1.
By the time you read it, this story will have died.
Slippery and amorphous, it will have disappeared into a cold, slender groove in my brain. Like a mountaineer tethered to friends, tiptoeing around a crevasse, my story has taken other stories, other ideas, with it, all of them connected by a thin cord, all sliding down the unreachable tongue of a glacier.
It began one way, a story about a boy, and then it became about something else: a death, a dog, a flying elephant, a street in Seoul. One moment, I thought I had the story by its shoulders, but I was simply holding a shapeless protuberance of ice. Other times I wrested it up with frostbitten fingers only to find it had changed. It was born, or stillborn; I couldn’t tell the difference. I mourned in the midst of celebration. I buried it and dug it back out. It was always ending and beginning.
How do you give such a thing a funeral?
2.
In the time it has taken me to write this, someone my husband knew has died. Not a family member or close friend, but rather a boy from his youth. A kid whose face changed dramatically over time, like all faces change, years filling out the space around the eyes, the borders of the jaw morphing into intractability. Life sinking into the flesh, just a little, like a month-old pumpkin. Once, my husband and this boy sat in high school at a dinged-up wood table and drew together with colored pencils. I don’t know if the boy was any good. My husband is good, at drawing and many other things, but death has a way of making the things you’re good at seem quite ridiculous.
I found my husband in his study, his face in his hands. “He was struck by a car,” he said.
The boy, who was now a man, and now, also, nothing, had argued with his girlfriend. He was drunk. He shouted. He pushed her. Then he walked out into the street in Seoul and was hit by a car. He was doing some things, and then, just as suddenly, he wasn’t.
My husband and I stood together, looking at pictures on Facebook. The man smiling, his girlfriend on his lap, one hand on her thigh, the other gripping a sweaty beer. The man with his dog, a little white Pekinese, soft as the corner of a cloud. The man making silly faces, mugging, kissing the dog.
“His girlfriend barely speaks English,” my husband said. “She’s trying to find out what to do with the body.” Like that, he had become a body. Something that other people have to deal with. Something without a choice.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Did you know him well?”
“No,” my husband said. “I hadn’t seen him for years.” He wept. It was death in the abstract that was bothering him. The endness of it. The boy would not draw again. The man would not hold his girlfriend in his lap, squeezing her thigh. Somewhere someone was already planning a funeral for him in which he would be exalted, all his best qualities enumerated, all his worst sins expunged. No one would talk about how fucking happy he was with his girlfriend and a beer or how the last things he did were ugly and hung in the air over the bar after he was dead. He had already become an idea.
I could not stop thinking about the dog. Was it in an apartment in Korea, waiting to be walked? Would the girlfriend take it in? In all the confusion and chaos, the body taking precedence, who would purchase food for it? Who would even think of it, with so much else to think of? And what was possible in the realm of the dog’s understanding? How could it grasp that one day the man was there, squeezing it, kissing its cloud-cheeks, taking pictures with it pressed into the bones of the man’s face, and another day he simply wasn’t?
3.
By the time you read this, a story will have been born. It will be saved to a hard drive and published. It will appear and speak its truth. It will squall so you can’t ignore it.
We call our books our children, our babies. At a conference recently, a writer shocked everyone by saying that when she held her book in her hands, it felt like a dead thing. The audience gasped because it was vivid and true. Because it was like looking at a skeleton, stripped of the skin, and knowing for the first time the truth of what we are.
When we write books, we say we have created something, but this isn’t at all true. We can’t create out of nothing. We create by listening. If you want to learn to write, you should learn to prick up your ears to the soft course of your blood.
The words become something, the author becomes something, and finally, this something becomes a story. The story has to die, over and over, as its organs fail, as you find which parts are no longer useful. Throw a kidney out here, a knot of arteries there. Be ruthless about it, for if you aren’t, you will end up with the equivalent of an embalmed body. An imitation of life.
I remember my first funeral, the husband of a woman who sometimes carpooled us to school with her children. His car stalled on the train tracks. “Don’t look at him unless you’re ready,” my mother warned me at the viewing. I wasn’t sure how to ready myself, but I was a child, and curious, so I looked. I memorized the details. The thin thread that stitched together his lips. His hands, clean and folded. They had taken a blackened body smashed to bits by a train and made it look almost normal. If you looked quick. If you didn’t search.
