there is a new blog post over at www.jikahatsuden.net that i would love for anyone to read and leave a comment on, if you have the time. it's called 'doing literature'.
again, for click-impaired, the full text here.
---
sometimes, things are just a joy to write. they are fun, and they roll off the end of your fingers as though they were always supposed to be this way.
and then you become stuck. you forget how the damn things was supposed to end, if you knew it in the first place. you lose track of what you meant, or how it was supposed to feel.
an artist friend always tells me that he is never done with his paintings, they are never finished: they are just abandoned, because otherwise they wouldn't exist at all.
here is an abandoned story. this was a joy to write, and then i got stuck, and then eventually i figured it might as well be abandoned just like the rest of them.
---
Doing Literature
The day after you left, I sat in my room and looked at your photographs (yes, I had your photograph on my wall and my desk and my bedside table), and I thought to myself that I would make something of you to remember. Watch! I said to your photographs that day, watch! Here, I shall do Poetry to you!
So watch, your photographs did, as I sat at my desk with my nice writing pen and a blank ream of paper that slowly and surely became tattooed with my hatching and scratchings. Slowly, a picture emerged of you, painted in rhyme and what little reason I could conjure; a fractured, fractal funhouse version of you built with my mind and my fingers. In it, you were golden, and you rode a chimera made up of all the little pieces of the world you had touched, fused into a myth to bear you. The chimeras leonine feet beat in time with my labored metre, a galloping gait, claws tapping staccato syllables.
Your photographs looked on.
You are riding a chimera! I crowed when I was done. You are made of gold that moves and breathes, and atop that beast you bestride the world! Are you not impressed?
Your photographs looked on.
Fine, I shrugged, unperturbed, and I tucked the Poem of you into my desk. For my next trick, I shall do Music to you! Watch me remake you with Song!
And so, perhaps a week or so later, your photographs did watch as I abandoned my pen and picked up my guitar. I took her in my hands and began to strum, at first a simple two chords, over and over, looking for a rhythm to ride; and then I found it, and two chords became four, and I put down Charlie (remember, I called her Charlie) and scratched them onto a pad, then picked her up and began again, building notes into progressions and riffs. Each time, I kept coming back to those first two chords, as though they were your name and I was sewing it into the song. No matter how long and how far and how complicated my fingers wandered along Charlies frets (after all, if I was to do Music to you, I had to do it right), I kept returning to that simple duo of minor chords, as though they were the heart and the song was spiraling in and out from them like breathing.
Then, I started to Sing. First, just an echo to the chords; fingers and voice playing Marco Polo with each other from across a lake. I was never much of a singer, as you had told me playfully before, but the song suited my rough throat well enough, and soon I had a counter-melody, simple ornament to the Music, and I had you in Song.
I put Charlie down again, and went to make a cup of coffee. Brought the cup back to my room, sat down, and slowly sipped it while I thought over the Song of you carefully, memorizing with my fingers. Then, I picked up Charlie once more, and played you to the room, your photographs looking on.
When you were done, the last notes of your passing having faded into that afternoons birdsong, I looked up into your photos, smiling.
There! There you are! I have done Song to you! You are beautiful, no? No false modesty; you were marvelous in song, playful and secretive and familiar and unknowable all together. I played your chords again, slowly. Are you not happy, to be so made into Music?
Your photographs looked on.
I was quiet, for a time. I loosely played you again, but my heart wasnt in it anymore, and my voice cracked over simple notes, and I gave up before I made it through your first bridge. I sat, for a time, a little put out. I had made Music of you, after all.
Fine, fine, I said calmly. Youre quite right, of course. Quite right. Should have thought of it earlier. I took the pad with the chords of your Song, and put them away in my desk drawer with your Poem. Forgive me. Of course, Poetry could not be enough, and what is Song but Poetry with a little Music rag-tagging along? No, you are worth so much more. I stood; and although I felt more than a little foolish, it was just me and your photographs, so I struck a pose.
Here! Here! I shall do to you as you so deserve! I shall make Literature of you! Watch! And I went to sleep, fitfully.
The following day, I left the house in the early morning and returned in the afternoon, armed with a typewriter and ribbon, and good firm leaf on which to type (for this would be Literature, not some tawdry penny-dreadful or pamphlet. For this you would be typed, damnit). I sat down, in my chair at my good, solid desk, and set the typewriter before me. Took my reading glasses from their case (you remember, the ones you always told me to get rid of; the ones that made my eyes appear a little milky and far-seeing, as though I were going blind), and put them on my nose, and began to type.
