World of Fire. World of Original Experience.

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.” 
― Joseph Campbell

"Enter the forest at the darkest point."

"You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations."

Today I'm re-writing October 5th and my mood is sinking.  Because of technical problems and self-doubt about my craft and the story (replaying conversations with my old boss, my new boss and Grace in narration--should I break the scene apart?) but also the hero's path.  October 5th is a dark entry point, but is my memoir the right forest?  Using Campbell's word "bliss," which strikes me as ridiculous, if I finish this rewrite will I find bliss?  Or does this path lead to misery.  After I spend and hour or two on it, I'm reliably depressed.

I guess the analogy is false.  The book is the dark path.  The forest is life.  I can choose another path but not another life.

3 of 23 Pound Poetry Don'ts

Read Ezra Pound’s List of 23 “Don’ts” For Writing Poetry (1913)

in Poetry | January 30th, 2014

4. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.

13. When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

18. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure...

Curated by: Open Culture

I've had a short holiday from my book.  Resumed yesterday.  The break makes it clear, that in addition to the standard writerly insecurities, the subject matter brings me down.

Hamlet or Macbeth

Butcher's Chapter 9:  Plot and Character.

The emotions must harden into will and the will express itself in deed.

Hamlet: Events are then brought about, not by the free energy of will, but by acts of arrested volition, by forces such as operate in the world of dreamland.

Macbeth: strong, dominant, militant frame of mind.  Nothing is more wonderful than the resistless impulse, the magnificent energy of will with which a Macbeth or Richard III goes to meet his doom.

The fate that overtakes the hero is no alien thing, but his own self recoiling upon him for good or evil.

I'm pro reality, because lack of reality killed Jack.  That puts me clearly on the side of Reason.  My Reason failed to protect Jack, but that is secondary.  Primary, her irrationality, killed Jack.

The test of a man's sanity is the relation in which his mind stands to the universal.  Denise's action defied the universal.

Do I sound like Hamlet?

the end is the thing

Karr's art of Memoir

I don’t try to reconstruct empty spots. I’ve been vigorously encouraged by various editors to fictionalize. They would say, It must have been a very dramatic scene, saying goodbye to your mother. And I remember reading that Vivian Gornick said to her students, “Just make it up and see if it’s true.” Bullshit. In fiction, you manufacture events to fit a concept or an idea. With memoir, you have the events and manufacture or hopefully deduce the concept. You don’t remember something? Write fiction.

It pissed me off when I saw James Frey on Larry King saying, You know, there’s a lot of argument about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. You know what? There isn’t. If it didn’t happen, it’s fiction. If it did happen, it’s nonfiction. If you see the memoir as constructing a false self to sell to some chump audience, then you’ll never know the truth, because the truth is derived from what actually happened. Using novelistic devices, like reconstructed dialogue or telescoping time, isn’t the same as ginning up fake episodes.

Today I just couldn't get going.  I was in a muddle about verb tenses: my book goes in and out of past and present, even inside a paragraph.  It felt lazy to me.  One model novel, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, is most mostly present, but has past in there.  But always in a discrete paragraph or fragment.

My friends David & Christine bumped into me in the Ballard library.  I confessed my struggle on tenses.  Since David had mentioned Karr and Liar's Club, I went to the shelves, picked up Lit, and skimmed a lot of tense changes by Karr.  Mostly past.  Like mine.  But present came flooding in for whole chapters.  So use the verb tense the story demands.

Autobiography is mostly contingent on voice. If the voice is strong enough, the reader will go anywhere with you. And who’s better at syntax and diction than a poet?

So back home, google, and this Paris Review interview of Karr in 2009.

 Prose always seems inadequate to me because every line isn’t a jewel. But it can’t be. Prose favors information; poetry favors music and form.

The memoir’s antagonist has to be some part of the self, and the self has to be different at the end of the book than it was at the beginning. Otherwise you have what I call the sound-bite memoir or the ass-whipping memoir. 

On Neiman Storyboard:

That suggests that you are supposed to give the [Reader] something: an experience – that distilled experience.

Interviewed by Dean Nelson in 2011, around minute 8:20, Karr says she doesn't write for herself--not "what is important to me."  My whole memoir is what is important to me.  Hmmm.  Should I say fuck it, shred the thing?

At minute 9:50, a memoirist has events, and you don't know the truth of those events, so you manufacture meaning from those events.

At minute 15, the truth has to ambush you.  Is this example, the events are Karr leaving for California.  Her own life narrative had been that her dad left her.  She had to scratch at the story, the events, to find the truth--that she left him not that he left her.  So how would that apply to my story?  What myth have I created, that through the writing of this memoir, I'll find the truth behind?  I really resist the pithy answers.  I don't trust "finding the truth."  I think it is just a new narrative--one that replaces another.  But as I do this rewrite, I am trying to open my mind.

She Died of the Fifth Act

I added more content today; about Brown and my daughter.  I hope soon I can start pruning, so the story won't be too vast to be grasped by the mind.

Butcher, in Chapter 7, says Unity for Aristotle is the principle of limits.  Without Unity, my action would be undefined, indeterminate, accidental to The Reader.  Uh huh.

Amusing quote regarding the history of the stage:  "What did she die of?" was asked concerning one of the characters of a bad tragedy.  "Of what? of the fifth act!"

I think my entire book is Falling Action.  I don't have a denouement where all minor effects are subordinated to the sense of an ever-growing unity.

The epic is a story of the past; a drama, the present.

In Greek tragedy, the tragic hero often fights against destiny; in my book, I fight against something equally rational: psychosis.  Temporary psychosis.

The hero:  character is destiny.

full circle today

I wrote myself full circle.  Around 11 I panicked.  I found new content that was evocative, and that I had to find a way to add that to the draft.  The material was heavy (which already brings me down), but the idea that my draft was expanding was disheartening.  It's already too long.  Each thing I add makes the final edit harder.  And there was the fear of more landmines out there to trip over.

I took a break.  Showered.  Ate lunch.  I found a way to constructively attack the new content.

And then, about 3/4 of the way through the new content, I realized that what I was working on was from November 2007--not November 2006.

Yes I wasted some time, but the good news is that today's wild goose chase validates not just my composition process but also how I'm approaching this revision.

Grave and Great

Still Butcher on Aristotle: Chapter 6 "The Function of Tragedy"

The action in a tragedy should be grave and great, and at the climax, at Recognition, produce catharsis in the audience.  Involuntary.  A purge of feeling.

Plato:

• 'the natural hunger after sorrow and weeping' is kept under control in our own calamities, but is satisfied and delighted by the poets.  (My emotions were kept under control for the time-frame of my book.  I had convulsions of grief during the early years, but I it wasn't until the day my divorce was finalized that the fatigue, the relief from a long, long fight with Denise, and the exhaustion from anger was mixed in with sobbing.  So when I think of catharsis, and what that convulsion can physically feel like, I think of that day.  How I can set the table for that in The Reader?)
• it makes anarchy of the soul by dethroning Reason in favor of feeling
• through drama man becomes many instead of one

Aristotle:

• the pleasurable calm that follows when passion is spent--"a harmless joy"
• pity turns into fear where the object is so nearly related to us that the suffering seems to be our own

Butcher

• tragedy provides not merely an outlet for pity and fear, but a distinctively aesthetic satisfaction to purify and clarify the feelings.  (I get lost here.  That somehow seeing the events dramatized, the characters and actions, grave and great, universal, and I guess the audience, in concert, reacting to the spectacle--all that is necessary to purify and clarify.  If it is only to provide The Reader perspective, I can imagine accomplishing that in telling my story.  But there isn't the Universal.  My story is the Particular.  It is very grave but not great, and the Reader will miss the collective response of fellow audience members.  And I don't have climax! I'm doubtful about what purify and clarify means.  I don't see how I can provoke it.  How can I excite the Reader to catharsis?)
• the audience is at an ideal distance from the hero.  "the pressure of immediate reality (which raises our defenses and coping mechanisms?) is removed."  (I'm getting closer here to understanding.  Distance. Plus now I can accept the need for "universal," otherwise the Reader won't be able to identify enough with the hero to be empathetic.)
• each thing that happened could not have been otherwise.  (Lots of randomness in my story.  That Aristotle would want refined out.)
• the pain is expelled when the taint of egoism is removed?? (This is too glib.)
• This is my central disagreement. "The private life of an individual (me), tragic it may be in its inner quality (yes), has never been made the subject of the highest tragedy.  It's consequences are not of far-reaching importance; it does not move the imagination with sufficient power."  (And Oedipus does?  Why?  Wouldn't the Reader have more fear if the hero was just an every day individual?  One thing about Greek drama is that (Oedipus, for example) the story is already well known by the audience.  So being great in that sense, famous, provides the audience the opportunity to be constantly comparing Sophocles version with the story they learned growing up.  A side-effect, then, of Oedipus being great, but not the central point.)
• the divine plan of the world. (Butcher reveals some of his baggage.)
• the more exclusive and self-absorbed a passion is, the more does it resist kathartic treatment.  (And Butcher knows this to be true how?)

I am choragus:

There is a Denise in your life.  Don't presume Reason will save you from his or her irrational act.  Either by warning you or by giving you the know-how to stop it.  There is no antecedent to her act.  If I, if you, have the knowledge, you would have acted to prevent it.

I don't have a climax.

• the NGRI verdict was an anti-climax.
• Denise's move back to Trenton Psychiatric was an anti-climax.
• filing for divorce was an anti-climax.
• getting laid, if i had, would have been an anti-climax.

Getting Jack back, now that would been a climax.

And the only moment I get close to that, is when I break down weeping, and as I have written, those moments I cherish.

I want to give that to you Dear Reader.

There is a Denise in your life.  Either you have suffered a tragedy like I, and this story can break through your defenses and quotidian coping mechanisms, and you can weep for your Jack; or you haven't met your tragedy yet. Then the death of my Jack, I hope, can help you see, for a second, what your Denise could do.

Catharsis:

• involuntary
• convulsive
• transport The Reader out of his hubris, his complacency, just for a second
• relief, it's over