Writing In Public

In Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, which was published in 1968, the title character/narrator observes “…to write in public in the electronic age is to commit an antisocial obscenity.” This, of course, was years before ubiquitous personal devices, before it became a social norm to check in on facebook and check out of the physically proximate: those who may be asking you how you’re doing or trying to take your coffee order or warn you of an approaching bear.

So why does writing in public still feel so dangerous? I’m talking about writing, not pressing buttons, I’m talking scribe, the act of leveraging a pen between three fingers and moving it along a surface. Why is it that when I walk down the street and get an idea and try to record it by putting pen against paper against the wall of the nearest building, it feels like an alarm is going to go off?

There’s a reason why writing can mean graffiti. Even when a piece of paper separates your pen from the building’s wall, though, cars slow, necks crane. Heads shake? Why would you have an idea, people wonder, and why would you use someone else’s property as a means—however indirect—of capturing it?

Or am I just that self-conscious? In reality, how can anyone care? This is a tension I’m used to, the one between wanting to be read and wanting to be ignored. That’s why I lock myself in a room to write: some day someone will read this, some day this will be public. Just not right now. This thing is too fragile right now, will shrivel in the sunlight, will shrink at the sound of sirens.

The public realm is not one of creativity. That’s why performance art is both so compelling and so disparaged. Keep that shit in your books, in your ipods, plug it into the zeros and ones that compose your blogs. Our range of creativity, by design, is limited.

All around us is a culture on autopilot, made manifest in the landscape, one that repeats and re-repeats the same mistakes, that is “created” and re-“created” not for us to exist in or bounce off of but rather for us to stick to our path and turn a profit for a select few, who then hand a cut over to our legislators, who in return shirk their responsibility of creative solutions, as do we, this is, after all, a democracy, and it’s our duty as its citizens to stay informed, and we see via our personal devices that drones will now populate our own skies as well as those of our enemies, that the cameras now trained on us are there to keep us safe.

Creativity, when not in service of making these dudes a buck, is not good for capitalism. So stay numb. I know I do. When outside, I avoid interaction, and thus potential confrontation, whenever possible. And when I go to bed at night, rather than interrupting my eight hours and taking the time to write down my dreams, I wake in the morning and, first thing, I let them flee my mind. 

History of the Book.2

Continued from History of the Book.1

After that bleakest of Bellingham winters, I moved to New Orleans, into a Mid-City warehouse where all the rooms were only half built. On more than one level, I was entering a place about which I knew very little. That’s the thing about picking up someone else’s old book, right? Sometimes there is marginalia, which gives you a peek at the lens through which past owners have read it. Other times, a book has been so cared for, you’d swear it had never been opened. Either way, there’s a deliberate ignorance in choosing to destroy a book—even with the intention of giving it new life.

The few windows in the warehouse were new, recently installed by my roommates, my friends. I even put one in myself—that soul-sucking sound of the Sawzall, then the light coming in, at last—and there were vines on the other side, stretching out across the corrugated roof next door. Beyond that, graveyards, which sprawled in almost every direction.

There seemed to be a few ghosts in this building, too, which for myself, mostly manifested themselves in dreams: My dad and I, putty knives in hand, urgently trying to repair a warehouse wall. Inside the wall, there were ghosts, increasing in sinister pressure, always on the verge of leaking out—which they did, at last, with the sound of a hellish scream. When they escaped, it meant certain death—one of the few times a dream allowed me to die.

These are the sorts of things that happen, according to Wikipedia, when you alter a book: “cuts, tears, glues, burns, folds, paints, adds to, collages, re-binds, gold-leafs, creates pop-ups, drills, bolts, and/or beribbons …” And this, I think, is what makes it such an appealing art for for me: its interdimensionality. On one level, a book (and when I say book, I mean the traditional non-e sense) strives to lay flat; it purports to be there to display a readable page. Yet the pages refuse to stay constrained to the second dimension: they demand to be touched, to be lifted and turned, to rise toward the reader and be sculptural, to inhabit an infinite number of angles before again pretending to be flat. And with altered books, all those add-to's and cuts only complicate the interdimensional confusion.

In one of those warehouse walls I built—this is in waking life now—I installed dioramas, which merged scenes of caveman with roses and chunks of polished glass I’d found on the beaches of Bellingham Bay. Remember: to obtain those pictures of cavemen was barbaric. New Orleans, too, had a good source of cheap books: a large Thrift City only blocks from my new home. Soon, we at the warehouse began hosting art shows, which gave me deadlines, which inspired me to create (re-create?) more books. One of those art shows, parasite-themed, inspired Tiny Monuments (They start eating you long before you're dead). I still have Tiny Monuments today thanks to Michelle Embree, who talks about its rescue over at her blog.

