Clever Beast

This Voice is Borrowed

This voice is borrowed. The first murmur of the voice was whispered to me through Douglas Coupland’s book, Life After God. The stories were short, the descriptions sweet, and there were even pictures - naturally I was seduced, and found something meaningful where I had initially sought idle distraction. It was to be my introduction to the Melancholic. With each story he told I felt involved more than I had with any book, his characters were wrestling with feelings I harbored beneath the surface of my awareness. Glibly fashioned in shape of a pocket bible, it became, in its own way, a path to personal revelation. I didn’t know what to do with this awareness, but it percolated irrespective of my ability to contain it. In the end, the fictional Coupland confesses he needs God and, in that stroke, subverts even the magnanimous identity owed the Melancholic of being the resister of all social mores. I never thought about God much before reading that book, and in years to come I would read from many soon-to-be heroes of mine, Wittgenstein, Dostoevsky, Dylan, this same resignation to the Almighty. This voice gives into that hesitation, to fall neither toward nor away entirely.

Probably too early in my development as a human being let alone as any kind of writing conduit, I fell upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Maybe it was the right time precisely to let it fully bloom in my skull. It certainly left an impression. I was the corrosive rationalist then and bruised metaphysically by all that comes from such over-emphasis. The Underground Man was me, and his faults were mine, and therefore his lessons were mine. But it took awhile for that to settle in, I was twenty and I knew everything. I think at first I admired him, and my writing took a turn for the philosophically perverse. My first year in University, a TA chided me for being the resident rationalist, always ready to uproot a position. Not able to cope with other people, nor myself. Still the book held up more than a mirror to me, it got under the skin, particularly in the final chapter, On the Occasion of Wet Snow, it showed me how I must appear to be in the world, without hope of guile to conceal myself. A nervous tic of a man unable to hold the most basic conversation due to the paralysis of my mind and the raw fibers of feeling it pinched. I fisted out poetry that marveled over decadent words without the hindsight of knowing what decadence was. The voice gave into reason and wrote mostly to know, to know and know and know and know and know and know. My heart felt the con that Dostoevsky showed me but I couldn’t find a way to stop being that man.

I remember the first time I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and, specifically, Song of Myself. I was in my parent’s basement, my body weary from long hours working in a factory, still knotted in the chest, and reading it was like feeling every part of me just let go, soften and rejoice - a Whitmanesque word but damn it, rejoice it was! All at once in the way that only literature can entrap you with, I felt true joy, true happiness, I wanted to live like that poem said to live, I wanted to stop moping and give into the creative spark that I believe lies in all mankind. The voice found the will to write outside of knowing if only to pleasure in the sound of its own voice. The choice line: “Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me”.

I returned to Dostoevsky to understand what it is to be human, to understand right from wrong in an existential sense. Also it fueled my voice, his passion for rigmarole, allowing meaning to find its way in the loose bowels of one’s train of thought, and one tier higher, as characters interceding in each other’s lives without a cosmic message from the almighty writer, to let the meaning be in the telling not the prescription of thought. My first blog entries spilled this way.

With Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the rigmarole became autobiography, a sincerity that bashes its skull against irony to let something true bleed out. In this book in particular there is a noticeable lack of what usually is constituted as ‘sophistication’, he is writing against the grain of the literary. His sentences run on, but also do what I do, keep replaying the beginning of a sentence to carry the thought beyond the mandates of an idea, but just to see where you can take it - the thought process fossilized, you can look at it from all sides. Not to say there is no craft to what he does, there is, but he is not afraid to indulge and reveal himself. The craft does not edit that out but celebrates it. He is post-post-modern, for where at first there was the polished conceit, then the polished ironic conceit, both playing to a sophisticated audience, Eggers comes along and challenges the very importance of labels one way or the other by making something uncomfortably in-between, jamming their significance, until the only significance is his unvarnished voice. I feel like I know Eggers from this book, not because he talks about events in his life, but by the way he talks about them. Perhaps more than any of the other sources of inspiration, I find my voice in Eggers, in this courage to write oneself out.

This voice is familiar now, I don’t need to coddle it or regiment it, there are enough wheels turning of their own revolutions to get me through the second part of my life. It was not as straight a line as this post may lead one to believe, nor was there a teleological knowing at any point along the path, but for a myth, this will do.

