Category Writing

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Amy Leave a comment

“Noboru Wataya probably had some special power, and he knew how to find people who were especially responsive to that power and to draw something out of them. How he managed to do it and what the occasion was I have no idea, but at some point Noboru Wataya increased his violent power geometrically. Through television and the other media, he gained the ability to train his magnified power on society at large. Now he is trying to bring out something that the great mass of people keep hidden in the darkness of their unconscious. He wants to use it for his own political advantage.”

“It’s a tremendously dangerous thing, this thing he is trying to draw out; it’s fatally smeared with violence and blood, and it’s directly connected to the darkest depths of history, because its final effect is to destroy and obliterate people on a massive scale.”

—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Published in 1995, this passage from The Wind-Up Bird chronicle struck me as particularly applicable today. But then I suppose it would. In the book Murakami details atrocities of wars long over repeating themselves throughout history. No matter the war, no matter the conflict, violence, sadism, torture again and again demonstrating our own powerlessness to combat the darkness within us.

So here we are, with a madman in the whitehouse, his one talent, his all powerful weapon, the ability to bring out something that the great mass of people keep hidden in the darkness of their unconscious and use it for his own political advantage.

Is it as hopeless at it feels? Is all truly lost?

Scientists say it is. Too late to reverse the inevitable death of the planet. Well, it’s all connected, isn’t it? Our mistake was in living like it wasn’t.

Movies lie, well, most media lies, particularly when it tells you it won’t. Never trust anyone who says, “You can trust me.”

“What’s the good news? What’s the bad news?” Kurt Vonnegut often asked his audiences, rhetorically of course. He lived the bombing of Dresden; its complete annihilation. Centuries of historic art and artifacts turned to dust in moments. That’s what he wrote about in Slaughter House 5. That and how men fight and die, when they’re lucky. When they’re not they keep living and remembering, carrying a burden of shame. They know what lies within men’s hearts, within their own and now they must try to forget it. How does one know that and return to a normal life?

Men know how men die. Men understand that violence. Let me tell you how women die. It’s entirely different.

No, perhaps not today.

What’s the good news? What’s the bad news? Vonnegut said that Hamlet knew. Hamlet who learned his uncle killed his father to marry his mother, from his father’s ghost. But we all know that ghosts can be extremely unreliable. They may not be who they say they are at all. They may simply be spirits preying upon human weakness, feasting upon the energy of our sorrow. Or they may be nothing more than a manifestation of our darkest dread, the product of a disintegrating psyche consumed with emotion too heavy for the vessel.

Who hasn’t been there?

Nevertheless, it does seem plausible because it feels true. And what is truth except that which confirms the things we already know? Facts be damned.

So Hamlet confronts his mother and kills Polonius, an annoying nat of a man, but father to his financeé, so well, now they have that in common, he and Ophelia, fatherless. Still, not a great way to start a marriage.

Which was never to be because there’s a play Hamlet commissions to shame his uncle into a confession and in his zealotry he humiliates Ophelia for sport, it would seem. Anyway, she kills herself.

Nothing good comes from Hamlet’s actions. I suppose that’s what makes it a tragedy. So what’s the point Vonnegut wanted to make? Something about good things might bring bad results and bad things could bring good ones. I must be leaving something out of his Hamlet analogy because I can’t remember one good thing that comes out of anything Hamlet does. Although, there’s a bigger picture. Perhaps, from Hamlet’s perspective, he is fighting for justice. From everyone else’s perspective, he’s a tyrant-in-waiting ready to behead his political enemies because his father’s ghost told him to.

Our lives are not a hero’s journey. Happy endings are a lie. Yes, that was it. Vonnegut wanted us to know that happy endings could bring bad beginnings, with the reverse being true as well.

So where does that leave us? Somewhere in the zip code of hope? That this terrible thing may not be the end, but the beginning of something, if not good, then at least better?

That’s hard to see. Reality lives outside the realm of imagination and theory. Good news. Bad news. There’s just a lot of bad news. I could go through it, a litany of all the bad things that have ever happened. But I won’t force you to look at it. Heck, I can’t look at it.

The next question. Is it fate or can any of us create the change to bring about something good? Will our actions lead to justice or just more tragedy? Isn’t there a road that’s paved with good intentions, but ends up somewhere bad?

