Windows

The blinds in my living room have been pulled up for a few weeks now. I opened them to let the sun in, and the rule of entropy of my apartment dictates that when an action is performed upon any object in the apartment, it will not be changed for at least a week. If you leave the sugar canister open on the counter, no one will close it. If a poster falls off the wall, it will stay on the floor, blue sticky-tack up to catch the dust that drifts off the vacuum cleaner sitting in the hall from that time I vacuumed last month.
So when I opened the blinds to let in the light one fall afternoon, they stayed open. We never notice the window, anyway. During the day, it's like a Harry Potter painting; the trees move and the neighbors' dogs pass by, but to us it's just a colorful decoration on the wall, to stare at during deep conversations or when the TV is getting boring. At night it's a dull black square on the wall and an extra mirror. I forget that that thing on our wall is an opening into the outside world.
Other people forget that, too, I think, and I like to glance into the windows at night. I'm not watching, not even looking, really. Not hoping to see anything. There is a row of windows next to the sidewalk that leads into David dorm. I was always glad that I didn't live in one of the rooms that belong to those windows, because if you do, it means that there are just two panes of glass and three feet of air between your life and anyone who takes that sidewalk back to her room at night. I always used to look, though, when I was the person walking back. Tiny things catch your eye. The color of a brushstroke on a painting on the wall. The persistent tapping of a girl's hand on her computer mouse. The angle at which her boyfriend leans in the door to say good-bye.
I've heard it said that a lived life can be a poem, and I think it might be true, but life seems too big for that. Maybe at the end of it you can step back and look and see something whole. Maybe then you could condense it into words or into colors and make a poem or make a painting (because at their best they are the same). But in the middle of it, the most you can do is catch on to snapshot moments through windows. So I leave mine open.

after reading "Repeat After Me"

 I don't show my family the things that I write about them. You can never catch someone perfectly and set them out in words; people are too big for that, too detailed and contradictory. And there's always the thought that if you do manage it, if you get a word portrait or a fragment of one that is true to life (and by that I mean that it accurately represents your own view of a person), the person you've drawn will read your words and either won't find himself in them or, perhaps worse, will see himself all too clearly and the relationship that existed between you will be different.
Because the relationship between you and another person (your friend or your brother or your father) is a four-way relationship, always: the person you think you are, the person you think he is, the person he thinks you are, the person you think he is. This is complicated, and so we don't think about it.
I forget that the Rachel Boylan who exists in my own mind is not the Rachel Boylan who exists in the minds of my friends, my brothers, my father. I forget that on behalf of other people, too. If I wrote about my brother and I described him to you just exactly as he is, I would only be showing you my brother as he is in my own mind. That's who he is, but only part - only one copy, one reflection - and maybe I don't want him to see that, to see my own personal copy of who he is. It would make us different people and it would make our relationship a different character in the story of the world as we see it (because relationships are characters as much as human beings are).
Maybe I just don't want to do that.
It doesn't stop me from writing about my family.
But I don't show them what I write.

On being uninterested in gay-ness

Another one? I mean, I understand that the homosexual experience is an important, life-defining, society-defining sort of thing and therefore worthy of being written about.
And I don't have a problem with gay people, per se. I don't understand homosexuality and can't say that I think it's morally acceptable, but in the end the facts are simply:
1. There are people who are gay.
2. I don't really know any such people.
(I did have dinner with a lesbian couple once. One of the ladies looked like my grandmother, and although I found nothing to condemn, I didn't know how to answer when we parted ways and she said, "If we don't see you again here, we'll see you in heaven!")
3. Since the whole homosexual experience is so far removed from me, I can't muster much interest in it or see it as anything more than a distant and vaguely negative concept, like war or tuberculosis.
Maybe that is why I'm getting a little tired of essays about being gay, like Burl's. They tend to be repetitive and they rarely resonate except on an almost-voyeuristic level of abstract interest. And there isn't much of that, really.

Writers are people, too.

It's kind of like when you realize your parents are human. You know, that little pivot in time when your mother says something unexpected or you notice that your father looks lonely and suddenly you know that they have lives and personalities that existed before you did.
Well, it's kind of like that when you realize that people who write books and stories are human beings. Publication doesn't turn someone into a demigod incapable of any real faults; nor does an innate talent to write something publishable make the one who possesses it naturally incapable of being a really messed up person.
I think I'm not the only one who idealizes such people. It's hard not to; even when they write about the worst parts of their sometimes sordid lives, the words themselves make a barrier between the real person doing the writing and the real person doing the reading. Words turn lives into stories, which are separate and safe and not real, even when we know they're true.
I usually skip those little paragraphs about the authors that introduce each story, but after reading Torch Song and Embalming Mom, I flipped back a few pages and inspected them for some sign, some justification of the depth of messed-upness to which the writers confessed.
I don't know what I expected to find. A couple sentences, perhaps:
"Charles Bowden is best know for his non-fiction piece, Torch Song, which he wrote after working for several years as a journalist. He was admitted to a psychological ward shortly after its publication."
or:
"...he disappeared soon after it was written and has not been heard from since."
or:
"...he published no other major works and committed suicide shortly after the piece was written."
Instead, I found an italicized list of books Bowden wrote, magazines he contributed to and awards he received. He's writing yet another book now.
I can't quite believe that one human being can hold so much anger and sadness and dysfunction and yet still be undoubtedly, conventionally successful. Authors, like their stories (no matter how factual they are) are fictional constructs and must be either good or bad, perfect or all but insane. But of course they aren't. They are human beings as I am and as you are, simultaneously successful and severely messed up.