04/24/13

This Voice is Borrowed

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This voice is borrowed. The first murmur of the voice was whispered to me through Douglas Coupland’s book, Life After God. The stories were short, the descriptions sweet, and there were even pictures - naturally I was seduced, and found something meaningful where I had initially sought idle distraction. It was to be my introduction to the Melancholic. With each story he told I felt involved more than I had with any book, his characters were wrestling with feelings I harbored beneath the surface of my awareness. Glibly fashioned in shape of a pocket bible, it became, in its own way, a path to personal revelation. I didn’t know what to do with this awareness, but it percolated irrespective of my ability to contain it. In the end, the fictional Coupland confesses he needs God and, in that stroke, subverts even the magnanimous identity owed the Melancholic of being the resister of all social mores. I never thought about God much before reading that book, and in years to come I would read from many soon-to-be heroes of mine, Wittgenstein, Dostoevsky, Dylan, this same resignation to the Almighty. This voice gives into that hesitation, to fall neither toward nor away entirely.

Probably too early in my development as a human being let alone as any kind of writing conduit, I fell upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Maybe it was the right time precisely to let it fully bloom in my skull. It certainly left an impression. I was the corrosive rationalist then and bruised metaphysically by all that comes from such over-emphasis. The Underground Man, as I have said before, is/was me, and his faults were mine, and therefore his lessons were mine. But it took awhile for that to settle in, I was twenty and I knew everything. I think at first I admired him, and my writing took a turn for the philosophically perverse. My first year in University, a t.a. chided me for being the resident rationalist, always ready to uproot a position. Not able to cope with other people, nor myself. Still the book held up more than a mirror to me, it got under the skin, particularly in the final chapter, On the Occasion of Wet Snow, it showed me how I must appear to be in the world, without hope of guile to conceal myself. A nervous tic of a man unable to hold the most basic conversation due to the paralysis of my mind and the raw fibers of feeling it pinched. I fisted out poetry that marveled over words, decadently without the hindsight of knowing what decadence was. The voice gave into reason and wrote mostly to know, to know and know and know and know and know and know. My heart felt the con that Dostoevsky showed me but I couldn’t find a way to stop being that man.

I remember the first time I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and, specifically, Song of Myself. I was in my parent’s basement, my body weary from long hours working in a factory, still knotted in the chest, and reading it was like feeling every part of me just let go, soften and rejoice - a Whitmanesque word but damn it, rejoice it was! All at once in the way that only literature can entrap you with, I felt true joy, true happiness, I wanted to live like that poem said to live, I wanted to stop moping and give into the creative spark that I believe lies in all mankind. The voice found the will to write outside of knowing if only to pleasure in the sound of its own voice. The choice line: “Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me”.

I returned to Dostoevsky to understand what is to be human, to understand right from wrong in an existential sense. Also it fueled my voice, his passion for rigmarole, allowing meaning to find its way in the loose bowels of one’s train of thought, and one tier higher, as characters interceding in each other’s lives without a cosmic message from the almighty writer, to let the meaning be in the telling not the prescription of thought. My first blog entries spilled this way.

With Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the rigmarole became autobiography, a sincerity that bashes its skull against irony to let something true bleed out. In this book in particular, there is a noticeable lack of what usually is constituted as ‘sophistication’ to his writing, he is writing against the grain of the literary. His sentences run on, but also do what I do, keep replaying the beginning of a sentence to carry the thought beyond the mandates of an idea, but just to see where you can take it - the thought process fossilized, you can look at it from all sides. Not to say there is no craft to what he does, there is, but he is not afraid to indulge and reveal himself. The craft does not edit that out but celebrates it. He is post-post-modern, for where at first there was the polished conceit, then the polished ironic conceit, both playing to a sophisticated audience, Eggers comes along and challenges the very importance of labels one way or the other by making something uncomfortably in-between, jamming their significance, until the only significance is his unvarnished voice. I feel like I know Eggers from this book, not because he talks about events in his life, but by the way he talks about them. Perhaps more than any of the other sources of inspiration, I find my voice in Eggers, in this courage to write oneself out.

