As I try to bring order once again to my life, I return to my writing. The second book of short stories, almost all new stories written these past few months, may go untested. That is, I may not send them out individually to online magazines for possible publication which would give them a kind of gravitas. I’ll take the risk of coughing them up on the reader as new efforts. Only one story will be taken from The i Tetralogy. “Unanswerable” was also taken from the tetralogy for Down to a Sunless Sea as a kind of good luck talisman.
What is very freeing by being off the grid as a writer is that I go my own way. The hunger — the lust and envy — associated with getting published is crushed by my writer’s heel. I’ve been so removed from that. I cherish the freedom not to be conditioned; that to write a book and not have it published by a name-brand publishing house is a failure of a kind. When you and I are ash what difference does it make? I will not play the culture game that I swim in, the rules and regs of society, the musts and shoulds that are essentially corruption of every kind imaginable. If you think that I write out of sour grapes, fuck you. I don’t! I write as a free man who will have his say and be done with it.
By being off the grid I am sufficient and call upon my own natural and innate resources. I fuel me. The latest book on the Holocaust has made me feel two things: a sense of discrepancy and the ache of misgivings. To write about the Holocaust is to begin with failure, the inability to describe the ineffable, the unknowable, the unfathomed. I begin with a sense of failure; of not being able to get from here to there; I feel a disconnect as I try to write my stuff. The misgivings are a porridge of why bother, give it up, it can’t be done, it’s over your head, it’s beyond your reach — it is most assuredly beyond your puny writing talent.
The Jew perseveres. The New York Jew doesn’t quit on himself. The drive in me is very strong. I cannot account for that and analysis of any kind is a dry oasis well, the bucket banging against the cobwebbed walls. I go on. Chalk it up to my DNA — and my value system, cut from a different time and culture. I always associate to the tortoise and the hare and you know which one I am.
As I write or rewrite these stories I feel I am not even close but I must go on. The latent reward, I believe, is that I improve my skills, improve my abilities, that the struggle in and of itself strengthens me. I have always been tested, and like an orangutan swinging from one sword of Damocles to another, I just get by, all the while cutting and nicking myself on blade edges. I will do my best, publish the book, announce its existence and get on to the next effort. My “Before I Croak” goal is to have at least 5 or more books as a gift to my own ego and self, and to Jane and to my son and daughter. Posterity can go fuck itself, what I call “Future Fuck,” that is, doing a number on your head before it happens. I try to live in that pompous existential moment of now or what Krishnamurti has called “what is.”
For the time being, I’ll end here.
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