DougRice

When Love Was was written and completed before Here Lies Memory. There are moments inside this new book that echo and pull at the characters from Here Lies Memory as well as from Daughters of the Rivers (Volume Two of The Pittsburgh Trilogy, a novel which most likely be published under a different title).

Stylistically, this new work harkens back to Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist and Between Appear and Disappear. This new book is a pillow book. It is a series of poetic prose pieces with photographs. Vignettes. The narrators struggle with what love was when love appeared to be present. And the narrators struggle with loss.

This work would not have been possible had I not had a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude above Stuttgart, Germany. Nor would it have been possible had I not had the conversations that I had throughout the summer of 2012 with Basir Mahmood, Youki Hirakawa and Asumi, Sybille Neumeyer, Patrick Ritter, Angela Butterstein, and Silke Pfluger.

When Love Was is being published on kindle and will be ready for pre-order late 2018. A trade paperback version of the book will be available in early 2019 and a limited edition of the book will be available in late spring 2019.

After being away for five years, I am returning to CSU Summer Arts with a crew of insanely passionate and talented artists: Stephanie Sauer, Tia Blassingame, Janice Lee, Joshua Edwards, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, and Gordon Warnock. I have been reflecting on why I am taking time away from my own writing to return to the painful heat of Fresno, California. So, what follows are a few of the rambles into why now, why this moment, I feel it is so important to return.

I assure those of you attending the “Hybrid Poetics and Narratives” workshop that these artists will revolutionize your art and your lives. We will startle you with wonder and beauty on the journey to unearth verbs unknown and unthinkable.

"Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification. "  -- –Chris Hedges

Let us wake up from such amnesia.  

The culture of everyday life maintains the politically and aesthetically apathetic status quo. We need, therefore, to do all we can to unnerve our habits of being.

We are our habits. And too often we remain unconscious of our habits; we are most unconscious of our habits of seeing into the world through our daily acts of living. We do not so much need to abandon such habitual ways of being, but we do need to complicate them, to be constantly transforming them, to be always alert for ways to unnerve beliefs and desires that we passively accept and conform to.

One of the most powerful places on the planet to do this is in Fresno, California, during the CSU Summer Arts program. You are not coming to Summer Arts to be a “student;” rather, you are coming to live the practice of making art, of taking risks, of surrounding yourselves with other young artists who share your passion. 

The cult of distraction that threatens us every single day of our lives valorizes the superficial, the gaudy, the simple and the mundane. Distraction is the true agent that disintegrates culture. We must rail against such simplicity. Fuck distraction. We must learn to endure boredom and frustration. We cannot give boredom over to distraction. Boredom is an absolute necessary part of being human. Frustration is an integral part of making art.

As the British philosopher, Mick Jagger, suggests: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you get what you need.” Are you willing, like Mick and Keith and those other stones rolling down the hill, to actually try real hard? Or, are you weak and simply want instant approval and gratification?

Do you make art so that people look at you? Or do you work on your art as a practice for discovering ways to look into the world?

Everyone reading this sentence will one day die. Our only responsibility is to create the life we want to live, not conform to living a life that others want us to live. Creating our own lives will make us vulnerable. It takes courage to create, to risk not being accepted, to risk being misunderstood, to risk disappointing people we love. What does it mean to you to be successful? Do you value what you have been told to value or have you taken time to be present and to create your own sense of success?

The culture of illusion, one of happy thoughts, manipulated emotions, and trust in the beneficence of power, means we sing along with the chorus or are instantly disappeared from view like losers on a reality show.

Fuck the chorus.

At the end of our lives, our creator will have only one question for us: “In the beginning of life, I gave you one gift—the gift of time. What did you do with this gift?”

A gift is not a gift until the person who has received the gift begins to do something with the gift. The power of the gift resides in the person who has received the gift creating something with the gift. The power of the gift is never with the giver. The true giver of a gift gives a gift—whether the gift be the gift of love, or of insight, or of a new way of experiencing our bodies or of seeing—unconditionally. The true giver is simply curious about what the recipient of the gift will create from the gift. The true giver wants, nor expects, nothing in return. The true giver, like the true Springsteenesque poet, merely wants to stand back and watch. The giver hopes to be astonished by the beauty and light created by the person who experiences the gift. 

Summer Arts is the sort of gift that all young artists should give to themselves. To respect yourself, your art, so deeply that you give yourself this gift of time to explore your art, to be fully with your art, your practice of creating, and to surround yourself with other young artists and more accomplished artists. Every artist needs such an experience.

The culture of everyday life is against art. In fact, it is antagonistic toward art. It devalues art by valuing speed. Fuck speed. Life is too short to waste on speed. Slow down. There are miracles everywhere. You only need to move slowly enough to experience them. The faster you move, the less you see, the less you experience.

Do not merely do things with an intention of an outcome. Do something to be with the experience of creating something. Do something to be inside the working through of wonder and complexity. You don’t make love to be done with making love, do you? Hell no. You make love to be with the person you are with. To experience the movements, the muscles and breathing of your partner. Write sentences with the same sort of intention and hope.

Creating art is a form of prayer. We pray to be with our maker. We make art to be with the act of creation. We do not do it to get the approval. That is simple-minded codependence.

So come to CSU Summer Arts. Your life will change. You will change the lives of those around you. Revolutionize your soul.

How often have you wasted time? How often have you killed time? Killing or wasting time is simply evil. Nothing destroys life more than killing or wasting time.

The Canadian philosopher Neil Young once said that it is better to burn out than it is to rust. This is true. To live with an intensity that makes possible new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

My advice:

Risk getting lost.

Make art out of curiosity and bewilderment.

Always be alert and ready for unexpected revelations of beauty.

Care about the life you are living and the world you live in.

This is the time to start living the life you have always imagined, the life you have feared living because you feared those around you would not approve of you creating your own life, your own desires, your own art.

Quit simply going from one day to the next. Live with intention. Live with desire. What you give your attention to is who you are. There is no getting around that. More fully live the life you are living. Be a part of your own life.

Come to Summer Arts. Rub language against photographs and see what happens.

To practice means to perform, in the face of obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired. Martha Graham

Come do this at Summer Arts.

The following is a scene that was deleted from the published version of Here Lies Memory. (This is part of the writer's cut of the novel and is given to you as a Christmas gift.)

The Street Elder called laughter the one true gift God gave to men and women.

“No child knows how important it is to let her mother hear her laughing, not until that child becomes a mother herself,” she told Sylvia. “No child can ever know what a child’s laughter does to a mother’s heart. You got to know how much power there is in laughter. Before that, when a woman’s still but a child, she thinks that laughter is just laughter. Just a sound. Nothing more. When you’re a child, after it’s been hot day after day after day, hot so many days you think it’s never going to be nothing but hot, your skin suffering for rain, and when you do finally hear that first rain of summer, you run yourself outside as fast as you can. You don’t think about it. You just push open that screen door and let it be banging shut behind you, your mother be yelling ‘don’t let that door bang like that,’ but you don’t pay her no never mind, because you running down the steps of your stoop, you leaping off that top stoop.

You run barefoot out there into the world and into the rain, those big drops of rain splashing on the sidewalk, and when you get out there in that falling rain, and you feel that hot concrete turning cold under the soles of your feet, you dance, child. Don’t matter how old you are. How young. Don’t matter what no one thinks of you doing that. You sing. You dance. Everything else disappears. That moment you throw your hands up into the sky. That’s when you’re eternal. Don’t you let anyone take that from you, and don’t you never forget that moment. Never. 

“The world will try to take it from you, but you don’t never forget throwing your arms open to the falling rain and dancing barefoot on that sidewalk and laughing so loud your mother heard you all the way around the back of the house in the kitchen. She heard you even with all the windows closed. You don’t ever forget how you felt doing that, because that is what life is. That is all life is. Everything else you do in your life is for other people. You get a job. You go to school. You’re doing that for them. You’re obeying what you have to obey to get on in the world. But this? This you’re doing out there in that rain, this you’re doing for your own life. This you’re doing to create your life. This dancing, getting your skin all wet in the rain, you’re doing this because you’re loving your life. You’re not doing it because you were told to do it or for some reward, for someone to say ‘good job’ and all that; you’re doing this because you’re doing it. It’s that simple. And that’s why it matters more than all the other shit you ever do in your life, because this you’re doing to simply do it. And that is all that life is, child. This this. Do this. Do what you love to be doing. And when the creeps try to convince you to stop it. You just dance. You dance right there in front of them. And you fill your lungs with laughter.

“And that laughter your mother hear you doing out there. That’s the truest gift you ever give her, even when she’s calling you a fool and saying you’re going to catch your death of cold. That’s just a mother’s way of thanking a child for laughing. ‘Cause the best way to ever thank a mother for the life she gives you is not by simply saying thank you, but by laughing, by bursts of laughter. That’s a true thank you to your mother for her bringing you into this world. She’s grateful you’re living a life that allows you to laugh. She’s grateful you feel safe enough to laugh. And when you grow up and you get that job and you doing all this and that with your life, you best never quit living the life you want to be living. ‘Cause everyone out there is bent on destroying you. Don’t you let those creeps win, Sylvia. Don’t.”

The Street Elder’s smile, weary as it was, warmed Sylvia’s heart. She trusted the Street Elder. Her smile, her laughter, was never innocent of her life. Ruins and mysteries marked her laughter. The Street Elder had lived, and she was still living, and all of her living was in her laughter and in her smile. Inside laughter you can hear the whole of a person’s soul waking up, you hear the life story of the person’s soul and you hear that person’s soul growing.

The Street Elder reached down to rest her hand on Pete’s shoulder. Pete looked up at her. “You tell a child to be still, to sit and be quiet, and they look at you like you from some other planet. They give you that look like ‘Ain’t you never been a child?’ Child knows that talk is crazy talk. And fool parents all proud when the child obeys. You think a child is good because that child is obeying you. That’s not good. That’s something else entirely, and what that is harms that child more than you ever imagine it could, unless you look yourself in the mirror and see that harm inside you. That’s just proper behavior—all sweet and quiet—that ain’t got a thing to do with being good. You’d think a child running through the house is the demon incarnate, come to destroy the world. Like a child running through a house is going to make the walls fall down, wear out the carpet, and have everything in the house come tumbling down.”

The greatest gift we can give to another person is the gift of our time, of us being fully present with them. All other gifts are “gifts” that mask and replace this one true gift and that are not gifts at all; rather, these other “gifts” are fetishistic objects given to avoid giving this greater gift of our time.

We have come to value immediacy and ease over duration and devotion. But we must remember that our daily actions, the way we live our lives, form our soul and become our being. The more quickly we live, the more quickly we die. We cannot escape this. And if we live in a hurry, we will make our art in a hurry. Walter Benjamin feared this more than he feared the speed of reproduction and the loss of the aura. The aura was lost because artists sped up their process, and by going faster and faster, artists lost their souls, and their work lost its true value.

We do not pray to be done with praying, we pray to be still. We do not make love to be done with making love. We make love to be with the one we are loving, not to be done with being with the one we are with. Each moment is eternity.

We create our lives in the daily actions of living and thinking. Choose wisely.

It is easy to send a text. Communication at the speed of light, or faster. The thoughtless words of a text require very little of our time and very little of our attention. Often, autofill to does much of the work for us. Emoticons replace the emotions of touch. Such ways for communicating has very little do with respect or truth, and nothing to do with being with the person we are texting. Words, emotions, desires, are reduced to acronyms.

There is a Japanese word, kotodama, which basically means word spirit. It refers to the original, divine spirit of a word, before the word enters the world of people using the word for their own purposes. In the old days, Japanese people believed that every word had its own spirit and power and deeply affected our sense of identity. In modern days, our lives have become so fast that we have lost consciousness about what we value. Even in our speech, we become careless, and sometimes use words merely to fill up a void. My basic belief in words is that there should be congruence between words and internal experiences. Not only the meaning that the word conveys, but also the sound to which the word is connected has power.

