TORTURED GRACE / November 1st

Apocalypse Confidential, World Hunger, Power Cut Mag, other thoughts on truth vs fiction

TORTURED GRACE

Ok. Like that family you and your wife visited in California, your wife and father-in-law knew them via your wife’s friend their daughter who died in a plane crash decades ago, and you sat down to an awful meal —

and they said a thorough and detailed grace over the food before you all flipped the wet deli meat into your gross damp sandwich bread

a tortured grace, that touched, by name, everybody there including you the stranger the visitor.

So nice and hospitable they were, and clearly destroyed by still fresh tragedy, palpable as if it was last month, almost too much, so religious and warped into beauty like a rollercoaster safety bar you couldn’t take off all lunch long: the death that had touched them by fate, uncomfortable. Trying to make you understand.

A photo was tacked to the kitchen wall, a picture taken from a small prop plane that had flown once more over the spot where she’d crashed and died, with a Bible quote typed out under the photo on a greasy index card. Something from Genesis about how “I will go ahead and prepare for you a safe refuge.” It went over your head, like the airplane photo. Is this what we’re looking forward to?

—-

There’s a stick of dynamite in my dream, exactly where I left it.

Don’t invite me to church unless it is certain that the experience will make me weep, shed tears of terrified contrition and awe. Like the crying I did in Bath Abbey’s interior vault, off limits to everyone except those participating in the evening prayer. I went in with my mother — and I’m not even an Anglican. But the verger’s voice booming in that ancient empty space, the acoustics of long years of careful construction and diligent service of the Bath Christian community, drowned me in grave emotion. We prayed for the world. It felt like everything, the integrity of the world, humanity, life, light, Trump’s sanity, depended on our prayer in that moment. And I cried.

I want to have an encounter with God that I simultaneously want to escape from, that I hide from. Both motions are undertaken while scared, both fearful movements even though they are in opposite directions. Like some scrambling animal searching for refuge from a larger animal’s wrath, big feet treading overhead. No, that simile is too easy. Lets me off the hook in my quintessential humanity. Unfortunately, I’m one of the humans, one of you, reader. The question is, what are we going to do about it? History is there, waiting to perform some verb on us, to broaden us or elevate us or develop us or extinguish us, crush us. History could be like a serial killer that stalks us. I am tired of my habitual selection of metaphors and similes, reflecting a negative mind. Puts me in mind of how a poetess told me I could not say that “my ears got raped at a musical performance” because I had not earned the right to use that word. There are conditions placed on writers, on their minds, and words need to be earned. Can’t be facile, juvenile, and other -iles. Propaganda or pornography in the sense that they flail at your emotions to get a reaction, your desires, triggering your feelings.

11/1/24

The essay on UK cities came out yesterday in Apocalypse Confidential. A good feeling. It was all in 2nd person. You feel like a semi-professional writer with a “sharp take,” which is how Kosten Koper of L’étranger referred to the essay.

Next will be the fictional piece in World Hunger which is sensitive, in the sense that it has touchy subject matter in it. Intrusive thoughts and sexual assault. You wanted to write something edgy. Did you calculate and insert safety messages: “This Is Fiction — Everybody Be Calm, Remain Calm.” The Misogynist Underground is potentially part of a new longer project that is based to a degree on Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Using a character to explore misogyny as you understand it, perhaps to exorcise it as other fictional projects have tried to exorcise other personality ills from their author. Or to be at peace with the ills, try to limit the fallout by transforming it into something artistic that doesn’t harm anyone else. Writing feels like it has gotten harder somehow. You have a year’s worth of notebooks/diaries, you started to really buckle down and tear through notebooks after reading Kafka’s diaries. The hard work isn’t writing in the notebooks, it’s going back to sift out the valuable parts that link up and give a shape to a story, a poem, a novel, etc. It’s an assemblage, a mosaic that needs to be put back together from the explosion of your mind.

Example: the notes on the Pig Roast Publishing reading at KGB Bar in NYC in mid-July. You produced a mass of notes in different notebooks and pads of paper, sense impressions, observations, details. But you couldn’t write the piece which you’d been asked to do for Beyond The Last Estate. The deadline came and went like a nuclear blast, with no response from you. Part of what paralyzed you was the thought that friends and acquaintances, other writers, would read it and have reactions to your thoughts. You were in NYC for about 24 hours and you saw an eyeful. Some of it started getting sucked into a fictional vortex, to fill out a dead zone in your novel I See Prism Threads which is stalled out. Portraits of city traffic and the “elegant grime” of the afterparty in the Bowery Hotel Lounge. That’s great but it violates the treaty between fiction and non-fiction, it tries to smuggle writing across the border between the two zones. A border which you believe in, no matter how autobiographical that and other novels may turn out to be. The poet is vexed by his responsibilities, his fealty to the truth. Straddling truth and fiction feels double-agenty. Especially when people might have been counting on you to write about them. You’re told by your friend Adam Johnson to write as if everyone you know is dead, but no way, man. No way.

Not yet. You need to slide a few puzzle pieces back and forth first, and replicate the demise of everyone who would form an opinion about your “truth.” Not that there’s anything bad there. It’s not even real, it hasn’t been written yet and molecules have yet to swerve into position, ideas have yet to form, mental and digital objekts have yet to be thrown into the river of time to create dams, obstructions, turbulence. The thought of eyes reading such a piece may guarantee its termination in the womb before it can ever be. Mixed metaphors are your forte. You need to read more writers to see how it’s done, how metaphors and similes are tidied up and contained within sentence-units, never to pollute each other or cross-contaminate. You’re reading Proust right now, The Guermantes Way, and he goes overboard with such writing techniques, but it’s all somewhat controlled, even with his notorious sentences that spool outward and inward.

Anyway it is too soon to judge an exposé or a chronicle if it isn’t even written yet, and might not ever be. Maybe you’ll write it in a letter and send it to yourself. Maybe you’ll put it in here, in a newsletter where it could be forgotten by time. You would love to go back to NYC to write about it more without embarrassing yourself. The same goes for London, or Bath. A day, or a week, seems too short to write about a place, a scene, a child abroad, a group of beloved friends and respected acquaintances.

Here’s some artwork that appeared in Power Cut Mag out of Glasgow, Scotland. You submitted art that was accepted (you didn’t get paid, more on that later—no ill will but you feel the pressures of the wallet starting to bear down).

Just for more images, here’s a clip of a segment of the UK cities essay you enjoyed working on, you think it came out well:

It’s been a while since you’ve written a newsletter on here. Need to get back to this, it’s fun, it’s free, it’s for you and me.