—William Faulkner

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Exile’s Letter

From the Chinese of Li Po, usually considered the greatest poet of China: written by him while in exile about 760 A. D., to the Hereditary War-Councillor of Sho, “recollecting former companionship.”

So-kin of Rakuho, ancient friend, I now remember
That you built me a special tavern,
By the south side of the bridge at Ten-Shin.
With yellow gold and white jewels we paid for the songs and laughter,
And we were drunk for month after month, forgetting the kings and princes.
Intelligent men came drifting in, from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially, there was nothing at cross-purpose;
And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship.
And we all spoke out our hearts and minds and without regret.
And then I was sent off to South Wei, smothered in laurel groves,
And you to the north of Raku-hoku,
Till we had nothing but thoughts and memories between us.
And when separation had come to its worst
We met, and travelled together into Sen-Go
Through all the thirty-six folds of the turning and twisting waters;
Into a valley of a thousand bright flowers that was the first valley,
And on into ten thousand valleys full of voices and pine-winds.
With silver harness and reins of gold, prostrating themselves on the ground,
Out came the East-of-Kan foreman and his company;
And there came also the “True-man” of Shi-yo to meet me,
Playing on a jewelled mouth-organ.
In the storied houses of San-Ko they gave us more Sennin music;
Many instruments, like the sound of young phœnix broods.
And the foreman of Kan-Chu, drunk,
Danced because his long sleeves
Wouldn’t keep still, with that music playing.
And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his lap,
And my spirit so high that it was all over the heavens.

And before the end of the day we were scattered like stars or rain.
I had to be off to So, far away over the waters,
You back to your river-bridge.
And your father, who was brave as a leopard,
Was governor in Hei Shu and put down the barbarian rabble.
And one May he had you send for me, despite the long distance;
And what with broken wheels and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going
Over roads twisted like sheep’s guts.
And I was still going, late in the year, in the cutting wind from the north
And thinking how little you cared for the cost and you caring enough to pay it.
Then what a reception!
Red jade cups, food well set, on a blue jewelled table;
And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning;
And you would walk out with me to the western corner of the castle,
To the dynastic temple, with the water about it clear as blue jade,
With boats floating, and the sound of mouth-organs and drums,
With ripples like dragon-scales going grass-green on the water,
Pleasure lasting, with courtezans going and coming without hindrance,
With the willow-flakes falling like snow,
And the vermilioned girls getting drunk about sunset,
And the waters a hundred feet deep reflecting green eyebrows—
Eyebrows painted green are a fine sight in young moonlight,
Gracefully painted—and the girls singing back at each other,
Dancing in transparent brocade,
And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it,
Tossing it up under the clouds.

And all this comes to an end,
And is not again to be met with.
I went up to the court for examination,
Tried Layu’s luck, offered the Choyu song,
And got no promotion,
And went back to the East Mountains white-headed.

And once again we met, later, at the South Bridge head.
And then the crowd broke up—you went north to San palace.
And if you ask how I regret that parting?
It is like the flowers falling at spring’s end, confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking—
There is no end of things in the heart.

I call in the boy,
Have him sit on his knees to write and seal this,
And I send it a thousand miles, thinking.

(Translated by Ezra Pound from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the Professors Mori and Araga.)

Bruce Sterling, photo by kandinski

This unorganized lump of speculation is more or less a dump of my brain’s activity after I read Bruce Sterling’s talk, “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” which he gave at Transmediale 10, Berlin, Feb. 6, 2010.

A few quotes:

Refuse the awe of the future. Refuse reverence to the past. If they are really the same thing, you need to approach them from the same perspective.

and

Yes, you will look ridiculous. But by what standard? By what standard can you be held to be ridiculous? Why not just go and make yourself a personal public testimony for a future that doesn’t exist? Why not just carry it out with a kind of Gandhian dedication, and see what happens?

and

Atemporality is a philosophy of history with a built-in expiration date. It has a built in expiration date. It’s not going to last forever. It’s not a perfect explanation, it’s a contingent explanation for contingent times.

