How Literature Saved My Life (17 page)

According to Tolstoy, the purpose of art is to transfer feeling from one person’s heart to another person’s heart. In collage, it’s the transfer of consciousness, which strikes me as immeasurably more interesting and loneliness-assuaging. The collage-narrator, who has the audacity to stage his or her own psychic crisis as emblematic of a larger cultural crux and general human dilemma, is virtually by definition in some sort of emotional trouble. His or her voice tends, therefore, to be acid, cryptic, antic, hysterical (though hysteria usually ventriloquizing as monotone). I read to get beneath the monotone to the animating cataclysm. No wonder I’m a fan of so many collage books: they’re all madly in love with their own crises.

This American Life
, say. At its least ambitious,
okay, here is a bunch of audio about money
. At its best, each segment hands the baton to the next segment, and by minute 48, you’re in a significantly different and more interesting locale than you were at minute 17.

I wonder what it is about white space that’s so alluring. I find that I almost literally can’t read a book if it’s unbroken
text. What does such seamless fluency have to do with how I experience anything? (Collage = stutter text.) Whereas the moment I see the text broken up into brief fragments, I’m intellectually and aesthetically and almost erotically alert. Louise Glück: “I’m attracted to the ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. Often I wish that the entire poem could be made in this vocabulary.” Why wish? Why not do it?

The traditional novel is a freeway with very distinct signage, while collage is surface street to surface street—with many more road signs, and each one is
seemingly
more open to interpretation, giving the traveler just a suggestion or a hint. One reader might think he’s going through the desert; the next, that she’s driving to the North Pole. The traditional novel tells the reader pretty much where he’s going. He’s a passenger, looking at the pretty sights along the way. Collage demands that the reader figure out for herself where she is and where she’s going (hint: she’s going somewhere quite specific, guided all along by the subterranean collagist).

In quantum physics, electrons “test out” all possible paths to a destination before “choosing” the most efficient path. For instance, during photosynthesis, electrons in a green leaf perform a “random walk,” traveling in many directions at the same time. Only after all possible routes have been explored is the most efficient path retroactively chosen.

A cloud of gas is really just particles of hydrogen and
helium floating in empty space; transformed by gravity, the particles collapse from wild amorphousness into a thread being spun by its own increasing density into the shape of a giant star.

Manguso again: “White space signifies certainty that at least something has been said, that something has been finished, and that I may pause, digest, and evaluate. I fear being fooled into reading strikingly imperfect books. I don’t want to have to hold my breath until the very end and then find it wasn’t worth it.”

I sometimes stop reading front to back and read the book backward. I can’t predict which books it will happen to me with, but this reverse reading will tug on me like a magnet about halfway or two-thirds through. It occurs most often with books that I love the most.

In such books, the writer (the reader, too, for that matter) is manifestly aware that he or she will pass this way but once, and all possibilities are available. We’re outside genre and we’re also outside certain expectations of what can be said, and in this special space—often, interestingly, filled with spaces—the author/narrator/speaker manages, in hundreds of brief paragraphs, to convey for me, indelibly, what it feels like for one human being to be alive, and by implication, all human beings.

A
REVIEWER SAID
about my third book, the novel in stories whose cover I mentioned a few pages back, that if I kept going in that direction, i.e., toward concision, I’d wind up writing books composed of one very beautiful word. He meant it as a put-down, but to me it was wild praise.

“Honestly,” Natalie said, “most people my age don’t have the attention span to sit down and watch a two-hour movie, let alone read a book.”

In J. Robert Lennon’s
Pieces for the Left Hand
, “A local novelist spent ten years writing a book about our region and its inhabitants which, when completed, added up to more than a thousand pages.… Exhausted by her effort, she at last sent it off to a publisher, only to be told it would have to be cut by nearly half.” The final manuscript in its entirety: “Tiny upstate town/Undergoes many changes/Nonetheless endures.”

Manguso, to me: “When I read a poetry collection, I read the book ‘in order,’ which is to say in order of length. I read the shortest poems first, then the slightly longer ones. I skip any that are more than two pages. No time. My taste for small art might be related to my apparent short-term-memory problem involved with long narrative (or length in general).”

A friend gave me a ticket to a seat in the first row at a Blazers-Mavs playoff game. I was stunned by what the
game looked like up close. Given the height, width, wingspan, speed, quickness, and strength of the ten players on the court, only about five hundred people in the entire world could even dream of operating with any efficiency in the 20′ by 20′ space in which nearly the entire game was conducted. In order to get open for a shot, a player had to improvise at warp speed.

