Breaking the logjam (pt 1)

The word transition is both a noun and a verb. A noun. That's funny. As if a word that describes temporal activity could itself be some thing: a room, a gun, a culprit. Complete, functional, and static. When really it can only ever be in that it goes.

Maybe it's not that funny. I don't know.

Maybe I should start with a quote, instead.

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"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it."

- C. S. Lewis (full quote here)

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I engage with literature. I grasp, I fumble. I think. I do literature. I participate in the discussion it causes. I react, I suggest. I say.

I feel no closer to understanding the stuff than I was before I learned to read.

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For most of this year, I've been focusing most of my writing energy on fiction. Trying to. It's hard to focus these days. In this age. Even more so when your life feels riddled with transitions. What energy I can muster up after a day's work, what desire I can drill through the buzzing in my brain: I do my best to put that spare focus to good use when I sit down to write.

This--by the by--is why I find writing every day so valuable. Making a given piece of time sacred--as much and as often as possible--is a defense against myself. Let those walls fall, and my brain waves go Berzerk. There exists discussion about whether writing every day is necessary, or valuable. Some people don't need to. Maybe some people have better powers of concentration than me. Maybe some people are trust-fund humanoids armed with lasers. I don't have a laser. So I write every day.

So my blogging has suffered lately. That's fine. I've come to realize that for me, to understand literature is to write literature. To show you how I understand, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction is to write fiction that engages his in mimetic struggle. That radically oversimplifies the matter, of course. There is, or should be, a good deal of convolution, and expansion, and simplification, and experimentation, and personalization, and straight-up stealing along the way, all in the service of turning out things that started in other things--those other books, those other life experiences--but became their own unique things somewhere along the way. As if by magic. Coffee magic. Laptop magic.

I am not saying anything against the surrounding discussion. It's true that I have consciously decided not to write and publish book reviews. I could. I mean, I know I could try. But the whole "thesis statements and supporting arguments" thing isn't where it's at for me right now. I think I'm generating better results for myself when I write stories and novels. Hopefully, if or when my fiction should be published, others will also reap the benefits. That said, as a reader with some academic bent, critical essays and book reviews are still important to me. There's always room for more. I wish I had time to read and comment on more of it. Or, I wish I had the ability to pay more attention to it.

And yet. I've become restless. Mixed up. Rootless. Transitioning. For reasons both personal and literary. This past week, I finished writing a story, one I'd been working on for a month. Now I'm trying to find my next project. It's always an awkward time. Like looking for a job after you've been laid off, like looking for shelter after you've torched your tent. And the longer that period extends itself, the more awkward it becomes. It's a time for looking at everything, and not knowing what to make of it. My reading, I've been unable to settle down for a while. I think I'm coming off a short story high, without the correct novel to cushion the landing.

And, well. Lots of things. Work and love and death. It's been a year. Buy me a beer and I might mutter something about it, before I opt to nap on the bar. But you already know how it goes. You've had a year of your own.

Point being, I'm not surprised I've got that odd urge to do something critical. It would feel nice to prove things. To say, "This is so, here is why," and then to conclude with a hearty fist-pump, to the tune of applause and adulations from fans and foes.

Problem being that I feel like I've forgotten how to ask the right questions. They're similar to the questions that make me write stories, but I'm not certain they're the same. I can't tell. I feel blocked. It's like there's a question in front of all those other questions to which I've lost the answer: how do we talk about literature?