Writing on Writing

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Culture slithers forth, tastes the air, tests it, before ascending the throne. Haughty, sinister, the word sounds like vulture, stinks of well-powdered carrion in my nostrils. In the name of the concept, I smile, I bow; meanwhile, the gorge collects itself, preparing to mount an assault.

The seeds of my life are stories. This journey has bloody, vital roots but ends in banality.

My grandparents gathered secretly along a cod-stinking wharf, in a basement Fado bar in Porto with other plotting Marxists. My great uncle assassinated the damn Marquis-du-Somebody under the dubious cover of a sparkling, Venetian sun at high noon.

Now, my mother administrates an organ transplant unit in Milwaukee–though she is not, nor has been, a doctor of any stripe.

She is Jewish, by birth if not belief; therefore, so am I. When I write, chutzpah peeks out a slimy head from hibernation, eyes the sun’s angle, and blinks. Still, my religion, because of its history of heady, potent culture, fills me with impudence. I find my own roots distasteful. Or, more precisely, my religion disheartens me–because none of it exists, now, except for a well-starched, twice-stewed, odorless, colorless, meal.

Still, the history remains and my blood runs thick with stories, superseding any assimilation to a political or social culture. And in writing, as in life, perspective supersedes everything. Perspective is quality and morality. Perspective is the last wavering note of the shofar on Yom Kippur when you finally realize that all judgments are irrevocable, and absolute.

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I received a gift. On my seventeenth birthday, I received a book from Janna Sugar. She’s dead, now. When I remember her, I think of her small, soft hands, a wicked smile, and her steady, black eyes. The night of my birthday, we huddled under a playground castle while rain collected in muddy pools under our jeans. She pulled a book from her backpack, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and told me she wanted me to write the inscription.

“This is what you should be reading,” she said. “All the rest–Josh, it doesn’t mean anything.” I was reading Isaac Asimov in those days. She would have loved me, I think, if she had never seen my bookshelves.

“You want me to write an inscription? Isn’t that your job?” I joked.
“Just read,” she said.

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Perspective is everything. Each masterpiece, every work of art depends upon these entities: (1) the Artist, (2) the Art, (3) the Observer, and (4) the Lie. Each plays an integral role in any creation:

1. The Writer proposes a hypothesis; every word is a case in the experiment.

2. The Story takes shape or does not; it demands rules and laws that the Writer must follow or fail.

3. The Reader suspends disbelief, enters with an open heart. If the rules of the Story are too
harsh, the Reader will not survive. If the Writer forces the action, cheats the laws of the Story, the Reader will refuse to believe.

4. The Lie is perspective. Each of the entities listed above speaks with a distinct voice, and
knows truth from a single perspective. But the Lie is a single perspective, a unified, unique
voice that represents truth more fundamentally than fact.

A narrative story, whether film or fiction, pursues an outcome through cause and effect, and the outcome must inevitably explain the root cause, the beginning. The root is the Writer. The cause and effect is the Story. The Reader’s experiences in life determine the response, the validity of the creation. The outcome is the unified perspective, the Lie.

When we read, we receive our information directly from the narrator. In movies, the camera dictates the flow of information. Should a movie have a narrator, as does Jesus’ Son, then the viewer must determine who holds the camera. In this example, Billy Crudup plays the narrator/protagonist known as Fuckhead, but if we want a literal description of the action, we cannot trust his senses. A transcendent, intoxicated filter exists between his life and his world, and because the camera remains true to his perspective, we must join with him in sorting out the “truth”. In the back of our brains, we know this is fiction; Denis Johnson wrote the story, he spun it from the void of his own experiences. However, the Lie unifies us with the other essential entities. We have a story.
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Throughout the connected stories in The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien attempts to rebuild his history. The narrator’s voice speaks from the perspective of a Vietnam veteran suffering from a traumatic stream of memories. By telling stories, he creates a difficult trail through his experiences, subjectively determining truth for himself. In fact, he forces himself not to determine truth by itemizing facts; instead, he tells the stories, then tells them again in a different way, with different characters, different root causes, to uncover a truth that never depends on a literal truth.