Of course you should read the transcript to get a proper sense.

But what he proposes isn’t true atemporality: even if we glean data from various time periods, even if we transport ourselves, as in Borges’s famous story, Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, through experience and force of will, and in our minds recreate a former time, we still live and act in a sequence; we haven’t shimmied out of time entirely. If we were to break out of chronology (if such a thing were possible) we would need to write a new method of thinking onto our brains, to use the same hardware for an unintended but feasible purpose, like using a bobbypin to pick a lock. In fact, the act of escaping time and reprogramming ourselves is the same: as we are now, we assume relationships between the moments we see. But if that were not true, what sorts of thoughts could we have? Would they be discrete, or would all the thoughts we had and ever would have coalesce into an amalgam of experience, sensation, and intention? Is that how to know an atemporal being, by the shape his thoughts and acts make as he slides through a cross-section of time, like the Sphere in Flatland, projecting the dimensions of his character onto a sequential topography?

Cross reference this TED talk by Daniel Kahneman about memory and happiness, in which Kahneman says, “We think of our future as anticipated memories,” and explains the differences between the “remembering self” and the “experiencing self.”

So then, what defines our culture’s collective remembering self? Is it simply the consensus between members? I don’t think the experiencing self exists from the collective point of view, because currently—and I say “currently” in view of Sterling’s talk, with a loose grip on my map of how any given process executes in our transient society—our culture assembles its collective consciousness through transmissions of stories from one person to another. If we can each become neurons, then we will have some collective identity and function, and perhaps spawn a collective experiencing self.

To quote Borges from Pierre Menard again, “Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.”

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hiperactivo/ / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Yes, I made that.

“I am one of those who like to stay late at the café,” the older waiter said. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.”

— Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Mr McCarthy says:

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way. Things I’ve written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there’s something about writing about it that flattens them. You’ve used them up.

And, on the subject of the future and art:

Well, I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.

And, while talking about his forthcoming book, which is about a brother and sister, he says:

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Neil Gaiman said something similar about writing The Graveyard Book: he didn’t feel ready, waited a few years and tried again, but didn’t feel ready; and then, one day, he realized he wasn’t getting any better, so he sat down and wrote it. I wonder if there is any point of waiting for competence, then—working as one waits, of course—whether these two respectable writers achieved a new level of skill after waiting which made their stories manageable. Assuming the writer is basically competent initially, I suspect not. Some stories need time to simmer; it’s true, but writers improve themselves by daring to write stories that test the clarity of their vision.

I’ve been thinking about risk in literature lately—mostly in the context of wanting not to retread smooth ground—but I run into the same wall each time: by what criteria should I measure risk? (For an example of what he means by “creative risk,” Damien cites Bradbury, a writer of whose work I am, on the whole, embarrassingly ignorant, although I’ve read a few of his stories.)

Does risk lie in the writer’s fear of reprisal? Does experimentation lie in simple controversy (talking about what a society has quietly agreed to ignore), or telling stories in untried forms, or telling stories from a new point of view (a person, perhaps, previously ignored in that writer’s culture), or setting a story in a new sort of place? The writer can play with any aspect of fiction; there are no rules if the result works, and no penalty besides wasted time if he fails.

Short stories are an excellent medium for experimentation: they pose comparatively low risk, in terms of time invested. Elizabeth Bear compared the short story to the club scene in music: both are comprised of “bubble and boil;” they’re a conversation, one story to another, and their virtue is immediate feedback. Short stories are where we spy out the new land.

And what are the stakes? Are we risking only readers’ disapproval? I don’t think it’s mostly cowardice that stymies exploration; it’s complacency, or calcified imaginations. (And too, not every writer is by necessity an explorer. Some are homesteaders, and their role is valuable as well.)

What I want, and what is most difficult for me, is to write fresh stories, honest ones, without softening or misdirecting my words. Paul Park apparently suffers from none of this difficulty, if judged by his excellent fiction, yet he said the following in an interview, as he discussed the evolution of his style:

… the hardest thing for me as a writer is to speak without irony, without the protection of being misunderstood. To say, “this is what I think is important,” or “this is what I think is true, or beautiful, or funny, or moving”—that is what is difficult for me.