Stories change. Sometimes they merge and sometimes they haunt one another. They’re taken apart and re-ordered. New Orleans was where I first finally came out of the closet, a moment that had been building up for way too long. Once that ghost was released, I tried to ride with it, and was manic about it in the shyest sort of way: I wrote all the necessary people, and told the ones who I most hoped would tell everyone else. Then returned to the West Coast for what I thought was a summer trip. While I was there, though, my roommates all fled as well, and the warehouse was evicted and then looted. This was all several years before Katrina, so who knows what’s happened since, with those less than watertight windows, and those fragile dioramas which probably only weakened the walls. I have not been back to where that warehouse stood; I guess my ignorance has remained deliberate. 

Click here for Part 3!

Dream of Aimless Unemployment

In this dream, I had a job where I was unappreciated—to the extent that my boss could never remember my name. I decided to walk. Perfect timing, as my grandma pulled up in a minivan to treat me to lunch. Sitting across from her at a table in a woodsy diner, I tried to explain the injustice of my workplace. She didn’t understand.

Circumstances became such that we had to leave the minivan at the diner and walk through a busy park. There were all kinds of men with mild, mysterious smiles, wearing red athletic uniforms and chucking soccer balls against a fence. My grandma walked confidently ahead, skirting the fence, the men pausing to let her pass. As I followed, though, they began to throw the balls again, and I could feel the whisper of each as it sped past my head. The violence was in strange contrast to their smiles.

Somehow I lost track of my grandma, and went inside a decrepit parks maintenance building to try to find her. There was something wrong with this place, I realized: it was rat infested, I could sense them scurrying around in the shadows. The building’s unease felt more like a haunting than an infestation. There were all sorts of spiders and webs and egg sacs which clung to me now, and which I couldn’t get to fully leave my skin.

The sunlight outside was a relief, the men and their soccer balls less of a visceral threat as I began to make my way back to the minivan in hopes that my grandma was there. 

Dream That Ends Like a Wedding Review

Looking at dreams from waking life, motivations become unclear. Our reasoning in dreams is intuitive, based solely on emotion or something thereabout: something we don’t have the luxury of understanding while awake, what with the constant grind of logic. And so in this dream I found myself wrapped up in Scientology.

I was in a red brick plaza and wanted to see a psychic; the one I chose entered as part of a procession, carrying a cross. She was an elderly white woman in a cloak, and something about her was untrustworthy from the start. Her fellow psychics flanked her: one had a horned headdress, the other was a pathetically friendly young man.

This psychic held a power over me, like a boss or a parent, and I continued to take long, confusing bus rides to see her in her office at the edge of the red brick plaza. Her fellow psychics—all Scientologists, I discovered—were always somewhere nearby. I continued to give her money, hating her the entire time. Part of this relationship was based on fear, but there was something else unnamable between us.

At one point, my psychic required me to attend a wedding, which took place in the plaza. I stood at the very back of the crowd and had trouble telling what was going on. I took out a fine-point purple pen and began to doodle on the red brick. One of my psychic’s fellow psychics—the pathetically friendly young man—told me that drawing on the brick wasn’t allowed. It comes right off, I told him, and spit on what I’d drawn, and rubbed it clean with my finger. It’s still not allowed, he said, and I exchanged an eye roll with one of the other guests. 

Dream of Impermanent Buildings

I was driving through the country with a friend and an acquaintance, and we were all on our way to Asheville. Somewhere in our past, we had squatted a house—a mansion, in fact, labyrinthine and unlike any other. It was present in our minds because now it was lost. That was the thing about this dream: at one time, so much could have been ours.

Our plan now was to make the best of things by house sitting. The acquaintance, who was at the wheel, had the most experience at this. She had been on a lot of solo house sits in remote locales, she said, and I marveled at her bravery, as it was hard for me to sleep through the night in a strange place by myself.

I had heard somewhere that the Asheville Art Museum couldn’t afford to fix its roof and was going to have to close down. In the last few days before it shut its doors for good, its treasures were to be made available to the public on a frenzied first-come-first-served basis. Unfortunately, we were getting to town just too late to join the raid.

When we arrived at our house sit, I saw that it was my childhood home. The power was out because it was on the same circuit as the now closed museum, which it neighbored, although the two buildings were separated by a crumbling old garage, which at times became one of the museum’s abandoned wings. I had to make a long, fruitless, bureaucratically frustrating call in an effort to restore the power.