Finally, or finally as of this moment in time, the voice draws inspiration from this very medium, Tumblr. There is something happening here that I find remarkable, an oasis from the world I think I have been looking for since I read Coupland’s book so long ago. I never had a community, the melancholic walks alone. But much like reading Song of Myself I am eternally inspired by fragments of writing I find here, by people I follow or from sources of inspiration they want to share. Also this notion of micro-blogging, of writing succinctly, something I have admired in literature (three of the four works I mentioned above are hovering around the 100 page range). I still love the rigmarole and draw energy from it, but I am finding myself more and more trying to edit down to something precise, and even veering into poetry which I haven’t tried to do in over a decade. By being here I am changing, and the next chapter will likely be quite different from what came before. The wounds have healed, save the existential ones. By virtue of just how much sun-rise is around me here, it seems inevitable my output would likewise increase.

This voice is familiar now, I don’t need to coddle it or regiment it, there are enough wheels turning of their own revolutions to get me through the second half of my life, and then some. To begin is the hardest, but with momentum it all gets easier. It was not as straight a line as this post may lead one to believe, nor was there a teleological knowing at any point along the path, but for a myth, this will do.

Now, by what path have you tumbled here?

08/08/12

Hemingway’s

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Mustering up courage, I wait out the day in a sunny cafe, the world gaping from the windows. Hard drinks in the afternoon as I rehearse what I am going to say. Once escorted out of a bar by the beach, blacked out; now shakes of a different kind. One more drink to champion the everyday in me and perfect a worked-on effortlessness. Long swallow, with minutes to go I survey the site, twice, then one more time around the block to let the alcohol seep down to my fingertips. The world still gawking, the cosmos on high alert, all doors waiting to be opened.

I enter into society an unfinished man. In the rush of new encounters I am swept away by those who like rapids to my defiant rock, slam. The bottle in hand is the only tactile reality, if I stay quiet, may disappear completely. So I start talking to these faces, discolored ambient sockets of life, circuits of words blinking on and off, carrying on their own conversation. I am on fire, burning through a field of words in search of an anecdote. How cheaply my soul is given to break the ice, to those in the heat of energy expended playing out their reciprocating gestures, but off hours, in sober shops, to pass as strangers.

At some kink in the night, the attention bends back on me. A drunken woman I scarcely knew in high school but knows me apparently, in slurred celebration to talents I one time had, confesses an affection to me and my art. How loudly important both were to her imagined life, though I am almost certain she has me confused with someone else. But does it matter? Who am I in that moment anyways, but the reflection of some salved disquiet to bear witness to. There and always tucked in our own cells, clinking the bars with our glasses, wafting odes to some nostalgic past when we were free and formless, to be anything conjured now.

A glass raised in toast: long may we live to conceive our sad histories, to quake in love over nothing at all, live wholly in the dimples and freckles of time, and accept the wild varieties that wish to claim us!

Before the revelation wears off, I am released back into the fray. Happily evaporating beneath the timid stars, I leave absorbed, an errant thought in someone’s misremembered memory.

06/06/12

Notes From Underground Mixtape

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An anecdote and then the antidote.

I am/was an underground man. The first time I read Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’ I was twenty or twenty-one, a couple years younger than the novel’s protagonist during its second part, ‘An Occasion of Wet Snow’. I was going through my own ‘occasion’ at the time and in a beatific synchronicity I found my life mirrored in the novel’s pages. I have never felt anything like it, before or after: the once firm barriers between fiction and reality dropped from me and I was left feeling as if Dostoevsky had somehow tapped my psyche in order to fuel his creation. The unspoken reality I knew had been uttered and it was immensely comforting to have that seal broken. I have since revisited that wet snow evening many times, never once spared from a proper wounding.

