Behind the Purgative Text

I am lazy. Lacking in discipline. In initiative. Too often, I am unstirred in my sleep, and none of the ambitions of the world can rouse me. Sometimes, I ascribe this to my Floridian origins, and I am charmed by the joke. In reality, this impenetrable indolence probably finds its source in my own vying humors, the vices and virtues I have acquired through my life, the defeats or victories (mostly Pyrrhic) I've hung round my neck.

I have always wanted to write. Or should I say, be a writer? (We all have our romanticisms, our vanities. Some more or less than others.)

Not to say I haven't written. But more than that, I have always wanted to just be a writer. To be a writer. To look a writer's part. To play the part as well, but I think foremost to look like a writer. To seem like one.

And what does a writer look like? A writer is a person of carefully cultivated style, elegant in demeanor, but reserved in outward expression. He needn't have the layer of distance that a thick pair of goggles affords, but he is never without his poet's brow, his troubling gaze. His chin, icon of courage, is never pointed straight ahead; it's always tilted. His footstep humors the surface of the world, but is never wholly in it. I do think he is interested less in the people of his life, more in the people and objects, places and trajectories of his own fantasy. He can weather any amount of tedium or quotidium, because for him moments away from writing are only moments for planning, thinking, revolving over ideas that will help him when he finally sits down again with his notebooks.

An artist is always industrious. An artist is one who is never without his utensils, without his devices, and projects. He crafts without thinking. He can't help but create. For him, it is of the utmost biological urgency to express himself artistically. It is an uncontrollable urge.

An artist is sometimes inspired. There is the legend that Jean-Paul Sartre never revised his work: For him, art was a subterranean well that again and again breached the dam of his conscious mind, without fail and without spilling. Knowing Sartre's personality, it would not be surprising if he aimed to proliferate another myth - that he never took notes.

The truth is that all art is a combination of industry and inspiration. Einstein: 'Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.' This quote may sound nice and definitive, or it may be an exaggeration. Whatever the case, I know from experience that without a great deal of industry in any field, there is rarely ever growth.

I used to be very fond of Natalie Goldberg's method of free association writing (Writing Down the Bones). The idea was to write - regardless of hesitation, of planning, of fleeting moments of inferiority - write, regardless of it all. You select a topic, and then a time-frame, and you write: without ever picking your pen up, or allowing it to fall behind. All the muscles of your hand could seize, your apparatus of thought could bury itself in allusions, your vanity could balk at poor punctuation or penmanship, everything could go wrong, still your pen must soar like a freshly glutted eagle across a white plain that holds no interest. You never go back and fix mistakes, you never plan what to say, you never try to clarify a thought poorly executed. You just write, never relieving your hand, your mind, your vanity. For 10 minutes, 15, 20 - then, you do it again.

I have often said that being a writer (read artist in general) is a lot like being a prophet. And just as Moses had first to climb Mount Sinai to receive the Word of God, so must the writer. It is so tempting for new artists to hold off creating, because they haven't the 'inspiration'. But inspiration is like the Word of God, and every work of creation, whether it's seminal or not, must contain within it the voyage up Sinai. You need to be in good position to receive inspiration.

I am inspired too much: my problem. I get so inspired that for me inspiration has been democratized, mediocritized, has lost its luster and command, and I neglect or forget to record it. I always lose track of my inspiration, always wishing that I had a recording device built into my brain that could translate all the thoughts I have on the subway, at work, right before I knock off to sleep. But I lose most of it, always hoping that somehow the thought has returned intact to its temporary resting place in the muck of my subconscious. That it may once again come up for air. So maybe it does return. But too often when it does, it's an object of parallax. In one eye, I see the head of a glittering serpent crested with feathers, its tongue forked with mythologies. In the other eye, a dead mangrove root, colorless, mired, skeletal, most of all dead - a waste. And I am back again in the valley.

I have always had a problem centering myself. Another of my favorite jokes is that I am introvert with an extrovert's disposition. I do not prioritize my internal world as most writers do: I often don't feel the need to textify or contextualize it. At least not with any permanence. I spill my seed wherever I go, never saving it for germination, for conjugation. By the time I return to my notebooks, I have leaked out all my steaming broth.

I face this conundrum - why must I write to be a writer? Isn't a large part of it the perspective. Why can't my inspiration just pass? Pass in and out of me, pass in and out of friends and family, a movement without code or grammar. Why write a book, instead of living it? Why must I belabor a conflicted system in solitude, wrestle with snakes and roots alone, apart from the world, aloof and disengaged? Isn't it better to be in the world, grounded in the common and rewarding experience of life itself? To see in the world's hieroglyphics merely what they are - hieroglyphics - and leave them where they lie? Why must I take them home to parse them out? To give voice to an abysmal arcana? Why?

