Quick Brown Foxes
Last night, visiting my parents for a weekend of Passover seders, I picked up Philip Roth’s American Pastoral from the bookshelf, sat down and started reading. His writing overwhelmed me. The English language! We’ve got the best language in the world — all in one place you have words like shampoo, jaguar, pizazz, balustrade, vermillion, fuck, crepuscular, august and snooty. It’s a real duct-tape-and-safety-pins language, we can do anything, English liberty and American know-how, creating words like we’re playing with Tinkertoys. I’m a man who likes men, so I can be homosexual or gay or phallophilic. I made that last one up. David Foster Wallace writes Infinite Jest and someone has to make an online glossary to define the obscure words he uses.
It was after midnight on a Sunday night and I needed to go to bed but I kept reading. I’d connect with Roth’s words and something inside me would give off electricity, I had to put things down on paper, save them, but there was no paper around so the energy bolts dissipated in the air. I tried to collect as much of them as I could. Eventually I had to go to sleep but couldn’t, because sentences and ideas kept forming in my head. Sometimes that happens — I read a writer so good, so damn skillful, that I’m simultaneously inspired and agonized with torture. I want to write that well but I never will. Yet at the same time I can, I can! I just need practice. I need to keep filling notebooks with words and eventually I’ll get there. Our words make us immortal. But before immortality, our words make us alive. Most importantly, I want to use my words to connect with other people. I shout into the void hoping that somebody will read these words, that my words will help, or influence, or infect. I exist.
Why do I blog? Why shoot my wads into thin air when I can save them up for one good fuck? But that’s a fallacy (phallus-y). Natalie Goldberg tells us that we must be brave enough to throw away a piece of writing, to toss away something that is good, because more will always come. If you are stingy, you will never have enough, but if you are generous, you will have plenty. Our bodies are constantly producing creative juices, and whether we ejaculate these juices as semen or as words, we must have faith in our neolojism. We are all wellsprings. Potential geysers.
And in case you don’t understand, let me emphasize: Natalie Goldberg is amazing. Writing Down the Bones is the best book I have ever read on writing. Ever.