Critique Magazine :: On Writing II

The line is long and my fingers are tired but I refuse to quit. Once you've treated your own prostate cancer and lived to write about it, you know that the human body's power to rejuvenate and endure is miraculous and merely a matter of faith. And faith I have. In spades. And I've shared it all in Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy. The cancer took eight years to treat, the book two to write, and what are a few more hours autographing it for the long line of people who know in their carcinogenic bones that they too could have written this book If only ... if only they had listened to themselves instead of all the experts?
      The line stretches out the door of The Midnight Book Store, down Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade and past all of the fast food cancer stations that line it, up Broadway to Fourteenth St, turns left and winds its way past the Santa Monica Hospital, stretches across Wilshire Blvd and Sunset and turns east, heads for Pomona, Banning, Palm Springs, Blythe, crosses the great California desert and the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains and soon winds through Appalachia and up and down the east coast, past countless elite who hide in their intellectual boxes behind their secret language designed to keep the common man in the dark, just as they are in the dark of their own narrow field of vision, and the line is endless and my fingers grow tired but I continue to sign ... for I have a dream.
      And I sign for the sixty five year old Grandma who was given six weeks to live after two years of treatment of her leukemia at Stanford University's Oncology unit; who read Kamikaze Cowboy and went back to Stanford a year later to show them their prognosis for her demise was severely premature and they conduct their tests, just to assure themselves she is still alive for only through tests can they know she stands and breathes before them, and their tests say yes she is alive and her cancer is gone and she asks them if they want to know why. And they don't, but she tells them anyhow and she mentions Kamikaze Cowboy and they throw her out. And she stands in line with tears in her eyes and I sign.
      I sign for the computer salesman from Texas who couldn't get out of bed without a pill, sleep without a pill, couldn't live without a pill and then he read my little book and discovered what it really means to "just say no to drugs" and he's off the pharmaceutical merry go round and wants to spread the word, and I warn him it might be dangerous but he doesn't care and so I sign for him.
      And I sign for the overweight diabetic teen age girl from Iowa who had been an insulin junkie since she can remember but is now sugar free and nearly off the needle too and goes to sleep with the Kamikaze Cowboy under her pillow and is slim and beautiful and wants to know if I'm married and I say no but she can do better, and I sign for her.
      And I sign and I sign and I sign and my fingers are tired but my spirit strong for I see my dream coming true and I know I will sign forever if need be, sign the book of every soul awakening from the nightmare of living so long at the beck and call of the experts. The specialists. The powerful, educated elite who keep us forever afraid of trusting our own uneducated instincts about our selves. Who keep us distrustful of those voices of common sense who would bear faithful witness to the confusion and misery of the common man forever at the mercy of America's powerful elite as they practice their efficient manipulation in the glorious name of progress and technology.
      And I sign my name and look up ... and the line parts and a figure emerges with limbs of burnished steel and platinum skin, with neon lights and laser-like eyes and he tells me to put down the pen. Tells me my signing days are over. And I laugh.
      "You must stop all of this common sense," he says.
      "Nonsense!" I say.
      "If it were nonsense, I wouldn't be here. Nonsense is the brightest jewel in the crown of the rational elite. Nonsense is why men go to war and give their lives. Nonsense is big business and politics and Mickey Mouse. Nonsense is selling people what they don't need. Nonsense, you moron, is what keeps the wheels of progress turning. But this garden variety stuff, this common sense just will not do. It is making people think."
      "You think so?" I say, assuming this is a practical joke arranged by one of my friends who is in management at Sony. The figure doesn't laugh. His colorful lights flash even brighter. Whomever, whatever this is, it's getting itself very worked up over my little book signing and my small attempt at levity hasn't helped.
      "You can not be allowed to continue. Your book is making people remember." This is no practical joke from Sony.
      "It's important that we remember. Without memory, we are at the mercy of the present. Like children with no life experience upon which to build and increase the depth of their understanding, the strength of their character."
      "Precisely," says the flashing neon figure as the rest of the line begins to back away, "precisely. Memory breeds doubt. Non-conformism. Individualism. We can't have it."
      I put my pen down. I can see the platinum lad is quite serious and void of any sense of humor, common or otherwise, and he's beginning to piss me off. I decide to engage.