I type for days. I called my friends, told them not to expect me to dinner or the baseball or to the pub for a while; I was doing Literature. To which they invariably sighed and nodded, most of them having had, at the least, Poetry done to them at some point, some even knowing it; but all understanding what it meant. I typed for hours in the day. Sometimes, it would be fifteen, sixteen, seventeen hour stretches Me, the typewriter, and the Novel of you becoming, keystroke after keystroke. Of course, some days I would sit down with the typewriter and nothing. On those days I would get up after an hour or so, and take my notepad, and go walking around town watching people and seeing places and all the time scribbling little plot points or characters into the notepad of the Ideas of the Novel of you.
Slowly, you took shape; a story of adventure and discovery, elements of the fantastic, told in a simple and unadorned style that anyone would have instantly recognized as being yours. Your characters, too, came alive in my notes and in the type, all the characters of the Novel of you. The musician, the artist, the photographer, the homeless drunk, the effervescent thirteen-year-old costumed crimefighter and her autistic twin sister. And the telekinetic schnauzer.
Oh, the twists you took. The suspense, the drama, the ridiculous farce and the pathos and the romance of you. I took you to coffee houses, left pages of you on tables and retired to a corner to watch, and write. The people would come, and as they sat and sipped their mocha or jasmine tea or what-have-you, I would watch them read your pages and write their reactions into my notes. Like the women who started crying, or laughing, or combinations of the two. The students who picked you up one afternoon (who I guessed were Media or Film or Creative Writing students), who wrote their names and contact numbers on your pages and left you for the next, more well-connected person to find.
That was the only time you were left behind, though. Even the lawyer-looking man who read you, then re-read, then took you to the counter and demanded to know who had left you there. Even he, who stalked around the shop asking all the other drinkers if you belonged to them, growing progressively angrier until he stormed out, throwing his half-finished drink half-in the trash; even he took your pages with him. (I could never understand why he was so angry. I often wondered what, in those few pages, he had thought hed recognized.)
Of course, I didnt tell him that I had written those pages. Not because I was afraid, you see, but what would I have told him? Yes, theyre mine. Yes, its someone I used to know; Im doing Literature to them. It sounds mad.
Months, it took, of typing and collating, editing, revising and typing again, until one day, there it was. The Book, the Novel of you. You, Literature, completely. I took all your pages, putting them straight and ordered, and bound them together. Then I put it aside for one, then two, then three whole days; and tried incredibly hard not to think of the Book, sitting there, waiting to be read. I tried to forget it, filling my time with other things: books other than you, songs other than you, poetry and art (other than you, of course); making soup and drinking too much coffee, and taking photographs of the world. Taking all of that data, and thinking and stewing and mulling and coming up with ideas that would be poems and songs and stories other than you.
I reconnected with people. Talked to my friends and told them I had finished the Doing of Literature, and they congratulated me and asked, Well, where is it then? So I made copies of the bound manuscript for my closest, gave them out, and waited, the original still sitting unread on my desk.
In the following weeks, while the original Book remained untouched on the desk, the copies came back one by one. Each of my friends told me that it was beautiful, amazing, unique, confusing, intense, compelling, frustrating, epic; until I collected the last, and began to smile. For, apparently, I had done it.
So back to my room and my desk, and the original manuscript of the Literature I went, and sat, and I opened your cover and began to read. They had been right, my friends, for it was all of those things. It was, after all, you in Literature. All the twists and turns, all the ups and downs, beauty and violence and everything rolled together; into a story and characters that variously screamed and whispered your name. I found myself lost in it like I hadnt been lost in a story since I was twelve and Frank Herbert showed me how worlds were made. And I had written the damn thing. Each chapter draped another layer of sinew and muscle and skin over the bones of your plot; crises and triumph and quiet little moments right up to the climax. Even a denouement I barely remembered (that mustve come in the deep parts of my caffeine-addiction-induced insomnia).
It took me a couple of days to finish it, to absorb it all. Then I sat back. I had done it. I looked up at your photograph on my wall, and I grinned triumphant.
There! There it is! I have made Literature of you, Literature that speaks your name to all who read it!
Your photographs looked on.
What? I said, disbelieving. What is the matter? Are you not pleased?
Your photographs looked on.
What else do you want? I cried angrily. I have done Poetry and Song to you, made you Literature! I have done Alchemy three times over now, each more truthful than the last. I have turned you into beauty in three forms, and still? Still!?!? You have nothing to say? What must I do?
I slammed the manuscript down. I felt powerless.
What do I have to do?
Of course, your photographs said nothing. Impassive as always, they looked on. The truth was as obvious now as it had been before you left. There was nothing I could do, except take your Book and put it away, inside the drawer of the desk that kept your Song and your Poem.
Of course, while I had been here doing Literature, you had been elsewhere, doing Life.
