The problem with the early short stories I wrote--aside from being written by a teenager!--was that as a writer I was angry about the wrong things. I remember back then taking great satisfaction in the suicide scene in Dead Poet’s Society, especially the Controlling Father’s grief, which I figured was just what he deserved for stifling The Artist in his son (the same feeling was probably attached to Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy”). While in my early stories I never condoned the murder of one’s peers (or oneself), the killer was always the main character & the contradictions he saw in society were always held up beside his own actions. My own teenage mind, susceptible to Catcher in the Rye & every easy cynicism fifteen year-olds are capable of, condemned the school-system, the materialism of popular-culture, the idiocy of what was popular, etc., & while I never said It was because of Society that he killed, I couldn’t help but make the guy somewhat romantic.

But with “The Confessions of Cain” and its absorption into Language, something changed. The tragedy of events like that--this now after Columbine especially--wasn’t that the kids got picked on, & they finally fought back, & what do you expect, but rather that these kids took the judgment of those who picked on them, or the school administrators who thought them weird, or their own parents who didn’t care about or understand them, or the “society” that was so obviously hypocritical, commercial, artless, etc.--the tragedy was that they took these forces as the highest plateau they could hope to reach. As I said in my previous entry, I don’t see why a novelist or storyteller would take Thackeray as the barometer of what their work should be like, when (for me) such obviously deeper wells are out there. These kids who ended up shooting up their schools--or who never did, but nevertheless ended up bitter & unhappy anyway--were essentially doing the same thing, I realized, in assuming the approval of their peers meant anything to begin with. The real tragedy was that they couldn’t discover or hold onto anything higher, anything that wasn’t dependent upon familial, societal, or any kind of “popular” approval. By this of course I mean a “religious” kind of impulse, but it’s the kind of impulse that doesn’t necessarily have to lead to adherence to any religion at all, just the knowledge in things that actually are lasting, things that can sustain a life & occasionally entire civilizations.

A scene in a documentary I saw recently comes to mind: the documentary was about how awful the music-industry is nowadays, how in bed it is with every other form of media, how it's all about money & not about art, how it's prefabricted, etc. & those the movie-makers chose to be the "rebels" in all this were the angry & face-painted fans of Insane Clown Posse (this before they were on MTV, I suppose), who were all about giving society the middle-finger. But to me this just amounted to giving "society" the exact same attention fans of Britney Spears did, just in reverse. "Society" still ruled their lives, &, ironically, the more they hated it & the more they made their hate known, the more "society" still remained an influence for them. What if they really didn't care about society at all?

I realize something like this is probably impossible for a teenager to realize, even minimally, at the time--I know I never could have--but since society outside of high school rarely seems anything but high-school writ large, it’s something to realize after the fact. Seeking the approval of our peers or family or society doesn’t stop after high school, & neither do the popularity-games that only transfer themselves from the cafeteria at fifteen, to the office (or equivalent) at thirty or forty or fifty.

For the longest time, my own need to write was crowded with various visions of various fame--huge readings, masterful acceptance speeches, even of acting or getting into music somehow. While the art behind it was always there, & never eclipsed even by the hope that it might somehow help me meet girls, the majority of the scenarios that filled my head were always from the POV of everyone I’d ever known--relatives, classmates, friends, etc.--finally seeing I’d turned into something, or done something. Again was the assumption that this was the real goal in life, & further that our name being in big letters on a sign, or in small letters in magazines or newspapers or on the web, was even what the point of creating the art was.

It’s been the now nearly two years of living with my fiancée in California, & the gradual giving-up of all those antecedent dreams--which in a sense added up to the baseness of wanting to show up to a reunion in a limo, or not show up at all--to focus entirely on the art itself, that has made so much of this clear to me. I’ve always said that if any of my work simply lasts, but somehow with my name erased & left unknown, I’d be fine with that; but it’s taken the last few years of writing a long poem largely spun out of other people’s work to really make me see what this means. I can’t remember where I read this--& it may just be a matter of something that’s been running through my head so long I just assume it came from someone else--but I think the idea of writing autobiographically in this way is also somehow a giving up of myself. Whereas other writers--or anyone who might end up in the public eye--are all about cultivating an image, or how politicians plan what they do & say entirely for effect, I’m only saying these things to put them out there, & you can do what you want with them. I don’t own myself, & after I’m under the ground I hope for the same thing Whitman did, that whatever small words I’ve contributed to the vast web of words spinning out there right now, the evidence of a thinking & feeling person, at the turn of the 20^th- & into the 21^st-century, might exist. It’s this simple, & I don’t think any great amount of approval or disapproval over the next fifty years can change this very much.

