What is literature - this thing where one of us writes and one of us reads? A pleasure? An obligation? A religion? An attack on implacable facts of life? A calm voice during a scary hour? An obfuscation?
Just getting dinner or watching a movie can be tricky. And language, where we meet, is perhaps the trickiest place. Even in good faith, while trying to tell the truth, communication is delicate and difficult. Literature has larger ambitions, encompassing long spans of time and multiple generations. Tricks of memory, such as songs and sayings often distort or conceal their subjects, and too much memory can make you a zombie.
The traditions and institutions I’d hoped would shelter and support me may not be the friends I’d imagined them to be. Actual friends often help, and sometimes the maturity of age does, too.
I’ve been a writer for all of my adult life, telling stories, reading to small crowds, writing novels, poems, essays, screenplays, sales copy and of course, content. Basically everything except for orders of execution. I’ve kept on working, making money, keeping my cool, and evading authority, through misunderstandings, embarrassments, disappointments and outright failures. It hasn’t all been respectable. It hasn’t always been easy to stay enthused. But it hasn’t been boring. I’ve seen it turn out worse for more successful writers than myself.
All of this occurs in an enormous civilization of fluctuating repute, in a landscape of bad-faith improvements, bad-faith pieties, bad-faith institutions, even bad-faith mourning. It’s a place that distorts the most fundamental attempts at understanding. This pinches hard in middle age, when hypocrisy and moral failures threaten to become the most prominent parts of one’s personality.
Despite all of this, meaning has a way of showing up, even entrapping me, while time stares mercilessly through my inventions, death quickens the march around me, and the inexplicable regularly beckons.
Animating all of this is an impossible magic, an unlikely logic, a faith even.