COLUMN - In Orbit:

Jean Genet

Jean Genet, the French homosexual criminal, wrote a novel on a roll of toilet paper. When the guards threw it out, he wrote it again. Thomas Mann skipped his son's funeral; he was too busy writing. Kurt Vonnegut, who hated semicolons, said that the only rule of writing is that whatever works works. The first page of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf is a garden of semicolons, proving Kurt Vonnegut right; writing is a crazy game.

Reality is a crutch for those that cannot handle drugs, they said in the 60s and they may have well been talking about writing, which creates its own parallel universe, both a replacement and supplement to a world without words, if such a thing can even be truly thought. The days are like gods, said Henry Thoreau. He may have been talking about their beauty, although he could have meant their writer-engulfing caprice loading the personality with a didactic perfunctoriness into the cultural repository, the possibly permanent digital record of living language, which owns us as much as we it.

The Crazy Game – I am hard pressed to track down the exact reference for the heading of this my first column, which comes through the philosopher Jacques Derrida in translation from a French poet who you may guess. An inspirer of Baudelaire, an inaugurator of symbolist poetry, my eponymous subject was so christened by a mustached man who subtly sang the praises of words on the edge of meaning, linking the white sail of a ship to the white-as-the-driven-snow pure possibility of the blank page. This ludic metaphor of writing as a game, an addled one at that, owes itself to Stéphane Mallarmé.

Stéphane Mallarmé 

I'm on firmer ground when I track down the origin for the title of this column: in Orbit. It's easy to forget with all the nearby sun pollution, the blinding light of days, but, in Orbit is where we are, spinning as we elliptically loop about our star, itself far flung on an arm of the Milky Way Galaxy whose white middle can be seen on a clear night if you're not too close to the distractions of some big city.

The prepositional phrase “in orbit” reminds us of what we do every year, where we are on our cyclical but changing course. Astronauts report that in near-Earth orbit, revolving around the globe every forty-five minutes or so, the cycles run faster; coming up, the sun cuts through the thin ribbon of the atmosphere, sending the interior of the cabin through all colors of the rainbow. Less than an hour later, the sun goes down; Earth becomes the place where there are no stars.

I love this image as it shows that perceptual reality is not fixed but in flux. Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman laughingly assures us that the imagination of the universe is far greater than the imagination of man. This is good news for writers, as it suggests that what is now imagined may one day turn true, and then some. Like Jules Verne and Johannes Kepler imagining moonshots, or Emily Dickinson advising the reader to “dwell in possibility,” the crazy game of writing not only creates its own world, but may predict worlds to come.

Jalaluddin Rumi "Mevlana" by Aydaks

In orbit also refers to the lasting ecstasies imparted to us by the dizzying heights and depths of great writers, familiar and not so. Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th century mystic and poet translated in free verse by Coleman Barks, is the best-selling poet in the spinning world. Rumi literally spun as he rhymed, and is said to have set a vast number of his poems floating upon the water, gifts without a destination. Poetry, Robert Frost reminds us, is what gets lost in translation, but Barks, who doesn't speak Farsi, seems somehow to have gotten Rumi's number.

I love not just Derrida but Charles Bukowski, not just Stanislaw Lem but Clarice Lispector, the beautifully crazy Ukrainian born Brazilian who, as a little girl, misunderstood books, thinking them to be like fruits and babies natural products that just appeared on their own. She died at 57, although we cannot be absolutely sure, as it is clear that she persistently lied about her age, giving the impression that her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was even more precociously intelligent than it was.

"I rode into town on a night train/with an arm full of box cars," sings Screaming Jay Hawkins in the Tom Waits song, Whistling Past the Graveyard. "I'm-on a tear me off a rainbow/and wear it for a tie/I never told the truth/so I can never tell a lie."

Dizzyingly, fiction is nonfiction because it's always from a particular person's point of view, and admits from the git-go that it is to be taken with a grain of salt, whereas nonfiction so often is fiction because it pretends to an absolute objectivity beyond the relativity of place and personalized vision.

Clarice Lispector

In the mixed genre known in Brazillian journalism as Crónicas, short reports ranging from poetic philosophy to brief autobiographical accounts, Lispector writes, "The worst of lying is that it creates a false truth...if a lie were merely the negation of a truth, then that would be one of the ways (negative) of telling the truth...To write, therefore, is the way of someone who uses the word as bait: The word fishes for something that is not a word. When that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be discarded with relief."

Louis Auchincloss, author of over 40 books, admitted to a species of John F. Kennedy's alleged plaint to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that if he didn't have a girl every three days, he got headaches. I thus will forgo the temptation to resist the temptation to use this column as a cemetery plot and to deconstruct Auchincloss's proper name in his honor. From now on I hereby decree that "To Auchenclot" will mean to feel an ill-ease anywhere from antsy to downright physically ill when not writing. May you rest in peace, good sir.

Similar to Vladimir Nabokov, who admitted to feelings of physical withdrawal if he stopped writing for more than two or three days, or to Auchincloss afflicted by his own newly christened syndrome, Lispector confessed she only felt truly alive while writing. Borges said he considered himself foremost a reader, and only secondarily a writer. Good for him, whose favorite English word was “dim,” as most writing is about other writing.

Writing makes strange bedfellows. And it makes the great cultural bed in which we all someday will rest, perhaps with elements of our own personalities entering the crazy quilt of generative grammars, slang and neologisms, the soul-mingling language that unfolds from here to the great cultural beyond.

Photo by Joy E. Stocke

From “To Lie, To Think” and “Miraculous Fishing” of Crónicas, in The Foreign Legion, (Giovanni Ponitero, tr.), New Directions: New York, p. 119.

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