I think, do you want to know what I think? I think we have to try to do something. David Mamet, in 3 Uses of the Knife, wrote that often we prefer to stand up and rush around boldly instead of doing any actual thing that matters. Yes, so instead of marches and Facebook rants, in place of things that look like doing something, we do an actual thing to make the world around us a better place.

I know what you’re thinking, but just listen. This is all I’m going to say. We’re in a battle everyday and whether or not any one of us recognizes the part we play in it, what we think, how we act, the words we say, place us squarely on one side or the other. When someone can use the forces of television and the media to draw out the worst in us, then the reverse must be true. It must be true that if we choose to live, even in the smallest ways, better, kinder, more generously, when no one is looking, we can push back the rising darkness. That’s its vulnerability. It overlooks the smallest of us, the least important, the powerless because it thinks its inoculated us, rendered us useless in society. But it does not have our thoughts and in that way, our actions could create a ripple effect that goes all the way to the top to topple the tyrant.

It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.

Unbranded

Amy 6 Comments

Everyone wants it. That silver-bullet brand that shoots you to the top of search engines, amassing legions. I do. It won’t happen. Does that mean I stop producing, shutter my little vanity project and give over to the inevitability of anonymity? It wouldn’t matter to anyone but me, but the point is, it matters to me.

What Neuroscientists Know

I’ve left, returned, gone away, come back, failed to produce a consistent practice that builds a career. Yet, here I appear again. This time it’s different. I know why I write. I’ve meditated and journaled each morning for a number of months now. Not for self-improvement. Ask my husband. Not sure there’s been much. I did it to finish a creative piece within five months. Digging deep, telling truth, finding organic characters whose complicated desires drive plot–well it could take years. I didn’t have it and wasn’t willing to sacrifice those standards. Your subconsicous has all the answers, neuroscientists argue.

Each night I asked myself to solve the day’s plot hole. Each morning I’d rise, meditate for 10 minutes and mind dump into a journal working out the problems from the prior day. The answers arose, every time and I began a new habit that carried me back to my original purpose. Write with confidence, surety, insight. Write without apology.

The energy and effort branding requires cannibalizes truth’s pursuit every time.

There’s a cost, of course. People only pay for well-branded script. Still, I remain unbranded. That’s ok. I continue to write for hire, now I also write for me. I’m no longer ashamed to admit it. I want to be celebrated like my heroes: Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Maya Angelou, August Wilson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Hunter Thompson, Flannery O’Connor, to name a few, in the order that I discovered them.

The Fight IS the Brand

They grabbed space on a hostile stage and found an audience who needed to be heard. (The white men, the exception. I’ll get to those.) Their fight was more difficult than ours, in a way. We fight search engine algorithms from our living rooms. They played their works to tiny drunken audiences in grimy bars, or wrote tirelessly for a page-10 space in their local paper.

Yet we share the same struggle, growing an audience from a handful of people to a legion. For ego? Sure, but it’s a mixed bag. If you’re any good, you struggle to right wrongs no one else addresses. In that way, you can make a contribution hefty enough to transcend trends and withstand time.

For many of us, writing is a populist medium. In the vacuum of pedigrees, expensive educations and introductions, we write to those who need our voice to make theirs heard. We, the writers who emulate the greats with slavish devotion, understand early that great magpies grow into visionaries.

Hunter Thompson wrote plainly, and created violent prose. He transcribed Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others at his typewriter hours a day, until he heard their rhythms in his head. They unlocked his voice. He unlocked mine.

To any writer who cares little about grammar, don’t be a fool. It is the most powerful writing tool on the planet.

You’ll notice, at times I drop verbs or articles. Write in fragments. Misuse grammar. I hate any tense of “To be.” Passive, lazy, “To be” smacks of early drafts and single thought arguments. Sometimes however, it’s unavoidable. This technique, entirely self-invented, allows the heart of the idea faster passage to the reader. I hope. But we struggle for common ground, you and me.

Language is fluid. Grammar, when you know it, can be broken. I break grammar well. Maybe that’s my brand. Well, I’ve a lot of competition there.

Words Fail, Brands Endure

Thompson, Pinter, Mamet– the white man exception to my earlier argument. These men stepped into the public space with more ease, because, you know, white men. The world’s ear is tuned to their voices. Even in speaking against power, as these men did, they don’t begin from a disempowered state.

Getting on with it.

