It was a treat getting to chat with Carly Newfeld on the Last Word podcast (KSFR, Santa Fe Public Radio), as we talked about wild mind, inspiration, the richness of solitude and silence, and my new novel, The Last Furies, from which I read an excerpt.
The interview will air on Thursday, December 11th at 5:30pm (ksfr.org, or, 101.1 on local Santa Fe radio), and afterwards will be available to stream on The Last Word archives of ksfr.org.
A story from out of the dark. First there was one voice, followed by a second voice … the dark twists itself into shapes and semblances. The dark is the clothing our ghosts wear. I have tried to acquaint myself favorably with the dark. Intimately. Went so far as to classify the different kinds of dark. I have attempted to grow close to the dark in its all moods and phases. One of my primary concerns as a writer is self. The self lurking beneath persona, the self ceaseless and tagged for void, the self that can never be spoken or written about, hence all this writing and speaking, this insane questing for the impossible, this pipe fix mania and fiendish polka. It is fondling absence on its phantom limb and expecting a warmly felt response. Silence will always have the last word.
Wordwise, edges and ledges: we are falling off. We, as in word-wielding also world-wearied, we, an endangered species, parrots with branded larynxes … falling off.
Ask a stranger to cup your balls (male or female you, no matter) as you cough, the stranger playing doctor and nursemaid to your quivering mass of neuroses, your celibate graveyard, as you diagnose yourself a dying breed. So be it. You believe if you say so be it again and again, everything will turn up roses in a garden of manure and Manuka honey. You even go so far as to tell your center—Look, I don’t want any more trouble from you. I’m done listening to your constant moaning and bellyaching … find another sucker to dump on.
What about the words? Ah, the words, our words, many words, have become grossly fattened dodos with albatrosses dangling from their necks. It is a double-bird curse, affliction in the form of gristly feathers amassing in the black of your throat. We are using words as hatchets to bludgeon and bury cause, rhetoric bereft of vision or imagination, blind beggars with candy canes, imbecilically muttering touche to every dropped remark or empty vent. Words that secretly wished to god they were something or somewhere else. Our words have lost their way—highly disturbed and hyper-sensitive orphans adrift in the swimless tides of shifting climates. They have grown dull, palsied, ineffectual, at the mercy of typing void of forethought and hoping to reform through afterwords that never come. Where is the wonder? Can we recall when language itself, its voice and summons, was kin to dreaming? From out of the dark, stories arise. One voice meets two … two meets a burning choir. The dark is the clothing our ghosts wear when animating desire.
It is a lonely road. The road made of words. The words stay put. The feelings don’t. The words crystallize, become the flambed edges of something soft in the center. It is a struggle within, and a turn-on, mud-wrestling false angels under hot lamps.
In Fellini’s film, 8 ½, the protagonist, Guido Anselmo, the cinematic avatar of Federico Fellini, says—I have nothing to say, yet I am determined to say it.
We mime silence by kissing words on the mouth.
We are ghosts haunting our own lives, understanding on the deepest level that there is no beginning and no end. Because we know that, or in spite of knowing that, we wander, we stalk, we pursue. We give names and values to the things we tell ourselves we are stalking and pursuing, but the truth of the matter is—that name, that value, that designated whatever—is not the true catalyst behind our stalking and pursuance. It is the illusion serving as functional catalyst behind the stalking and pursuance. The stalking and pursuance would be happening, sans named motivation. We stalk, we pursue, we wander, because we are ghosts haunting our own lives. Epitaphs become us in real-time.
She compiled what they called obscure texts into what was then labeled an obscure book. She was vilified. To be obscure, to be knowingly obscure, was, as they saw it, was a veiled threat to innocence and an assault on harmony. In other words, without using the word, they called her a witch. Their words, not words at all, but rather banal and unimaginative feats of actionable pitchforks.
She wasn’t of them. She was other. To be other, and to be obscure on top of being other was egregious and unpardonable. There was no place for her at the table where places had been formally designated. She ate eyeball soup in a glutinous broth using a salad fork. In other words, without using the word disgust … they were disgusted by her.
Pitchforks flashed in their eyes. All witches come to the same end. Obscurity is always destined for mud, failure, burial. These words they understood and they inhabited warmly—mud, failure, burial. These words were denominators in a common mortuary.
One evening the woman and her husband were invited to dinner and were greeted at the table by objectionable eyes. One set of eyes became a voice, asking—What is the meaning behind all this obscurity? Breath left the room, like outgoing tide. Roared back in. The woman’s dark eyes glistened. Her expression betrayed no known feeling. Then she lifted her butter knife, and with the palm of her other hand flat against the table, she spread the fingers of that hand as wide as she could, and what followed was frantic needlepoint, the edge of her butter knife flashing blunt silver in the spaces between her fingers, the knife-game, as some have called it. She did this with methodical rapidity, an unbroken cadence to her action. After about a minute, she stopped, set the butter knife down by her plate, and asked in a low, conspiratorial voice—What is the meaning of that?
The eyes looked at her, astonished, but negatively so. She was, as these types were prone to do, responding to charges of obscurity with more obscurity. One of the men at the table raised his butter knife … set is back down. The woman’s husband said it was best that they get going. They went. Once the door was closed, the host of the party snapped—Where is the copy of that woman’s book—to which his wife responded—there—pointing to an end table on the far side of the room.
The man went over, snatched the book, went to the kitchen, and returned, book in hand, along with a lighter. He laid the book on the dinner table, as if it were a sacrificial offering to lost gods, to recalled gods. He flipped open the cover. Clicking the lighter, a slender flame danced upward, which he then set against the edge of a page. The page darkened, assuming an ebony char, but wouldn’t burn. The lighter fell from the man’s suddenly slack hand. The lighter clacked when it hit the wooden floor. Nobody moved. Fear became the room temperature. The man suggested what they were all thinking, without saying a word. They rose from their chairs, and walked out in the straightest of lines.