I strive toward greater honesty in all things. But is this greater personal clarity and vulnerability the sort of uncommon boldness we’re striving for, or is that process of flaying the lying layers from the writer’s heart simply called “writing well?”

At the last, whether all my other questions are answered or not, I want to know: where is the unpeopled frontier? Because I want to spy out the new land.

the tortoise in the wheelchair wrapped his forehead in a bandage
with a cast they made from plaster for his phony broken leg
so he’d get pushed around the sidewalk by the zookeeper’s assistant
with the hummingbird observing from behind the yellow flower
and he flapped his tiny wings they moved so fast you couldn’t see them
with resentment for the tortoise which was clear by his expression
but the tortoise turned and smiled with a peacefulness which proved
that there’s a movement in our stillness and however much we move

we’re bound to stand completely still.

— mewithoutYou, Goodbye, I!

I don’t simply want books in a general sense, I want books that will change me, that I will love, inspiring fiction and non-fiction, which means I want intelligent, informed recommendations. I want the literary equivalent of a specialty bartender who knows my tastes and will recommend weird new drinks he, in his occult bartender scouring of the dark quarter, has found and enjoyed. As Damien says, “We want educated, erudite staff with whom we can discuss not just books but the broad range of knowledge we learn from them.”

So then I thought, “Egad, what if I could partake of a refreshing beverage while reading said personally recommended stories? What if I could talk to smart people, both staff and fellow patrons, about books I enjoy, and, through conversation, enjoy great books more deeply, and from various perspectives?”

I wish there was a bar that included a well-stocked library, preferably my “if I were a rich man” library, walled with inset, dark wood bookshelves bearing rolling ladders; it would be a wide room festooned with comfy chairs and couches, split into alcoves acoustically tweaked and separated for quiet reading, conversation, and pool, various sized alcoves intended for groups of three, six, and ten; all of it bereft of television; reserved for people who wouldn’t ruin it with body shots and discussions of “which Grey’s Anatomy character turns me on.”

That last bit is horribly elitist. As if, having created this citadel of the intelligentsia, I would be allowed in. Feh. But what sort of clientele would it attract? Would it self select? I think so. Other questions: would a club like this depend on foot-traffic, and random passers-by, or should it be referral or invitation only, like a speakeasy? Would it require membership fees, or could it subsist on proceeds of the bar/book sales?

Self sufficiency based on sales would be one way to avoid excluding, as Damien mentions, “the poor working classes who can’t afford the fees.” If I did require a membership fee, some help for people who can’t afford it would be necessary, but direct sponsorship, from one patron to another, seems like a horrible idea, because then an explicit hierarchy would develop, instead of the muddier status negotiation that already happens naturally. Maybe some sort of general scholarship fund? Because if somebody wants in, he probably likes to read, and so I want to include him. (NB: the “hims” here and elsewhere do not denote maleness. )

I’d want membership to a club like this to be earned, and therefore somewhat exclusive. But then, too, books are pretty great, and I don’t want people going without. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (But I’m not so large, and I should probably be more consistent.) Also, when one talks about earning entry, one has to develop criteria, and that’s some dicey business.

But I don’t think general literacy would be in any way hampered by an exclusive reading club. The public library is a wonderful resource, and is run by the government (in a good way?), and, at least in Wake County in North Carolina, has an excellent selection, smart, enthusiastic staff, and a killer inter-library loan setup, via which a patron can request almost any book circulating in the United States (maybe elsewhere too). I used to work at one of the branches, and man, I got more intelligent recommendations from my coworkers each day than I could possibly read (woo Southeast Regional Library!). And, anyway, I’m talking about limiting club membership to people who want to be members, so it’s a bit of a moot point.

This is a meandering mess, and I’m fairly certain I’ve repeated myself. Bottom line, fancypants book bars: why don’t I own one?

“I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties; that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.”

- Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov