62: Different Kinds of No Wind
on working on my novel, breaking language & the physics of failure
I’ve been spending my mornings here in Joshua Tree working on my novel. Or rather: I have decided that this trip is going to be the rebooting of my concerted effort to finally (begin) do(ing) the work of completing it. For somewhere in the ballpark of twenty years I have been jotting down notes, building and conceptual and narrative structures, adding and subtracting elements, isolating and articulating themes, putting together playlists, compiling miscellaneous ideas and otherwise archiving my daydreams into a more or less singular amalgam of material that will someday, on some level, look like a novel.
I realized— last year I think it was— that the “existence” of this “novel,” its constant “presence” in my life, has (for going on two decades, mind you) been a pleasant, companionable experience. I suppose you could say it “looms over” or even “haunts” me or my life, but the contours of this psychic spectre do not sketch out some fearful phantasy of the pressure or the horror of some inevitable failure to “make it happen.” No, it’s been more like a friend who has been with me through a lot of shit. Who carries the signs and traces and histories of a lot of that shit, who helps me hold or keep with me the lessons from said shit, gives me the sort of institutional memory that helps me remember and helps enable my own embodiment of a sense that I have duration, that “I am real”— was real, am real, and (will) continue to be real until that time we both fizzle out and don’t need each other any more.
As I write this the sun is cresting over the desert horizon, promising to soon make being able to see my computer screen impossible/ impossibly uncomfortable, and the morning doves that have been cooing peacefully for the last hour are now flying about, their wings sounding surprisingly like creaky dry cardboard slapping against itself.
Much of the aforementioned “shit” that my novel and I have been through together is precisely that which it does not, to my relatively well-scrutinized self-knowledge, represent the fear of: failure. Or more accurately: the experience of (taking a) risk/ (and then) failing. It is more than likely because I have experienced so much of this, or experienced enough of the feeling of risk/ failure, that I can no longer bear to exist in fear of it. It isn’t that I’m used to it— well, it is, but the takeaway is that at some point I consciously decided that I would no longer stand for letting failure dominate me, and have since been building the skills to practice and improve this refusal.
I mention this because the cliche, which I seem to embody “on the surface,” of the guy who is “always working on his novel,” seems to be the form of this specific relationship to failure. It sounds sad, pitiful or pathetic. I giggle as I sit in the rising sun thinking about this, considering the extent to which my always-working-on-my-novel-ness does not, (it seems) to me, fit the bill of this cliche, though it does contain the shades of failure, and I wonder if my lonely laugh out here reads as the opposite: as the evidence for a deep denial. Which is to say: I wonder how crazy I sound. I don’t care— but I wonder.
Everything at this level of consideration, like the conundrum of paranoia, begins to sound like a reaffirmation of that which we are afraid of, which means fear is something like mass, that thing which curves, and somehow gives direction to, spacetime; that pulls us in. For example my novel is all about hidden languages (surprise)— codes and cryptographies, ciphers, riddles, heuristics, treasure hunts, indexes, secret societies, curations, arrangements, etc. etc.. The building of multiple layers of these structures, both in the diegetic world of the text and in the arrangement of the text itself, has involved— and this more than likely to a(n officially) ridiculous extent— hours and hours of labor inventing and devising, inquiring into and (eventually) putting together these arcane and idiosyncratic systems, such that it at times feels as though I’m actually working to uncover the mysteries of some gnostic text I’ve actually discovered, when I have, in fact, built it. Building something for the purpose of “discovering” what’s it that something sounds like a definition of being crazy to me, but it also sounds like the definition of writing a novel. Or maybe writing anything. I suppose the crucial distinction between the two lies in the fact that in the latter, one is aware of what one is doing. The problem is that the creative process seems to constantly fight you on this: tries to get you to forget, thus causing one to (in the best case scenario) at least hover, perhaps slip back and forth, over that threshold between being crazy and writing fiction. The point is that the form of this endeavor seems to be the form of denying one’s fear of failure: that one is establishing the set of conditions that will ensure said failure— or at the very least, is setting oneself up to torture oneself for a time. Before quite possibly failing.
Perhaps the litmus test is the thought experiment of one day saying: I will stop doing this, I will “let it go.” For me, especially just now, this idea gives me a certain joy— not, as one might justifiably think— because it would release me from a cycle of self torture and inevitable failure, but because the spirit with which I might someday let go of this ridiculous project would be the same spirit in which I have endeavoured to continue it: in spite of the pressure of the spectre of (the fear of ) failure, the gravitous mass of our psychic life. The prospect of saying goodbye to my novel feels wonderful because I know that it’s something I can do. Seriously: I can quit whenever I want. See how the logic form of this weighted psychology works?
I know this because the building and solving of these riddles for myself—see: the act of writing my novel— is invigorating. It is life-affirming and life-giving. Yesterday, my partner and I hiked up a mountain in the middle of Joshua Tree. As you know, the desert is particularly rife with hidden languages. With every fiber of my senses or apprehending apparatus available to me I reached out to my surroundings, not only to read them, but to simply apprehend their presence. Everywhere there were traces of stories I didn’t understand— weird colorations from alien shrubs on bizarre rocks painting streaks down vales, veins of mineralized ancient lavas coursing through cracks in rocks that were different enough to not necessarily be grouped together as simply rocks, an occasional blue in a stone or a flower, a silence that touched my ears and whispered weird possibilities about itself: that there are different kinds of no wind, different kinds of silence; that seemed to illustrate for me in ways that break my language the difference between silence and stillness. That returned my efforts to experience them with the weird ellipses of having no apparent emotional reaction, but with the slightest suggestion— clue— that it merely felt this way because I hadn’t felt it before. And it’s this, these powers of elusive languages, that I find when I write, or even daydream, about my novel. And how the fact that sitting on the side of a mountain in a vast desert carries no possibility of failure is itself the last fact on a long list of more important facts; is itself, like the languages that give it to me, barely registrable.
Also and again! If you enjoy my writing, I would very much appreciate it if you could subscribe, send to friends to subscribe, and/ or drop a tip at my venmo! If you’ve read this far you know that the guy who is always working on his novel is also always already living paycheck to paycheck. I already texted my boss at dawn to make sure payroll gets processed on time, but at the end of the day what can you do? Just keep writing, I guess, and crossing your fingers. Thanks and XO