Arc Welding For The Truly Mad

I like to put words together. I mean, who doesn't, right? How can anyone not enjoy putting words together? Isn't conversation fun? Seriously, what better amusement is there than talking with a friend or two or three about whatever, about books, drugs, music, chocolate éclairs, the God particle, marriage, divorce, the little shits that are younger than us, influences, outrageous medical bills, midnight confessions, weird perceptions,  ghosts, earthquakes, harmonicas, vaporizers, movies, places you've been, places you'd like to visit, the possibilities are endless, and that is it in its essence, the entire allure to speaking: it is endless. It is the closest that we can get to the infinite while still in our skin.

It’s when we decide to make an art of putting words together that things get unwieldy and difficult. Not so much fun. But it depends. Is fun the right word? In the case of art, no, not really. This isn’t to say that putting words together ceases to be fun, but the landscape changes drastically from the quiet pastures going by your train window as you discuss books and movies with a newfound friend, to a rickety scaffolding fifty floors above the street, a swaying rope bridge in the Himalayas, a yawing abyss, a volcanic terrain of steaming fumaroles and chunks of red hot lava unfolding at your feet.

Fun is for kids. Drugs can be fun, but much of their time they’re not. They’re exciting and mind-blowing and akin to fun, but they’re in a different sphere. They’re in the decadent, lurid, La Dolce Vita sphere. They can be transformative, but mostly they’re just cheap thrills. Taking a drug like heroin isn’t fun, it’s dangerous, highly risky, and very much against the grain of mainstream values, which makes heroin a cogent analogue to the literary life. Psilocybin has a lot of good press, pot is a warm poultice for a tired brain, LSD is the NASA of inner space and I’ve heard ecstasy is exquisite for raves and festivals because it makes you fall in love with talking. I’m not recommending heroin, pot, LSD or ecstasy. I just want to reinforce the point about fun. Fun is for amusement parks. Extreme sports are for maniacs. But writing is for the truly mad.

The intent to put words together in a way that makes the words different, that makes them shiny and hard and incandescent is a very strange ambition. It will not make you money.

Let me repeat that: it will not make you money.

Unless you’re somehow able to put words together with none of their inherent magic in evidence because you’re showcasing content, an adventure story, a romance, a sensationalistic fantasy involving vampires and wands, a political ideology or a suspenseful plot full of guns and bloody vengeance. That’s not writing, that’s pandering. This is writing done for a particular market. If you can do that, my hat is off. I can’t. I don’t know why, but every time I begin putting words together it becomes an art, and people like Marcel Duchamp and Gertrude Stein enter my mind. I fill with giddy intent. I want to construct pituitary banjo awnings, cardboard headaches, creamery walks in funny liquid shoes.

I would love to be able to write for a market and make lots of money. I like money. It’s a form of language, like words, only you can buy things with it. Things like clothes and dinner. Real shoes, not liquid shoes. Whoever heard of liquid shoes? Words did, that’s who.

Ok, now that that’s cleared up, let’s talk about putting words together as an art. It is a difficult battle at first because the language is essentially social. The uses that I make are only partly social. There may be ideas I want to express, but they are secondary to my primary intention, which is to liberate the inner genius of words, their realities as living entities.

And right away, I’m slipping. “Living entities” sounds a little trite. Are they, really? No, they’re not. They’re words. Words have histories, words have rules. But they’re not embryos. I can say they’re embryos, and you may picture embryos, but are they embryos? No. They’re sounds, that’s all. Vibrations in the air, vibrations with meanings attached.

