Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Jennifer recently brought the following to my attention. It's from an article on Henry James that T. S. Eliot wrote for Vanity Fair:
James has suffered the usual fate of those who, in England, have outspokenly insisted on the importance of technique. His technique has received the kind of praise usually accorded to some useless, ugly, and ingenious piece of carving which has taken a very long time to make; and he is widely reproached for not succeeding in doing the things that he did not attempt to do.
It amused me and struck a nerve, because of a recent online conversation regarding my work and genre "horror," in general, and Silk, in particular. I would elaborate, but I have a weakness for crypticisms.
Yesterday, Spooky and I read through Chapter Three of Murder of Angels (which, too my relief, didn't suck as much as I'd feared), and it is my goal today to begin Chapter Four. It's a bit like finding oneself in a staring match with an angry bull Allosaurus, starting this next chapter.
Sophie is meowling forlornly in the hallway.
The story place feels very close to the surface this morning. The place I pull the stories from. The dark and sticky place. Press my skin and its seeps from my pores like an obsidian syrup: the fictions, the myths, the dreams, the worse-and-better-than realities, the domnio tumble of nightmares. It pools in my eyes and leaks from the corners of my mouth if I'm not mindful. It clings to everything I touch, staining things and people and moments. Fortunately, it's hard to see. You have to not look directly at it, intently, and bide your time, just to get the barest glimpse. It has no odor, which is also fortunate. It buzzes in my head and my heart and my gut like wasps. It wants nothing but to be set loose, but, more often than not, refuses to leave when I open the door to let it out. Inside me, it is true and safe and sheltered from the blinding light of knowledge and opinion and other irrelevancies. I am the perfect unsane ecosphere for its continued existence, but it knows, as do I, that its destiny lies somewhere beyond the familiar atmospheres of my imagination. An outer space, I suppose. A space outside me. The space where other minds may draw their own fractured conclusions - unwelcomed, inevitable, necessary. My skin strains, a thin, thin surface for some placental, amniotic sea of squirming foetal-primitive mythosyllogisms.
The only difference between bleeding and writing is the efficacy of a tourniquet.
|
|