I wish to return those divine spirits to words. Rather than creating work or living a life that exists only to be consumed, I want to create gifts that are devoted to stopping time, to holding us near to a moment of breath.

My desire, not only as an artist, but also as a human being, is to disturb the modern sense of time, to undo the desire to be done doing something, to fight against our contemporary insistence on speed, of instant gratification and communication.  We must resist the temptation to join the cult of the artist, the desire to be seen as an artist. Only the work matters. 

Consuming is empty; it is why, if we put our faith in consuming, or structure our identity by consuming, we have no choice but to continue consuming; otherwise, our “I” disappears. We trap ourselves in an endless cycle of consumption for the sake of consumption. And such a prison, created by our daily actions, distracts us from discovering and creating new ways for being alive. There are miracles everywhere. We simply need to move slow enough to experience them. Once upon a time, Albert Einstein never said: "There are only two ways to live your life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." 

All acts of consumption destroy time and destroy being present. And this desire to consume is akin to that of lust. One empty signifier endlessly chasing another empty signifier. Floating signifiers disappearing beneath a signature on a credit card. A shadow world. Smoke and mirrors. Jean Baudrillard smoking a pipe that was never a pipe to begin with. This is not a pipe. That is not a president. Simulacres et Simulation.

The more we give ourselves over to consumption, the less gifted we will be. But the very moment we stop consuming, we become awake to ourselves and to the world of creating a life.

Think of two disappearing means of communication: the rotary dial telephone and the pen and paper. Think of how and why they disappeared and think of what has replaced them.

Remember the physical and emotional effort it took to dial a rotary dial phone? We had to actually want to speak with the person we were calling. We had to know all the numbers of the person’s phone number. We memorized our partner’s phone number, our children’s phone numbers, our mother’s. People we loved—their phone numbers, their images—inhabited the grey matter of our brain. We did not relegate such “information” to external memory chips. (How many of us know our partner’s phone number?) And when we called someone, we were always careful while dialing the phone so that we would make a full rotation of the dial so that we did not have to start dialing over again. Our actions were not automated.

Then, answering machines invaded suburban homes. At first, those machines were used to answer calls while people were away from their houses, and thus were also away from their phones, because their phones stayed home, attached to a landline, while they (the people) went about living their lives away from their phones, but knowing if someone needed to contact them, they could leave a message. (The American philosopher Janis Joplin argued that freedom is just another word for: nothing left to lose; now, perhaps freedom means leaving your cellphone at home.)

Eventually, people began using answering machines as a way to screen their calls, as a way of not being at home even when they were at home, answering their phone only if the caller was someone they wanted to talk to. 

Now, we are rarely, some people are never, away from our phones. (The creeps have won. And yet there are people who wonder how the people who have recently been elected got elected into these positions of power. People wonder how fake news is created and disseminated and believed. [Everywhere we go, we have a phone with us.] People “share” links rapidly without thinking, often without even reading beyond a headline, still people wonder how fake news exist. People “share” without reflecting and engaging, still they wonder. “Sharing” for the sake of people “liking” what they post, because everyone reading what they post is of the same “mind”. Seriously. And yet people still wonder how an orange man has become president. Anyone can become president. This is true. After all, we live in America, not so much the land of the free, but the land of the comfortably numbed narcissist. So, yes, anyone can become president, but, one of my fears, is that not anyone can be president.)

When I was young, we had a rotary dial phone. My mother still has the same phone in her kitchen. 56 years. The same phone. How many iPhones have lasted 56 years? Ok, granted iPhones have not been around for that long, so here is a challenge: If you are, say, 33 years old, how many phones have you had in your life?

Now look in the mirror. Go ahead. Whisper aloud the number of phones you have owned and thrown away. Now cry. When I was young, I thought having a touchtone phone and an answering machine was a sign of wealth; now, I know it is a sign of evil. (Also, when I was young we had a newspaper that we paid for, magazines that we paid for. We did not expect news, knowledge, information, to be free. We thought that people writing news, providing insights, should be paid for producing knowledge and insight, the way I felt that I should be paid for my work as a garbage man.)

Years ago, I blew out my knees from running marathons. So now I can only hike. The same is true of the joints in my fingers. I basically have blown them out from writing so much. It is easier for me to type, and I can type much faster than I can write. And people can read my typewritten pages much more easily than they can read my handwriting.

So, when I write to a friend, a true friend, a real friend, I must slow down, so that my handwriting is legible. Even then, my handwriting is still a challenge to read. Friends used to complain about it when I wrote them letters, now they are more appreciative of it. They now know that I took a long time from my life to slow down enough to write to them and that while I was writing to them I was devoting time to being with them.

And then as they read my letter, they were devoting time in their life to being with me. The marks on the paper were marks of time, of body, of being together. Then the journey. The duration of the letter being sent from Lotus to Stuttgart or to Pittsburgh or to Hsinchu or to San Francisco. And the wonder of actually holding an envelope containing a letter that has made such a journey? Magical. And then you open the envelope and struggle with reading the script of the person’s handwriting. The struggle is part of the love. And the struggle with reading such a script is giving you more time to be with the person who sent you the letter. 

A few years back, I wrote a letter to a woman who I knew was moving too fast, so I wrote in tiny tiny tiny script. And I wrote part of the letter in German. (This was to someone who did not read German.) I wanted to give her a different experience of time. I wanted to create a possibility of time being different. I wanted to be with her longer than for a fleeting moment.

If we value speed and instantaneous communication and instantaneous gratification, then we value tweeting over writing letters to each other. Imagine all that cannot be said in a tweet. Imagine all of what can slip into a handwritten letter. Imagine the beauty of an erasure, a nearly disappeared letter or word. (Not a Derridean erasure or a Percival Everett Erasure, but the traces of having erased. No word, no letter, can ever be truly erased once it has been written onto paper, and the little scar on the page of having attempted to erase a mistake is a gentle reminder that we are human after all. The delete key on your computer keyboard is an ahistorical demon wanting nothing to remain. No evidence. No half-formed thought.)

Imagine a shoebox under your bed filled with letters, instead of a folder on the screen of your laptop filled with typed documents. Imagine touching the words that your lover sent to you, knowing her hand rested on the paper you now hold in your hand, knowing she sealed the envelop, knowing this letter was carried to you from her. 

‘Tis the season to be giving, not gifting. So give love as a gift. Replace “I love you” with “I love to you.” And give this love without any expectation. Give this with wonder, with the desire to see what the person you give your love to does with the love you give to them. Too often, we forget to let go of the idea of our self.

Every moment of living is a gift, we must be able to give and accept such gifts without clinging to them. If our intention in giving a gift is to bind another person to us, to put that person under an obligation, to exercise a hidden moral tyranny over that person’s soul, then in loving that person we are only actually loving our self. Nothing is more selfish than committing such an act of narcissism. So give, then watch what the person creates with the gift you have given.

(When remembering Kathy Acker tenses become disobedient.)

Before Kathy Acker fades away from this present into color, she teaches me the disease of writing. She comes closer to her own difficulty and opened the spaces between discipline and punish. Diseased. The unease of the foreign on our skin. In the morning, Kathy and I leave the streets of San Francisco littered with remains from our dreams.

Over coffee, she tears away at the soft edges. The corners of her mouth. Lips that have cracked from the dry winter.

Be with me tonight, Doug. Stay here. I have lost this. At the crossroads. To return to origins through languages. To revive the space that has been made to disappear at the moment of blood.

Kathy gave me skin.

In a dream I saw a way to love. To survive the breaking of this body into loss. So we stood barefoot near the edge of a river. In mud. No one saw us. Or if anyone saw us, we no longer cared about their seeing. Only our bodies in this space. Water moves over our bodies. To become awake on the inside of skin. My body alert to this becoming. We are carried to a present before the past disappears Kathy. To live with water washing our skin. I want to come to your body with my body. To come near your skin. To wound. To seize. I take a hold of your bones. You close your mouth. Somehow you keep your eyes open and you see something blue. She once told me that I could make her come to blood just by touching her skin. That with each touch she began bleeding.

This forgery of forgetting.

Before Kathy had her first tattoo written onto her skin, she spoke. “I have been afflicted by some highly disturbing symptoms caused by the mere act of writing.” To lift the veil. “I speak but do not speak.”

I know how to make a reader come.

To follow.

But the primary pleasure is not for the reader, Kathy says, it is for me. Years later, Helene tells me, “I feel like I am protecting myself from reading you. I keep a layer over this space that wants to open. That hungers. I am frightened by your inside, Doug, so I read you safely, from over here. I know to stay away.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I search for deserts.

“I hold back from reading you.”

Kathy took me by her hand. Led me into an awkward land to live among lost souls. And we walked down the empty streets, cold, in Providence. To find the ocean. To step into movement. I am bleeding tonight. The words she says wait on the floor. Like her words, she wants to serve. To survive. “I know this desire,” Kathy says, “to be owned. To be placed.”  There is an antagonism between my body and my language. I am separated. Someone had broken into her body in an ungodly manner. A thousand and one ways for saying. The new moon slices the dark sky. I can see the fold. The gaping wound. Flooded by rituals.

She comes and goes.

Condemned to say nothing, but the same word. Again and again. The breakdown in repetition. The sight unseen. Uncertain girls with fragile hands led me to this other place where bodies have been rejected, expelled. We were on the outside. Orphans interrupted by sudden memories. The shock of recognition beneath naked feet.

In those suicidal late nights before every holiday between midnight and two a.m., Kathy always called me. She wanted my voice. For her body. Tell me a story. I need sleep. Her soft, gentle, obsessive voice cutting into the night. Kathy’s skin becoming a lonely child for just one word. A strict wanting that never dies. No one knows this silence. The silences we have just entered with Kathy’s death.

Tired. She comes slowly. These nights appear longer than those nights that we had devoted to watching bodies becoming unrecognizable. Kathy wants. Still. For me to utter memories of other skins the way a photograph remains marked by movement. Once I tried to forget not the memory, but the wanting. Mangled bits of old meaning that have lost touch with language. We stood in some alley near Alphabet City after a reading. We stood in the dark where we could not see each other. This body unable to control its own life. My eyes weak from a night of smoke and pained desires.

I want to take you inside. Where you become obscure.

Not wanting to look, I reached my hand toward the place where her body was not mine. This innocent shame of some pain. Kathy said she wanted to wake in my skin. “We need,” she said, “to stop kissing each other because language can no longer exist.” Her teeth in my elbow. The unknown smile of a girl locked in her own childhood.

I thought she doesn’t have a father. Tenses resist death.

Kathy turned page after page locked inside her need to push and shove her body through books the way sailors travel the waters without maps. Bold thumbs. Coarse calluses. Broken bones and torn muscles. The dangers of reading without flinching. Without turning away. I feared she would turn away. Become lost. Separate her self from this. Here. We had died. Captive bodies. Deteriorated. In this life, we had become nothing more than a chance encounter between flesh and page. “When you read my books,” she tells me, “I become dirty.” Her fingers wet. 

January 23, 1996

I can’t bear it … depression depression … I am retreating into a new book, want happy books cause it’s so dreadful in the ‘real’ world … oh well … take care of yourself darling,

K

Dear Kathy,

There are people who never feel and who have no idea what they are missing. The vestiges of childhood. Living needs a sting. Call me.

doug

***

I write on you, Kathy.

My words cut her words off at the pass. Spaces. The violence of the meaning of our hesitation. She said that she feared she would become a termite of her own body. That her bones would become dust in her mouth. I need this love. The words stuck to her skin. Covered her in their memories. Suspended in their own dread. Ferociously religious in our longing to return to the moment we open our eyes and come. To speech. Abandon the world and fall into breathing.

The landscape of depression is revealing.

