the omniverse

2011-03-11T03:19:00.001-08:00

In an essay published two years ago in Time magazine, the writers of The Wire made the argument that we believe the war on drugs has devolved into a war on the underclass, that in places like West and East Baltimore, where the drug economy is now the only factory still hiring and where the educational system is so crippled that the vast majority of children are trained only for the corners, a legal campaign to imprison our most vulnerable and damaged citizens is little more than amoral. And we said then that if asked to serve on any jury considering a non-violent drug offense, we would move to nullify that jury's verdict and vote to acquit. Regardless of the defendant, I still believe such a course of action would be just in any case in which drug offenses—absent proof of violent acts—are alleged.

Both our Constitution and our common law guarantee that we will be judged by our peers. But in truth, there are now two Americas, politically and economically distinct. I, for one, do not qualify as a peer to Felicia Pearson.

-David Simon, in response to Felicia Pearson's aresst on drug charges 3-10-11

2011-03-05T08:36:00.001-08:00

2010-01-15T05:14:00.000-08:00

...a man at a table on the other side of the window, hunched over his coffe cup, warming his hands at the sides...

2010-01-13T17:51:00.000-08:00

...the woman singing in the car behind me. Her hands loose upon the wheel, her eyes closed, she sings quietly, mouthing the words. And I don't know the song, but I recognize the joy...

2010-01-12T05:12:00.000-08:00

...the stillness accompanying snow...

2010-01-10T12:32:00.000-08:00

A writer's job is to watch, to see. We are voyeurs. We steal from others, from who they are. We steal from ourselves. We are hungry and ruthless, never satisfied, always wanting more. Always searching for another way in which someone might reveal themselves to us without knowing it.

We are promiscuous. Everything has a possible use, from the greatest tragedies to the most intimate moments. We enter every experience as a writer searching for material.

It is a writers job to remember. Not the color of the sky or the way she wore her hair, but the full import of the event. Its heart, its most tender passage. It is our job to live within the moment we create. Everything we might steal from others we also lay bare within ourselves.

It is part of the job to extend our own suffering, not to suppress it but to allow it to flower into full bloom so that it might be seen and fully experienced. Not just the suffering we are comfortable with (because we are all comfortable with some suffering), but the sorrows we avoid or run from. It is our job to allow those terrors to become completely real.

We trade in the ecstasies of living, of seeing every feature possible; we steal the joy of others but also their misery. We steal who they are but we give them a name.

We are the witnesses to every act we can imagine. The witnesses to our own joys and transgressions and the ways in which we move those through the world. We are the witnesses of Now. Right Now. Now.

I want a literature in which people are trying to find their own worlds, trying to enter them, develop a faith in them. In which people are trying to find other people whose world resonates or coincides with their own in such a way that something can happen between them. I want a literature of search, of faith, of terror and beauty; one in which people may succeed or fail but they are reaching out toward something.

I want a literature of small events which linger. A literature in which something glanced on the street by chance may be more important than years in a person's life. In which two or three words, or a glance, or a touch, takes on more prominence than a career or a degree. In which relationships may be inexplicable but true nonetheless; in which we may constantly tell ourselves we don't know what we are doing, yet we are doing nonetheless; in which an element of love does not just bring pleasantness and comfort but the actual material we need to shape who we are; in which true understanding is hardly ever spoken but is known nonetheless.

It is the writer's job to listen. In restaurants, on the street, in the grocery store. To everyone, to each distinct voice and its cadence, its memory, its life.

It is our job to observe, free from judgment, free from meaning. To see only what is there and nothing else.

It is our job to notice the tenderness of a mother bending to her child, a lover's hand upon a knee, a spontaneous laugh.

It is our job not to know, to suspend knowing, in the service of observation. It is our job not to know even what we are doing.

We use the world in every terror and jubilation. We feel things, think things, which don't belong to us. We devote ourselves to condensing all of human experience through the ages down to just one thing: this page.

It is our job to see. To listen. To remember. To celebrate and to mourn.

To quieten ourselves, slowly, patiently, cycling down into a single still point within which our experience might speak.

Then, to sit before the page, as white as a open field of fresh snow, and mark out a path.

2010-01-10T12:26:00.000-08:00

...a letter from an old friend awakening a sense of nearness instead of distance...

2010-01-09T15:33:00.000-08:00

...ice crystal spidering across a window...

2010-01-08T05:30:00.001-08:00

...just the idea that people sing...

2010-01-07T04:35:00.001-08:00

...a simple handshake...

2010-01-06T05:22:00.001-08:00

...a squirrel leaps in the hard grass, directly along a line of shadow...

2010-01-05T04:41:00.000-08:00

...staring at a man three tables away who's staring at nothing...