Still I am not the same person I once was, and I cannot say with any certainty what others feel as they age but I consider my life somewhat fractured. Looking back I think of myself not as one person but at least three, separated chronologically in time, roughly one a decade. There is a bit of Alzheimer’s to my nostalgia when I reflect on my underground years, I begin to think of myself as a separate person, one with a largely different repertoire of associations running through his mind, one wounded and frankly quite ill. I cannot penetrate his psyche save for the mementoes left behind, they hold something that if used properly resonate some of the feeling-in-use mostly obscured by my memory and its new co-ordinates. I recently unearthed just such a box of mementoes from that time period, long buried in my parent’s basement. Contained within are at least three unfinished novels, reams of tangential poetry, a guttural expression of life crammed between a lot of incidental things like empty shot bottles, fragments of wall-collages, photographs, and mixtapes. When I come in contact with these items I remember some things about this other person but they are not the same of course, and I have learned that there is a considerable difference between the act of feeling something and the state of living in accordance with it; one is not necessarily contained in the other, one has to bring whatever else one has to it in order to set up camp there. I come by these feelings of the other me lately like an unprepared scout, with none of the provisions needed to stay around for long, no matter how alluring the prospect may be.

Herein lies the challenge of self-analysis: the closer the inspection of a particular feeling the less defined it becomes, until eclipsed by awareness it ceases to be anything. It is like a video camera aimed towards its outgoing image rendering itself into infinity; a fraction to the left, a fraction to the right and there is still something, but to look directly inward gives in to the holographic conceit of knowledge. So is this tiny feeling that I captured in these songs… I can only nod to you with some gesture of assurance that ‘it happened’ and hope you understand, for even to me it is a half-understanding. To know you feel something is a silly proposition, you feel it wholly and it shatters thought and in the aftermath one pieces together a record. I sense that the feeling is properly enshrined in this playlist because something of the familiar melancholy lingers when I listen to it and I feel not quite so fractured, almost whole.

A quick note on what exactly this represents because it would be false to say these twelve songs encompass the whole of the text. I have made at least three failed attempts to do that and I could not balance my want of harmony in the work by the fractured two part nature of the story, so I recently decided to focus solely on the second part, ‘On the Occasion of Wet Snow’, and once I did that everything came together wonderfully. Gone was the impulse to crowbar in the heavy sounds of a ranting elder self-destructive; what is left is the distillation of youth at the moment of corrosion, something I truly identified with during my bout with the bottle in my early twenties. For those who do not know what this chapter entails, I can describe it briefly as follows: The unnamed protagonist of the story is remembering a pivotal moment in his young life, a moment which quite possibly comes to define his later cynical ways. He seeks to establish a reputation among his peers on a rare night out and in the process gets exceedingly drunk and thoroughly embarrasses himself. The night ends with the protagonist alone with a woman of ill-repute and the tenuous relationship that blossoms over night and into the next day becomes his richest experience of love.

The entire ‘Notes From Underground’ Mixtape in one long stream

Feel free to message me for the playlist, if interested.

Some choice quotations from the novel that I feel are captured in this playlist:

“I was never able to dream consistently for more than three months, after which I would develop an irresistible urge to plunge into society” - notes p 69

“1) I detest phrases, phrasemongers, and pinched waists 2) I hate smut and I hate people who relish smut 3) I love truth, sincerity and honesty”. - notes P. 90

“The fact is that at those very moments I was more clearly and vividly aware of the revolting absurdity of my imaginings and the entire reverse side of the medal than anyone else in the world could have been. and yet… “ notes, p. 98

“Now’s just the right moment to throw a bottle at them all, I thought, and, picking up a bottle, I… poured myself a full glass.” notes, p. 91.

“Nasty day for a funeral!” I started again, to break the silence. P. 105

“She understood out of all this what a woman, if she loves sincerely, will always understand before all else. She understood that I was myself unhappy.” notes, p145

“And enter my home openly and freely - full mistress of it all!” - notes pg. 131

“They won’t let me… I can’t be… good” - notes, p. 145

03/27/12

This Voice is Borrowed

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This voice is borrowed. The first murmur of the voice was whispered to me through Douglas Coupland’s book, Life After God. The stories were short, the descriptions sweet, and there were even pictures - naturally I was seduced, and found something meaningful where I had initially sought idle distraction. It was to be my introduction to the Melancholic. With each story he told I felt involved more than I had with any book, his characters were wrestling with feelings I harbored beneath the surface of my awareness. Glibly fashioned in shape of a pocket bible, it became, in its own way, a path to personal revelation. I didn’t know what to do with this awareness, but it percolated irrespective of my ability to contain it. In the end, the fictional Coupland confesses he needs God and, in that stroke, subverts even the magnanimous identity owed the Melancholic of being the resister of all social mores. I never thought about God much before reading that book, and in years to come I would read from many soon-to-be heroes of mine, Wittgenstein, Dostoevsky, Dylan, this same resignation to the Almighty. This voice gives into that hesitation, to fall neither toward nor away entirely.