Kathy told me she was unable to read any more books. That her past was not there. Could not be found in there. It just wasn’t there.

A young woman lingers. Wanting. We traveled down corridors with invisible doors. But she could not wait. She ran down a narrow hallway. Locked doors. A man is chasing her. But we never see this man. We can only know that this man wants to destroy her. I wait in this place where the sun never shines. Flowing white curtains. Spring rain and that breeze off the coast. The disturbed chaos of an Argento film.

I want the spaces to speak, Doug. I want to show you.

“Look, Doug, between these spaces.”

I saw men dressed in scarlet robes. Red and red and more red. So much red so deep into their skins that they were nearly invisible in their own body. Girls we could not rescue. 

[The following text includes fragments from conversations, emails, letters, postcards, and phone messages with Kathy Acker. There are also passages from her published work and from mine.]

My friendship with Kathy Acker was most often little more than a string of long nights on the telephone. Miles and miles of roads and wires. Writing each other in and out of our bodies. Desperate longing. Locked inside being so far away from each other, Kathy and I became lost to space and time. “Come to San Francisco, Doug.” Her voice trails off. “Teach at the Art Institute with me. Here you can be free. Escape Ohio. Turn away from that fascist dean.  Here, you can begin to think again.”

Late in her life, Kathy wanted nothing more than to cut her body into pieces. Small pieces that would stop the dying, the dying that ravished her body. An ancient, festering wound of incompleteness that threatened to replace the violence of sacrifice in her body with the ritual of purification. To seek. To lose. “If I remove my breast, this pain will go away. This coming death will flee.” But in Tijuana death is more resilient. It lingers all through her body. All through her life, Kathy had written endlessly about dying but did not die. Now on the inside of dying, Orpheus descends. The herbs fail.

We had lived each day in the kind of oblivion that can only create identity, that can only break and turn into a song. A tiny song that moves in the breeze, that cuts through berry patches. Blue stains on our shirts that want to cry but can find no tears. Just a tearing into a silent body. Write from the inside out. Do not hesitate until the flower bleeds. The anxiety of the Orchard. The scent of eucalyptus near her thigh. Jasmine behind her ear. For her breath that haunts my skin. I open my voice. Loose and abandoned words that want to be somewhere.

They will make you impure. Our personal histories written on filthy rags that are barely legible and that exist without language. Keep your wounds alive to the ghost of my innocence. To come to your touch in the night without words.

Near midnight Kathy and I walk into the city. We pick up what others have thrown away. We fill our pockets with discarded moments from the lives of thoughtless people who drop their memories on concrete. Paperclips, rubber bands, soiled paper. Dusty locks of hair. A perfect tomato. We think of knocking on doors to find the owner of the perfect tomato. But then Kathy bites into it. Her gold tooth in red. In our dreams we somehow get away.  Without knowing. We stand outside Barneys looking in the display window like children with all their wanting and their laughter. Her leather coat like some other skin that covers her, that warms her, that saves her. She tugs at my sleeve. “Look at the green of that blouse, Doug.”

There’s a lot that we do not see.

Kathy exiled herself.

Kathy taught me to dream. The map of dreaming. To enter, Kathy says, the water world of dreaming. Lost children inventing pain. Kathy’s red book. The triangle patch of dark grass. Wanting for love. My heart betrayed. This wanting that came down to the place of words. For her to seize my bones. My need for disease like a prayer to make my body into a foreigner. This return to the damp concrete of unforgiving basements. My own walking through streets in Sacramento now makes me become a prey to this fever of memories. Come home, little girl. To my hands. His smile. I am not afraid of my mother, father. Kathy writes. But she cannot stop. Her cheeks burn. He led her down this road. Her heart a traitor. But this longing that carries our bodies into the river.

“I will forever be writing my thoughts without order,” Kathy tells me, “without respect for your need.” She feared she would fall. She feared she would open her eyes and see her father one more time. Her mother pushing her away into another dark room. Locking her in dormitories for disobedient girls learning to be quiet. Boarding schools that discipline the beauty of soft skin into broken memory. I want my father to know my father. (Kathy resisted grammar and did not know what she meant.) Her mother forgetting and forgetting until the act of forgetting became her only memory. On many occasions she had forgotten Kathy’s name. Her mother with her knives and her pills. “Please take the pill that makes you funny, mother. The one that lets you kiss me goodnight.” Curled up tight. Not knowing how her mother’s fits of rage, fits of humor would write themselves onto her skin. To make them into sins of her past. Aimless threats. “I dream myself inside sex shows. There I am alone. Always telling myself who I am.” Fathers stare at my body. Reach toward my naked skin. It’s like traveling. Between.

In this world without end. I thought Kathy would live. From this day forth. Kathy will live forever. No beginnings. Only a world with Kathy. So I never thought to take a photograph of me with her. I did not want her presence. Those slight marks on some frail paper. She would be here. Present. Years later, Matias tells me that he, too, has no photos of Kathy. Just these marks.

From the first moments of our friendship, we spoke in tongues contaminated by years of reading and longing. “I want to find a way in. I want to understand the brutality of being in love with some man that I have met in an orchard and whom I can only understand as a vague abstract body in that state of being where only sex matters.” In Germany, Kathy drives her motorcycle into the trees. Fallen apples. She nearly slides off the road into the deep snow. Finds him standing there. A dark forest. Still. The smell of a river. I am sorry this is not you, Doug. To live without meaning. Beyond the comfort of words. Following into this desire. Bone. An uneasy song becoming noise.

Beneath the needle, inside the pain of cancer, Kathy invented someone to help her make her body.

I forced myself to do what I wanted to do.

“I am in my body now,” she said. A recording, the echo of her voice, left on my answering machine. Oct. 2nd, 1997. Last words. Lost words.

I don’t want to be this monster any longer. To be a loner on the rim. To live in parking garages. I want to be able to live without swallowing one more thing. Her mouth wanted to become disobedient.

It took Kathy forever to hang up the phone. Don’t leave me like this. Now without her voice here I wonder if she has escaped. She said she could see doors. All along Revolution Boulevard we stumbled in and out of consciousness.

In death, orgasms change.

(To be continued in another blog.)

Ever since November 8, 2016, people have been blaming other people on the outcome of the presidential election campaign. We have blamed white men. We have blamed African Americans. We have blamed white women. We have blamed pollsters. We have blamed the founding fathers for creating the Electoral College. We have blamed Russia. A few of us have even blamed ourselves.

Some people have gone so far as to blame Facebook. And by “people,” in this instance, I mean the stupidest people in America; actually, the stupidest life forms in the Milky Way (not the film by Luis Bunuel, but the galaxy.) That’s right. These people have blamed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for getting them to believe in fake news. People want him to apologize for their own stupidity, their own naïve madness. (They may want to sue the educational systems that nurtured their fragile minds, instead of running the risk of actually educating these people.)

These people claim that Zuckerberg made them victims of fake news. These fake stories that streamed on their newsfeeds victimized these people by seducing them into clicking on them, and then, after following the bait, they believed the news story. How could Zuckerberg or anyone else expect these people, who think news should be free (because they are entitled to everything being free), to think for themselves? How could they be expected to be critical thinkers?

These are the same people who click “like” on people’s relationship status when someone says their relationship status is “complicated.” Or that click “like” on photos of a couple performing their happiness for the voyeuristic gaze of a newsfeed, instead of quietly wearing a raspberry beret and loving each other in the privacy of their own lives, touching each other here and there and there and there again until one of them . . . , but I digress. So, of course these people believed these fake news stories were real stories. They probably think their Facebook friends are real people.

As a country, we have pointed our fingers here, there, and everywhere. And, still, we are not exhausted with blaming others for having created this catastrophic moment in history.

I personally would like to blame poets. I have friends who are poets. And I, myself, have been accused of being a poet. (I have been found wanting. I am sure you can imagine what that means.) Still, I find it important to blame us poets for our own invisibility, for our decision to remain aloof, to write poems only for other poets, or for workshops, or to read at open mic nights. Poetry has become such an insular act that it is, in truth, no longer an act.

So once upon a midnight dreary, in the middle of a cruel and lonely night (‘twas dark and stormy, as well as cruel and lonely), I decided that instead of blaming poets, I would like to encourage all of us to unleash the inner poet that is trapped inside us. We must all, once again, become poets, instead of becoming tenured professors or instead of falling down and becoming students seeking the approval of tenured poets, or instead of working in coffeehouses bemoaning our fate. (‘Tis not fate that has brought ye here, but a mistaken faith.)

The time has come for poetry.

Stop living prosaic lives of quiet desperation. Stop blaming others for your own victimizing of yourself. Take responsibility for breathing the breath that you were given as a gift to not just breathe, but to create.

I dare you to be a poet. All of you. And I mean a true poet, one who can pick a lock, one who can lift a shadow off a sidewalk and see what lies beneath that shadow and sing whatever is discovered lurking there into being. I want us all to become the kind of poet who wanders the streets, eyes aflame, voice stinking of yesterday and tomorrow, grabbing wedding guests by their collars and kissing them with none too subtle truths. I want to experience the hard-core poetic truth of living pressed against my lips. And I promise not to blink, but to carry such a truth unto others, and press my none to innocent lips against theirs until they too know this truth with their bodies and souls. A revolution in words.

(Years ago I assigned Werner Herzog’s A Guide to the Perplexed. The next week, every one of my students came back to class ready to discuss Herzog’s book. I asked my students if they had actually read A Guide to the Perplexed. They said, “yes,” and they claimed to be eager to discuss it, not use Herzog’s idea, not put them into motion, not act with them. They asked me what sections of the book would be on the final exam. I was never so disappointed by human beings in my life. I told them, gently, that they had all failed in the reading of Herzog’s book.)

Be poetic with your life.

Out of the classrooms, out of the malls. Off of Facebook. Off of Instagram. Even poets have bodies. Cultivate sensuality. Discover your body. Take it (your body, your desire, your voice, your passion, your beauty) to the streets. When the American philosopher, Bruce Springsteen, wrote: “The poets down here don’t say nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be.” He was not suggesting that poets be passive. He was demanding that poets expose the truth that only poetry can know. They, the poets, must stay out of the way of poetry. (In all honesty, there are no such thing as poets; there are only poems. Bring out the poem in you.)

Why aren’t poets walking the streets, tweeting up a storm like angry birds? Why are poets, instead of tweeting, publishing in journals that no one reads? Tweet, poet, tweet. When someone sends a truly terrifying tweet, poet, get thee to a tweetery and tweet away. (I have heard of poets who do not have twitter accounts. Instead of twitter, they retire to the solitude of narrow chambers. I understand the need of emotion being recollected in tranquility. But now is not the time to go gentle into that good night. We must roar. The night’s bursting open. Poets, we have work to do.)

I want poets that are criminally insane like Ezra Pound, and I want dangerous poets, poets like Dante so divinely comical that politicians chase them out of the country. I want Santa Claus to create a special island for poets, like that island of misfit toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I want to listen to Burl Ives narrating the backstory of this island burdened by melancholic longing, but spirited by passionate poets who know, like those toys on the island of misfit toys, that even though they are broken, flawed in some fundamental way, they have a voice that can break on through to the other side, a voice that can burn light into the shadows, that can return meaning to words.

Over the years poets have sinned by turning their backs on spoken word, on rap, on hiphop, on tweeting, on snapchatting. I want to see naked poets snapchatting like foolish innocents. (Ok, I do not want to actually see naked poets, and I would want to protect the youth of America from experiencing the unseemly much ado about nothing sights of naked poets rhyming up a storm full of fury signifying nothing, so I mean this in only a figurative way.) But now that it is out there: therein lies the rub. Too much fury signifying nothing.

Being alone in a room with a poet should be a terrifying experience.