      "I thought that's what made America great. At least that's what Thomas Jefferson used to say."
      "Times have changed."
      "But people haven't."
      "Who do you think you are?"
      "A faithful witness."
      "Witness? To what?"
      "To the world and all that's in it. To Everyman ... and who or what, may I ask, do you think you are?"
      " I am pure intelligence. Intellect. I am the son of rational thought …"
      "For a minute there you had me worried, what with all the neon and flashing lights ... I was afraid you were going to say you were God."
      "God? God no! God is emotion. Sentiment. Blind faith, void of reason ... God is unscientific."
      "Couldn't prove it by me."
      "A faithful witness, eh?"
      "One who writes."
      "You're not a writer. James Joyce was a writer. Marcel Proust was a writer ... "
      "Nobody reads Proust anymore. And no one ever read Joyce."
      "That's literature."
      "It's unreadable."
      It's not meant to be read, you moron."
      I promise myself that if he calls me a moron one more time I'm going to turn the homeless loose on him that line the Third Street Promenade outside the book store. That'll give him a taste of common sense he won't soon forget ... him and his abstract gibberish. But I can't help myself ...
      "What about Baudelaire? Zola? Voltaire? Swift?"
      "I'd be careful who your idols are if I was you."
      "Well I've already written the book so stopping me from autographing it is like spiking the cannon after the mortar's been fired."
      "You're the living proof. Without you the book's just a bunch of words. Easily marginalized. We have expert spin doctors who will take care of that."
      "They killed Jesus Christ. Didn't stop the Bible."
      "Who says?"
      "Big hit. Or hadn't you heard?"
      "You’re not as smart as you look." At least he's stopped calling me a moron. "And you're certainly no Jesus Christ. Not nearly as smart as you look."
      "Oh yeah? John of Patmos claims to have channeled Jesus Christ then goes on raving for pages about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Seven Seals, the whores of Babylon, dividing the world into good and evil and undermining completely Christ's careful, and one would assume deliberate, avoidance of painting fanciful pictures of heaven and hell to satiate Christian imaginations. And the earliest manuscripts of this Patmos John are in Hebrew. Quite different from the other John, John the Disciple, who wrote in Greek and during a different time but still gets continually and conveniently blamed for the Wildman of Patmos and his so-called Revelations. 'Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.'"
      There's a pause and I know the Latin riff has got him. I let it get him for a moment, enjoy watching pure intelligence feel stupid, and then, just when it looks as if he's going to pop his platinum skin, I twist the riff.
      " 'What can be asserted without proof, can be denied without proof.' Where's that pure intelligence when you need it, eh?"
      "Latin's a dead language."
      "So is English, thanks to you and your ilk, but that's a whole other discussion."
      "I don't have time for this."
      "Nor I. I have a life to live. Books to sign ... "
      "No you don't. You're finished."
      "Are you kidding me? Didn't you see the line outside? Looks to me like you could use a little common sense. Maybe all the glitter and facade of your glorious intellect has you blinded? Line stretches from here to everywhere. Just because you ignored the line, doesn't mean it isn't there."
      "It doesn't exist! Except as a momentary aberration of doubt in the sea of certainty that we, the keepers of rational thought, have created and that is essential to measured progress of civilized society."
      "Who are you anyway? I mean really. All kidding and pure intelligence aside."
      The burnished steel legs take a step closer. For all his flash and shiny grandeur it strikes me that he has no 'presence.' From the tip of his burnished steel toes to the top of his platinum dome he is all abstraction. Maybe that's why I am not afraid. Nothing in the abstract is real, not even fear. We are eyeball to eyeball. Iris to laser. I resist an almost uncontrollable urge to reach out and touch the platinum. His lights switch wattage and I know he's about to give me the bottom line.
      "I am the system. I am reason. I am the keeper of the secret." He pauses for effect. And to let the full significance of this sink in I presume and then before I can answer, "And you are a pain in the ass to the American Medical Association." He says and lights begin to go off in my head.
      "That's who sent you?"
      "Among others. Like the makers and sellers of armaments. The junk bond dealers and political power brokers and stock market manipulators and multi-national corporate structures and ... "
      "Wow."
      "About time you were impressed."
      "No I mean wow, they've read my little book?"