Thompson, Pinter and Mamet demonstrated a powerful efficiency in emotional expression. They arrived at the heart of the matter, fast. I saw subtext emerge and the depth of human experience visible through craft in a way that gave my own voice permission. Mamet, for example, translated the language of thought. The words emerge in broken phrases, stunted, forceful, speakers overlapping one another, to dominate, control, harm and sometimes soothe. Words, he demonstrates, frequently fail us, often betray us and generally speaking, prove inadequate to translate the truth. His characters live in this constant frustration.

Often the most profound revelations require the fewest well-chosen words. All three men told on themselves and the culture, revealing its flaws at a time when people needed to tear the system down. Yet, they all suffered from a misogyny blind spot. Heroes are problematic.

Brands aren’t. A good one makes you impenetrable, unstoppable, a going concern. Yet truth, conversely, defies branding. It’s unclickable, uncommodifiable, uncomfortable. The writer must choose. The energy and effort branding requires cannibalizes truth’s pursuit every time.

What the Truth Can Do

I mention the white men first, not because they deserve it, but because they don’t. Their contributions proved valuable to me only after I discovered the others on that list. They helped me with the “how,” Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, August Wilson, Langston Hughes, helped me with the “what.” Collectively, they revealed the harrowing truth about my country and my race. In short, they challenged the infrastructures of my narrow paradigm and white-washed education. They spoke and I grew more empathetic, in effect, more human. Truth-tellers, ball-busters, tear-it-down-to-the-foundation storytellers, they each revealed the power of truth-writing. Fearless, justifiably angry, they spoke what generations before them suffered, piercing through millennia of lies and forced silence.

Truth, if you seek it, grabs you by the throat and makes you listen. Fact: great art emerges from great suffering. The privileged classes make pretty things that shine briefly. What do they know? Ease? Comfort? Intellectual pursuits at best. What do they have to say?

My suffering bonafides? That’s a lot to unpack. Here, if you’re interested. I’ve said all I’m going to say on it, for now. What really matters, do I say what I say well? If I do, does anyone need me to say it? Ah, the rub. The truth about branding–without one, I may never know, I’ll never be found.

Well, in the words of Billy Budd, “That’s alright, sir,…I’m content.”

Satan, God, and a club called Medusa’s

Amy 16 Comments

Former site of Medusa's after it burnt down.

Following the fire, Medusa’s was no longer. In its place, an office building.

Unfinished business gets in your DNA. Like that guy from high school I almost loved, but feared. He symbolizes much of what I didn’t do and now regret. He’s in my dreams from time to time. Because I don’t do what it is I want to do. His ghost lingers over all I’ve let drift.

If I could go back I’d change…but what would I change? When would I change it? How far back do you go? Because you could go all the way back to childhood but you’d just end up accumulating different regrets. I’m obsessed with high school. I wasn’t popular, but I wore that like a badge. I knew it meant I was better, more artistic, smarter than the cheerleading uniforms bouncing through the hallways on a Friday afternoon before the pep rally. Pep rallies. A time my outcast friends and I used to troll for older boys and pass private notes like they were Pentagon secrets.

Until Satan and God and a club called Medusa’s. Before midnight on Saturdays it was a juice bar. After midnight, bouncers kicked underagers like me out. They kind of did. It really depended on whether they thought you were cute. Anyway, I didn’t like to drink. I just wanted to dance, and do things my parents feared. But my overactive guilt complex required absolution. I told my mother about the upside down crucifixes, gargoyles, and twisted angels hanging from the walls while The Sound of Music played ironically on a 20 foot screen overlooking the main dance floor. My mother grounded me for life. No, I’m serious. She grounded me until the age of 18 or until college, whichever came first. No phone. No television. No activities of any kind. Her one stipulation. Go to church. And as long as I did stuff with church kids, she’d allow me day passes.  She picked me up. She dropped me off. Until it became too inconvenient, then she let me drive myself. And by that time, I’d stepped fully into Stockholm Syndrome. Church became my life. Church kids. Church writing. Church membership. It lay the groundwork for my life. Every decision I made until the age of 29 shot out from the center of a rigid, literal interpretation of the Bible.

I killed myself. Not to be overdramatic, but I think there’s a certain truth to it. I killed my potential. The person I almost became. The one Mr. Banacheck identified in our Cinema Studies class when I was a Sophomore. He wanted to mentor me. He saw that I had promise as a writer.  He was Jewish and secular. Two things my mother could not abide.