In other words, embryos. Embryo comes from the Greek, embruon, meaning fetus, which stems from Greek ‘em,’ meaning ‘into,’ and ‘bruein,’ meaning to ‘swell, or to grow.’ Now certainly, when I say a word, I don’t just say it, I put my breath into it, I breathe into it, and the word assumes life, the vibrations produced by my vocal apparatus put it out there, a living breathing entity of semantic import. Ok, but what if I don’t say it, I write it, what’s that? That would be a word formed by pixels on a computer screen, or ink on a sheet of paper. No breath involved, not for the word, or words, whatever it is they breathe, whatever ether propels their little lives forward or backward is the fingers of my hand. Their histories, however, existed long before I got around to playing with them. And in the case of English, this is pretty extensive, because English is a polyglot language, a hodgepodge of all the other languages that have previously existed or continue to exist, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Choctaw, Arapahoe, Sioux. Not to mention French and German and Spanish. Billow, blunder, birth and billow are Norse words. So are dirt, gun, bug, berserk, gust and geyser. Did the Vikings have guns? No (thankfully) but they did have daughters, and the really badass Vikings liked to name their daughters Gunnhildr, a combination of two words, gunn and hildr, both words meaning ‘battle.’

So if you dare to go into a language like English with the intent to make art out of its gusts and geysers, you’re in for an adventure, my friend. You’ll be stumbling around in a lot of history, syntax, grammar, nutty predicates and insane nouns like flibbertigibbet and borborygmus. You’ll be bumping into Vikings and brushing shoulders with berserk motorcyclists named Panhead and Rocky. You’ll be going on expeditions into fabulous realms of mung bean and wanderoo. It’ll be a gas. You’ll get to wrap your mouth around big juicy words like parcheesi and juggernaut. You’ll be slashing your way through fertile valleys of bamboo and liana vines seeking that ultimate treasure, the metaphor to beat all metaphors, a trope so fantastic in its reach and metaphysical in its implications that it will threaten the very fabric of the society in which you live and trigger a chain of never-ending associations. Reality will topple over. A new reality will need to be assembled, quickly, before the neighbors find out what’s happened.

What has happened to me, you will wonder. Why are my friends avoiding me? Why can’t I pay my bills?

All arts require sacrifice. Language above all. Musicians, you may have noticed, occasionally make money. Not as much as they used to. But getting on a stage with a guitar and singing is more apt to garner applause than getting on a stage and reading a body of words calibrated to explode in people’s heads like verbal nitroglycerin. Those glazed looks in the audience are the people who don’t understand that your metaphors are intended to blow their minds and cause them to carry you triumphantly into the street. The polite applause is a hint that you what you’re doing with language on the level of artistic treatment isn’t totally connecting.

There’s no easy formula. You can get so entangled in vocabulary and syntax you’ll need the jaws of life to extricate your ass.

Or, you can keep things simple if you like. It worked for Samuel Beckett. He worked for a time as a secretary to James Joyce, he took language to the nth power in Finnegans Wake, stretched it to its very capacity and reached the fourth dimension, so why repeat that thought Beckett, who went off in his own direction, and wrote with increasingly simplicity and starkness as he aged into the craggy face that not be a more perfect match to the existential bleakness to the writing, and its humor, which is evident in Beckett’s eyes, which are the eyes of a hawk spiraling thousands of feet above the earth in a column of warm rising air. 

It should be mentioned that Beckett did a very interesting thing: he wrote in French, then translated it into English. He lived in Paris nearly his entire life. Yet, like Gertrude Stein and Joyce, however fluent he may have been in French, it was not (as we like to say) his mother tongue. However comfortable you get in a foreign language, it preserves its foreignness. That is a key element. If you begin working with a language in which you have a sense of it being other than you, you’re way ahead of the game.

The people I envy are the first people to begin language, to get it rolling. How did that happen? Who were the first people to look up at the sun, say, and say ‘sun,’ or whatever sound they made when they all agreed that that sound was going to mean ‘sun,’ and the word ‘shine’ was going to mean ‘shine,’ and so on. Jesus I wish I could’ve been there. It’s hard to imagine, hard to remove the word ‘sun’ from my mind and imagine what sound I might’ve made to mean ‘sun,’ at a time when language was both an art and a medium of social exchange. How many years before people lost a sense of its natural foreignness and began taking it for granted? Before it became those tired, meaningless phrases we use at work, or the politicians made flags and wars out of them.