Writing About Writing

Some days, there is nothing. You sit at the computer and you don’t find the tag-end you can pull, which will release a flow of words. But those can turn into the best days, because late in the afternoon or early in the evening, a spark comes and you’re off. You’re launched in a new direction, on a new course. You’re “in the tower,” that place from which you can say what had never been in your mind before. Gold coins are dropping. You’re electric again.

When you’ve had enough of those days, you know you’re a writer because you’ve endured the dry patches of desert. You’ve refused to give up. You can still topple false gods and grind them down and make soup out of the flour. You can see the slices of blue among the clouds, or you can turn away from the blue and welcome the coming storm. Nothing will stop you. You’re not crazy, you’re beyond crazy, on the other side. You’re rearranging the closets of reality, you’re burning the closets, you’re shoving in all your chips on spaces you yourself are inventing. You’re the riverboat gambler. You’re your own president. There is no sentimental attachment to the mob, the crowd, the mass, the group. You no longer look for the easy way out. You’ve left that in the dust.

The whole point of audience for the writer is the possibility that they will suddenly be brought up short. In your words, they’ll see a few drops of rain falling out of a sky that has no clouds. They’ll catch on. They’ll realize that invention is the joker in the deck—and they can remove that card and never bother to play the game at all. Because there is a new activity above the game.

When the poet follows one line with a massive leap into another line, and when the connection isn’t clear but somehow makes a startling amount of sense, the poet has demonstrated that he doesn’t care. He’s flying. That’s all. He’s flying and running with great giant strides. Into the gloom. Out of the gloom.

No theories apply. No rules are spinning their wheels. One page, 50 pages, a hundred pages, it doesn’t matter. The walls and ceiling, somewhere, are shattering. Somewhere in the world, on a street corner, where planes of the sky meet, a few people notice the stitching that holds them together, and it’s coming apart. The sky breaks open, and another sky sits behind it.

That is magic, and it doesn’t matter to the writer how many people realize it. That isn’t his preoccupation. If it were, he would never be able to pull off the feat.

How far can the writer go? There is no limit.

How far can imagination go?

These are the great days. Every day has possibility.

I came from a town with water wheels and rivers and mysterious old blackened factories sitting on the banks. It was your town, too. In the factories, reality was manufactured in uncountable and unconscionable ways. We ran along the banks and with our invisible pistols and rifles, we shot the products that slid down the ramps of the loading docks. We didn’t know what we were shooting, but we knew they were artifacts of the wizards of Is. They were populating the world with this Is and that Is and millions of Is. The wizards were in the business of mass production. They were telling us all about essences. They were sending us their physical and metaphysical messages about existence, about its composition and makeup and meaning and we were supposed to crawl up inside those shining objects and feel our way along them, in never-ending mazes. We shot them down with our invisible guns. We scorched them and rendered them useless. We moved according to our instincts. We ran and we flew.

The days were long, so long they never ended, and even now they are still stretching out past the horizon.

Some days, there is nothing. You sit at the computer and you don’t find the tag-end you can pull, which will release a flow of words. But those can turn into the best days, because late in the afternoon or early in the evening, a spark comes and you’re off. You’re launched in a new direction, on a new course. You’re “in the tower,” that place from which you can say what had never been in your mind before. Gold coins are dropping. You’re electric again.