For today we have naming of parts.

Naming of Parts  (that's a link, by the way)

All memoir is naming of parts. What you really want to say will inevitably be too big to just tell, because in order to do that right you must first piece it together and understand it. Stories, especially our stories, are made up of innumerable little parts.
Mark Doty could have simply told us: "I'm irreconcilably estranged from my father because I'm gay and because I publish his faults to the reading public." Instead, visited his childhood school. He tried to find the home he lived in when he was seven years old, and he relived the details and moments of his adolescence bit by bit. Those parts, put together, let him see and understand what his life had been and still was, and they also let the reader enter into his life just a little by seeing the parts fit together one by one.
For instance, before I can look back and say, "I was a reckless child," before I can use such an all-encompassing word as "reckless," which in my case I have not got yet, I must have naming of parts.
There is the part where I ran away from home and strolled about the streets of my little Guatemalan city for the afternoon, taking a particular expedition to the ancient prison to peer around its stone gateways in hopes of seeing grizzled prisoners shuffling about the courtyard in chains and squinting at the guards.
There is the part where I stacked every mattress in the house onto my bed so I could reach my high window, then climbed on top of them, my treasures at hand in a Snoopy duffel bag, and prayed with all my might that the house would spontaneously burn down so that I could jump out the window, wreathed in flames and smoke like some kind of brave heroine. Or at least like Nancy Drew.
There is the part where I wandered off from where my father was with the ropes and harnesses and decided to climb a cliff by myself with no equipment but my old sneakers. Or the part where I walked six miles through the veldt without telling anyone and ended up jogging in controlled panic, looking behind me and singing "American Pie" very loudly to keep the baboons away. Or the part where I thought it was a good idea to drive from Florida to Nebraska all at once without stopping.
Those are the parts of recklessness, which in my case I have got.
We process reality by naming of parts.
If you are to tell your story you must first put it together from its various parts so that you can see it. If I am to read your story in such a way that it becomes mine, too, I need to approach it the way you do. In pieces that fit together to make an image of a reality that existed and will exist still in your mind and in mine. Which in our case we will get, together.

The majesty and burning of the lobster's death

Well, maybe I don't want to "Consider the Lobster"! Have you "considered" that, Mr. David Foster Wallace? You with your three-word name that must be said all in one, like bon appetit or menage a trois, but far less enjoyable. Maybe I don't need to think about the questionable questionings of the people who actually have the money and the initiative to locate and purchase a live lobster.
The one time I ate lobster was in a Cajun restaurant in Lafayette, where I munched on a bit of my mother's leftovers under the hard glass stare of the baby alligator head I'd bought in the restaurant's gift shop. It's not that I wouldn't have cared at all about the horrid fate of the marine crustacean I was chewing on; it's just that I cared a bit more about the fate of the baby alligator whose head still sits on my brother's bookshelf back home. The alligator has a face.
I could put a lobster in boiling water and watch as its futile claws clambered against burning metal of the pot. I could stand and listen to the clattering of lid and the whistle that isn't the lobster's scream after all but means death all the same. I do not say that I would enjoy it, but I could do it.
When I was young I washed the dishes after dinner and I would stand very still and hold my father's big French knife after I had dried it, staring at the inert blade in my hand and at my little brother playing on the floor, and know in an instant certainty that a twitch of my hand would kill him.
That certainty is why I do not care about the lobster's death. If I myself (and not just soldiers and not just madmen and not just children with guns in war-torn countries) have the capacity within a single twitch to kill a human being, I cannot stop to consider the lobster.


And anyway, I don't really like lobster.

P.S. In reference to David Foster Wallace's footnote: The idea that the use of the words "beef" for the meat of a cow and "pork" for the meat of a pig originates in some inherent need to separate philosophically the creature from the comestible, although intriguing, is not irrefutable. An explanation for the use of these words can be found in the socioeconomic climate of medieval England, in which the words developed into their current state.

Henry Fitzroy and I are friends

I suppose I ought to write some kind of Ars Poetica here (side note: am I the only one who thinks the phrase "Ars Poetica" sounds sophomorically amusing?). Or rather, "Ars Non-Fictiona," or something.

At any rate, when it comes to writing, it seems like creative non-fiction is the bastard child that no one pays any attention to. Like Henry VIII's son. Fiction and poetry are Mary and Elizabeth, just stewing in fame, controversy and importance - everyone knows them - but poor creative non-fiction is Henry Fitzroy, shoved off on some earldom or other and currently kicking about in the bowels of Wikipedia and obscure textbooks.

I get the whole fiction thing. Just make up stories! Easy, right? No. Not easy. I blame the characters; making them is like cutting out those identical paper people that hold hands in a chain. One snip the wrong way and they're all lopsided or unattached or just plain unhumanoid. Writing fiction is work. All of a sudden you're no longer an intelligent and capable young adult churning out this generation's literary masterpiece; you're a preschooler who knows just what he's trying to cut out but can't quite handle the scissors yet.

I get the whole poetry thing, too. Condensed language and all that. Images made of words, like stop-motion film in technicolor. Unfortunately, technicolor doesn't come cheap. Retouching the details and capturing each instant in time is swatting flies, not pinning down butterflies.

But creative non-fiction, that red-headed bastard child of language, slips onto paper without effort and without thought. It's not work. It just happens. You put your hands on the keyboard in front of a blank Word document and creative non-fiction is what appears. Is that normal? Is it allowed to be real writing when it isn't work?