Which brings me to where I initially planned to start this entry--Adolf Hitler. I just read the first volume of Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of him, & not until now have I really understood what Joyce meant by the “nightmare” of history, the horror of watching things happen in hindsight. But what struck me from the outset was Kershaw’s stated intent to write a biography of Hitler’s power. He made it clear--& his text all the more so--that Hitler’s private life was so vacant that he seemed, outside of politics, an “unperson.” & it struck me how empty a person has to be to base their lives entirely around power, since power is sought after & achieved entirely to be enjoyed right here & right now. & when I look around me, power seems to be all there is--& in Southern California it’s not hard to see every relationship perverted negatively in the name
of power, of parents who never wanted children or now regret having them; of relationships that were either made or developed into nothing more than one person’s desire to control or abuse the other; of the cutthroat world of business where you can pretty much do what you want (sometimes outside the law) to get by. It’s all power, & all apparently a great rush or great relief for those who have it.

By contrast, I love being an entirely powerless writer. I can say that I’ve written a few books & that I’m writing a long poem, & that might suggest a sense of power over my material, of creation, but that isn’t entirely true. I’m not so much a writer as I am dictating what is coming from some deep center within me (& elsewhere) that I can’t begin to explain. You could say I have power over something in the act of revision, but that’s not true either, since even revision is more an intuitive process. I’m merely chiseling out the shape that’s already under the stone; I’m merely digging up what’s been buried there. I am, while with the title of “writer,” more a helpless discoverer of what I’ve been suggested to find. & this pleases me just fine--I have faith that I’ll find the right form after all, & to pretend that I have “power” over the material at all is ridiculous. Rather, I can’t imagine how many times I’ve resorted to looking at maps, reading memoirs, reading almanacs, or glancing over hundreds of pages of photographs, all around the subject of the American Civil War, simply waiting for that great feeling to come--inspiration--that springs from an anecdote or photo or elsewhere, that tells me where I should be going. If there was any kind of power in inspiration, it wouldn’t be inspiration at all--& most writers I know would agree that to try to force inspiration only ruins it.

I bring up Hitler because, as everyone knows, he was rejected entry into art school, not once but twice. & what can we say about that? Forgetting what he went on to do with himself, what can we say about a European artist in the first decade of the 20^th-Century who was rejected entry in art school, & occasionally despaired that he’d never put paint to canvas again? First thing that comes to my mind is Joyce, having fled Ireland with Nora Barnacle around the same time, living mostly in seclusion from the European & Irish literary world for the next fifteen years, his work rejected time & time again (&, when accepted, only to be rejected on second-thought, & burned too)--the difference being that he kept on writing, & even in his worst despair, he kept on writing. If Hitler had only had a backbone like that--or of any writer or artist we can think of who never saw fame until late in life, or after they died--his disgust for the coming-modernism that was appearing in Vienna, or the full-thrust of it he saw in Munich before & after WWI, would have meant nothing, since he would have simply kept painting. & what would we say of him today? Maybe we wouldn’t even know of him, it’s true, maybe his reliance on more old-fashioned forms would have left him completely unknown, or maybe he would have developed in ways I (as someone largely ignorant of art) can’t try to imagine. (But the example of Faulkner, who in three or four years went from his uninspired first two novels to the monumental breakthroughs of The Sound & the Fury & As I Lay Dying, suggests a great deal)

So that if I have any power, even slightly, it is the weird instinctual power (it isn’t called a Muse for nothing) that has slowly, over the past few years, allowed me not to grant any power whatever to those whose judgments easily crush other writers--since, in an even weirder way, there is no me to crush. Living so happily & happily supported with a fellow writer & fiancée who would also rather just write than be famous is a tremendous thing, & takes all the worry about those outside things far, far away. It’s a great peace, this.

But is it just the last bastion of someone who probably knows he’ll never be rich to not see much importance in money? Or for the poet or writer to see that he may never be known to not see much importance in fame, & only in an eventual, posthumous influence? Possibly, but it’s much deeper than that. It really is a matter of asking what the point of all of our striving is, & reading about Hitler (or any significant part of history, or any significant life in history) most occupations & interests really do seem deader than dead, & a great majority of the internet & culture & what passes for “news” at ten o’clock as an endless cycle in being “distracted from distraction by distraction.”

Being a writer somehow seems to be a kind of essence of powerlessness, & the waiting for a line in a poem or novel to be like when I was single, living in three cities in as many years, always waiting & looking & sure that the love I needed--not the fame or acceptance of a crowd or public--was there somewhere. & of course, she was. It is the waiting, the powerlessness, the acquiescence to things outside of your control, & the faith in it (a logical ignorance but an obvious knowledge elsewhere) that also seems the essence of religious experience. & this is what makes the judgments, the opinions, the products, & nearly every other outgrowth of the majority of the “outside world” worth next to nothing. & it’s also when that very “outside world” gives you that inspiration, whether in a conversation overheard or a scene you pass by, that illuminates it, & you know even more that what is supposed to
“matter” doesn’t matter at all.

But that’s another entry for another day. I don’t know if I’ve made sense here, but feel like pasting Eliot’s lines about waiting, from his East Coker:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.