The Book Death Mood

Samuel Beckett is who I think of when I think of this. Most great artists have a myth, and the Beckett myth is very compelling to me: a lone man in a small room, staring at the wall. Every so often, he moves over to a desk and scrawls a few words. Then he retires to a couch or bed, and the process starts again. This is, in a word, torture. The Beckett myth hinges on the artist's ability to derive solace from torture. It is viewed by the artist as good torture. Beckett's famous I can't go on/I'll go in shows the abraded edges of a psyche pushed, through enforced solitary activity, to its limits. Yet Beckett pushes himself; he is not a martyr to circumstance, or a jail-bird, or an invalid. He has chosen a kind of auto-erotic lifestyle, and staring at the wall confers a despair that has a few dollops of comfort in it. It is like a spider making a web only for itself; self-containment and self-sufficiency are distinguishing characteristics of the Beckett myth. It is a myth not of ease but a myth of silence and slow time, and of one man, one vision, one room (distinguished from Proust, by Beckett's relative, agency-granting health.) Beckett may be a prototypical manifestation of the "Spartan greatness" I've been describing here lately.

I don't mean to be cryptic. I am simply describing the state of consciousness that arises when you have burrowed deep (maybe too deep) into a self-made labyrinth, that takes the form of a manuscript. It goads you into working on it. It won't let you rest. It makes passages that initially seemed secure insecure, and grants security to passages you hate. Most importantly, it effects your affective state. You feel like you have a hellhound on your trail. Is there anything more miserable than being half-way through a really demanding book? Needless to say, I am writing this because this is more-or-less where I am. It began suddenly; I had time to pick up Held, which I hadn't touched in months. A huge gust of momentum led me to spend all of yesterday writing, but at one point I looked up from the page and there it was: the hellhound. The book death mood had descended, and will remain until I put down Held again. What, you might ask, about the B.D.M. is redolent of death? It has to do (for me, anyway) with claustrophobia and entrapment. It also has to do with the contradictions that have been preoccupying me: spending time on work for which there is no material reward, and even (to be honest) no guaranteed spiritual reward either. In truth, every book is a risk, and most books that are written wind up being wastes of time. I don't want to be cynical, but posterity has a brisk way with manuscripts. Everyone wants to think that they are doing something important, but the truth is that most of us aren't. But you have to keep going anyway, just because. And the hellhound slobbers all over your sneakers and you have to let him. Those who write for pay must experience something different, but I am not writing this for them. Nor am I writing it to valorize myself.

I think a lot of my feeling regarding Held has to do with my current preoccupation: narrative. Rather than a fractured Beckett-ian narrative, this book has a straightforward one (it is the sequel to Chimes, though done in projective verse.) Here, for me, is the weird thing about narrative: to use straightforward narrative in the context of post-avant winds up being far more tricky than being disjunctive (and I've done both.) In the end, there are few things more difficult than telling a good straight story. Narrative done badly is very easy; narrative done well, with rigor, is a hellhound and a half. Roland Barthes said (and he was quoting someone else who I don't remember) that every narrative is a staging of the father, and creating a father winds up feeling (I imagine) like creating a Frankenstein. At times, it's enough to make me wish I were one of those poets who just throws sixty poems together and calls it a book. On a certain level, I am in awe of the gumption that would allow a poet to do such a thing. But it is irrelevant to me, because (to be frank) my ambition demands that I write books that are books. I'm sure this makes me a snob, but so be it. To bring this back to Beckett: just as Cleanth Brooks said of Waste Land, Godot implicitly implicates a secular and secularized world; however, unlike Eliot, Beckett never resolved this qunadary by retreating into Anglicanism. If there is no God, then there can be no resolution to the vulgarity of secularization, because the alternative is just as bogus and just as vulgar. Religion is a subject that seldom seems to come up among post-avant poets. So, let me ask: what do we believe in? The book death mood aside, is writing books enough? I mean, here, to touch on realities deeper than ideology: teleology, ultimate essence, etc. Because, ultimately, this will inform how and what we create, and why. It may even land us in a space where the book death mood disappears (for those of us who suffer from said mood.)