Without me.
---
peace.
again, for click-impaired, the full text here.
---
sometimes, things are just a joy to write. they are fun, and they roll off the end of your fingers as though they were always supposed to be this way.
and then you become stuck. you forget how the damn things was supposed to end, if you knew it in the first place. you lose track of what you meant, or how it was supposed to feel.
an artist friend always tells me that he is never done with his paintings, they are never finished: they are just abandoned, because otherwise they wouldn't exist at all.
here is an abandoned story. this was a joy to write, and then i got stuck, and then eventually i figured it might as well be abandoned just like the rest of them.
---
Doing Literature
The day after you left, I sat in my room and looked at your photographs (yes, I had your photograph on my wall and my desk and my bedside table), and I thought to myself that I would make something of you to remember. Watch! I said to your photographs that day, watch! Here, I shall do Poetry to you!
So watch, your photographs did, as I sat at my desk with my nice writing pen and a blank ream of paper that slowly and surely became tattooed with my hatching and scratchings. Slowly, a picture emerged of you, painted in rhyme and what little reason I could conjure; a fractured, fractal funhouse version of you built with my mind and my fingers. In it, you were golden, and you rode a chimera made up of all the little pieces of the world you had touched, fused into a myth to bear you. The chimeras leonine feet beat in time with my labored metre, a galloping gait, claws tapping staccato syllables.
Your photographs looked on.
You are riding a chimera! I crowed when I was done. You are made of gold that moves and breathes, and atop that beast you bestride the world! Are you not impressed?
Your photographs looked on.
Fine, I shrugged, unperturbed, and I tucked the Poem of you into my desk. For my next trick, I shall do Music to you! Watch me remake you with Song!
And so, perhaps a week or so later, your photographs did watch as I abandoned my pen and picked up my guitar. I took her in my hands and began to strum, at first a simple two chords, over and over, looking for a rhythm to ride; and then I found it, and two chords became four, and I put down Charlie (remember, I called her Charlie) and scratched them onto a pad, then picked her up and began again, building notes into progressions and riffs. Each time, I kept coming back to those first two chords, as though they were your name and I was sewing it into the song. No matter how long and how far and how complicated my fingers wandered along Charlies frets (after all, if I was to do Music to you, I had to do it right), I kept returning to that simple duo of minor chords, as though they were the heart and the song was spiraling in and out from them like breathing.
Then, I started to Sing. First, just an echo to the chords; fingers and voice playing Marco Polo with each other from across a lake. I was never much of a singer, as you had told me playfully before, but the song suited my rough throat well enough, and soon I had a counter-melody, simple ornament to the Music, and I had you in Song.
I put Charlie down again, and went to make a cup of coffee. Brought the cup back to my room, sat down, and slowly sipped it while I thought over the Song of you carefully, memorizing with my fingers. Then, I picked up Charlie once more, and played you to the room, your photographs looking on.
When you were done, the last notes of your passing having faded into that afternoons birdsong, I looked up into your photos, smiling.
There! There you are! I have done Song to you! You are beautiful, no? No false modesty; you were marvelous in song, playful and secretive and familiar and unknowable all together. I played your chords again, slowly. Are you not happy, to be so made into Music?
Your photographs looked on.
I was quiet, for a time. I loosely played you again, but my heart wasnt in it anymore, and my voice cracked over simple notes, and I gave up before I made it through your first bridge. I sat, for a time, a little put out. I had made Music of you, after all.
Fine, fine, I said calmly. Youre quite right, of course. Quite right. Should have thought of it earlier. I took the pad with the chords of your Song, and put them away in my desk drawer with your Poem. Forgive me. Of course, Poetry could not be enough, and what is Song but Poetry with a little Music rag-tagging along? No, you are worth so much more. I stood; and although I felt more than a little foolish, it was just me and your photographs, so I struck a pose.
Here! Here! I shall do to you as you so deserve! I shall make Literature of you! Watch! And I went to sleep, fitfully.
The following day, I left the house in the early morning and returned in the afternoon, armed with a typewriter and ribbon, and good firm leaf on which to type (for this would be Literature, not some tawdry penny-dreadful or pamphlet. For this you would be typed, damnit). I sat down, in my chair at my good, solid desk, and set the typewriter before me. Took my reading glasses from their case (you remember, the ones you always told me to get rid of; the ones that made my eyes appear a little milky and far-seeing, as though I were going blind), and put them on my nose, and began to type.
