Tag: Tropic of Cancer

[Reflections on writing]: I’ve been thinking about writing, about the different voices or modes I use to express myself depending on what prompts me to write. It’s relatively easy to respond to a prompt from another person, whether that prompt is a specific question or an email or whatever. I supposed it’s just easier to get started when one is prodded like that. Free writing without any clear intention is more difficult, at least in terms of getting started. I’m toying with the idea of writing specific prompts for myself, as a way of galvanizing the process and differentiating the cacophony of voices echoing throughout my dome. It seems my blogging voice is different from my journalling voice, the former coming across more as a “letter to all and sundry” type of thing, the latter a “getting things off my chest” gesture of catharsis.

[So now what (post-job, pre-grad school)?]: Well, looks like I’ll have some time on my hands for at least the month of June, assuming my daily job searches continue to yield nothing. As has been the case for years now—twenty years, at least—, I’m not at a loss for things to do. Boredom is not something I experience outside of a compulsory work or school situation. My “free” time is often haunted by other bugaboos though, like self-doubt, poor focus, fuzzy intentions, habits of distraction and avoidance, etc.

[So, what are you avoiding right now?]: Despite the fact that I’m writing at the moment, I’m certainly dodging the long-standing, ever throbbing intention to write in a more disciplined way. I’m also haunted by the many unfinished songs that I’ve set aside over the years. Every now again I try to take the perspective of my future self, myself as an octogenarian reflecting back on my life. From that point of view, I imagine that my biggest regrets will have to do with the extent to which I allowed my deepest, juiciest intentions to wither and shrivel in the face of ignorance and/or self-imposed paralysis. Many have expressed to me over the years that I have a talent for this thing or that. Writing, music, counseling—these things immediately come to mind. In fact, these three things are quite clearly the three things I’d like to focus on right now. I’ll start counseling classes in a matter of weeks, so the prompts and prods from the structure of the graduate program will more or less force me to engage on that front. Writing and music, however, demand more intrinsic motivation and discipline, and here is where I always seem to surrender to my demons. I’d like to declare, “Not this time!” or otherwise make a big show of how things are going to different this time around. But I’ve broken too many promises to take any of my “drunk talk” too seriously. The thing is to actually do that which is worth doing.

[Not-so-random thought]: I’ve been reading through Henry Miller’s published letters to his friend Emil Schnellock. In 1931, Miller was living hand-to-mouth in Paris, never sure from where his next meal would come or where he might spend the night. He was also struggling mightily to find his writing voice. He was finishing his first “proper” novel, which he had been working on for years, and he was also anxious to begin working on his “Paris book”—the book that would become Tropic of Cancer. On February 16 he wrote:

Here I am, still muddling along with the book. At the very end and can’t put Finis to it. And sick and sore about it…disgusted…hate it…think it the vilest crap that ever was. […] Somehow only a meager portion of what I feel and think gets expressed, and that nearly drives me crazy. Sometimes I believe it’s because of the form I have chosen. This book, for example, has been so carefully and painstakingly plotted out, the notes are so copious and exhaustive, that I feel cramped, walled in, suffocated. When I get thru I want to explode. I will explode in the Paris book. The hell with form, style, expression and all those pseudo-paramount things which beguile the critics. I want to get myself across this time—and direct as a knife thrust.

Later, on August 24:

I just finished the book and must wait now until payday for funds wherewith to mail it. […] I start tomorrow on the Paris book: first-person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!

Incredibly, Miller was interviewed more or less on his deathbed, at the age of 89. He didn’t seem full of regret, but rather “alive to the end.” May we all be: