reading

Absent

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

Something is always missing in my writing that I can’t put my finger on. This is normal, and over the years I’ve had conversations about this with everyone from Tim O’Brien to Susan Sontag; that others read your work and say, “That’s exactly right,” all the while you step away from it frustrated that it is still shy of what you meant, what you know it needs, or worse, know it needs something but can’t figure out what. Welcome to the arts. It’s a like/hate relationship. Love rarely shows up except, ironically, during the conception stage when everything makes sense. But later, well, something is always missing.

More than a few times I’ve been asked to read from older works. My last few books I don’t mind reading from because even though I know I could improve what is there, I’m still satisfied with the material. But when I’m reading a piece from one of the two early books about life in Russia I want to apologize as I go, read a few lines, look up and say, “Geez I’m so sorry this is so shitty,” and then continue, sighing after each paragraph. That’s the nature of the beast–actors too don’t watch old films for the same reason. Perhaps we have learned more since then and we approach the early material unfairly from a more experienced perspective. Or perhaps it really did suck and we just hate to realize it is in print somewhere waiting to embarrass us.

But this: I’ve never read something I’ve written and found material I wished I had not included. It is only what’s missing that haunts me, the untold parts, the “I didn’t say that quite right” parts. And then when I recognize what I should have done, when it is clear to me what really is missing, it can be unbearable.

***

It’s hot today, mid-nineties, heat index about 104. I brought my car to the dealer for it’s check-up and I bought new pillows. I spoke to a friend in Ireland, and I talked to someone in Rhinebeck, New York, about a new project. Then I had to make a call to a friend at a newspaper.

You know, some things simply don’t work out no matter how hard you try. I had planned some overseas trips with people that fell through, and two of three book projects have been delayed. So I took the morning to get stuff done and enjoy a little peace. Then I spent an hour on the phone doing an interview with an old friend of mine up north about the book that is coming out this winter, and we talked about those days back in college when much of it takes place. It was nice to look back.

When I thought the questions were done, he recounted my life for me–the books, some of the jobs, most of the years, as a way of matching my work to my experience. And then he asked something that no one had ever asked before and which never really crossed my mind: “Bob,” he said laughing, almost as a rhetorical aside, “is there any aspect of your life you haven’t written about?”

“Bob?”

I was quiet a very long time, and it came into my caffeinated mind like it had been waiting ready to expose itself, and it was quite suddenly and for the first time for me at least, quite obvious.

“Well. Fuck.”

“Yes.”

It took me awhile to understand what just happened in my head, and I apologized, glad he was someone I used to know well enough to not worry about the dead air between us. It didn’t take him long to decide to remain silent, knowing/sensing I needed to get myself together. He quickly changed the subject but I pulled him back. “No, that’s okay. Repeat the question.”

“Just curious if there’s anything significant in your life that might be worthy of a book or even an essay, but you haven’t written about it and, well, why? Why not?” That’s real journalism right there. We had the same mentors but I was never that good. Damn.

It’s always frustrating when something is missing and you can’t put your finger on it. We all know that feeling, like the song that’s on the tip of your tongue, or the meal you prepared and before the guests arrive you step back and feel like there needs to be one more thing, and it turns out to be the most important element. That feeling. Only this time I had the answer; I know what has been missing, what I never wrote about, though it was never a conscious decision. What’s even crazier is I spent part of that phone silence wondering how no one, no one, through the years ever even once asked about it. Ever. Yet it’s absence now seems so crystal clear, like seeing the two shadowy faces that turns out to be a lamp, and once you see the lamp you can’t find the faces anymore.

“So what you’re wondering,” I replied, “is if I ever consciously didn’t write about something that probably deserved to be written about since everything I’ve ever written has been about me, not to sound egocentric or anything.” He laughed and said my work rarely is about me, that I’m just a character in the narrative. This guy is that good at his job. Our mentor Dr. Russell Jandoli would be proud.

“Is there?”

***

Last year I heard a review on NPR of Tim O’Brien’s book American Fantastica, in which the reviewer said, “This is clearly going to be his last book.” I called Tim and we laughed about it and he said he had heard the review and ironically he was already at work on a new book and now he’s thinking of calling it “Posthumously.” We laughed a long time.

“So you’ve got more to say?”

“Yeah, Bob, but it doesn’t mean anyone wants to hear it.”

Well as just another player in the art world I can vouge for the idea that we all just assume no one will ever want to read or listen to or watch our work; that’s not why we create. But, yeah, I still have more to write about as well.

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog

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A

BCDEFGHIJK

LMNOP

QRSTUVWXY

Z

26 letters.

That’s it.

In the beginning. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. To be or not to be—that one just six letters.  Jesus wept—seven.