The first job of any poet is to defend language from corruption. W.H. Auden knew this. So, poets, get thee to the frontlines. Defend language from corrupt narcissists who want to celebrate Baudrilliardian silliness. When a narcissistic neutered newt of a manchild says that while he knows the facts say that the crime rates have gone down, he feels they haven’t, poets must rescue language. Such a tongue must not wag anymore untruths. Que Sera Sera, my ass. Call on Pierre Paolo Passolini. He knows what needs to be done to such a tongue. (If you do not understand this reference, perhaps it is better.)

As William S. Burroughs once said: “The only job of the writer is to write what is before his very eyes.” The only problem with writing what is before our very eyes is that what is directly in front of us is covered over by language. We must first battle this corruption of language.

Forget euphemisms. I mean when someone dies, they are dead. They have not passed away. They are dead. Yes, I know some people may be hurt by the truth, the reality, of someone dying, so we may soften it by saying: I am so sad that your wife has passed away. Passed away is, I have been told, less difficult to hear. It is a gentle way of saying: Your wife is dead. Some people insist on saying that the dead woman has gone on to a better place. Seriously? How can that make us, who are still alive, feel better? When my grandmother died, my mother told that me that she had gone to a better place. I was eleven. My first thought was: Why would Grandma want to escape being with me to go to a better place? And where was this better place? Hawaii? I mean, maybe there are better places than Pittsburgh (I seriously doubt this) that my grandmother wanted to go to, but, hell, she should have said something to me. I am still traumatized by my grandmother leaving me to go a better place without taking me with her. 

Alt-Right. This is worse than a euphemism and it is the one, sole duty of poets to get to work on this, to prevent anyone from using this word to cover over blatant evil. If we do not control language, language will control us. Language will control the thinkable and the unthinkable. Language has the power of smoke and mirrors. Language can make us look the other way. We need poets. Alt-Right by any other name is evil. And we, all of us, poets and ne’er do wells, must fight this by any means necessary.

If you are a poet, do this experiment: Pick up a pot. Slam the pot down onto the counter in your kitchen or, better yet, take said pot out into the world (the world is the place outside your door, you will see it if you lift your gaze from your navel and look up and away from your self), once outside with this pot, strike it against the cold, hard concrete of the sidewalk. When you do this, does it make a sound? If it does, then forget metaphors, forget empty signifiers. Celebrate the pot. 

Come on poets. Seriously! Come on poets everywhere. Oh my kingdom for a well-placed comma. Oh to hell with commas. Not just the oxford comma but all commas. Let come what may. And come it will. There but for the grace of a comma goes the end of civilized discourse.

No poets were harmed in doing research for this blog entry. No poems, aside from a few bowdlerized Shakespearean moments, were significantly harmed.

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I had only planned on writing one tiny harmless paragraph for this blog entry. One simple suggestion:

Take 24 hours this week, and every other week, to simply be grateful. Don’t buy anything. Just sit still, breathe, and say, “Thank you.” When you wake up in the morning, be grateful that you have been given a new day, and as you are falling asleep at the end of your day, be grateful that you were given the day you had just experienced.

Then. Out of nowhere, for no logical reason. A man went to see Hamilton: An American Musical. Of all the men in America, what was this man thinking? Did he think he would remain a political virgin while experiencing a work of art? Does he think that all art must conform to his beliefs? That art must only value and repeat back to him what he already thinks? Does he, or that one friend of his, think he possesses the power to silence art?

Granted other white people have sat back in comfortable chairs and harmlessly watched Hamilton as part of their New York City Broadway Adventure before, but this particular white man is myopic and color blind in ways that only people of a certain ilk are. (He is of the ilk that can stand on a stage, with another disturbingly pale man, and stare out over a sea of other people, drones who look exactly like these two comrades, and pronounce that it is time to bind the wounds of division (i.e. it is time to ignore difference) and come together as one united people; people, that is, of the exact same color and social and economic class, who agree on the exact same values.)

Did this man think that he was simply paying for an innocent experience? One that he could mindlessly applaud once the singing stopped? Did he, do you, think that art would not unnerve his, your, sheltered, protected way of being in the world? Did he think he could continue on his merry and innocent way, dreaming of heterosexual sugarplums and fairies after confronting a work of art? Did the white snowflake need a trigger warning?

Brandon Victor Dixon, a cast member of Hamilton, feared that this man would only consume an experience, that he would see nothing and think nothing beyond his own thoughts. That he would then leave the theater and continue to do what he does. That he would continue to think in exactly the same way that he has always thought.

So, assuming that this one particular white man, sitting in the audience watching the performance, most likely was not understanding the performance, Dixon ended the performance by thanking the man for coming and by requesting that the white man, who had just had the experience of watching Hamilton without seeing Hamilton, think about what he had just missed seeing and by asking that this white man see something other than his own mirror when he comes to have power over people he most likely will never see or acknowledge exists.

Then, another white man, defending his compatriot from being bullied by an actor, tweeted a demand that the cast of Hamilton apologize for trying to explain something to someone who cannot understand anyone who is different from him and whose experience differs from the purity of his own singular experience. 

Here, then, is my one question, and this is my question for all artistic experience: Having seen a musical or a film, or having read a book, or heard a song, or looked at a photograph or a painting, what are we going to do with what we now know that we otherwise would not know and would not be thinking about? That is: How are we going to be in the world in new ways given this new way of seeing and of thinking of the world?

This is the value of art.

I am not very curious about themes or symbols or allusions. Such methods of thinking are simplistic (and safe and apolitical) ways for narcissistic intellectuals to show off their eclectic knowledge of arcane and somewhat dead knowledge, and to exercise power over those who do not posses the same tradition. If we do not act on, act through, and act with something, then it is not knowledge; it is only information. Knowledge must be activated through doing something, not simply filling out answers on an exam on a way to degree.

Art is not a comforting experience. Artists are not here to distract us. Art should terrify us. Art frightens me. Art threatens my identity. The other day I mailed a copy of my new novel to Bill Vollmann. The postal agent asked: “Is there anything inside this package that is liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?” I replied: “No, it is not fragile (I’m from Pittsburgh), no, it is not liquid, and I certainly hope it is not perishable, but yes, it is potentially hazardous; at least, I hope it is.” 

Then.

Thousands of people went to see someone named Kanye West, in a place called The Golden One Center, a place paid for by taxpayers in Sacramento. He sang two songs in their entirety. The people (his fans), however, expected him to entertain them with more songs; instead, he went on a rant (which, I am told, differs from a rap). While lording above the crowd on a floating platform, West ranted about a man he admires, a man he would have voted for to become the Leader of the Free World, if he did vote (and if there was an election for such a position), but he, like so many others with intense (and slightly insane) political convictions, did not vote.

Still, West feels it is important to talk about whom he would have voted for, had he taken time out of his precious life to vote. (If not voting, but ranting anyway about politics, does not make someone a red-blooded or blue-bloodied American, then nothing will. A man who feels he is entitled to complain and rant, without actively participating in political processes, is a truly heroic man. That is sarcasm. And, from the research I have completed, West does not even take the time to “like” posts on Facebook. I mean, come on, Kanye, at least appear to be political! “Like” something on Facebook. Or “like” this! Or “like” Josh Fernandez’s brilliant critique of your performance.)

Similar to the man who went to see Hamilton, these people (fans of a man named West) merely wanted to be entertained without having to think, and they wanted their entertainment to be free and innocent of anything political, because, if Disney Enterprises and Hollywood and the whole culture industry has convinced us of one thing, it is that entertainment never circulates an ideology. Entertainment is just entertainment. 

Seriously. I mean seriously. It is not as if there is a twilight enterprise teaching our daughters that they only have value if they are in a relationship with a boy. And it is not as if there are songs suggesting that our daughters are only objects. No, we are only consuming entertainment free of ideology, unless, of course, we disagree with the ideology of the artwork, then the entertainment is besmirched by the political. If we agree with it, we consume it and celebrate it as being free from politics. Oh, the bliss!

My only hope is that any human being who has an experience—whether the experience comes through art or through sports, or through a hike, or through touching another person—reflect on their experience, maybe even talk to other people about their experience. Such conversations are especially important when we experience something that rubs against the grain of what we formerly held to be true.

Still.

This week is the week in America for giving thanks. The cynic in me wants to question people who only donate one day out of the year to a local foodbank or who gobble up their Thanksgiving meal, giving thanks to all that they have, before rushing out to stores in order to buy more stuff, since they do not have enough stuff; since, we tell ourselves, there we can never possess enough stuff. We are told we need more stuff, so we obey.

We buy stuff to protect us from ourselves.

What would happen if we, instead of distracting ourselves, created time to be alone with ourselves, with our thoughts? If we are able to devote one day each week to being with ourselves, then we have more than most people.

So begin and end each day with a moment of gratitude. We do not have to wait for a special day to come once a year to be grateful.  And just because Blue Laws have been overturned does not mean that we have to accept that. Be a revolutionary take one day each week to refuse to be stupid.

Devote every moment of at least one day every week to living and being grateful instead of consuming and being fearful. Imagine if we convinced ourselves that our identity came from what we gave instead of from what we bought?

Too often we focus on what we do not have. We live with seeing lack, rather than experiencing our simple abundance. So, each day we need to remind ourselves of what is part of our lives, what we hold in our hearts.

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"I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers."  -- Ralph Ellison

Even though there is a presidential election, and everyone is frantically voting for someone on Tuesday, and even though I have been encouraged by strange dreams and fantasies and the voices in my head to run for President, I am not actively campaigning to become the next President of the United States of America, at least not this year. Still, I would be remiss if I did not participate in the narcissistic joy of saying random things aloud in a tone that make my words sound like proclamations warning of an apocalyptic future where John Oliver and Trevor Noah are forced to work for Fox News and to report the news exactly as Fox News imagines it to be true.

Because you are not me, you may think I am a narcissist, but I am not a narcissist (and trust me, only someone who is truly not [or is it not truly?] a narcissist would say that they are not a narcissist, and only an authentically narcissistic narcissist would accuse me of being a narcissist because I claim not to be a narcissist); so, to return to the beginning, I am not a narcissist, nor was meant to be, but I, like the rest of us, do want my own reality television show, because nothing is real until it is real, and it is only real after it has been determined to be real by having been photographed or  having been recorded, then seen (and ideally liked) by someone other than by ourselves. (And, just a casual heads up, if you like something that you post yourself, we know who you are, and there are reasons that we avoid you when we see you on the streets; that is, if you ever venture out onto the streets.)

And even though I am not running for President, I think all of us should contemplate what our first 100 days in office would be like, what we would focus on accomplishing. If all of us devoted time in our daily lives to reflecting on what we truly value, and then devoted time to discovering ways to bring those values into the world, then perhaps we will no longer need politicians. Instead of politicians promising hope and change, or promising to make America great again, or promising that we will be stronger together, imagine if we respected ourselves deeply enough to be able to respect those around us (especially those who are different than us). Imagine if we were so comfortable in our own skin that other people in their own skins were not threatening to us. In fact, instead of feeling uncomfortable or threatened by those who are different than us, imagine becoming curious of difference? (I know you think I am going to bring Jacques Derrida into this. But I am not going to do that. I am speaking of difference, not differance, or am I?)

Imagine an America without politicians.

Imagine committing ourselves to doing, instead of merely, and passively, sharing and liking memes. (I know that word—meme—is pronounced mēm, but, take a moment, look at it—me me. Now, stop being so silly. Unless, of course, you have graduated from the Ministry of Silly Walks and cannot help yourself.)

What are we doing beyond all this? To own our lives. To live this time we were given at birth.

