Author: collageaslit

A continuation of the hazy concept method writing

I wrote two poems today. I'm in the process of reviewing a very strange jazz album that I picked up at a record store in Minneapolis. It was one of those shopping trips where I didn't know exactly what I was looking for - I've been listening to a lot of jazz recently, so I was in a jazz mood. I walked out with a Coltrane record and this other one. It's so experimental I had to split my listening into two sessions. I'm only halfway through.

After listening to side A, we went for a walk. I thought about the Fourth of July fireworks we went to the night before, about the walk back to the car after the show. There was a group of four kids, early twenties, had been rowdy the whole show walking up ahead of us by about a hundred yards. They were loud and obnoxious, mildly inappropriate for a setting with children present, but harmless. In between us and this crowd was a drunken, top-heavy redneck mountain stumbling back and forth with his two young children, possibly grandchildren, two steps ahead of him. 

Something had transpired between the rowdy boys and the cantankerous old drunk, but I had missed it. They were jawing at the drunk, loudly and the drunk was (loudly) yelling "Let's Go Brandon. Let's Go Brandon", over and over again, trying to talk over the youngsters who probably deserved a comeuppance that this old man was too drunk and, let's face it, too incoherent to provide. 

Earlier in that day, Erin and I had jogged through the same park where we had just watched the fireworks display. We spotted a bald eagle on our jog and after I pointed it out Erin said something to the effect of, "Ain't that America? Something to see, baby? A bald eagle on Independence Day! It's the perfect American metaphor. 

As we unsuccessfully tried to overtake the drunken idiot waddling and wailing, "Let's Go Brandon", I came to realize that a bald eagle on Independence Day was not the perfect American metaphor. In addition to the two poems I wrote, having been inspired by the insufferable wailing of the experimental jazz record and the drunken idiot, I wrote the beginnings of a story (or something) with the working title of Allegory No. 1. It's rough right now, but I enjoyed banging it out on the typewriter. America may have just celebrated its birthday in a way that estranged families celebrate Thanksgiving, potentially fraught and actually violently, but my mind has been rather preoccupied with Russia.

On today's walk, in that same park I might add, I began to think about Nikolai Gogol's Diary of A Madman. The dots are there if you care to connect them. As it is nearly midnight I don't particularly care to - I want to get to the point of this rambling post. Allegory No. 1 will undoubtedly become something entirely different by the time it's done. What it is now is a bit of method writing.

Method writing is a key component of Literature as Collage. In the beginning the collage was formless and void. Unlike God, I can't just conjure the light ex nihilo. Method writing is still a pretty hazy concept. Here's the principle that I'm trying to get at in a nutshell, because Allegory No. 1 is a perfect example of it as it stands right now. Russia, for better or worse, has a bit of real estate in my head right now. I have a feeling that this isn't too strange given the current state of the world. For whatever reason, I was walking in the same spot where I told Erin that, "this is America and it is embarrassing", I thought about an insane asylum and Nikolai Gogol's A Diary of A Madman.

Method writing has a lot to it (I think). One component completely steals from automatic writing. It's a mystical practice, for sure. There's some of that ineffability that makes descriptions a bit tough (and some of the nonsensical stuff that makes reading it a bit tough). With that comes the delusions of grandeur and associated arrogance, the pompousness bordering upon presumption. I confess! I like to dip my toes in that pool. Sometimes I even skinny dip. My goal is to keep from being baptized in it. 

The only way I know how to achieve that negative goal is to humbly accept that when I write, I do not have an omnipotent foreknowledge. I don't know where the story goes. That makes it exciting for me. It also means that sometimes I end up somewhere like Sylvania, GA. You know what's in Sylvania, GA? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What truly gets me excited about this concept though isn't the potential for satiated curiosity at the end of a dirt road between Augusta and Savannah (or peril). The gambling- like quality to writing stories without knowing the ending has some appeal to me, of course. I'm compulsive; gambling is exhilarating. As an aspiring adventurist the thrill of the gamble catches my attention. But, the thing that really jumps out at me in this whole method writing endeavor is the power it has to blur the lines between author and reader.

If I as an author of a story come to the ending, the twists and the turns as they come then in essence, I come to them at the same time as any reader would come to them. Actual spacetime be damned; its reliance on relativity makes it just as questionable as my own inner reality. I come to the end of a story (as an author) as any reader does. I may have an inkling, but there might be a twist. The point is to get there to find out. Since the spacetime reality no longer has the moral high ground - and, since its claims to real reality are just as shaky as this esoteric solipsistic reality I am conjuring up as we speak and, - since I am coming to this end in the same way as you (as a reader) are, we might as well say we're coming together at it at the same time, relatively speaking, (of course). Thus, through this aspect of method writing we arrive together at a deeper reality, a truer truth. Which in my opinion, is the entire purpose of art. 

If this sounds like bullshit to you and you find yourself saying something to the effect of "there can't be more truer truths than others", take a moment and look around you. The world abounds with truths that are more or less true than other truths. There's a whole cottage industry based upon it. Isn't that the American Dream, though? We see someone become wildly successful, enriching himself at the expense of all others and we try and emulate it. It is the gambling aspect that drives us on, boom or bust, baby. 