      "No, no. You moron. They didn't read it. They never read. They had the literary scientists read it for them."
      "And ... " I say with the kneejerk reaction of all writers. And my mind, always susceptible to a tangent, takes one ...
      Writers and their compulsive need for a good review. Even Der Fuhrer was not immune for, it is rumored, during one of their 1939 lying fests, he gave Lord Chamberlin a copy of Mein Kampf. (Looking for an English publisher one would assume.) Some months later, the Author called to tell the Prime Minister that he had changed his mind and was going to blitzkrieg Poland and if he didn't keep his British nose out of it, he might also bomb the shit out of merry old England. 'I should have known,' said the Prime Minister with a sigh, 'I read your book.'
      Pause.
      'And ... ?' asked Hitler.
      The tangent dead ends, my mind comes back to me and I find myself still waiting for a response. I repeat the question.
      "And ... what did the literary scientists think?
      " ... None of them is pleased with all this common sense hoopla you prattle on about," says my platinum pal, "Suggesting that the uneducated nonprofessional masses can understand this complex world we live in without the assistance of specialists! And the AMA is particularly incensed with your proselytizing. You're hurting business! And you will stop."
      "I live in this society and I mean to write about it."
      "Not if you know what's good for you!"
      "I don't write for me. I write for the people."
      "The people?" He says with derision. "The people are only interested in fiction."
      "You mean novels?"
      "Bingo."
      "Zola, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Dickens ... all those guys you hate so much ... they wrote novels. Stories about social reform, about the corruption of the establishment, the power of the individual to make a difference ... they packed quite a wallop."
      "Not anymore. I told you. Times have changed. Voltaire was alive today ... "
      "He'd be pretty pissed off to see what's happened to his Age of Reason."
      "Too bad. He were alive today, nobody would read him. That's why we have television. To keep people from reading. To make sure some guy like him doesn't sneak through. We've diffused novels to the point that they're only value is as selling tools for the movies that are made of them. So if you gotta keep scribbling ... "
      "Actually I use a word processor. Microsoft ...
      "I'm surprised. Neanderthal like you. You wanna write, write a novel. Or write books about books. Or about how fucked up you are. And you are. All writers are. Otherwise why would you write? Except to share your misery?"
      "Maybe we write to share our joy, our vitality?"
      "Proust with his asthma and closet homosexuality ... "
      "I thought you liked him."
      "Hemingway–alcoholic suicide; Joyce–poverty stricken and blind; Fitzgerald–alcoholic and impotent; Kerouac–momma's boy, drug addict and drunk; Burroughs ... ditto ... Tennessee Williams ... ditto ... you want the entire list of your joyous vital writers or do you get the picture?"
      "Shakespeare?"
      "An aberration. A freak. He doesn't compute. Thank God they don't live long."
      "Shaw? Lived longer than most elephants."
      " Or maybe they just know we can't make them famous, truly famous, until they’re dead? Take Raymond Carver for instance. Wrote harmless, twisted little stories about his peripheral little life. What a relief that now he's dead we can give him solace for all his "artistic" suffering. Recognize him for his "literary" merit. Even throw in a movie deal to show how "important" he was to us. The last thing we need are long-lived, "important" writers writing real books for the masses in simple language that every Tom Dick and Harry can understand. Heaven forbid. We can't have uncontrolled truths being circulated amongst the masses. They are non-professional people! You would do well to take some lessons from James Joyce.
      "James Joyce!"
      "The greatest writer of all time as far as we're concerned."
      "James Joyce?"
      "The perfect example of what it means to be a literary giant."
      "But nobody reads him. Or understands him"
      "Bingo! Mention the name of Joyce and there isn't a soul who won't tell you he is a great writer. All without having read him. Which, as I already told you, is the point. You'd better wake up and smell the system. We live in a world where food is grown, packaged and sold not to be eaten, but to make money; where nuclear missiles are made, sold and deployed, not to be used, but to maintain "peace"; where fire, theft and car insurance is big business because statistically nobody needs it but the lawyers; where political leaders are elected not to lead and be followed, but to read polls to find out what the people want to hear and then tell it to them, while they do what we tell them to do. Writers would do well to remember Joyce and forget Celine and Dickens and Moliere and Tolstoy and Zola and most of all your Voltaire.
