Assignment
I know I'm going to get in trouble for starting this, and someone should take away my poetic license. But I got a job with the postalservice so I could stop by your house. Would you move to a different zone? Tell me quickly for it is almost winter. The North Pole is really dark this time of year. Even the snow is black. There are only a few things I know how to do and identify them is not one of them. I have categories for everything. Let me give you an example: matchbooks with a single match torn out are in a different category than unopened matchbooks, which are in the same category as unopened books. I have a lot of those. I don't know what I'll do if I don't find a reader soon. Swoon. Or drop into the snow, an angel. I got a letter in the mail that began “Dear Steak Enthusiast.” This is intimacy. There are too many things to elaborate on. If I thought you'd finish this page I'd finish it too. What a wonderful world that would be. Harry Mathews says that the creative act is done by the reader, the writer providing the tools. Paul Auster, similarly, cautions against overdescription in fiction. I don't know what to believe myself. One or the other probably doesn't exist - reader or writer - in any event there is some imagination which takes place up upon a balcony overlooking a Renaissance stage from seats padded with straw. Is anybody listening? Of course someone is. I have no one to write to. Tell me about it. End of paragraph. Okay let me cut to the quick, the chase, if you will, as it were, and get down to brass tacks, business: Writing is a way of Being. That's all. It is, as Auster writes, not a profession one chooses: it chooses you. Echoing on this point Mathews who thinks that the only less-rewarding profession must be being a musician, as musicians require organized performances, whereas the writer can whisper to a captive audience in the privacy of a bedroom or subway car. Then comes the hunger, but, to look on the bright side, that hunger may well have come anyway. So think of yourself as a railroad conductor instead. Constant motion in a direction. Like arrows, vectors, rays. Like light, sound, grammar, narrative, melody. Like telephone wires over hillsides, the lines rise and fall together. There is no one to tell these things to. If I tell these things to an empty forest will a tree fall and if so will I exist or will that confirm that the world is a hallucination, an imaginative projection. Fancy. Or was it folly. But to get back on track to my point, I would encourage you to correct the chaos of your life one element at a time, tireless and methodical and determined, think of it as failing to lose ground, a very slow and determined effort. Direction is good but not necessary as is clear from examining the motions of a butterfly. I would have called you to tell you these things but I'm not sure you would have understood the gesture. I'd fax it to you if I could, but let's be reasonable, you don't even use email. Why should you? How could you? I am, however, strictly speaking, a treasure trove of potentially interesting advice. Next time you balance your checkbook, write a line for every check, with one word for every dollar spent. Next time there is trouble with the bowels, you may write a long line on toilet paper proceeding lengthwise. It is like this. Every postcard you mail off becomes a patch in the quilt, a cloud in the sky, until all is opaque and there comes a sudden wind or cloudburst. It's autumn: try not to pass up this chance to be melancholy. It is precisely the right temperature for the mind, and it is like thought or weather fleeting and indeterminate, despite efforts to fix the temperature at a single a number at a fictional instant in time and space, or efforts to count the number of words per line. Also, you might want to write a poem for every item on your grocery list and tape them up in the store. An anthology of your best writing can only be organized so many ways, but a grocerystore is a landscape of shifting categories for charcoal, lightbulbs, and vegetarian meat. Then, when you write the poems for the grocery store, lift weights with your left hand and write with your right or the other way around. For every repetition write a letter to Patch Adams or State Representative Johnson or me. Then write a poem on the outside of the envelope, xerox the envelope, copy the poem onto a cocktail napkin at a crowded sports bar during Happy Hour (IMPORTANT: DO NOT DRINK. YET.). This draft you are going to want to type into a computer, and then email it to a stranger. You have to do this part. Wait, you are not done yet. Write about the whole experience on the outside of a winebottle and then drink the wine on the moon and sing a song about the color blue. This song you must memorize, etch into stone, and never breathe a word of to anyone. Now you are ready for step two: doing laundry. Write a poem on every item of clothing. Use a nonindelible crayon. At the laundromat, copy these poems onto gessoed 3 foot square (round will do equally well) canvases using alizarin crimson and vermilion oil paint thinned with a mixture of linseed oil and saliva. As you do this, put each item of clothing into the washing machine and consider the following: this is only the wash cycle, and the leaves reveal a shocking spectra as each bursts into flame and falls to rejoin the mud. The way I feel right now, before the rinse and spin, should be bottled and served on transAtlantic flights to very sad businesspeople or Iceland. The suds you feel are irritating but they serve a purpose. There is no way to reverse any of these processes. The next stage is much more difficult. You must find a cafe whose owner agrees to let you have an art opening where you display your laundry paintings and walk among the guests as if you were one of the dead. This is the uncomfortable part but if you see it through then the gears are in motion. I have always wondered what it is like to speak in a conventional language and the other night when, fleeing human contact, I ran into you, I was unable to discourse. Someone spoke of dreamboats. That wasn't what I was talking about, although I said nothing. You see, something has been bothering me, gnawing if you will, at me, and there is no way to say it to no one at no time no way, so I avoid the spoken word. Spoken word. Why do you think. When you say some things, do they cease to become true. It is like the tree falling in a forest only makes a noise if there is no person there to hear it. Otherwise it is the person who is making the noise, internally, constructing the noise from the raw materials the falling tree provided, but the creative act was that of the person hearing the tree fall. What were they doing in the woods anyway? If it was me, they would have said that I was couldn't see the trees for the forest, but they would have been wrong. I am not like that. I see the trees. And I want to lie under them all. Each. Which, mathematically, is scarcely feasible. Which reminds me: people are often nice to each other. There are isolated occasions of interpersonal heroism. They are not to be criticized, or to be treated suspiciously, or seen as fitting into a larger and irresponsible pattern, but nurtured. Then, as you move your clothing to the drier, write your last will and testament beginning with the words simply “I, ______, being of mind and body....” No one will hear the sound for the forest. For this reason, the only work you will do in the world is the work you are not paid for, all of which can reasonably and fairly be called art. Ready?
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