I am a man of constant itching. Restless, shiftless, feckless. I have the itch to sleep when I'm tired - to eat when I'm hungry - shit when I'm backed up - masturbate when I'm horny - smoke when I'm out of pace - and drink when I've lost my bearings. I am a human entity, first and foremost.

Many of my literary role models love the comparison of artistic creation to biological release. Bukowski said it best: Writing a good poem is like taking a hot beer shit: "Nothing should ever be done that should be done. It has to come out. Like a good hot beer shit. A good hot beer shit is glorious. You get up, you turn around, you look at it, and you're proud. The fumes, the stink of the turd. You say, 'God, I did it. I'm good.' Then you flush it away, and there's a sense of sadness, when just the water is there. It's like writing a good poem. You just do it. It's a beer shit."  

His art was an act of regular, private, perverse emission. The throne from which he made his decree was porcelain and covered in hair. For some of us, art is something else. My art is too precious for me. Each time I set down to write, it is not in a bathroom where I do my work, but in a temple. I do not drop my drawers; I don the fine linens of a Kublai Khan. That's what it feels like to me. Precious. Too precious.

Of course, I know it's all the same. Most likely the best and worst of what I do has a touch of the septic tank. When it appears to me that I sit, I'm really squatting. When I speak, I'm really shitting. When I can't think, I am clogged by a mental brick. When I can think, I suffer a burning diarrhea of symbolisms.

I am too often clogged. I can remain at the beginning of a project for weeks. I will not move on if I haven't achieved a satisfactory level of perfection. I am not in the business to write any old thing. I find myself writing the first line over and over for weeks, endeavoring like a mad Trismegistus to convert every particle of syntax into resplendent gold. This is my worst handicap, that I have too much desire for perfection, for ultimate clarification. I like to see all my writing as an ecology of rarae aves, every specimen to be preserved individually and on the whole. The whole for me is impossibly large. The individual just impossible.

An anecdote: Not long ago, Cafe Orlin on St. Marks was open 24 hours. I used to sit there in the wee hours (either with my good friend Steve or alone) and muse, or write, or plan to write - often deferring to write. There were always a few idiosyncratic owls who like me frequented this perch. One of whom was a (presumably) French hobo named Andre (or so I was told, never having been introduced). Every time I saw him there, his head was on the table, face crumpled further in the crook of his elbow, his body gelatinous and out of control, spittle leaking, his shoulders pulsating violently with sleep. He always had a barely eaten salad before him. It was always salad. On the rare occasions that he would wake, it was always the same: he would conjure all his strength for a moment, push a forkful of lettuce into his mouth, and return to slumber. For hours, he would sleep without interference. Finally, he would rise, pay his bill, stow away his wilted salad in a tupperware designed expressly for the purpose, and shift off into the night. On one occasion, a manuscript sat on the table in front of him. All I could read was the title. It said either 'Project: Projects' or 'Projects: Project.'

Both are true and viable concepts for the artist. Every project has its parts, every part a project in its own right. Projects all the way down. Take this diatribe for example: I began because I wanted to talk about the purgative text: artistic creation as biological release. The more I conceived the project however, the more it became about what prevents me from release. What prevents me has very much to do with what drives me. What drives me / prevents me has to do with my habits of personal resistance and my history of selective imagination. The next step: enumerate those formerly mentioned vices and virtues, victories / defeats which have led me here.

It never ends.

One project begets another begets another. Until at the end of it all (if I'm lucky enough to be there), I will collect all of the projects together under the heading of 'Project of my Life' or '-of my Art.' And some other series of project will have to be rolled out from me after I'm gone. Or if not from me, from someone else. Every artist must deal in his / her own way with posterity. Every artist must consider the 'Project of Human History' and where their personal project aligns or departs.

But this is undoubtedly too colossal a project for an individual to sustain. Leave it for the brief moments of migration before and after sleep. The artist having awoke has one thing before him: his worktable and all that it contains: his pens, his books, his notebooks, his computer, his instrument, his paintbrush, his post-it notes, his thinking cap, his bathrobe, his mug of coffee, his ashtray towering with ash. And out of this array of mundanity, he must concoct the world he wants to see, one focused breath at a time. He must begin crafting. Whether it's writing whatever, composing whatever, painting or drafting whatever, he must first of all begin. And over time the malodorous, negligible 'compost' he's turned will  feed a garden. Just as a smile when sustained long enough will actually make you happy.