      " 'All styles are good, except the boring.' That's what Voltaire said. And I agree with him."
      "He was a dangerous guy. A real nuisance."
      " 'God is not on the side of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.' A real guerrilla writer if ever there was one."
      "Yeah that's him. And you're gonna regret you ever heard of him. France had the good nonsense to throw him out. Unfortunately they sent him to England where he hooked up with that other rabble rouser Swift. Learned a lot of bad habits ... satire, irony, ridicule of those in power. Voltaire was just mad cause he lost all of his money. If he had learned how to kiss the ass of Royalty, and believe me it wasn't because he didn't try, he would never have spent so much time stirring up the stupid citizenry. No one else would listen to him. Him and all his populist pamphlets on personal freedom and humanism. Took centuries for us to give him and his Age of Reason just the right spin. Thank goodness those days are behind us ... "
      "Voltaire wouldn't like it. Spinning the intent of reason until it is nothing more than dogma pretending to be solution to the very problems it has created. If he were alive today ... "
      "But he isn't. And we won't have the pathetic likes of you stirring up people's memories of those unpleasant times."
      "You mean memories of a time when a word meant what it meant and a book could give the Pope an anxiety attack or tumble a government or head of state?"
      "Those days are gone and you better get used to it. Joyce was the first to get it right. 'Important' writers are not meant to be read. Except maybe at poetry readings or around the conference table. Writer's reading their own words to other writers. Giving themselves awards. That's what today’s real writers do to appease their creative tick. And they have the good nonsense to make their livings by teaching other would-be writers how to do exactly the same. How to take the danger out and put the literary in. Or they support their insular lives by writing reviews to pass amongst themselves; or by opening a restaurant or hosting a talk show or running for public office or writing screenplays or sitcoms. There's lots of work out there for today’s writer, just so long as he understands the system. Or drinks enough. But there is no room for the writer who would "bear faithful witness" as you so quaintly put it. And in plain language! For the masses? "
      "So the less people read you, the more important, the more 'literary' you are.
      "Bingo! But only after you are dead."
      "Back in the old days the important writers were also the popular ones. Moliere, Shakespeare, Byron ... Baudelaire said any book that doesn't address itself to the majority, in quantity and intelligence, is a stupid book."
      "Baudelaire? Baudelaire? Aren't you listening? You better get your mind out of the nineteenth century and forget you ever read about it. Or him! We've got plenty, plenty of popular writers. Don't you ever go to the beach?"
      "But they're not important, right?"
      "Of course they're important. We sell their books in airports, drugstores, shopping malls ... everywhere. Even book stores if we have to. Would we do that if they weren't important? They are the perfect distraction for your beloved masses. And they adapt well."
      "The masses?"
      "And the books. Into movies. Everyone connected with them makes lots of money and they don't make anyone nervous! You, on the other hand, make people nervous."
      "Better that than putting them to sleep."
      "And your book will never make a movie or a mini-series. And neither will any of Voltaire's, for your information."
      "Pretty good company ... "
      "And that isn't all you have in common ... you and Mr. Voltaire."
      "No?"
      "No. You're both dead."
      And with that this whirling, flashing dervish riveted me with his laser eyes. A stream of light shot from his platinum sockets. I felt beams of light penetrate my eyes and seep gradually into my brain, into the frontal lobe and then ooze back and down toward the medulla oblongata and then stream like warm honey down my spinal cord and into the epicenter of my creative being. I'd been laser-eyed. Mesmerized. Rationalized. I felt a letting go, a calm, out of which was born a strong desire to withdraw from the field of battle against the heavy battalions of dogma and deceit. I no longer felt obsessed to wave the flag of common sense in their face and "vex the world rather than divert it."
      I had been disarmed of my dangerous ways and for the first time in my life I tasted what it felt like to belong. To be of the world and not out of it. I started dreaming of the screenplay, the mini-series I would write. Of the money I would make.
      I stopped signing. The line disappeared. And the book store, and even sunny Santa Monica, and I sat up in bed in Bigfork, Montana, looked out across the frozen expanse of Flathead Lake and was heartened to realize it was all a dream. I felt my resolution to be a faithful witness creep back into my brain, my blood, my bones. Voltaire would be pleased. It was only a dream and I was still an individual, still out of step with the institutions of conformity as they march to the edge of the cliff of despair and I felt, and was thrilled to be, out of this world.