"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."  -- Antonio Gramsci

So, as a beginning with more to come, in my first 100 days:

I would change the names of all the streets in America, but I would particularly focus on neighborhoods that are predominately white. Dig, if you will this picture, a white family, living in an all white suburb, giving a white friend these directions to their house: “First you get off Highway 50 at the El Dorado Hills exit, then you make a left onto Martin Luther King Blvd, then at the second stop sign, you make another left onto James Baldwin Avenue, then a slight left onto Nina Simone Place, then an abrupt left before the next traffic light onto Frederick Douglass Street, pass through the intersection of Malcolm X Way and Rosa Park Avenue, and go under the Roberto Clemente overpass, then make a final left onto Harriet Tubman Street. We are the third house on the left, number 21.” Now, imagine that family driving or walking up and down those streets everyday and their children asking mommy and daddy who the streets were named after.

I would eliminate cup holders in cars. People lived without them and drove their cars without them until 1983, when they became standard in cars the same year mini-vans were marketed. (There is a connection and the connection should make you and your family sad.) Rather than buying coffee to go, or rushing out of the house with a cup of coffee in a travel mug, and drinking the coffee in the lonely isolation of a sad car, I would encourage people to slow down, to sit at the breakfast table and devote time to being with your family, or to sit in cafes and talk with each strangers.

I would cut off all electricity in America every Wednesday of every week. (I would, of course, allow necessary electricity to continue to be delivered—electricity to refrigerators to keep beer cold, and electricity for hospitals and other health related needs.) Stores would be closed every Wednesday as well. I know this is reminiscent of Blue Laws that most often were enforced on Sundays, but to avoid any sort of conflicts between my presidency and religious practice, I decided it would be safest to do this on Wednesdays. Hump Day. Doing this on Wednesday, also will not create conflicts with people desperately needing to watch football games.

My Blue Laws on Wednesdays are NOT religious in nature or belief; rather, these laws will allow us to rethink why we exist.

I would unplug the internet every Wednesday.

I would do unspeakably sad things to people who go on social media to say that they are unplugging.

I would design cell phones that can only be looked at four times in any 24-hour period, then they would shut off automatically. 

I would change the workweek to six hours per day, five days a week. Eventually we will become bored with consuming, and, because we will no longer be exhausted by work, we will have the energy to create, to dream (it does take energy and passion to dream), to put into action our desires.

Creation in place of consumption.

And as we do this, our values will change. We will no longer judge ourselves or others by what we have (or too often by what we do not have); rather, we will celebrate ourselves, and each other, through what we create and give to each other. In fact, it would not matter that we had more than others or that others had more than us. This will then change our definition of success and change our sense of what it means to live a meaningful life.

And if we share what we create with those we love, instead of selling it to strangers purely for profit, we will commit ourselves more directly to our hearts and to our souls and to our minds, not to that which society demands we value. (Those marketed values crafted to keep us in our place and them in positions of power.) Imagine the kinds of creative risks we would take with expressing our desires? Our dreams? Our ways for loving?

Sit down with one friend this week and sit with at least one stranger and listen to them tell you a story about something or someone that matters to them. Carry that story to someone else.

"And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become."  -- James Baldwin

Please vote god.

Please, vote god.

Please, vote, god.

Please vote, god.

Commas mean something, or the other. And Sometimes commas do more harm than good. So be careful.

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"You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to save the world."  -- John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Even though this week’s blog does not appear to be about anything, it is about the upcoming Presidential election in the “United” States of America. I, however, like Tom before me, have left out the coordinating conjunctions and the conjunctive adverbs, so you, dear reader, are on your own to make sense of what stopped making sense years before this election, which, in essence, made this (whatever this is) possible.

But we, all of us we’s everywhere, are responsible. We have created this opportunity for anyone to become President through the very ways we have been living our daily lives.

So, what follows are merely a few casual and meaningless observations that I fell upon while walking through certain half-deserted streets (mostly in San Francisco, in the fog) following tedious arguments of insidious intent (mostly in Berkeley in the light of dusk). And, like my old companion Prufrock, I dare not risk disturbing the universe by making a decision that will, any minute, be reversed with the newest meme that comes my way, telling me what to trust, what to believe, what to know; for what is knowledge any more? A blink of an eye?

Indeed, that (the place where a blink of an eye passes as knowledge) is no country for old men. All those terrible beauties trying to seduce us. 

Dear Facebook:

Why do you call it a Newsfeed? Who gave you such permission? Please stop doing all you do to language, to thinking. Stop it. Words were innocent, before you abused them with your filthy fingerprints. And you, dear Facebook Newsfeed, have perverted the purity of our youth into believing activism is as simple as a click of a keyboard, that we can be involved, active, without ever leaving the solitude of our social network prison. Imagine if Martin Luther King, Jr, had stayed home, had stayed off the bridges and streets.

Please. I beg you, Facebook. Stop.

It is not a newsfeed, nor was meant to be; it is a mirror. And please do not hire a Frenchman (Lacan by any other name) to look into this, to move around the mirror, to disinfect the mirror and make it become other to itself. No Frenchman is up to the task.

My advice is that you hire Andrei Tarkovsky

Love,

Narcissus

(Written on the surface of a perfectly still pond before the rain fell or before a stone skipped across the surface of the pond, rippling the words into a dance so subtle that we could no longer separate the dancer from the dance, and then what becomes of thought?)

We, none of us, become radical political activists by passively click “like” on a Facebook post. There are, of course, more devoted Facebookians, who do so much more than merely clicking “like;” some agent provocateurs of the Facebook ilk go so far as to click “like,” and write a comment. Something like: “There in spirit. If only the Gilmore Girls were not on tonight.” If such a commitment does not change the world, then, seriously, nothing will. And of course, there are even more passionate activists, ones who click “like,” leave a comment, AND go so far as to share the post on their very own Facebook page. The next thing you know such Facebookians will be storming the barricades. (Gentle reminder, the word activist in English means to get the f*ck off the sofa, walk out the front door, and step into the mud of the world.  That is, get thee to a barricade, and storm it.)

More often than not, we click “like” so that we can feel good about ourselves, perhaps even feel like we have done something, or we click “like” so that others can see that we like what they like, and so that we can agree that we think alike, and, because we think alike, we can stay Forever Facebook Fiends (Yes, I know you think that I missed a typo, silly you.), and so that everyone can see that we are ever so progressive with our like-clicking.

In fact (in the fact of being there in reality, without pulling Keanu Reeves into this conundrum), we are nothing more than Pavlov’s dog, obediently obeying and responding to what is placed in front of us, and only what is placed in front of us, and we promise never to question how what got placed in front of us got placed in front of us, and we promise to never question our own implications of us being a member of the they that we want to blame for what we ourselves have created. 

We are not victims of they. We enable they.

And, what is placed in front of us, and what passes as politics, or as knowledge worthy of reflection, is frightening.

A few of my “friends” on Facebook (perhaps more than a few) have begun unfriending people with whom they disagree, and/or unfriending those who disagrees with them. This saddens me deeply. So many people claiming, a priori, to know the truth, without being open enough to think deeper than the memeing madness that we are served.

Are you being served? I didn't think so.

What becomes of philosophy when memes replace the soundbytes that replaced narratives? How is thinking possible outside narrative? What becomes of becoming?

Facebook is little more than our own private mirror reflecting back to us exactly what we think, exactly what we value, exactly what we believe. And, yet, we accuse others of being narcissists. I know you already know this. We all already know this. Everybody knows. And yet.

"The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor."  -- Leonard Cohen

This should frighten us. This insistence on everyone thinking exactly the same way that we think. This fear we have of speaking each to each. We should be afraid of what has become of us. We should be ashamed. Our parents should be disappointed in us, in our fragility, in our own unwillingness to listen and to think beyond our own limits of understanding the world.

There is an election next week. This election will elect the next President of the United States of America. So I will leave you with discarded parables I found in the Mission District the other morning.

Bugs go Ka-choo. It happens. There is even a carefully written, witty memoir of such a bug going Ka-choo, and of all that happened because the bug’s gentle and accidental ka-choo. This book is important because the bug takes responsibility for setting in motion a series of events, even though the bug did not intend to create such a series of events. Still, this bug never positions itself as a victim. It takes ownership of its ka-choo. Such a stance is heroic. We need more heroes like this bug. (We do not need more heroes who need wars to become heroes. Mel Gibson knows what I am talking about, and the American philosopher Tina Turner knows this in an even more profound way.)

For years a girl (this could just as easily be a boy or any other gender, but since this is a true story, it is a girl, a daughter) gets into her mother’s car. She buckles her seatbelt and then immediately looks down at her phone. A short while later (or a long time later, depending on the destination), mother and daughter arrive. The daughter lifts her eyes from the screen of her phone, unbuckles her seatbelt, and gets out of the car. When this girl one day takes her first driving lesson, she gets in the car, sits behind the wheel, looks down at her phone, and waits.

A simple reflection for all of us to undertake before we vote: Think back to the day when you first started carrying a cellphone with you everywhere. Can you remember the exact day that happened to you? (Twenty centuries of stony sleep.) How many times have you left your house without your cellphone, then, realizing that you did not have your phone with you, rushed back to get your phone? (The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.) Can you remember the first time you thought to yourself that you had to have your phone with you in case something happened? (The deep sadness of this thought is that the only way it is true is if nothing ever happened before cellphones, and we know that is not true. I mean, after all, Hitler was possible without Twitter. Imagine if Hitler had Twitter. But, honestly, the deeper sadness of thinking we have to carry our phone with us everywhere is that it might be indicative of a loss of faith in community, in the humanity of helping each other.)

Vote.

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The sentences in this short blog should be read as miniature mystery stories that do not understand what they are saying or what they are chasing, and that refuse to be solved.

Often words are abandoned on the streets. Dancers leave footprints. A shadow falls on a woman’s flesh. “Thoughts,” Ludwig muttered on that small boat drifting away from Bertrand enroute to Iceland in order to release Ludwig from the grasp of his elders and gain the freedom to think without the distractions of the city, “thoughts so alive that they have an architecture of their own.”

 The trick with curiosity is to refuse to follow. The following, that which comes after this which comes before, is following of the sort that is never following. I knew a man who walked across the desert in worn out shoes, but never left a trace. It’s what a sentence can do.

Most people think that seeing is believing. They will say that they would not have believed something had they not seen it with their “own” eyes, as if they own their own personal way for seeing. But the simple truth is: the more you think you know, the less you see.

And the more important, and unfortunate, truth is: Believing is seeing, not seeing is believing.

Seeing is believing is merely a cliché we resort to as if we had the courage to see without a deep-rooted fear of uncertainty, as if we had the intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual wherewithal to abandon knowledge and see. What is philosophy after all? A desire to approach pure immanence. Or empirical homelessness. This is not a question, was it?

We must remind ourselves daily that believing is seeing so that we can disturb ourselves into a way of seeing that is free from what we believe before we see what we see, or before we saw what we saw, which is/was there only without us seeing it.

In our daily habitual practice of seeing, we already, a priori, believe in what we see prior to seeing what we claim to see because our language for understanding traps us inside a basement where language makes familiar the unfamiliar. And since believing is seeing, we cannot begin to see until we discover ways to begin to forget.  We must unnerve seeing. Most of us, however, are too terrified to forget the name of what we see or the name for what we feel or the name for what we think, because we are afraid we will look stupid, or we fear that we will become lost.

Just think of all that we could see if we are not constrained by conventions or habits. Get rid of your ego, and see, baby, see. We are imprisoned. We cannot see things as they are. We only see things as we are. Anais Nin whispers from afar. 

  Be stupid. Get lost.

"If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few. "  -- Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi

No artist has a special gift. No artist is original. These are lies. Every artist is insanely passionate and curious and needs to be disobedient. Every artist knows that curiosity is hard work, backbreaking work. Originality is replaced with discipline. If there is any such thing as originality, it is not in saying something that no one else has ever said before, but in saying exactly what we think ourselves.

And talent? No, not talent—infinite patience. We must teach this infinite patience to ourselves in a world gone mad with love for speed and instant gratification. 

Like me, Faulkner believed in the muse of creativity. And that muse comes every morning at 6 am whether it wants to or not. An artist cannot wait to be inspired. An artist works to be inspired and work generates more work. But, I also believe in daydreaming. 

"Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds."  -- Helene Cixous

Hold a vision steady and long so that you can look into something instead of merely looking at something. See into it so that language becomes confused, exhausted, meaningless. Go to those places that resist language. 

An assignment for the week:

Make a list of all the crazy things you thought about as a child. Go ahead. I will wait for you to come back.

Remember the things that bewildered you, the things that you found marvelous, the things that made adults respond to you by saying “because”, as a way of silencing your desires.

(Parents should be punished for using the word “because”. That gentle word has damaged children for centuries, and adults use that word when they really want to say: “Shut up and stop being so curious. You’re driving me crazy.” And the reason the adult, usually a parent looking out for a child’s best interest, is going crazy is that everyday, because of the way that they have chosen to live their lives, they are forced to confront the reality that they are no longer curious. That nothing is miraculous to them any longer. They are merely paying bills or taking out the garbage.

They no longer think about time and space. About why, when it has rained for so many eons, the earth has not simply eroded away, or how they do not drown when their body is 50 to 65% water or what really happens to your skin when rain falls onto it. They no longer wonder. )

Our souls suffer when we live superficially. Our souls breaks. They simply shatter into a million tiny pieces.

To see the soul of something is to devote yourself to being with whatever it is that you are looking at. This requires a childish understanding of time, an extended sense of time. A sense that goes beyond the ways that adults have for measuring time.

Seeing requires an unnerving endurance of patience and uncertainty.

To get to the seen, we must bypass the imagined, the already known. Too often, if we are careless, we look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there, what we have been conditioned to expect. Stop projecting. Stop labeling. Stop categorizing. And break on through to the unspeakable shadows with a clarity that makes visible the shadow beneath the shadow. Have you ever watched a child trying to lift a shadow from a sidewalk?

I have met people who are more interested in, and excited by, something called Game of Thrones than they are fascinated by the skin cells falling off their bodies onto the carpet of their “living” room as they watch someone on television (or on any screen) entertain them. Instead of wondering who they are becoming as these skin cells fall of their bodies making a mess of everything, these people remain unconscious, consuming flickering images that mirror who they want us to be. (These people [the ones who consume entertainment designed to define them] are not my friends, but they do exist.) Because if skin cells are falling off our bodies (and they truly are) then every human being must be like Theseus’ ship, and that, my dear fellow human beings, is pretty cool. And imagine what would happen if all these skin cells commingle and rise from the carpets of our homes.

"We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve, I think, they also get the kinds of criminals they themselves bring into being."  -- Margaret Mead

As a child, and many times throughout my life, my parents and teachers told me, and so many others, that anyone could grow up to be president of the United States of America. I vaguely remember wanting to truly believe this. At the time, I think they were trying to encourage me to dream. My teachers and parents wanted to inspire me to be all that I could be. In fact, or in myth, they wanted me to be more than I could be; or, perhaps, they wanted me to leave them alone. They wanted to distract me, while all that was solid was melting into air. They wanted to distract me so that they could watch television or drink beer or have affairs.

My black friends and my African American friends were much more skeptical than I ever was. That is, until Barack Obama became president of these United States of America. And, once again, we all heard the rallying cry that anyone can become president. We were all inspired again. Anything was possible.

But.

Now, when I think back to my mother telling me that if I tried hard enough I could become president, I no longer think she was trying to inspire me. I think she was warning me. I, however, could not hear her warning. I wanted (or needed) her and my teachers to be inspiring me, not warning me.

The problem was that I could not hear my mother italicizing the word “anyone”. Had I heard the word “anyone” in italics, I would have been more prepared for what has been happening. Indeed, it is now very clear: “Anyone can become president of the United States.” Anyone is different from anyone. My mother and teachers did not know how to italicize their words when they spoke. Shame on them.

"This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are."  -- Plato

Our dreams and our fears are now true, terrifyingly true, and anyone (if we are not careful) will become president. Anyone. And, indeed, anyone will become president if we, all of us, not just the we that lives their lives like me, or that share my values, or my education, or my love for my children, but the larger we, all of us, do not wake up.

And this means more than voting. This means becoming a citizen again, so that when we say to our children: “Believe in your intellect, believe in your heart, believe in your soul, and anyone, you, even you, can become president.” And we can say it to them honestly, with meaning, and we can say it to them without italics.

And we must say this to them to do more than to inspire them to go on their own narcissistic journey. We must say this to them so that they are inspired to participate in creating a world that they want to live in. And we must encourage them to understand that their world will not be realized by them merely voting, and it will not be realized by them merely pursuing their own dreams (if their dreams are simply those of an ego gone mad with wanting power); rather, their world will come into existence by them actively being in the world.

I know there are clichés aplenty about this. But we have to live lives that create a world of light where anyone (without italics) can become president. Because living in the world we have created means that unfortunately anyone can become president, and that should frighten us all.

"In America, anyone can become president. That's the problem."  -- George Carlin

I am not in any way trying to tell you who to vote for in the upcoming Presidential election. That is not my point.  After all, as Adlai Stevenson has said: “In America, anyone can become president. That’s one of the risks you take.” And he seemed to be saying this without italics, even though, I would argue, his words do express a hint of italic-fear. Given the right circumstances, Stevenson and Carlin know what kind of anyone might become president.

"And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? And you may ask yourself What is that beautiful house? And you may ask yourself Where does that highway go to? And you may ask yourself Am I right? Am I wrong? And you may say yourself, My God! What have I done? "  -- Talking Heads

We must trust these talking heads over other talking heads. We cannot let the days go by. But perhaps because we have allowed our days to go by, we have the muddled madness that we have been experiencing. We, therefore, have a duty to transform our daily ways of living with each other. 

But, we must do more than simply cast a vote and rely on someone else to change our world for us. This is our world. We are responsible. We create our world. We cannot simply cast a vote, and then forget our responsibility to live differently. A vote for change is not change. Change is change.

If we can change, if we can truly look into our souls, beyond capital, beyond memes, beyond t-shirts and posters, beyond clicking “like” here and there, and beyond the desires that distract us from truths that are deeper and that often exist prior to speech, prior to words, then we can create a daily practice of living that will change how we experience the world. Doing so will terrify politicians and panic narcissists, because what they value and what they consider success will no longer matter to us. Their desires for their own interests will be replaced by the desires and dreams of people (Plato would call these people citizens) seeking to create communities.

The tiniest revolutions in the practice of living our daily lives will unnerve the prisonhouse of consumption that we have fallen prey to, a prisonhouse that now owns our behavior, because too often we live unconscious lives.  Once we become convinced we are free, not merely free to choose, but truly free to live our own lives, we will no longer need reminders from those who have power over us that we are free. Until then, the very fact of those people (members of the they) telling us we are free will keep us trapped.

Look in the mirror. Go ahead. Narcissus did not have a mirror. He could only see his reflection in water. Stare at that mirror. We are responsible for everyone who ran for president and for everyone who is still running for president. We are also responsible for all the beautiful people who did not run for president. I can wax nostalgic and ask where have all the flowers gone, I can do that, I truly can. I can ask why the Bobby Kennedys of America have been replaced by what we have created.

But honestly, this is our fault. 

What to do?

1. Stop what you are doing. Just stop.

2. Look into your life. For 21 days, write down everything you do or experience (every action, every feeling, every thought, and so on). Decide which ones to change. Change at least one of them.

3. First thing every morning for the rest of your natural life, write a poem. See how seeing changes.

4. Be like Augie Wren, and at the same time every day do what he does. See how seeing changes.

5. Use your turn signal when you are making a turn. See how your fellow humans see you.

6. Drink coffee at a coffeehouse or diner. Do not take your stupid phone (even if your phone tried to convince you that it is smart; it is not, it is stupid, leave the stupid smartphone at home) or iPad or i-this or i-that or laptop with you. Go alone to a coffeehouse and talk to someone who is different than you, who holds different values, or who is from a different social class. And stop drinking coffee alone in your car.

7. See how many sentences in a row you can begin without using the pronoun “I”.

8. Go on treasure hunts daily.

9. Listen.

Let us go then, you and I, while the evening is spread out against the sky and share simple dreams. Let us begin, right this very second, creating a world through our own actions so our daughters and sons can live in a world where anyone, without italics, can become president. In fact, let us now and forever f*ck italics and all they too often stand for and suggest.

And let us hope that anyone does not become president.

Since my divorce, I have taken many photographs of my daughters—Anna Livia and Quentin. Every photograph just another failed attempt on my part to remain in their lives, to hold them and keep them here in the present of what my life has become. Over the years these photographs have taken on a life of their own, have in some ways become a cover story, the story that reminds me that I am a father, their father. The stories behind these photographs haunt me the way that fairy tales haunted me as a child. Stories nearly true enough. Stories on the brink of becoming real. The kinds of stories that open time and place. All those desires that begin with a whisper and a hope. A tiny voice.  Once upon a time. And from this breath of story, I enter into believing as easily as if I had opened a door to another room. And together we fall down the rabbit hole.

One photograph of my tiny daughters—delicate in their bodies, their eyes, their hands—in particular haunts me. In this photograph I see what has become their always familiar, forever-lingering fear of abandonment, a fear written deep into Livia and Quentin’s eyes, a fear marking their fingers, fingers not able to stretch out far enough to come to me, their fingers reaching, trying to hold onto something already gone. They fear, they know, with all their hearts, that I am only here, now, for now, only returned for this one moment in order to once again leave. Be gone.  To disappear into flight. To become only a voice carried over 2,500 miles of thin telephone lines. So they are learning to protect themselves. Their bodies have become defensive—rigid angles posed against tenderness, to prevent their hearts from opening. They guard themselves—bodies and hearts—hands rigid and still at their sides or fingers linked. They hold onto their breath. And they cannot look at me. At first glance it appears that they are simply shielding their eyes against the bright summer sun. But this is not so. They have lost the courage to look directly into the lens. They look away, away from me, away from here, as if they are seeking some other place that had been promised to them in a forgotten language. In nearly every photograph, Livia and Quentin wait inside this place.

If ever there existed an in-between world, a land not answerable to our laws of gravity and movement, Livia and Quentin inhabit it every time they see me once again for the very first time.  Frozen by this neither here nor there moment, they linger with breath held. They wait just as they had been waiting before my arrival for my return. They know not to trust me. They know that even though I have just returned yet once again to Pittsburgh from California that in a week or so I will return to California away from Pittsburgh. The sole purpose for this arrival, of my stepping off the plane, is to make possible another departure. One evening while we are playing outside in my sister’s yard, an airplane flies overhead. Quentin will say, “I hate airplanes.” So my daughters cannot move when they first see me. Will not budge an inch. Not until they find enough courage to release themselves.

The photographs I take too often keep my daughters locked inside this gaze. They inhabit a stillness that holds them separated from the world of the living. A rigid protection against further disappointments. They remain frozen, tentative around the edges of the world of the living. My sister’s son Jack runs aimlessly through the house. Certain. Fearless. Bursting with speed and rambunctious joy, nearly dizzy with energy and trust. He squirms out of his father’s embrace with reckless abandon because he knows tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow he will be able to rest safely again in his father’s arms. He knows his father will hear him when he calls out. Jack does not fear giving himself over to dreams because he does not doubt that tomorrow he will wake up and again his father and his mother will be there waiting for him. Always. So he does not fear sleep. He is not afraid of what will happen while he is sleeping. In the morning, every morning, the world will be new for Jack again but it will, even in its newness, remain stable. Sure. Certain. Quentin and Livia become even more tentative as they near bedtime. My daughters are not so gentle in their sleep. Their blankets end up on the floor even in the cold of winter.

 “Dad?”