Exceptional artists create the zeitgeist of an age. I am content with portraying it. *The asterisk at the top has no purpose other than ornament. I happened to like the way that it looked. That is all. As I said, I am content with portraying rather than creating... 

There are many reasons I write. Above all the reasons that I won't bore you with at this juncture is to relieve myself of an idea or a story that has been growing restless in the dungeons of my mind. I get a lot of these ideas in that mind of mine, most of which either don't warrant or won't conform to the paper I would consign them to. Those that don't warrant the paper treatment get sent down to the dungeon where they can either grow strong enough to rise or die - it's totally in their hands once their unfair punishment is meted out. Those that are so abstract and obscure they refuse to be put on paper are likewise thrown into the dungeon. 

The punishment of these obscurities is not only warranted, but necessary. Obscure and abstract thoughts tend to be the loudest in the room (which if you have forgotten through my tortured metaphor, signifies my mind). I have no fear that they will die in the dungeon like some of their quieter and weaker kin. What I fear is that if they aren't confined they will make such a racket that I won't be able to think on anything else. I will be unable to function in both the world that I am making and the one that I am actively trying to graft said world into. Have you ever tried to make feijoda while pondering Pythagoras' prohibition of beans? That prohibition has haunted me for twenty years. I'm convinced it has something to do with air, spirit and flatulence. It's very distracting to think about and I have thrice burned a perfectly good feijoda while pondering such nonsense. I fear that if I don't banish them to the dungeon for a time that I will end up putting their nonsense to paper, like the three times I burned the feijoda.

There is a part of Collage as Literature that I call, method writing. It is the process through which I hope good, readable stories will come about. At the moment it is so obscure and so abstract that it defies my paltry ability to make it concrete, let alone good or readable! I confined it to the dungeon months ago with the hope that it would take the confinement to do some soul searching, maybe so yoga and find clarity, if not conciseness. Instead, it has screamed bloody murder and riled up all its fellow inmates. The whole prison complex is in an uproar. 

Eventually the guards are going to have to let it out. By the content of its screaming I doubt it has reflected one iota. Unfortunately, that means that at some point I will write something very unintelligible (not to mention borderline megalomaniacal). I will derive conflicting feelings in making concrete this abstract notion, relief and guilt. The reader will probably not see either of those. I have a premonition that the reader will wade into that abstraction only to find that concrete is still wet. Who knows? Maybe that's the entire point, to entrap the reader.

Now that you know what's going on in the bowels of my brain, now that the prisoner called method writing has a promised release, now that I have preconfessed my sin of future obscurities we can talk about the more concrete part of that idea we call process. Let us proceed with caution. There is a delightful aroma wafting through my apartment at the moment. It isn't feijoda, but a delicious and intoxicating arrogance.

This is a tenet of Collage as Literature that proceeds from another tenet mentioned already. It is a little hazy and I ought to give it some times down in the bowels, but my judgments are at times (as I have already confessed) unfairly meted out. Technically speaking, all of the tenets proceed from one another. There isn't a core that all are attached to and there isn't really a distinction between the individual tenets. Collage as Literature is pantheistic. That isn't a core tenet, but it may turn out to be a meta-tenet. See, this is what happens when you don't let an idea cool out in the dungeon for a bit - the arrogance just oozes out doesn't it?

Collage as Literature is pantheistic in nature. We'll leave that as it is for now, whatever it means. At the moment let us focus on the truth that every thing has the potential to become paradoxical and that a thing's utility to literature depends upon how much it gives into becoming paradoxical. The physical process of writing for me begins handwritten in a notebook [1st draft], moves from handwritten to typed on the typewriter [2nd - penultimate draft] and eventually to the mac, either on a blog or word document [presentable work, hopefully].

The handwritten notebook allows me to see the former prisoner in the full light of day, so to speak. I think that if I had good handwriting there would be no need for the typewriter. The notebook would have been sufficient to make words flesh. I don't have good handwriting, in fact it is atrocious. Often I can't even read it. The typewriter is the necessary artifice for the ideas to become free. That was my justification when I bought it and I'm going to stick to it.

The physicality of the typewriter (a writer with good handwriting might not need this step) makes concrete the freedom for the abstraction that was hitherto imprisoned in dark, dank cells in the belly of my mind. I'm sure that the abstractions are much happier in their freedom than they were in bondage. I know I am at peace when I can expel the unruly concepts. It's a win-win situation. That would be the end of it if it weren't for my ego. Hmm, if it weren't for my ego would I be at perpetual peace? TO THE DUNGEON, DAMN YOU! 

Here is where the paradox plays into the tenet that Collage as Literature necessarily expresses itself most completely through a physical component. The concretizing of the abstract is paramount to the whole thing. Unless you are me, you are likely reading this on the Internet, a virtual reality that is by design antithetical to concreteness. It is a minor paradox, for sure, but paradox, all the same. 

This blog serves two purposes: to be the repository of the cutouts necessary to write novels in the style of Collage as Literature; and, to stroke my ego. I like to imagine that one day the posts here will some day constitute a body of work interesting enough to a person with the right literary connections to sign me to a book deal. I'll publish a story, get an advance and go write in Paris - there is an idea (he is in the dungeon, of course) concerning every single metro stop in Paris. (Part satire, part memoir, part travel book, in case you are the person with the right literary connections to sign me to a book deal). Then, we shall all live happily ever after. I like to imagine...