Janna died in London. A drunk driver killed her early one morning in April. I was living in Colorado at the time, just a freshman in college preparing for a weekend with friends in Breckenridge. I heard nothing until the following Monday.

But in my mind, I stand with her on the corner of some metal-gray intersection underneath a thick, blowing fog. She flashes a smile, blinks her eyes. And the story ends there–or, rather, it begins, pivoting on agile toes, redirecting the action toward the past, saving her from her future.
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I love writing. I love the paradoxical truth fiction creates. What I love most is the amazement that blooms from the places in a narrative that the author chooses to omit. The reader supplies the imagination, joining with the author in creating a vibrant, unexpected story. And when you realize that movies are a different narrative art, telling a story by engaging the observer in a new way, you understand how human communication has evolved, how simple human beings have found ways to explore their capacity for sharing. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind struck a fundamental chord with my concept of perspective. Our identities are so fragile, and our memories, too, tremble with every new experience. Memento provided me with a fluid example of how a camera can do something so differently than a pencil would. The unifying of perspective is seamless: the writer, the fictional script, the persuasive, tainted voice of narration. Film builds liquid dreams for everyone to see.

My culture abandoned me to a liberal, secular life. But the void exists, demands a perspective. People I meet during my life absorb the characteristics of the stories I know, somehow transforming familiar faces into a single, simple face: likewise abandoned, orphaned from their history, and forced to discover meaning on their own.

I believe fiction creates an audience for our hidden voices, allows us to work out, for ourselves, the misgivings we feel toward the apparent reality of our pasts.

While I have breath, Janna continues to live–I refuse to write the inscription!–and I want to know why. Yes, it's strange that simply speaking cannot solve a mystery like this one while fiction, the creation of new perspective, explains so much more. You see this fundamental truth in the survival of ancient mythologies in stories, in the way the peoples of the world throw their purest souls into the fire for the sake of stories in their bibles. This is what it is: the truth that exists in bibles and mythologies--in stories--is a truth that exists beyond factual truth.

We share stories. We try to understand them. Human beings find the lasting meaning of their lives in no other way.

Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
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It's interesting, isn't it, how one tragic event can change the course of our perspective forever, our trajectory, the friends we have, and the decisions and relationships we make or break as a result of it.
A young death freezes our loved ones in our own idealization. Their "would have beens" give us an opportunity to create a fantasy around them. They would have been a great author, a nurturing mother, a life long friend, the greatest love. Perhaps they would have been, but then again they would most likely be what we all are-- insufferably human, terribly flawed, hopelessly unaware of our own purity and potential.

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it's never just one tragic event: a single tragic event reminds us of every tragic event that has ever happened to us or anyone, ever. these fantasies and flaws youre talking about, some conflict between hallucination and reality, is just another way of explaining the way we look at things.

janna was hit by a car, and killed--though not instantly. i didnt know she was hit by a car until three days later. by then she was dead. still, monday morning i knew nothing about it. i believed she was still alive. and although i wouldnt have spoken with her for weeks or seen her for many months or even more, the fact that i thought she was alive will always conflict with the fact that she was dead.

so what? so nothing. shes dead. but i think about her. sometimes i have dreams where suddenly i see her somewhere, or think i do. i'll track her down over the course of the night, confront her. sometimes instead i find her father, and demand to know why everyone told me she died when plain as day, she is alive.

the answers that the jannas or the fathers of janna give me are heartbreaking. love crushing answers. waking up from a dream like that more than 10 years after she died . . . well, it isnt a lot of fun.

and whether or not she was perfect doesnt matter in the slightest. and even whether or not i love her more now than i ever did when she was alive doesnt matter. because when i think of her now, i change the way she wore her hair. i change her tastes, i give her new friends. or i dont. sometimes i cant even remember what she looked like at all. but shes in my head, in my heart, and strangely she is a huge part of my life even now. but that part has changed just like i have. and so it goes.