During this time, there was a news item, something so over-reported, it was hard to discuss anything else. A little-league football player had covered his face with bright blue eye shadow, and tempered it with a small spot of blush on one cheek. Bafflingly, little boys everywhere were beginning to consider this a masculine look.

Dream of a Tolerable Prison

Somewhere in the background of this dream, a chaotic event: the calendar had somehow collapsed on itself (whether by accident or design, it was unclear), and several holidays—Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and New Year’s Eve*—were all happening at once. Much of the world thought that this was a sign of our last day on earth, and in the midst of the havoc being wreaked, I woke up in prison.

The prison seemed more like a commune: there were few guards and most of the inmates were women. There was also a kind of golden brown light. Our first task of the day was to perform an exercise where we stood on a yoga mat and waved our arms back and forth. My cellmate told me we were supposed to pay for the mats, but if I got rid of the price tag on mine, they would think I had already paid.

Our next task was a math lesson. My cellmate opened the book and showed me where all the dirty pictures were: a cartoon of a little girl with fully developed breasts, an educational looking silhouette of an uncircumcised penis. She went on to tell me she had wound up in jail after encountering an alien. When she said alien, I didn’t picture the big-headed, bug-eyed kind, but instead a brownish, four-legged beast.

It was a relief to be in a prison like this, I came to understand, like a womb away from the hell that was taking place outside. The buzz among the inmates was that the institution had somehow slipped through the cracks, and anyone who wound up incarcerated there was the envy of the rest of the prison system. And it was true: the only stress I now felt was that I hadn’t finished my math lesson.

*Is this Garry Marshall’s fault? 

Dream of a Job Like a Family

In this dream, I had a job interview at a family-run print shop. The daughter was my friend; she had long, mouse-brown hair and glasses, and she’d cut the heels off the backs of her flip-flops. I imagined her feet being very calloused as she walked all around the print shop like this and her family lovingly ridiculed her. I waited in the kitchen to be interviewed, listened to the presses in the next room, and started to feel the enormous emotional weight that was attached to this job. The previous interviewee made his exit, and he was much younger than me, and more flashily dressed. I realized I was the one they were going to hire and began to relax.

The father was a very nice man who provided a strong sense of unity. There was something sinister about this,* but not sinister enough to prevent me from wanting to work there. Once I’d been hired, we all decided to go for a walk and then a drive. On the walk, I saw that the tips of every branch of every tree had been carved into a knobbish little head with comical features and gaping wide eyes. I pretended not to notice, and when it became clear this had been the work of the daughter, I was glad I’d kept my ignorance hidden.

On the drive, we were moving through mountainous streets, somehow magically past deadlocked traffic. The car felt like it might leave the earth in that way cars sometimes do when they’re climbing a hill and then dipping. I saw an animal: a wild boar I thought, and I remarked on it. The car was filled with laughter as everyone corrected me and I saw that they were right: the animal was really a black goat. This time I was sorry I’d let my ignorance show, and I tried to change the subject back to boars: “Do you have them around here? What are they called, javelinas?”

*This dream was probably influenced by the documentary miniseries The Staircase, directed by Jean Xavier de Lestrade, which had been present in my mind.

Dream of Two Sisters

This dream took place in the country. I had to scramble down through various ditches and cross several creeks via stepping stones, never really worrying if my feet got wet. I was trying to get to a house because I needed to talk to its occupant. I needed to confront them about something that would be hard to discuss. When I neared the house at last, I found that it was sided with cheap, sandpapery roofing material which was made to look like brick. As I approached the front door, I saw that it was one of two front doors: the house was a duplex. Knowing there were multiple occupants to confront, my anxiety now grew stronger.

What a relief when no one answered the doorbell, which was one of several doorbells, although I didn’t try the other ones. It was safe to say my efforts had been thwarted, and so I could now guiltlessly avoid the confrontation. I climbed back across the ditch and decided to sit for a while, it was so nice there in the country. I sat watching the house. There were several trees in its yard, one of which soon fell over with a peaceful little crash as it hit the ground. Even though the tree had been dead, I worried that I would be blamed. Another tree fell. It didn’t matter; I sat and listened to the water. Soon, two plump white women came out of the house and sat in the grass. They were wearing t-shirts and jeans, and were probably sisters. I watched them from across the ditch, thankful they couldn’t see me, as happy as they were to be talking on their phones.