It is what it is—six.

I can’t write, my students say; my mother said; my very own demons say when something needs to be said but I’m at a loss for words. The history of English has turned and spun back on itself, argued with endings and double negatives, trampled meaning, treasured nuances, made murderers of us all, and unearthed muses to slipknot a string of letters, tie together thoughts like popcorn for a Christmas tree, individual kernels only able to dangle dutifully due to one common thread.

I do. Rest in Peace. Go to Hell. I quit. I miss you; I love you—7 letters both.

The alphabet was not alphabetical at first, made that way in the 1300’s on Syria’s northern coast.  Today, we slaughter its beauty with a cacophony of sounds whose aesthetic value is lost in translation while simultaneously softening hardened hearts with poetry and prose for the ages. For nearly a millennium this alphabet. whose letters lay the way for understanding in multiple languages, has dictated decrees, is uttered by infants one syllable at a time until by age five they’ve mastered the twenty-six consonants and vowels.  What circles of wonder are children’s faces when someone’s tongue pushes out “toy” “treat” “your mommy’s here” “your daddy’s home.”

Plato said, “Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because they have to say something”; Socrates said, “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.” The sins of our fathers forever condemn us to hell but for confession, penance, and absolution.

Forgive me father for I have sinned—14 letters.

Of all the languages on the planet, English has the largest vocabulary at more than 800,000 words, all from those same 26 symbols.

There are roughly forty-five thousand spoken languages in the world, about 4500 written today but almost half of them are spoken by less than a thousand people. English, though, is the most common second language on Earth—translated or original, the Magna Carter, The Declaration, The Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the tablets tossed by Moses and a death certificate all reassembled versions of the twenty-six.

I have a dream—eight letters.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country—fourteen.

We the People–seven

Teeter-totter—four.

Mooo—two.

Billowy is one of only a few seven letter words whose six letters remain alphabetical. Spoon-feed is the longest, at nine letters, whose seven letters are reverse-alphabetical.

We can talk, us English. We can spin a yarn, chew the fat, beat the gums, flap the lips. We have the gift of gab, we run off with the mouth, we can spit it out, shoot the breeze, talk someone’s ears off, or just talk shop, talk turkey, talk until we’re blue in the face, be the talk of the town. We can, for certain, at just seven letters, bullshit.

My point (7 letters) is that (3 letters) sometimes, despite our skills (4 letters) with the English language (6 letters), we are often left, at just six letters, speechless.

What are the odds on a planet of nearly eight billion, the vast majority of us would comprehend each other because of twenty-six characters, small symbols.

The first time we meet we say hello (four). And then we love (four). And all too soon later, with the misery of six letters, “Goodbye.”  

And because eight characters is simply too much sometimes; sometimes too painful, we knock it down to three with RIP.

And the rest is silence (six).

Video File: Small Talk

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I write mostly personal essays or memoirs, so my work bends toward the lengthy; it isn’t unusual for an essay to run fifteen pages. When I started doing public readings, it took about twenty minutes or more to read one piece, but this was not an issue as I would either read alone or with someone else who would do all their work at once and then I’d do mine, block style.

But then my dear friend, poet Tim Seibles, suggested we read together, that is, on stage at the same time, alternating pieces. We did a series of twelve readings for roughly two-hundred people each time at the now defunct Jewish Mother in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Jewish Mother Sessions forced me to write short pieces so that when we alternated on stage, he didn’t read a four-minute poem followed by me reading a thirty minute essay; we’d have been there all night.

So I took fragments of long pieces, and then I started to write dedicated short work a la Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” I’m not a poet, but I threw a couple of lame attempts in there as well later in the evening after the crowd had been drinking a while. As a writer, I loved the exercise of telling a story, or more often just a piece of story, in a flash. Hence, “Flash non-fiction” entered my world, and since then many were collected in my book, Fragments: Flash Non-Fiction.

The individual pieces had been picked up by some journals, including Kestrel, Matador, Sand, and more. I wrote about animal names, about health conditions, about 911 and art. A few pieces got some legs, like “Instructions for Walking with an Old Man at the Mall,” originally written for our readings, picked up by Kestrel, reprinted in Fragments, and then anthologized several times. This piece, “Small Talk,” is one of my favorites for self-explanatory reasons. I’m certainly more comfortable after a glass of cab in front of a few hundred people who have had several gin and tonics than I am in front of a small camera in a small space. But as my mother says in a phrase she is convinced she coined, “It is what it is.”

I learned from Tim to STFU and just read. So, here, from my office at Old Dominion University a few years ago, is “Small Talk.” Thank you for tolerating my face and voice for a few minutes.

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