It’s nearly impossible now to tell a story that isn’t completely familiar and predictable. You have to cut to the part we haven’t heard before. See David Eagleman’s
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
, which consists of forty very brief descriptions (mostly in the second person) of afterlife scenarios. Each “tale” feels less like a “story” than a hyperextended, overly literal joke or the explanation of the rules to a complex video game or role-playing game.

The point is often lost upon me in longer works, which may be “well made,” but what I can pull from them remains obdurate. In some prose poems/lyric essays/short-shorts, I’m told a simple and clear “story,” but the writer has figured out a way to stage, with radical compression, his or her essential vision. Such works are often disarming in their pretense of being throwaways. At first glance, they may feel relatively journalistic, but they rotate toward the metaphysical. Working within such a tight space, the writer needs to establish tension quickly, so he often paints a sexual tableau. Said differently: prose poems/lyric essays/short-shorts frequently hold the universal via the ordinary.

I love infinitesimal paintings, the more abstract the better. (Not without exception, but in general, as one moves east, the orientation of art schools gets less abstract, more traditional, more commercial.)

Manguso, for the nth time: “In college I was once accused of owning only six objects. In my dating days, as soon as I anticipated going to bed with someone, I found it absurd, irrational, to further resist the inevitable. If there’s a good line in a book, I’ll happily copy out the line and sell the book to the Strand. Jettisoning content—temporal, material, or textual—makes me feel good all over. There’s no time to relax in a short text. It’s like resting during the hundred-yard dash. It’s ridiculous even to consider. One should instead close the book and just watch television or take a nap. Kafka, who was unusually susceptible to textual stimuli, read only a couple of pages of a book at a time, he read the same relatively few things over and over, his reading habits were eccentric, and he wasn’t a completist. One good thing about my impending death is that I don’t need to fake interest in anything. Look, I’m dying! In Joseph Heller’s memoir,
Now and Then
, there’s a scene in which Mario Puzo, after visiting Joe in the hospital, says with marked envy that Joe would be able to use the diagnosis as a social excuse for the rest of his life.”

My father’s favorite joke: Two prisoners told each other the same jokes so many times that they resorted to numbering the jokes and just mentioning numbers. One
prisoner turned to his bunkmate and said, “Hey: number twenty-seven.” The other one didn’t laugh. “Why didn’t you laugh?” “I didn’t like how you told it.”

My former student Tara Ebrahimi, who has battled manic depression and suicidal longings (we bonded like bandits): “I don’t want to be bogged down by the tangential, irrelevant, or unnecessary. Stick a spear straight to my heart—stick it straight to my brain.”

D
O I LOVE ART ANYMORE
, or only artfully arranged life?

How it didn’t
.

V
ONNEGUT
: Contemporary writers who leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorian writers misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

“Seattle’s downtown has the smoothness of a microchip,” Charles Mudede says. “All of its defining buildings—the Central Library, Columbia Tower, Union Square towers, its stadiums—are new and evoke the spirit of twenty-first century technology and market utopianism. If there’s any history here, it’s a history of the future. The city’s landmark, the Space Needle, doesn’t point to the past but always to tomorrow.”

Most new technologies appear to undergo three distinct phases. At first, the computer was so big and expensive that only national governments had the resources
to build and operate one. Only the Army and a handful of universities had multi-room-sized computers. A little later, large corporations with substantial research budgets, such as IBM, developed computers. The computer made its way into midsized businesses and schools. Not until the late ’70s and early ’80s did the computer shrink enough in size and price to be widely available to individuals. Exactly the same pattern has played out with nylon, access to mass communication, access to high-quality printing, Humvees, GPS, the web, handheld wireless communications, etc., etc. (Over a longer timeline, something quite similar happened with international trade: at first, global interaction was possible only between nations, then between large companies, and only now can a private citizen get anything he wants manufactured by a Chinese factory and FedExed to his shop.)

The individual has now risen to the level of a minigovernment or minicorporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mininetwork. The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn’t matter anymore that I have or am on a network. The power of the technology cancels itself out via its own ubiquity. Nothing really changes: the individual’s ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule. In the case of the web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience—a few more people slide through the door—but
Facebook is finally a crude personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away.

Moore’s Law: the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit—essentially, computational speed—doubles every two years. Most of humanity can continuously download porn (by far the largest revenue generator on the web) ever faster and at ever higher resolution. The next Shakespeare will be a hacker possessing programming gifts and ADD-like velocity, which is more or less how the original Shakespeare emerged—using/stealing the technology of his time (folios, books, other plays, oral history) and filling the Globe with its input. Only now the globe is a billion seats and expanding. New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and—possessing a vision unhumbled by technology—use them to disassemble/recreate the web.

I am not that computer programmer. How, then, do I continue to write? And why do I want to?