She was an avid writer of obscure texts. Her obscure texts, which related to identity, language and alienation, rendered the topics as and through compound fractures. She adopted the brokenness and mirrored it obscurely in brokenness. Self/reflecting through heretical shards. Hr syntax was snapped twigs and pulverized bones. Where once were words was white dust and smithereens caving to wind. In the old days they might have called her a witch for conjuring such a spell. In the new days she was called a witch, though not in so many words, but in different words and silences wearing disguises and pitchforks.
Her obscure texts had been sewn into a book and that book was published and one week after that book was published this woman was raped, strangled, and bludgeoned to death in a building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. What was this building? What was she doing there?
The man who committed this abomination was the building’s custodian. This man turned this woman into a disaster, a back-page. The woman was originally from South Korea. She spoke three languages: Korean, French and English. I wish I could remember the woman’s name. I can’t. They took it away. These kind of mental records are erased these days. You may recall fragments of what happened, you may recall the broad strokes of bludgeon, rape, and strangulation, but the person upon whom these violences were committed, that person’s name … those things are taken away through their procedures. Their, as in they, as in I don’t-know-who … I have never known.
People gripe and complain about obscure texts, but there is a far more dangerous and insidious obscurity at play involving they and them, and the thorny relationship between pronouns and procedures. Her name is gone, but what remains: rape, strangulation, bludgeon.
I do not know much about this woman. I have told you everything I know. I wish the questioning would end, wish they would let me out of this room, they. They told me to speak, to write, as if no one was listening, but how can I do that when I know they are listening and watching. It reminds me of the command people sometimes give when taking a photo: Act natural. As soon as you start to act, isn’t that the end of naturalness?
They have seized the woman’s book of obscure texts, but I have memorized most of it by heart. When I say memorized by heart, I do not mean that I can echo the text verbatim, what I mean is that my heart has absorbed the essence of the book, in the way a sponge absorbs water. Strangulation, bludgeoning, rape. These are brutal words, darkened windows that open onto slates of hell. I just remembered something else. The woman was married. If I were the woman’s husband and I received word that my wife had been murdered, and these words were used in relation to her murder, how would I process that? There must be a lot in this world that goes unprocessed, because somehow we keep going on, and we keep doing these things that make processing a peril and impossible scar.
Someone mentioned a river for lost souls. Maybe the woman’s name is there. When they let me out of this room, if they let me out of this room, I will begin my search.
Longing’s end goal is itself, though it will never admit that. To admit that would strip Longing of its impetus and bait, would render it flatfooted in its futile race against time. Longing is habitually wired to attach its fevers and fires to an end-goal not itself—an object, person, place, dream—something that can fulfill the role of necessary motive and Grail-tease. In reality, though, longing is only and always chasing its own tail. Its desire to devour is the endless tale of Ouroboros devouring its own tail. Desire is self-perpetuating, and whatever causes or goals it takes aim at or adheres to, are arbitrary and interchangeable. They all serve the same function as catalytic agitators, or distances eloping with horizon lines.
What is that feeling?
Allow me to cite certain examples which attempt, in vain, to touch upon the vagaries of that sensation, that feeling. It is like longing to be at home when you are already at home. It is as if you are not feeling enough at home. That there is more home to your home, hidden somewhere, something that is missing, perhaps there is a secret door or portal that would open up into the second home, or other home, or sub-home you had been seeking (the home-within-the-home). This longing for home exacts an unparalleled gravitational tug … it is the haunt which afflicts us most deeply. Everything we do, every thought we have, every voice we hear, every desire we burn, every longing we ache, is born from and contains within it traces and vestiges of homesickness. It’s the wanderer’s plague, the wayfarer’s spite, the nomad’s agony. Novalis said all philosophy is homesickness. Thomas Wolfe said we are all exiles and outcasts here. This is why you can be at home, while desiring to be more at home, to feel more at home—there must be more mother behind mother, more father behind father, there must be more home to this home, there must be ultimates with whom we can develop intimate rapport.
Now, in tilting the scale in a different direction: It’s like wanting to fuck someone so bad while you are fucking them. It is as if the feeling is not consummating, or rather is not commensurate with the depth and intensity of desire—this is what makes people want to devour each other, why our passion to consume, after having consumed, leaves us hungrier than ever. Imagine this: you are having sex with someone while imagining what it would be like to have sex with that person, as if you were not already having sex with that person (in real-time) … you are, while in a state of consummation in a state of anticipation, the ol’ double-edged sword of fantasy and action … in other words, the consummation did not, as you expected, efface or eradicate the sense of anticipation which held you, but rather, perversely, anticipation has been considerably heightened by consummation, as is there was a layer of anticipation beneath anticipation which only comes to the surface when the first layer of anticipation has been exploded by consummation—it is the anticipation-consummation-anticipation sandwich, not to be found in any deli or restaurant, and that second anticipation brings with it longing for greater deeper consummation while you are in the energetic midst of consummation (this being a sandwich that can have many more levels than the simple A-C-A equation I just mentioned). This how and why this state of longing grows in scope and complexity, as you amass an assortment of details when filtering your stringent longing through a projection lens, for example: I am having sex with her, yet I can’t wait to have sex with her, and I am nervous and excited about next weekend when we get together, if we get together—your mind now accumulating details in architecting a fantasy which is superimposed over present reality—you and she are having sex—but you can’t wait to have sex with her, as if you are not having sex with her, never had sex with her, and how might it all play out when that first time arrives again, never, and how will it unfold when you finally get to consummate what is, in essence, unconsummatable.
John Biscello 