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The reading group (not book club) had begun meeting in January, two months after the midterm elections that had, as they could not yet know, swept the Democrats out of congressional power for the next almost-decade, and Vivek was treated with the mild deference due to someone who had recently suffered the death of a somewhat important relative, a great-uncle, maybe, or adult cousin. There were no Republicans among them, of course, but there was some range in the degree to which politics was central to their lives, from the socialists associate-editing a newish journal of “literature and ideas” to Thomas, who presumably voted for Democrats, if he voted, but also went to church, exercised regularly, and worked for an international bank. Derek had felt in himself a recent, emerging desire for political commitment (like Larkin in the abandoned church, but for economic justice?), though he hadn’t acted on it. He didn’t enjoy going to protests, and he didn’t want to be in one of the Marxist reading groups whose membership overlapped significantly with this one. Maybe he would ask Vivek if there was anything he could do for 2012, though he feared that would prove less than life-changing. Hope had pulled off the big win once; what could the next election be other than a crowd-pleasing but redundant sequel?
ha
He’d moved down to the corner of the table to talk to Patrick, who was the lead singer of a rock band that had just received a devastating negative review on a popular website. Derek was existentially unnerved by the unfairness of it. Patrick was sweet and funny, and everyone who heard his music loved it, and yet now some asshole had endangered his possible career because his album didn’t meet some nonsensical standard of originality, as defined by a critic whose sense of history didn’t extend any further back than David Bowie’s third album. As if originality even existed. Derek realized this was a rich position to take, as someone who edited (assisted in the editing of) reviews of various degrees of negativity, and he had already written a couple of less-than-positive ones himself, though they were for obscure-enough venues that he was confident he hadn’t derailed anyone’s ambitions. It was wrong, he knew, that the reason he was opposed to this particular bad review was that it was Patrick, a person who was already so sufficiently self-effacing that he didn’t need a website to tell him he should dislike his own work. The solution, Patrick was telling him now, was not to take things personally. One needed, he had discovered, to let one’s work be as the seagull over the ocean, drifting on currents and squawking horribly, unencumbered by the dull perspectives of the beachgoers on the distant shore.
“Huh,” Derek said.
“Yeah, I guess I’ve been thinking about it too much,” Patrick said.
respect
When I was an “emerging” artist I wanted only to finish emerging. But not knowing what I would become, not knowing the circumference of my life—I never expected to solve those mysteries, and once they were solved, I missed them. I didn’t know I’d miss them.
At the twenty-fifth reunion, a presentiment of the grave, now that all the girls from your high school class have borne the last of their children.
On an autumn afternoon we sat in the back seat of a small car. There were too many people in the back seat. Our legs touched. Hello, he said. My left side burned. I can feel the pressure of his body, all our clothes between us. I’ve been trying to write about this for thirty years.
I want to dig up everyone who was in that car and drag them all home, holding on to their melting faces, screaming into them, Was any of this real? Did any of it happen?
We wrote notes to each other and left them on each other’s drawing boards in the art studio. Fifteen years ago I threw them away. They were getting in the way of what I wanted to remember, which was the distance between us. I didn’t realize at the time that I controlled it totally, that I’d invented it to maintain my ecstatic debasement.
You give up your job to move somewhere for your spouse’s job, which pays better than yours ever will, so the marriage wins. It happens five times in a row, in five consecutive years. You’d never have agreed to this, but the marriage keeps winning! The trick is to train yourself to value the marriage above yourself, to feel as if you win when the marriage wins. After the fifth move, I barely even tried to make friends, barely arranged the house, barely cared what it looked like, what I looked like. Marriage is a machine that deforms whatever self you once were into an accommodating engine.
But then there is the opposite agony of the pristine, unmarked self.
Having nothing to write isn’t writer’s block. It’s just the dormant phase of the work. I used to write all through this phase, and it looked like productivity. It wasn’t.
The concept of writer’s block depends on the assumption that whatever you’re producing, it’s not enough.
I need to insulate myself from even the idea of productivity in order to get anything of value done. But even the idea of getting it done is evidence of the pollution of the act.
Crossing an ocean is a good metaphor for reading a book, but it’s not a good metaphor for writing one unless the crossing takes place before the age of astronomy, and the captain is ready to fall off the edge of the world.
Only an idiot wouldn’t be depressed, I think, and it makes me smile.
Depression keeps me from writing and tells me to blame everything else.
After I give a reading, a worried teenager asks, Do you think you’re a good writer?
People ask, What are you depressed about? But there is no about.
A few years ago I had a headache after which I was a different person. It changed the way I thought about myself. Forever after, I’d know I had a limit. I don’t remember the pain, exactly, but I remember my certainty. I trust it.