And now, more than 10 years after I shed the shackles of my faith I still feel too guilty to write freely. I went in the wrong direction, forged the wrong neural pathways. The ones I need do not exist. Writing in my voice feels much like learning a new language. In youth your brain moves freely to find its truth, like an amoeba shifting between poles. I sense my truth, but I can’t access it. What if it’s too weird? Too gross? Too overtly sexual? What if that makes me too broken? What if people see it and know my worst secrets? And judge me. What if it costs me work? When you’re young you don’t fear because you don’t know what to fear.

I dreamt about that boy last night. He lives in my basement and he loves me, desperately. I’m dating someone else. A safe boy. A church boy named Jim. He actually existed. Jim was Tracy’s boyfriend for four years. We thought they’d marry. They were the most popular couple in the group. Athletic. Good looking. Fun. In my dream I am Tracy. I mean I’m me, but I play Tracy. I long for this other boy living in my parent’s basement. My mother refuses to let me see him. Until I tell her she cannot stop me because I am a grown woman. She realizes I am 18 and her spell breaks. I descend the stairs and say to the boy, “I love you. I will always love you. I’m breaking up with Jim, just give me time.”

“You’re so confusing,” he says. “You East Coast girls are so confusing to us on the West Coast.” This is a dream statement. He and I both lived in the Midwest. We spend the rest of the dream in a push-me pull-you state. Much like the actual dynamic in our high school days. I did love him. As much as a kid can love another when she barely knows herself. But knowing myself now I know that I never loved any other until I met my husband. This particular boy haunts my dreams because he was the last significant contact I had with my authentic self before I got lost in the forest of faith.

Our identities are shaped by the people we love. Entire selves emerge from the fires of our deepest connections. The people I loved, the men I knew all had to do with a false self, a supposed self, a self created for safety’s sake.

Most of the time I don’t think about this boy. Actually, I don’t think of him at all in my waking hours. But in sleep he visits to find resolution and I wake aware that resolution never comes.

Ruminations on the Why of It

Amy 6 Comments

TCRiggs wrote a response to my last post I thought worth sharing. A personal essayist struggling to find her voice might find the following interesting. The essential question, “How much time does one give a thing before it’s safe to write about it?” 20 years? Perhaps. She also suggests perhaps turning to fiction. She keeps a level of anonymity on her blog.

But what if it’s too late for that? What if the damage is done? I mean essential damage? That’s what I’ve done. I’m really good at tearing down the foundation of a thing. Exceptional at destruction. Here’s my response to her:

Anonymity is good. Fiction even better. But I’m working on a brand and it conflicts with every area of my working life. I write to a small subset and write myself out of others. I’ve struggled with this and for decades I haven’t written at all, working for little to no money in other industries and profoundly frustrated. Unable to construct a sentence. I’m unsure of the connection between them, why must one exist to the exclusion of the other?

But it was when I started to write those things closest to me that I found words again. Much to the detriment of many things. I don’t want to. I don’t try to. But when I stop, then I stop writing.

My heroes are the rebels and the cynics. I’ve always felt that cynicism is thinly veiled hope. A cynic sees the world for what it is, but knows its potential for more. A glutton for punishment, she never stops hoping even when things are at their worst.

When I read Hunter Thompson’s, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, it unfastened a latch within me. I recognized something in his writing, a thing that felt like me. Not in the subject, not in the content, but in the how of it. In the rage of it. And in the self-awareness of it. There’s beauty in his disgust and self-knowledge. In the last sentence of that essay he recognizes that he and his subjects are one. They disgust him as he disgusts himself. He never judged himself for it. I judge myself for everything. So on the page, I fight for his courage.

There are others who inspire me now, but it was Hunter Thompson who taught me to trust my voice. I’m somewhat transgender in my writing. My voice sounds like a man’s. A friend once told me that, and he didn’t mean it to flatter. But I don’t mind anymore. Except that the world still wants girls to sound like girls.

There is always luck in success and Thompson was the writer for his time.  I’ve been mining the depths of my life and I cannot find it. That thing that makes me unique. That thing that people want.

As for making money in the meantime, there are many things I’m good at, but one thing I want to do more. And when it’s in opposition to those other things, it creates constant tension. I’m looking for work, I’m not writing. I’m writing, I’m not able to find work because of what I’m writing. Now it’s all out there. It was unwise. It was unrealistic. It was perhaps, wishful thinking to imagine I could give the finger to the man and expect the man to give me a paycheck.