like i wrote in this article, a while back though it was, the stories we hear and tell are way more important than the original, factual occurrence. your bibles and your mythologies are filled with this weird truth, amy, and you of all people should know it.

tbt

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You're right I suppose that what's important is our interpretation, and reinterpretation of any given story. Stories and events have infinitie causes, and there are infinite ways of interpreting a situation. I certainly didn't mean to criticize your experience of tragedy--I can't imagine losing someone so young and someone I loved so much. No wonder she haunts you . . .
I'm simply speaking of the illusion our minds create over any single event or idea, and the attachements we form to those ideas. In attaching ourselves to anything we lose the raw experience of living. It's a prison that most of us live in, (myself included), and few escape (save the dalai lama). That's all, I hope I haven't upset you. I hope you have a wonderful day and life and that love pours into you from all directions.

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the dalai lama once gave an interview, and was asked this question: do you have any fantasies?

how's that for a strange question? still, the lama came up with an even stranger answer:

he said that sometimes he daydreams that he's marooned on a deserted island, with his legs broken.

i have a fantasy about that love pouring in on me from all directions thingie you mentioned.

so i have that going for me. which is nice.
tbt

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kingbee

Join Date 04/2004

+42

great piece...and always great to see you've dropped by with a gift. whatta perfect choice of film as illustration too.

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The love pouring in on all directions is not a fantasy rather a reality that is untapped.
Question is how to untap it, and which method to employ to do so. Arthur Green, a modern day kabbalist (not the Madonna sort), talks about how the forefathers dug wells. Abraham dug a well, and then Isaac t dug wells, but some of Abraham's wells had dried up--he had to redig them while also digging his own. There is a spiritual interpretation to all this well digging--indeed we have to dig our own wells, find new ways to locate the Source while also using the methods and history of those before us. In Hebrew the word for source is Makor which also means well. So we have to dig our own wells then, and the universal energy forms those wells with all the elements-- Ihave an image of rain pouring down and the water flowing into a brimming pool to create magical water (like in Tuck Everlasting), we just have to find it that's all.

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thanks for the note kingbee. im trying to remember, but i believe i probably owed you an email and got sidetracked. i havent been back here in a while. stinking ghostwriting. those contracts are growing boils on by bollocks.

amy, im not disagreeing with you, but i have some thoughts on the buddhist perspective.

the idea of the universe as a singular mass and/or energy is one i like to think about a lot. im not sure i believe it, but all the quantum concepts that a dodo like myself can understand make for good meditation.

as far as i can tell, buddhism is not about finding truth--and is only partially about finding enlightenment. the path is what is important, right? the steps one takes to escape samsara are steps one takes to overcome pain.

true, the story goes that the buddha himself found enlightment by sitting under a tree and meditating, but his teaching relate to the different steps one needs to take to follow the path TOWARD enlightenment, which is really just a method to overcome PAIN.

im going to butcher his name, but i think it was gershom scholem(?) who collected a bunch of hasidic metaphysics together and sorted out the lasting from the riffraff. but somewhere in mix he talked about the the "physical structure" of the universe, or god. one of the crazier concepts is similar, i think, to what youre talking about. there will always be a difficulty figuring out where and when god ends, when and where the universe ends. this idea suggests that god contracted, removing substance from existence, to make room for the universe. so you have the symbol: reality created within, and truth existing externally. so your well-digging works nice with this idea.

in siddhartha by hesse, there's a cool interaction between siddhartha and the buddha. siddhartha, who had considered himself above and beyond any possible master, discovers in the buddha something pure. so he approaches the buddha and talks to him about his teachings of the many-fold path. siddhartha says something like "this path you teach, you didnt follow it yourself, did you? no teacher instructed you, no master hooked you up. you found it yourself. dont you believe that everyone must find enlightenment on their own path [check out your welldigging here]?"

and the buddha replied "you're clever. be careful of too much cleverness."

tbt

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