Things pop up into my ken, and I let them lead me where they will. Saw this poster on the FB page of a disenchanted Yalie (one of two) I look in on from time to time. Hadn’t thought of Kafka in a while. He was a co-star in of the Boomer Bible’s books of the VIPs, Frankie & Johnny, and I liked this quote as well as a lot of his writing.
Looked him up at Wiki, (re)discovered he had died at the age of 40, a life cut short like other writers whose work I respect and admire to varying degrees. I decided to do a roundup of other writers who had died young, the outer boundary being Marcel Proust, with whom I share a birthday.
What’s striking about the list is that all of them wrote the kind of books that might be interpreted as “wounding” in some way, even if their stabbing was only of writing conventions in force at the time they lived. The most innocent of them was Ring Lardner, who wrote with insouciant good humor, often in colloquial dialects that probably offended the guardians of Standard English. (His writing voice was as oral as dialogue, meant to be heard by the reader, not just perused. Cool.) I learned from him, as I did from every name here, how far you could go in using words to kindle imagination and thought in the minds of readers. I loved “You Know Me, Al,” “The Dream Life of Balso Snell,” and “The Metamorphosis” as much as I admired “Tender Is the Night,” “Le Bâteau Ivre”, “À La Recherche de Temps Perdu,” and the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe, much of which I memorized even as a boy. I actually feared Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” of which I have read only excerpts quoted by others because I had been warned about the dangers his writing posed to alcoholics trying to stay sober. But I could read portions of “Under Milkwood” out loud with the best of the other wannabe actors who perform mostly alone in shower stalls. I read Camus’s “L’Étranger” only because my polymath French teacher at Mercersburg disdained it so when he told us it was on the list of required readings for the AP French exam, but we wouldn’t be wasting time on it in class. I thought it was better than his review of it, if not a candidate for favorite books.
Looking back on them now what I feel is a melancholy sense of how much they missed by dying halfway down the road. Like any Fitzgerald buff, I was reminded of his dictum that “there are no second acts in American life.” But this is more glib than true, and it certainly doesn’t predispose the answer of what these gents would have done if they hadn’t died young. Yes, some of them may have decided they’d already given their best and moved on. I knew that temptation from my own experiences with alcohol, something I clearly have in common with Fitzgerald, Thomas, Lowry, Rimbaud, and Poe, regardless of any similar demon in the lives of the rest of them.
I did, in fact, have a deep existential crisis in my life at about the same point in my writing career as the prematurely dead ones listed above. But I did not die. I did go on to have a second act in my life, not famously but prolifically, with many rewarding experiences that have altered my perspectivr in enlightening ways. Why I feel a distance between me and all of them. When I look at their lives my eyes are more Gandalf’s than Aragorn’s, though Aragorn is still in there somewhere, stirring to consciousness as need be. I’m content to be the old one now, even if I resort to the prosthetics of AI to be convincing in the role…
In this face and hair and attire, I find my thoughts drifting toward the wedding guest, which I too have written about, and a sudden avalanche of other curiously familiar dramatic events. I have my reasons, as you will read later, but here’s how I used the Internet to find my way back to an old character who speaks only when spoken to…
The trigger in this YouTube pastiche of the Coleridge masterpiece was the live action drawing of the female and her golden locks. Why I had to dig up the key passages of a much longer work…
_________________________
In the current context, the verses above drove home to me the many close parallels to what I actually did experience as I mu life collapsed into a ruin so complete it seemed over. Tied to the mast is not a bad way to describe it. The sheriff had banged on my apartment door in Delaware. I had to be out of the place by morning or I would be arrested. I had nowhere to go. I had no cash. All I had was a phone number. She came with her blonde locks and her funeral-black Cadillac and wouldn’t let me quit on life. We made three roundtrips between Delaware and Greenwich NJ in a single night, each time with her car stuffed full of my last remaining possessions. After that is the magic number seven, because I did not realize she had indeed won a game of dice with the devil and she did not want to let me go. I was hers.
Seven yewrs I’ve described variously elsewhere, but I regained my creative spark and produced two of the major works I’ve ever done, as well as the launch of a third that would carry on even even after I finally made an escape of sorts into a fulfilling afterlife. The seven yewrs were full of lessons that came later than most middle aged men can expect to be schooled by them. I, too, finally saw the beauties of the water snakes “in tracks of shining light,” and the albatross fell from my neck.
One could say I’m reading my own narrative of perseverance into a highly unlikely stroke of luck that turned out favorably for everyone involved. One could say that if I didn’t have evidence of a phenomenon I’ve described here before — that big important things in my life happen out of order.
As it happens, I formed a mystical bond with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner many years before I experienced my personal version of it in my mid-forties. It was in the late 1970s that I conceived of a punk writer movement with the mission of saving a generation from illiterate nihilism. The allegorical sea from which the punks sprang was a story called “The Parade of Volumes,” written down from a waking dream. A great city is dying, trapped in the spell of a woman named Madame Sapinaire. The churches fell, one after another, and then everything else too, as a hungry lichen swallowed the ruins. Survivors fled underground into the tunnels and two brothers battled for dominance, one hard, one generous of heart. It was the hard one who survived to keep fighting.
As this story continued simmering in my mind, I surprised myself by writing the first punk story, by a band whose name came from a nursery rhyme I may have first heard in the crib. The Shuteye Train. The story, titled Shammadamma, was part rock song, part oral prose written to break every rule of fiction writing. The authors announced themselves as the authors, declared their intention to murder their main character, who was a Sixties cliché full of drugs and political slogans, and self indulgence. Goaded by the authors he awakens sometime after Woodstock to the need to make money, have stuff, and “change things from inside the system.” He goes to law school, etc. The story’s climax occurs at his wedding, when the Shuteye Train crashes the reception, terrifies the wedding guests, hangs the protagonist on a cross, scarecrow-like, and guns him down. “Shammadamma, Shootabooma, Blammadamma…”
The punks of South Street arise around the mystical coming of the Shuteye Train, which rules as the iconic creative inspiration of the movement, reaching their full height in a story that is also my best poem, Epiphany Ship. Long physically invisible to the punks, Shuteye Train finally emerges from the computer under the leadership of “Doctor Dream,” whose entrance is recorded in the book Punk City, one page of which is shown below…
“It is an undead visitor…” Derived directly from The Ancient Mariner. Back then I had no hint that The Boomer Bible and its follow-ons would become the albatross that strung me up as a pariah in American publishing. I had no idea that my failure to become the next writing sensation would disillusion my wife or that a long quieted beast called alcohol would return to maroon me in a wide wide sea of indifference, loss, and doubt.
About those snakes. Doctor Dream is the “Son of the Raptor,” a metaphysical predator of empty souls in a mythological world based in the ghostly Egyptian entity called the “ka.” Here is what the Raptor Ka looks like…
No comments:
Post a Comment