If a writer is lazy, you can always tell. You’ll see the seams in the story, the thread between the lips. If she tells too much, the story will lose its shape in the lard of excess information. Too little leaves a story limping along, a stray dog on the beach, its ribs in relief. A cautious writer writes around the edges until there are only edges. An overly bold writer won’t stop whispering in your ear over dinner.
We know this, but we forget it again and again. We hone our voices, hold tuning forks toward ourselves, trying to catch our secret frequencies. But we make the mistake of hoping for the living story and fearing the dead. We never allow for something to become nothing.
4.
To ride or to write this story, you must be this tall.
At seven, I almost died inside the guts of a pink, metal elephant.
Attached to a rotating column, the elephant took me around in a quick approximation of flight, dipping and rising. I don’t remember the name of this contraption. It was but one ride in an amusement park of rides, built from a blueprint, constructed with polymers and plastic, held together by screws and bolts that threatened, always, to work their way out in flight. Operated by a teenaged kid who took the tickets with loose, clammy fingers, watched his passengers board while a different movie played across his eyes, one with the promise of getting laid on a sticky summer night.
I climbed inside, the metal bar lowered across my thighs.
Once up in the air, I didn’t know anything about the world outside the pink elephant. In front of me was the facsimile of a control panel, buttons and levers that suggested something real that didn’t exist. While the ride was malfunctioning, I grabbed at those dials and joysticks, not so much thinking I could control the elephant – which by then had somehow managed to dangle precariously at ninety degrees, doing its best to spill me out – but instead using them to hold on. A two inch piece of plastic in my fist. That’s what I believed in.
The purpose of the ride was to disorient you, to discombobulate you, to create the illusion that you, a mere child, were free. But then I was.
I held on, and though the machine failed me, the two inches of plastic did not. The ride could not be stopped in mid-flight, so I clung to the elephant for what seemed like hours, but in reality was probably three minutes. My mother screamed below, my grandmother’s pale, fleshy arms gesticulated wildly around the teenager’s head. From above, it looked she was bludgeoning him with a cut of meat. I couldn’t hear anything above the shaking of the elephant, the grinding of metal. I held on. I was part of something happening, the fullness of that. And when it was over, the boy came over, infused with good will, with the intention of smiling his way into making me forget what had happened. My family played along. I would not be scarred. They would not let this happen. So I was given a free ride on one of the properly functioning elephants, made to ride against my will, so we could all re-write the scene with a better ending.
I’m not telling you this story because I learned something, though I did, even if I couldn’t articulate it. I was at the mercy of a metal elephant. Now I am at the mercy of a story, and so are you. Hold on tight. Just because I survived doesn’t mean you will. All the time there are real stories of people walking beneath roller coasters who lose their heads, decapitated quite accidentally by someone’s tennis shoes.
5.
RIP, story. Hope you’re having an awesome birthday in heaven.
Writers don’t always write their way to the end. We can start with the end and move backwards, retracing our steps. We can do a foxtrot with the story and dance our way into something else entirely. A novel, a prose-poem, a thing-in-stories. What is a beginning or an ending if we know the story before we write it? When we dream, aren’t those our forgotten stories, a million versions of them? Something reminds us of what we already know, an old bear trap waiting to clamp down on the dark images lost in our woods.
If we’re doing it right, the story will change us. It will die in our arms, and we will press our lips to it and breathe an idea back in. We will stand among hundreds of our stories gathered in piles at our feet, and we won’t know if we’re in a cemetery or a nursery.
You don’t have to write to watch a story live and die, to catch it changing shape. You just have to pay attention.
6.
A few days after my husband’s friend died, Facebook sent us a reminder that it was his birthday.
Wish him a happy birthday, it said. Send him a gift.
It was heartbreaking – the ignorance of technology, the possibility of a buried man’s birthday. We thought about his family, his close friends, the people who were also getting such reminders. And yet, when we went to his page, we found that his friends had turned it into the world’s most raucous funeral. They were celebrating him, shouting cheerful encomiums into cyberspace.