I type for days. I called my friends, told them not to expect me to dinner or the baseball or to the pub for a while; I was doing Literature. To which they invariably sighed and nodded, most of them having had, at the least, Poetry done to them at some point, some even knowing it; but all understanding what it meant. I typed for hours in the day. Sometimes, it would be fifteen, sixteen, seventeen hour stretches Me, the typewriter, and the Novel of you becoming, keystroke after keystroke. Of course, some days I would sit down with the typewriter and nothing. On those days I would get up after an hour or so, and take my notepad, and go walking around town watching people and seeing places and all the time scribbling little plot points or characters into the notepad of the Ideas of the Novel of you.
Slowly, you took shape; a story of adventure and discovery, elements of the fantastic, told in a simple and unadorned style that anyone would have instantly recognized as being yours. Your characters, too, came alive in my notes and in the type, all the characters of the Novel of you. The musician, the artist, the photographer, the homeless drunk, the effervescent thirteen-year-old costumed crimefighter and her autistic twin sister. And the telekinetic schnauzer.
Oh, the twists you took. The suspense, the drama, the ridiculous farce and the pathos and the romance of you. I took you to coffee houses, left pages of you on tables and retired to a corner to watch, and write. The people would come, and as they sat and sipped their mocha or jasmine tea or what-have-you, I would watch them read your pages and write their reactions into my notes. Like the women who started crying, or laughing, or combinations of the two. The students who picked you up one afternoon (who I guessed were Media or Film or Creative Writing students), who wrote their names and contact numbers on your pages and left you for the next, more well-connected person to find.
That was the only time you were left behind, though. Even the lawyer-looking man who read you, then re-read, then took you to the counter and demanded to know who had left you there. Even he, who stalked around the shop asking all the other drinkers if you belonged to them, growing progressively angrier until he stormed out, throwing his half-finished drink half-in the trash; even he took your pages with him. (I could never understand why he was so angry. I often wondered what, in those few pages, he had thought hed recognized.)
Of course, I didnt tell him that I had written those pages. Not because I was afraid, you see, but what would I have told him? Yes, theyre mine. Yes, its someone I used to know; Im doing Literature to them. It sounds mad.
Months, it took, of typing and collating, editing, revising and typing again, until one day, there it was. The Book, the Novel of you. You, Literature, completely. I took all your pages, putting them straight and ordered, and bound them together. Then I put it aside for one, then two, then three whole days; and tried incredibly hard not to think of the Book, sitting there, waiting to be read. I tried to forget it, filling my time with other things: books other than you, songs other than you, poetry and art (other than you, of course); making soup and drinking too much coffee, and taking photographs of the world. Taking all of that data, and thinking and stewing and mulling and coming up with ideas that would be poems and songs and stories other than you.
I reconnected with people. Talked to my friends and told them I had finished the Doing of Literature, and they congratulated me and asked, Well, where is it then? So I made copies of the bound manuscript for my closest, gave them out, and waited, the original still sitting unread on my desk.
In the following weeks, while the original Book remained untouched on the desk, the copies came back one by one. Each of my friends told me that it was beautiful, amazing, unique, confusing, intense, compelling, frustrating, epic; until I collected the last, and began to smile. For, apparently, I had done it.
So back to my room and my desk, and the original manuscript of the Literature I went, and sat, and I opened your cover and began to read. They had been right, my friends, for it was all of those things. It was, after all, you in Literature. All the twists and turns, all the ups and downs, beauty and violence and everything rolled together; into a story and characters that variously screamed and whispered your name. I found myself lost in it like I hadnt been lost in a story since I was twelve and Frank Herbert showed me how worlds were made. And I had written the damn thing. Each chapter draped another layer of sinew and muscle and skin over the bones of your plot; crises and triumph and quiet little moments right up to the climax. Even a denouement I barely remembered (that mustve come in the deep parts of my caffeine-addiction-induced insomnia).
It took me a couple of days to finish it, to absorb it all. Then I sat back. I had done it. I looked up at your photograph on my wall, and I grinned triumphant.
There! There it is! I have made Literature of you, Literature that speaks your name to all who read it!
Your photographs looked on.
What? I said, disbelieving. What is the matter? Are you not pleased?
Your photographs looked on.
What else do you want? I cried angrily. I have done Poetry and Song to you, made you Literature! I have done Alchemy three times over now, each more truthful than the last. I have turned you into beauty in three forms, and still? Still!?!? You have nothing to say? What must I do?
I slammed the manuscript down. I felt powerless.
What do I have to do?
Of course, your photographs said nothing. Impassive as always, they looked on. The truth was as obvious now as it had been before you left. There was nothing I could do, except take your Book and put it away, inside the drawer of the desk that kept your Song and your Poem.
Of course, while I had been here doing Literature, you had been elsewhere, doing Life.
Without me.
---
peace.
noidd:
hehe thank you