I hear Quentin’s voice. She has appeared beside the bed in my sister’s house where I am sleeping. Livia and Quentin walk hallways so quietly it is as if they have been condemned to always walk on tiptoes. They seem terrified of the possibility of something going wrong, of somehow being responsible for having disturbed the universe. Years ago, my son, Cory, lived trapped by this same fear, this same hesitation, but he has found his way through this uncertainty. And this gives me hope for Quentin and Livia. 

  On this morning, they keep their eyes averted. Afraid, knowing, that I am about to once again abandon them. No matter how many times, how often, I come home this coming home will only be another homecoming that will quickly lead to another abandonment. And I do. I mean I really do. I do. This time I am saying I do with a commitment that I will honor. And so I leave. This forever leave-taking is what I know I can give as my devotion, as my promise. It is what saying I do has come to mean to me. So, even before I have left, Livia and Quentin stay always already behind in this world of photographs. Taken and stored. Protected. 

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The following should be rewritten before it was read in the unnameable tense. (You may think the preceding sentence has a logical error. You may think that if you wish.) I can’t go on. I’ll go on. The impossible.

The tense of Federman.

Somehow, believe it or not, take it or leave, double or nothing, Raymond Federman changed tense on October 9, 2009. I miss him. But Federman did not die. No. His “death” is, and was, and will, forever, be a painful Beckettian change in tense. In life, Federman ignored tense; he resisted the restraints of the sentence. He disobeyed the pure whiteness of space on a page. His sentences formed lines of flight that escaped the page and created tiny fairy tales, hoping for a happy ending, a period, or an enjambment, but to this day, these catastrophic sentences of Federman remain lost in some lonely forest. Adrift. Never-ending sentences. Sentences that never began to begin with.

How is this possible? Exactly. This is impossible. This can only be that.

"Ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time."  -- Samuel Beckett

Federman is, and was, and will be, forever, too vibrant, too much alive and living, to be anything other than a change in tense, not a death. I refuse to believe he is no longer among us. He is playing golf in the snow in Buffalo. He is swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Federman is here. He must be.

His sentences continue to spill off the page. Marginal sentences that turn themselves inside out, that turn back against themselves, that become something other than what they were meant to be.

I never intended this to be that. Sometimes Federman is as much I as I was. Is.

He replaced literature with laughterature.

In a very dark bar in Buffalo, I ask Raymond: What is a sentence?

Nothing but an absence.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was; in fact, it was not just any once upon a time, but an actual time, 1979, a lonely boy read Double or Nothing, a wild disobedient novel, and was thrilled.

Noodles. Closets. Sugar. Stones. X-X-X-X.

When his tongue became entangled, he lingoverted his way out of the closet. Escape. But there is no real escape. There are always twofold vibrations of voices in the closet.

"There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday, because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us... We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday."  -- Samuel Beckett

Another fairy tale of a time outside of tense happens in Buffalo, New York.  In this ongoing present, I told Federman that I had read him for the first time in 1977. He said, “You are mistaken, Rice. You have been reading Federman from the beginning of time. All writing,” Federman said, “is Federman.” During a conference on plagiarism, in a voice barely above a whisper echoing from some distant past, Federman claimed that Federman is, not was, the precursor to Federman. Later, during that same conference, Federman himself insisted that, in deed, a Federman text is even better than the real thing. Perhaps this sounds like nonsense to you, but for me this is the only way into a reading of Federman’s insane prose. A prose that challenges even the most flexible of readers. Federman misbehaves in the space where the Barthesian stripper’s garment is made to gape. He misbehaves, deliberately, as a well-intentioned confusion. Messy boy with no sense of syntax. Words strewn all over the place. His writing is little more than the bloodied remains of an undisciplined grammar.

On a dark and windy night, Federman and I were skyping, or were we? Telling each other tall tales with loose signifiers. In the midst of it all, he said unto me, “Rice, I refuse to begin, for I never know where my thoughts begin or where my thoughts emerge with others.” Or perhaps, more accurately, I said this to him, calling Federman Rice and Rice Federman as if there were no echoes.

I told Federman that he was misquoting himself. That what he was saying he had said and written in the snow of Buffalo before he fled to San Diego for a warmer sun and to play golf year round. He claimed, as usual, that Beckett was to blame. This is typical of Federman’s paratroopical speech. His leapfrogging from one story to the next. Jamming one narrative into an other narrative. Nothing is ever lost on Federman. (That is right. I am not forgetful. Nothing is, not was, lost on Ray.) All stories converge and become new again.

After reading Federman or dreaming Federman or speaking to Federman, I must find prayers to cleanse my own origins of this Federmaniacal virus. I become forgetful of where my language begins and when it converges with that of others within the dialogue I entertain with myself and with the noises, the shouts in the streets that disrupt the calm narrative of identity. But for Federman, the eye of his narrative storm is like the eye of a hurricane. Swirling junk crashing together to irritate sentences that others claim to own.

Most of what is written you cannot know before you know.

Raymond inscribed his book Here & Elsewhere poetic cul-de-sac to me by saying: “For Doug who is always here when I am elsewhere.” But when Rice is here, Federman can never be elsewhere.

"Just think how different the world would be//how different life//if when we arrive into the world were laughing instead of crying." Federman.

There is a photograph of Federman behind bars in Time Magazine. 1970. He had been arrested as a faculty member for actively being an intellectual, instead of merely teaching students harmless information. He protested the war. The police arrested him and 45 other faculty members. Federman was struck over the head; he believes by the police. Michel Foucault bailed Federman out of prison. I honestly believe you need to read that sentence again for all that it means, and, since I dare not trust that your will do so, I will do this: Michel Foucault bailed Federman out of prison.

I have always wanted Foucault to bail me out of prison. Or at least out of this Victorian mess of a sentence that desires to say all that cannot be said, all that remains quiet beneath signs of another time.

Have you ever watched Raymond Federman’s hands when he gave a reading? Have you ever listened to what happens to Raymond’s voice when he speaks of George Chambers?

Federman gave me permission to digress in 1979. Before a notary in Buffalo in 1993, he signed a sworn affidavit granting me permission to play with his name, and to digress. It snowed that day. While the original affidavit has been lost or confiscated or never existed, I continue.

As does Federman.

A few confusions set loose by Raymond Federman upon my writerly soul:

1.) Theseus’ ship is falling apart, decaying dead wood. As the ship sits in the port, rotting, Theseus’ men replace each rotten plank. The ship remains the same ship, even as some of the planks are replaced. The men store the old rotted wood in a building. After many years, the last of the original planks is taken off the ship and replaced by a new plank. Now there is enough wood in the building to rebuild the ship. The men do so. Two ships now float on the waters, side by side. Which one is the original ship of Theseus? In a world–social as well as aesthetic–of anti-oedipal cover stories echoed in minor languages, shem-like pelegariasts abound.  (What came before was a parable of Federman.)

2.) Like a diseased fugitive I take leave of words. An unpacked library with erased copyright pages. A pirate traveling down a lost highway. 

3.) She would never say where she came from.

“I am a virgin.”

“No,” Federman said. “No, you cannot say that.”

4.) I read nothing in ways that most people dream of reading Dante. Between the lines, white dust and kaleidoscopes of visions. I pick up words along the way. Pack up my ermines. Step into gutters and steal debris that had at one time appeared useless. Back in 1922 when the tourists invaded Trieste, Paris, London, I stole image after image from men with holes in their pockets. But in the 1970s, while listening to music so bad that I nearly died, I washed my hands of the whole messy affair.

5.) Federman teaches me to write in one sentence: You rub and flatten silly-putty on the comics, then you lift the silly putty ever so carefully, like you are making an original readymade. Like you are Duchamp or Warhol.

6.) Definitively unfinished.

7.) Federman is a delirious child set loose upon the Enlightenment by some whimsical demonic force intent on making footnotes, afterthoughts, allusions look downright silly. My partner despairs each time Federman visits because he leaves behind traces of unused quotation marks all over the floor of our house. (We have a small child who has on occasion put said quotation marks into her mouth. The innocence of infancy. “No,” we scream, terrified of the nature of literary genealogies. “Don’t put that into your mouth. God knows where that quotation mark has been.” We spend days and nights after Federman leaves, cleansing our house. Returning our lives to purity.)

Since I began writing, I have only ever had one window open when I write. That one window has always been a single piece of paper in a notebook. I still write longhand, so I still write with only one window open.

(How many windows and tabs are open on your computer screen now as you are reading this? More than one? As long as capital keeps you distracted from realizing that you are distracted, the creeps win, and you live the life “they” design for you to live, not your own life.)

Having only this one window open allows artists not only to focus and concentrate, but also to contemplate what they are creating and, most importantly, it allows artists to see, to tend to the scene that is being explored, to pay attention to it in visceral, intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic ways. (There is an important difference between looking at something and seeing into something, between seeing a character and seeing into a character. Remember, seeing demands that we forget the name of the thing seen. And forgetting is a difficult journey, one fraught often with remembering displacing forgetting, and with blindness covering over insight.

To see, we need innocent intoxication, and we need to be playful with such innocence.

We need to cultivate solitude, to quiet the noise that pulls us away from the seeing. We need to devote time in our lives to uncertainty. This will require that we make choices, instead of excuses. This will require courage. Thinking and creating art demands uncertainty and frustration.

Many young artists rush to quote Old Sam’s delightful witticism: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” As if Beckett himself said this. Think of the hours of each day, the days of each week, the weeks of each month, the months of each year, the years of our lives that we must devote to this practice of failure in order for our failures to lead us somewhere. And, remember, there is no guarantee that all these failures will lead us anywhere. Perhaps these failures will only lead us to other failures.

So we need to love the joy of our process of seeing and thinking our way into the world. Because if we deeply love this process, then there is always a reward, a joy of seeing, in each failure, but if we only do it in order for it to be recognized, if our joy is dependent upon the acknowledgment and acceptance of others, well, then…we may want to do something else.

But even this act of merely quoting Beckett is problematic. Look at the proliferation of pithy quotes used by “people” as status updates on Facebook or on Instagram or Tumblr and so on. (And anyone who knows me knows I would never use the word “pithy” in a sentence, unless I am upset about something. I am from Western Pennsylvania for chrissakes. And after all is said and done, actually before anything said or done, pithy is an adjective, and everyone knows how I feel about adjectives.) 

I bet there is a website for pithy quotes of pithy quotes with pithy quotes so that pithy people will never have to read the whole of a book to discover something inside that book that speaks to them; people could just rely on the pithy quotes other pithy people have found for them, so that they can live their lives under the umbrella of pithy quotes found by others.

(This is simply one more way of giving our lives over to others, instead of taking responsibility for living our own lives, for creating our lives, by exploring the world around us. Now, if the pithy quote led someone to read the book that the pithy quote was lifted from, then the pithy quote was not so pithy after all.)

The Beckett quote, for example, is seriously and carelessly torn out of context. (I would, in fact, by matter of fact, by matter of reading, suggest that Beckett never said this.) And most people who quote this “pithy”, easily digested bit of wisdom from Beckett have not read the book it is in. How is it possible to quote something without having devoted the time to reading the whole book? How arrogant is that? How do you even know what the passage is about? How do you even know the quote is there? Or anywhere? Do you know how much writing Beckett had to do in order to find a way to think that thought? Have you experienced the joy of reading the whole of the narrative that Beckett wrote that led to this moment in the book? 

You do not have my permission, nor do you have Sam’s permission, to quote anything, unless you have read the whole book. Seriously. On his deathbed, Beckett told Raymond Federman and me this. He even said it in English so that Federman would not simply make up some extravagant French story about what Beckett said. This matters. Beckett said, unquote me, Ray. Federman went home that very day and removed the quotation mark key from his typewriter, and that, my dear friends, was the birth of Federman The Penman. True story. Seriously. Neither Federman, nor Rice, has ever made up a story just to fit a moment in time.

Failure demands a mindful discipline, not casual mistake-making.

