

"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