Probably too early in my development as a human being let alone as any kind of writing conduit, I fell upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Maybe it was the right time precisely to let it fully bloom in my skull. It certainly left an impression. I was the corrosive rationalist then and bruised metaphysically by all that comes from such over-emphasis. The Underground Man was me, and his faults were mine, and therefore his lessons were mine. But it took awhile for that to settle in, I was twenty and I knew everything. I think at first I admired him, and my writing took a turn for the philosophically perverse. My first year in University, a TA chided me for being the resident rationalist, always ready to uproot a position. Not able to cope with other people, nor myself. Still the book held up more than a mirror to me, it got under the skin, particularly in the final chapter, On the Occasion of Wet Snow, it showed me how I must appear to be in the world, without hope of guile to conceal myself. A nervous tic of a man unable to hold the most basic conversation due to the paralysis of my mind and the raw fibers of feeling it pinched. I fisted out poetry that marveled over decadent words without the hindsight of knowing what decadence was. The voice gave into reason and wrote mostly to know, to know and know and know and know and know and know. My heart felt the con that Dostoevsky showed me but I couldn’t find a way to stop being that man.

I remember the first time I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and, specifically, Song of Myself. I was in my parent’s basement, my body weary from long hours working in a factory, still knotted in the chest, and reading it was like feeling every part of me just let go, soften and rejoice - a Whitmanesque word but damn it, rejoice it was! All at once in the way that only literature can entrap you with, I felt true joy, true happiness, I wanted to live like that poem said to live, I wanted to stop moping and give into the creative spark that I believe lies in all mankind. The voice found the will to write outside of knowing if only to pleasure in the sound of its own voice. The choice line: “Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me”.

I returned to Dostoevsky to understand what is to be human, to understand right from wrong in an existential sense. Also it fueled my voice, his passion for rigmarole, allowing meaning to find its way in the loose bowels of one’s train of thought, and one tier higher, as characters interceding in each other’s lives without a cosmic message from the almighty writer, to let the meaning be in the telling not the prescription of thought. My first blog entries spilled this way.

With Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the rigmarole became autobiography, a sincerity that bashes its skull against irony to let something true bleed out. In this book in particular there is a noticeable lack of what usually is constituted as ‘sophistication’, he is writing against the grain of the literary. His sentences run on, but also do what I do, keep replaying the beginning of a sentence to carry the thought beyond the mandates of an idea, but just to see where you can take it - the thought process fossilized, you can look at it from all sides. Not to say there is no craft to what he does, there is, but he is not afraid to indulge and reveal himself. The craft does not edit that out but celebrates it. He is post-post-modern, for where at first there was the polished conceit, then the polished ironic conceit, both playing to a sophisticated audience, Eggers comes along and challenges the very importance of labels one way or the other by making something uncomfortably in-between, jamming their significance, until the only significance is his unvarnished voice. I feel like I know Eggers from this book, not because he talks about events in his life, but by the way he talks about them. Perhaps more than any of the other sources of inspiration, I find my voice in Eggers, in this courage to write oneself out.

This voice is familiar now, I don’t need to coddle it or regiment it, there are enough wheels turning of their own revolutions to get me through the second part of my life. It was not as straight a line as this post may lead one to believe, nor was there a teleological knowing at any point along the path, but for a myth, this will do.

12/26/11

Notes from Underground Mixtape

Permalink

An anecdote and then the antidote.

I am/was an underground man. The first time I read Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’ I was twenty or twenty-one, a couple years younger than the novel’s protagonist during its second part, ‘An Occasion of Wet Snow’. I was going through my own ‘occasion’ at the time and in a beatific synchronicity I found my life mirrored in the novel’s pages. I have never felt anything like it, before or after: the once firm barriers between fiction and reality dropped from me and I was left feeling as if Dostoevsky had somehow tapped my psyche in order to fuel his creation. The unspoken reality I knew had been uttered and it was immensely comforting to have that seal broken. I have since revisited that wet snow evening many times, never once spared a proper wounding.