2010-01-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

...the way her body shudders and her hands clasp together at her waist as she comes up on her toes and to declare, 'I want a cookie!'...

2010-01-03T11:46:00.001-08:00

...the moment the cat curls into your lap...

2010-01-02T06:05:00.001-08:00

...a stark full moon on a cold night...

2010-01-01T04:00:00.000-08:00

...the soft warmth of a morning bed, the sheet curling around the ankles, the quilt overlying...

2009-08-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

Writing is not primarily a sensual medium or art form. Music, for instance, strikes the ear first and is only later 'translated' from its sensual first impressions into something else. Painting or sculpture introduce themselves first as material objects which can be touched and studied, in which color, shape, size, form a sensual impression. Writing is something else altogether; something big and miraculous happens before one can gain a sensual impression from writing. I'm reminded of film director Luis Bunuel's observation that, in watching a film in the theatre, the audience spends half of its time in the dark (that is, in the flicker between the frames as they pass through the projector. Mostly, we watch films differently these days.). This, 'spending half our time in the dark', is not a romantic notion but a physical fact, and for me is analogous to what happens in the moment of reading.

In reading the reader MUST supply at least a part of the experience. No matter how well a situation or a character, or a concept, is described, the reader must build this picture in his own mind in a completely different way than if he were watching a film of the same material or listening to a lecture. The act of reading is active and immersive in a completely different way than most other arts.

Compression is an absolute tenet of writing and has been since before the arising of the term. Compression in writing attempts to reduce experience to patterns which are incomplete enough to allow the reader personal access to them, not as concepts but as experience. In writing, one is always trying to find the circumstance or the character or situation which can hold as much information as possible, of itself, so that one can then strip away all else. So that a text becomes as much about what has been left out, or abandoned, as the remaining elements. For some writers, this practice still contains the holographic sense mentioned in the article below; in the belief that a well-developed scene or character or moment in a piece, even when removed from the work in the editing process, retains a resonance with the final work, that is, its shadow still lies over the pages even though it has disappeared.

In writing fiction, it is sometimes necessary to write long sections or chapters of a character's experience, which you know will never be used in the final work, simply in order to make it real; to create it as an invisible adjunct to the finished piece. Strangely, it is sometimes not enough to simply 'think through' this event in a character's life, it must be written in order to somehow become a part of the completed work.

Primary decisions concerning a piece play hugely important roles because they are a way of making decisions about how to compress information. What is the time frame of the story? How many characters are important? What is the structure of the piece? These decisions allow the writer to build in hidden information which often only becomes apparent by the absence of other information, that is, why do I learn so much about this character, but another character has only a single sentence devoted to them? Compression also plays a part in the juxtaposition of scenes and the manner in which one scene follows another or, doesn't follow another, being broken up and interspersed with other events.

One understands, in writing, in reading, that words are not a solely linear process one following the other like a mathematical equation which produces a result. Words are personally associative, culturally associative, and they are associative within the work itself, so that one might learn, in the course of a novel, that a certain shade of blue has a particular meaning for the protagonist, and every reference to the color sparks an association within the reading of the work itself. Writing creates gaps, and the best writers create the best gaps, by presenting us, as readers, with a framework which we must make whole.

Writers have the need to reduce and reduce and reduce, to pare the story or the novel down to its necessaries, to compress experience into single words, phrases, sentences. Writers know the pain of the single wrong word in the sentence, the single word which prevents the sentence from unfolding or, the single word, which when found, allows the sentence to become larger than itself, to unpack into a thought or an image or a feeling which, by all rights, it should be impossible to encode within a sentence. There is the dream of the homeopathic novel, so small so slight, yet which contains the explosive essence.

This essence, that which the author talks about below, finds its best expression for me, as a unique act of observation. The 'essence in my mind out of which this document flows' is, for me, the act of seeing a something, an expression, a pattern, a moment of beauty, which is personal and yet not personal, subjective yet not subjective; perhaps, I think as I write this, it is a 'seeing' from a place in which minds might meet. My job as a writer is to be as committed to that perception and its act of seeing as I can possibly be, to encode as much of that experience into a single sentence as I can manage. My job as a reader is, not only to decode the author's act of seeing from the text before me, but to meet it halfway. Not to settle for a simple description of the moment or process, but to allow myself to be drawn in by it, changed by it.

The miracle of writing, as such, is that this 'seed' or 'essence' does manage to make its way across the paper and the words and all spaces between to take up root in another human being. And, in the best circumstances, it has already been modified by the time it takes root in the reader, by the act of reading, by the unique interaction of the reader with the text. So that, in the best of circumstances, the author does not simply move or replicate that essence, AS AN OBJECT (here a secondary question about whether an essence can even be an object), from one mind to the next, but initiates a process which allows the nurturing of an essence with the reader. And when you think about it, that's a fucking miracle.