RUDIMENTS, pt. 306
Making Cars
I always thought I was
raised in a happy-enough
place. Nothing riotously over
the top, but no black hole of
sadness either. Born as I was
in Bayonne - all the waterfront
and river traffic kind of stuff
with the glum apartments and
the seedy amusement strip -
I always took those first four
years as my dark period, the
shadowy precursor to the
remainder of my life. I guess
everything after that had its
ups and downs, but I'd say
the real half-light darkness
was mostly gone. That sort
of environmental stuff, I'd
think, does eventually affect
one's character. Not saying
that every kid who grows up
in slum-like conditions grows
up as a criminal later on, but
there are adjuncts and connections
to everything in that sphere. Just
as it's incomplete to not say that
there are a million different kinds
of slums anyway, and that any
well-off kid of New Cannan
privilege (Connecticut) is in
constant happiness. There are
all family matters of all sorts
that are their own sorts of
slums. In just a few steps you
can be walking into Norwalk or
New Haven's darkest holes.
-
In the field of writing and gibberish,
(no, they're not the same thing),
there's always been a saying,
'Light writes white.' What it
means is that if you're 'happy,'
then your page stays blank. The
underlying premise being that
there 'has to be some friction for
the words to catch fire.' I'm not
perfectly sure about any of that,
but it does seem to bear out in
some way a vein of the truthfulness
of writing - unless you're Erma
Bombeck or any one of those
hundreds of goofball-happiness
writers to whom everything is a
sunny-side up. The dark and the
ghoulish and unsettled sides of
things have a tendency to bring
out the intellectual flatulence and
the over-crowded verbiage of
any strain of angst or existential
grimace. The contest at times
does seem to be on - 'who can
be the most miserable among us?'
-
A long time ago, the poet Richard
Wilbur wrote - 'Obscurely yet
most surely called in praise / As
sometimes summer calls us all.'
That's a stab, by a somewhat dark
guy, at saying that, no matter the
crummy things that arise (he saw
'shocking combat' in WWII, and
suffered depressions and addictions
his whole life), there was still room
enough, in-place, to find the 'blind
delight of being.' I'd say that was
all about right. I spent three-quarters
of my early years with ball in-hand
as if it were an apple, endless
afternoons of baseball-gravel and
dusty-dirt with small friends and
big friends shouting, yelling, and
in frolic. The cloud that rode with
me, and which only later really
blossomed into a formidable object
to be dealt with - like any of those
8-year old neighborhood girls'
tee-shirt chests - was still forming,
still in hiding for time's outreach.
Only later did I need to deal with
it all.
-
Going back for a moment to the
lines of Richard Wilbur quoted
above here, let me point out the
pretty wonderful thing going on in
them, happiness or not, with the
line 'Obscurely yet most surely.'
That certainly is pretty wonderful,
and I daresay would removed some of
the gloom of the worst day, to have
written that. That's what struggle
brings forth - words like that
don't just 'happen.' A spiritual
writerly soul has first to be built,
groomed and husbanded (or
mothered, I suppose - such a
self-conscious equivalence these
days needs be mentioned, or I'd
surely get five layers of comment
deep about my own shortcomings
using 'husbanded' instead of
'mothered.' Talk about depression).
Keeping oneself open to those
pipeline flows of words and of
impressions is vitally important,
gloomy or not.
-
And in this vein, here are some
more thoughts : 'How much does the
imagination have to do with one's
experience?' - (a very germane question,
for me, in writing these chapters) -
and 'And how much does one's will
have to do with one's imagination?
Many writers claim not to choose their
subjects. True enough, but they do
choose the range and focus of the
attention through which these
subjects may come.' In this regard,
Richard Wilbur had said: 'Try to
remember, what you project / Is
what you will perceive; what you
perceive / With any passion, be it
love or terror / May take on whims
and powers of its own.'
-
My simple youth on Inman Avenue
brought me, of course, no reckonings
on any of this - neither did the ways
of normal schooling. It was all outside
of that circle - you learn what you
learn by picking it up along the way.
But it's not all an exact science. It's
chancy, like projecting the spin or
bounce of a hit ball before it lands
for either your catch or your chase.
'A poet who feeds on pathologies
eventually becomes their food.'
Whew, that's a scary message. No
one ever plans on becoming a monster,
but I guess it does happen to some.
Holding it all in, remaining stuck in
place, rigid and demanding fixed
moorings. I had to figure all of this
out on my very own, personal, 'run'
for the roses. Once I hit NYC, it was
wide open and wild, full speed ahead.
That's really where any real learning
and sensing came from : streets,
hunger, riff-raff, being broke, danger,
doubt and dread too. 'A culture too is
a work of the imagination, or a failure
of it.' A person cannot just equate
misery with authenticity - as Christian
Wiman puts it - nor can anyone rely
on violence and degradation to then
say they are 'writing real, bringing
back the streets,' and all that claptrap
so prevalent right now. GIGO, in
computers, means 'garbage in /
garbage out. You don't establish
character and presence by beating
on women, or others. You can't
present intensity by degrading
others. These are little-boy life
lessons that I always walked
with, and only now I realize that
subliminally, my mind was already
at work, steering me - into darker
places, portents of the flip-side, so
I'd not fall into that whole, big,
'light writes white,' Cheshire cat
smile of pure nothingness.
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