      I climbed out of bed. Got down on my knees and began to pray.
      "Dear God. Grant me the wisdom and the strength that I might someday write a book so grounded in reality and truth that no organized power can control it or make profit from it. A book so dangerous to the powerful elite that I will be crucified for having written it. Amen."
      And I went to my writing table and began to write ...
      "In a time of moral confusion, of social decay and violence, when, with the push of a button millions of people and perhaps entire civilizations can be dusted in one nuclear moment, still the most powerful weapon on the face of the earth is the bare word written fearlessly, with vigor and free of any debt to any established power structure of any kind. For there is nothing more terrifying to those in power than a dangerous wordsmith who uses his weapon ... the word ... with clarity and simplicity. Destroying the walls of intellectual obfuscation masquerading as knowledge and expertise with his battering ram of common sense made from the raw material of having lived in the real world and not in the fluorescent halls of bureaucracy that house the technocrats of power."
      It wouldn't get me killed but it was a beginning. The genesis of which ... I reached for my Bible. Flip a few pages. Bingo. Genesis. Verse eleven:

"Come let us ... confuse their speech, so that they will not understand what they say to one another."
      And then with time, with the ebb and flow of generations and the fall from grace and the birth of good and evil and the flowering of dualistic thinking ... with all of this came the scattering of the tribes and the flowering of languages, each created by its tribe not to increase communication and understanding but to create division, keep control, keep secrets and gain power. And the glut of these many languages was called ... babble; the place from which they came ... Babylon.
      And mankind has been babbling on ... and off, more or less, ever since. Never more than now, in a time and place where society has the highest technology the world has ever seen at it's disposal; where computers are personal and everyone is a frequent flyer and facsimiles are electronic and endemic; where everyone has hundreds of channels with the remotest control and yet, in spite of all this scientific widgetry, it is a society of peoples incapable of communicating with or understanding one another. Because one people is from the tribe of Law, one from Medicine, one from Biology, one from Anthropology, one from Computer Electronics, one from Real Estate; one from Male, one from Female, and a whole pack of them from Politics. Each with their own, highly developed, brand of babble designed to keep those from outside in the dark and at their mercy.
      The addictive beauty of babble is that it renders all words void of meaning so that paradoxically, as any politician could tell you, any word can mean whatever the moment calls for it to mean.
      Even such simple words as 'freedom', 'health', 'love', 'sex', 'marriage', 'truth', 'peace', 'war', 'is' and 'alone', have been babbled into meaninglessness. And we poor speakers of these simple words, who depend on them for our connection to that better part of ourselves, who have not learned a specialist babble, are made to feel ignorant and illiterate by those who have. Living our lives forever at their mercy. Of which there is none. As any politician could tell you.
      The times are dire. It's sink or swim. Obfuscate or vacate. The death knell of language is sounding. As a matter of survival Everyman is now forced to learn the rules of the game once only known to lawyers, doctors, politicians and other members of the aristocracy of technocrats. We common folk must now learn how to fracture the pie. Divide and conquer. Learn how to be unreadable, un-intelligible, as a sign of expertise and intelligence and as the key to control.
      Any plumber worth his plunger can now render a heart surgeon mute by speaking in the babble unique to his Rotor Rooting Tribe.
      But not me. I will not babble. Will not let simple words become gibberish and die to be shipped off to the morgue of dead languages, along with with Latin, Sanskrit and Sioux, and have their significance autopsied by the ghoulish scientists of the Literary Tribe.
      To obfuscate is to defecate on the divinity of human experience and I say it is time to call a spade a spade, a truth a truth, a lie a lie and hold accountable those who would hide their hypocrisy and ignorance behind the facade of their boorish expertise.
      Let us be done with the wordsmiths of the establishment who would castrate our ability to communicate by rendering language so hopelessly complex that it becomes not a means of communication, of exchanging our individual reflections on the world we live in, but rather a shield, used by those elite few who master it, to keep us from ever knowing the real truth of that world or the degree to which it has passed us by.
      Let the only babbling we listen to be God's brook.