Hey man, I hadn’t seen you in a while, but you were cool as shit. Dude, it fucking sucks you’re not here. :-( RIP. Hope you’re having an awesome birthday in heaven.
“Can you believe this?” my husband asked. He was right. It was ridiculous. It was irreverent. It was like he wasn’t dead.
But I also understood, in a way. They had sent him a gift, a story. He was dead, and then he wasn’t. His story was beginning and ending all over again, both at the same time. He was a boy with colored pencils, drawing with another boy at an old, dinged-up table. He was gone, celebrating on a cloud with his girlfriend in his lap, one hand squeezing her thigh and the other gripping a sweaty beer.
The little dog, forever, was pressed to his face.
[Image credit: Bruce Fingerhood]
I enjoy your web site and wanted to drop you a line to thank you for sharing the writing queue with your visitors.
I recently started my own writing blog hoping that it will inspire me to begin taking my writing more seriously.
Keep up the great work. We enjoy it immensely!
Hey, whaddayaknow – someone else uses random numbers to manage large to-be-read piles of books. I started about a year ago to randomly choose my next book. I love the not knowing aspect in that even though I bought the book, it seems like surprise or treat. Which is very nice compared to looking at a full bookshelf and despairing (not unlike Ozymandias…)
Randomness is so much fun. I use it to decide what I will play on the piano, what I will wear, and like you, what books to read. I have about 400 books in my house that I want to read or reread sometime. I look them all over once in a while, just so I won't forget what they are. The top shelf of one bookcase is for current and next-in-line reading–six books each. If any book has a commentary, like the one I'm using for Ulysses, it can be beside it. I read my six current books in turn, a chapter or ten pages at a time, and alternating commentaries with the books they explain. When I finish a book, the first of the next-in-line books moves over, and I pick a new next-in-line book based on whatever book, author or subject I have recently read about in a journal. There are only two rules: each new book has to be as different as possible from the previous one(The Interpretation of Dreams follows Moby Dick) and there is always, these days, a Shakespeare play among the current reading. I pick those according to their order in Hazlitt's commentary. Thanks for letting me know I'm not alone.
Terrific blog,
Regarding your to be read stack, have you thought of asking your readers to give a vote to a book they'd like to see further up your pile. Nothing like a little reader involvement. I may try this out myself.
My strategy for what's on my to-be-read shelf is that I read the last book on each shelf going down the right side, then the first book on each shelf going up the left side. It manages to keep things mixed up reasonably well. At the moment, everything is shelved by color, but every few years, I rearrange by some odd criteria (height, author, title, order of purchase as best as I can remember, etc.). I've been toying with setting up a web page where people can vote on what I should read next, although that's some point in the future.
For four years I read using a regime I created to deal with the enormous number of number of books I had. I decided to choose a number of random themes and read everything I had that could fit that theme, which meant I would read the poetry and criticism and heavy non-fiction I had instead of reading novels all the time. I started with the Romantic era, leading me to read Byron's Don Juan, Blake's Jerusalem, Shelly's Prometheus Unbound, as well as De Quincey, Hazlitt, Lamb and Howard Bloom and Frank Kermode's books on the Romantics. I went through Crime fiction, Central Europe, the Renaissance, London and History, and I was in the process of reading the Greeks and the Romans when David Foster Wallace died and I thought I really wanted to read the copy of Infinite Jest I had had sitting on my shelf for years. Then I abandoned my thematic reading and went back to reading randomly, which I have mixed fealings about. I just finished The Savage Detectives and when I googled Roberto Bolano your review came near the top, which is what led me here. Looks like a cool site.
my reading queue sometimes reaches above 15 books, which pile up by the bedside. Then in a mad fit of tidiness I reduce it to three or four that I have read in the last week or so, the rest ' falling off the edge of the desk' so to speak. But then I run a second hand bookshop, so I'm in no real danger of not having something to read.
I love the random number generator idea! I often use a coin flip when I have simple, inconsequential decisions such as which of two delicious-sounding meals to eat from a restaurant menu, etc. This way you can never regret not choosing the other meal… this meshes with Barry Schwartz’ “Paradox of Choice” which he describes here: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html.