Since this exists on the internet, I have to find sympathetic employers who can see what I do and value it, not fear it. Whether or not I meant to, I created this. The secret will is a powerful thing. And so is the Internet. I’m deep into it now.

One Potent Mash Up

Amy 8 Comments

Go for the jugular or don’t go at all. If you don’t write from the gut, then what’s the point? Losing friends, family members, jobs, means you’re on the correct path. But you better be right, even when you make mistakes. It better be true. If it’s not. If it’s made up. If it’s cruel for cruelty’s sake or to make yourself look good, then you don’t deserve the title of writer.

But I’m not a journalist. I don’t have the stomach for it. My facts are subjective, therefore opinions. Listen, I don’t write to smear. My observations are just that, conclusions strung together on a clothesline  of experiences.

You should deduce from that that I’m a coward. I don’t fact check or interview sources. I vomit my positions onto the page and press,”publish,” without a second thought. Until about 24 hours later when, like Colonel Nicholson in Bridge Over the River Kwai, I think, What have I done? I had to remove another post. This time it was a judgement call and not a corporate directive. Social media is a bit like walking into an interview and spilling your guts to a future employer about everything you hated about your last job.

I don’t know. I don’t know why I had to do it. To write that. To lash out with my words. Because they’re good words when they’re close words, yes? The closer they are, the bloodier they flow. Because no one cares about bloodless words. They want a murder scene, carnage. They want assassinations carried out by the person who cares the most. The one who will stab 27 times. Overkill.

That’s me. That’s what I do. That’s what I want. To hurt. I think. Because I hurt. And you hurt me. And don’t you deserve it for being cruel and stupid? I’m smarter. That’s my weapon. And I hold a grudge. Until I don’t. And then I toss  your body into the river. I won’t even watch you go.

And for what? For who? I don’t know what I serve. Because I’m not serving myself. Jesus, let it go, Amy. Because I can’t. I just can’t. Not until I write it and not until someone reads it. And honestly, I don’t want the subjects of my ire to read it. I don’t want anyone who misunderstands the point to read it. The point that it’s about the writing less so the subject. Don’t listen to what I say, but how I say it. It’s the words that matter. Yes, the subject. Of course the subject. But we all say the same things. We just don’t say it in the same ways. And it’s the ways of saying things that matter to me. That’s the skill. That’s the craft of writing.

I wrote something and I lost a family member. Snip, in one essay, snap. That was a clean break. It’s one I think of nearly everyday. Turn it over, study it. Wonder if it was worth it. Ask myself again and again, Why? Why did I write something like that? Couldn’t I have left some things out. Just at the beginning. Just those few sentences. Everything would be so different.

That’s right. Everything.

But if you’re going to tell the truth, even when you make a mistake, you better be right. And I was right. But do you want to be right, or do you want a normal life with family and friends and frustrating jobs filled with secrets and shadows and unspoken wounds. Why not? It’s what everyone else has. Social constructs hang in the balance. Why would anyone in their right mind rip that apart? No really?

The written word is not the spoken word and the Internet is forever….But I gotta tell you, full disclosure, I’m glad that it is. It is my fail safe against my own remorse because my biggest regrets are when I must hide behind an anonymous curtain. I wrote several pieces for Salon that had to be published anonymously. The editors and lawyers decided it was best. No one wants to be a Rolling Stone. I don’t want to be a Jackie. But I’m not a Jackie. I tell the truth.

I want to write about it. I am never as good a writer as when I am spitting with rage. And when I write something I know is particularly imprudent, I want to keep it up.

But we live in a society for a reason. There are rules. And my rage along with this blog, a potent mash up for sure, could be my undoing. So best to keep it all under raps. And so here I go, back underwater. Perhaps an Ophelia, or just dumb doll, I’ll ride the tides and I may not emerge.

Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t you dare.

 

 

Perhaps Something New

Amy 2 Comments

imagesI take comfort in this quiet space. I live in a traffic clogged cacophony. It’s hard to think in this city, hard to find a space to breathe without fighting traffic to get there. We must get creative and clear the space ourselves. Here is mine and here I am free to find some movement and push this stagnant energy around.

Perhaps something can come of it. Continue reading “Perhaps Something New” →