Therein lies the rub, you sweet innocents, those of you virginal souls who celebrate what you feel is the meaning beneath Beckett’s “celebration” of failure. Only a fool celebrates failure. That is why it is so easy to post Beckett’s unnameable frustration onto social network pages. The quote "fits" any occasion, and if, as old Bill once said, everything is permitted then nothing is true.

People desire their friends to click “like” to glorify their public display of failure. Your friends “like” that you failed. No, wait, they “like” that you have the narcissistic “courage” to publicly expose yourself. (Oh, sweet Jesus, bring back the Medieval stocks…) And, they click "like" knowing or at least hoping that you will easily succeed the next time, suggesting that failure automatically implies success with the next effort. (This is one, and only one, of the many differences between you and Saint Teresa de Avila, who insisted that she be locked in her room to experience her tremors privately, rather than be used as a public display of religious ecstasy. I doubt Saint Teresa would have used Facebook status updates to announce her new moments of ecstasy.)

Most people will never truly fail. Failure takes too much work. Most will merely make mistakes, and mistakes are simply careless errors that any fool can make and that any fool can correct. Failure, on the other hand, is soul diminishing. It rips into your heart and muscle. Failure is complex desires run amok by someone trying to go deeper than is possible, and no amount of “correction” can fix failure. Failure tears sentences apart at the very seams, and demands a whole new way of seeing and of being in the world and with their work.

"That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.” "  -- Helene Cixous

Reading the whole of a book—instead of relying on someone else to find something important to quote from the book for you, or relying on (and trusting) Google to sort through a book for you—is important for an artist on many levels. Let us go back a bit. Thinking and/or creating art demands uncertainty. To be uncertain demands time, a commitment to time, a devotion to thinking. Answers, or piles of information (which some people mistake for knowledge), do not demand time; too often, answers/information merely require Google, and moderate typing skills (remember, and fear this, Google will autocorrect your desires to fit their needs), and then the “profound” skill of cutting and pasting.

Think of Google as the drive-thru window of a fast food restaurant. (And I use the words food and restaurant in the preceding sentence only in, at best, a Baudrillardian way, as empty as empty can be.) What is lost in such a way of believing that you are thinking when you Google anything, or of believing that you are in the world when you are staring at a screen, is the experience of the mind working through language toward uncertainty.

It is never simply what philosophers have to say, but how philosophers work their way to some hope for understanding and insight. They do not define ideas; they explore ideas. Their movement toward the moment of being matters. The dance of their intellect. The play of their syntax. The desire of their words teasing other words into becoming. Google cannot give you such wonder. Only you can give yourself such a gift. Uncertainty demands time, demands patience. As readers, as humans, we need to experience complexity, not memes.

Remember, even if you are an “intellectual”, especially if you actually think you are an “intellectual”, you have to fight the power. But first you must find the power operating on you even as you believe you are a radical operating outside systems.

Radio Raheem. Rest in power, Bill Nunn.

If you truly want to fail, and not simply make mistakes, my advice is to devote yourself to one window. Invest in a notebook, one that does not have wifi. Here is an example of such a notebook:

And, invest in a manual typewriter.

One of the advantages of a manual typewriter (aside from slowing a writer down and forcing a writer to actually intend and to mean each letter the writer pounds onto the keys of the typewriter, is that while using a manual typewriter, writers can only ever have one window open at a time. I still remember seeing one page of paper in John Gardner’s manual typewriter—that one window into the world of the fiction that he was creating. Imagine if John were to have five pages of paper, five windows, in his manual typewriter (as perhaps some of you may have five windows open on your computer screen). How could he see into or out through all five windows? How could he concentrate on all five windows? How could he avoid being distracted by one window while looking into another window? I dare you to try to look out five windows at once. And even if you can do this, why would you want to?

I know many of you young ones will say that, unlike those dead artists, who had to, and could only concentrate on one thing at a time, or unlike old-timers like me, you can multi-task. But, well, but, seriously.

So, we have come to our end, and I have one final question: how many windows do you still have open on your computer screen while you are reading this? 

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When I first saw this video (https://vimeo.com/43618619) and read the story about Eterna Cadencia publishing books in an ink that disappears twenty days after it is exposed to light and air, I was angry. American culture already has given itself over to valuing speed and instant gratification over reflexivity, patient thought, and stillness. We need to slow down, not speed up. Reading takes patience and creativity; in fact, reading takes as much patience and creativity as writing does. The act of reading deserves devotion and time, a slowing down, a time outside of the time of daily living.

Susan Sontag repeatedly argued that everything that speeds up either the creation or the experience of art must be avoided. At the beginning of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin feared that modern mechanisms for making and reproducing art would speed-up the production of art. He clearly saw Warhol over the Alps. Benjamin did not, as is so often said of him, simply fear the loss of the aura of art, because of the means of reproduction. He celebrated the potential of rapid reproduction and circulation, especially in film, but he did not feel the same about speeding up the production of art. Benjamin feared people would make art carelessly, and that such art would only be able to express empty or superficial values. He feared artists would give in to the demands of production, and not devote enough of their own time, their own patience, to creating art that challenged our understanding and our values and, by doing so, create or deepen values. He worried that art would be made quickly in order to keep up with the demands of reproduction. Art would be reduced to commerce.

Hollywood narratives have come to rely heavily on a style of intensified or hyper continuity editing, because the films themselves are empty. Tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The editing is so quick that a viewer cannot engage, think, or reflect; imagine how uncomfortable it is for an American audience to endure the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and aesthetic pain of a long take. The long take demands something from the viewer. But a viewer raised on consumption can only consume without thought. In movie theaters across this great land of ours, viewers open their legs and spread wide their arms and whisper: “Do me, Hollywood, do me.” The editing style of most Hollywood films is designed for an audience with Attention Deficit Disorder. Such an editing style is a form of distraction, designed specifically to prevent thoughtful engagement.

For the past twenty years, I have been working on ways to slow down readers of my work. To create moments of prayer with my sentences. In my collaboration with Stephanie Sauer on Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, readers need to become intimate with our book, with the sentences, the images. The book falls apart, becomes naked by the touch of the reader, and readers also become naked and vulnerable in their practice of reading.

So reading of this ink that disappears after 20 days, once it is exposed to light, initially upset me.

But then I began thinking more fully of a different kind of potential in using this disappearing ink for publishing books. The intention of the publishers, Eterna Cadencia, is to get people to read books by new authors, instead of merely placing such books on the shelf, waiting to be read later, or to be forgotten about altogether.

But what if this ink were used to print books like Twilight? (By the way, I believe that any parent who buys their daughter this book should be reported to Child Protective Services because of the harm this book can do to a daughter’s sense of identity. This series of books can be (well, is) purely evil for daughters who are too often raised to consume. Misogynistic ideology harms our daughters. We need to make this more visible. Wake up. Fight against this. Perhaps, our daughters should be raised on Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. (This is merely a suggestion and is not endorsed by the American Psychological Association on Parenting or any other parenting advocacy agencies.) 

"In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language."  -- Kathy Acker

Back to the ink. So imagine this: Twilight is exposed to light and air, and the words disappear! Ideally, they disappear before anyone has time to read them. And by the light infecting the book, the book actually then performs the vampire mythology. And, most importantly, your daughter now has blank pages, so now she can write her own book. She can create her life, instead of falling prey to the shackles of a culture that wants to deny her existence; that is, unless she is in a relationship with a boy or longing to be in a relationship with a boy so she can have an identity.

And then I thought, better yet: what if we use a kind of what I would call a Carravagian ink, a pentimento-effect ink, that allows evidence of a work printed beneath the apparent book to surface. So imagine using this kind of ink to publish the pathetic, evil, misogynistic Fifty Shades of Grey. (A book typed (it was not written) to be bought by the women who gave their daughters Twilight, talk about a built-in market.) As the ink of that piece of trite narrative fades under erasure, imagine Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote emerging, bleeding through Fifty Shades of Grey! (That's right, such a thought gives me so much joy that even I will use an exclamation mark!)

I mean, seriously, imagine how beautiful that would be. As Fifty Shades of Grey fades into the nothingness that it was to begin with, the beauty and true power of Acker’s writing takes over. Imagine the look on the faces of those bourgeois women, sitting in their comfortable chairs, sipping tea, safely reading Fifty Shades of Grey when Acker’s writing emerges. Then imagine how these women would begin to re-imagine romance and desire. … 

(And by the way, if you read Fifty Shades of Grey, shame on you. How is it even humanly possible to read more than one sentence of this book? And why did this woman, who claims to have written this book, do this to language? What did language ever do to her that she would infantilize and brutalize language in the way she did with each sentence? And if you bought this book, all you did was encourage her to keep writing and publishers to keep publishing that kind of trite. Shame on you. Why, oh why, did you do this?...And by the way if you read it because you have no imagination of your own and wanted to “spice” up your sex life, contact me, and I will give you a tour of your own kitchen, or of Home Depot, instead of spending money on the paraphernalia marketed around Fifty Shades of Grey.)

The true evil of Twilight and of Fifty Shades (aside from the horrible writing) is that they appear “innocent”, harmless (ideology, after all, only has power when it is invisible). And Fifty Shades claims to be “erotica”, not pornography. (Watching people read this book in public, though, is obscene and deeply disturbing. America needs to create safe spaces for those of us who have been traumatized by seeing someone reading these books.)

It disturbs me how parents (and occasionally Senator Helms) want to censor books or films because of a word or an image that they conveniently take out of context because that single moment is troubling to them, but these same helicoptering parental narcissists feel comfortable exposing their children to an ideology that is far more damaging because, to them, it appears innocent. The first sentence of every Idiots Guide to Parenting should be: Do not give stupid books to your daughters just because you are too distracted with taking selfies of your vain face, instead of committing to the responsibility of actually raising your child to be an adult.

Still, some “parents” will say that Twilight is harmless. After all, it does not use nasty words or include images that offend; instead, the “book” merely uses romantic images that destroy the very soul of our existence. We need to question why people are more offended by certain words and/or certain images that are policed (thus protecting us from evil, as defined mostly by men wearing white shirts, red ties, and blue suits), and why these same police allow the ideology embedded in these two books to circulate freely (thus indoctrinating our daughters to their evil).

Kathy Acker in her search for love, for true love, for pure love, uses words that risk offending and unnerving readers, and she gives us images that have power and depth and that may perhaps make us feel uncomfortable. Because Acker desires to escape the narrative of romance (something that Twilight and Fifty Shades are deeply entrenched in and can never break free of because these two writers (and their “readers”) lack courage and conviction), Acker has the courage to look directly into the heart and soul of America, without flinching (Akira  Kurosawa’s definition of a true artist is one who never looks away).

Acker, as a person and as an artist, wants (I know she has changed tense, but for me Kathy will never change tense) to escape the narrative of romance that allows capital to continue to use and control women. Twilight and Fifty Shades, in order to sell and be sold, use and control women; they simplify women and coerce women into weakness. (They perpetuate a myth that allows capital to continue to operate on our daughters and on all of us. They continue to create the myth of a daughter only wanting to need.)

Acker’s writing, say in Don Quixote, is an honest and painful quest for love, the love that escapes the narrative of romance. Acker believes in love, not romance. I, too, still believe in love, not romance. (There is a difference: Romance kills, Love enlivens.) Romance as a narrative is not simply a lie; it is more pernicious than that. Romance is a carefully crafted narrative to destroy love, to make you fear the intimacy of love. 

The narrator of Acker’s Don Quixote says: “What I wanted most was love. What I want most, even as I am dying, is love. …I would have this love which is neither control nor being controlled…She conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love.” Acker gave our daughters pirate maps of desire, of hope, of dreams, and ways for making this real.

Wake up. Don’t believe the hype. And by the way you are not too busy to read that book or to create stillness in your life for reflection. You are too distracted. Capital needs to keep you distracted; otherwise you will become creative and you will find ways to live your life instead of the life that capital needs you to live. Fight the power. 

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