We continue this week in serializing our inaugural contest winner’s novel, Seasons Clear, and Awe, by Matthew Gasda. New subscribers can catch up with the previous chapters below:
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“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.
Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.
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Stephen had decided that before he left Boston and had to drive five or six hours that he wanted to take a run. Or rather, he ran every day when it was time to run. And it was a gorgeous fall day. He had to get out of the apartment. Elizabeth, who considered it her right, took the opportunity to look through her brother’s things. His text messages weren’t very interesting. No girls, as far as she could tell. She couldn’t find the journal that she knew he kept (he had learned to hide it).
But inside this copy of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which she noticed was bulging unnaturally, were a trove of letters from their mutual friend from Bethlehem, Dan Boettner:
June 1, 2010
I’m writing to inquire whether you would like to renew our correspondence—nothing too complicated—just a working out of ideas (literary, philosophical, I suppose) as we did a few years ago—hopefully reflecting broader, more mature ideas and readings. I’m still, though I have scant people to discuss it with, bent on some sort of literary life and would benefit from feeling less lonely in my ambitions if you are still also determined to eventually produce literature. If you are not, or are simply not interested in picking up our correspondence, there is no need to respond—but if you are, please use snail mail, I’ve really begun to find email mind numbing.
June 10, 2010
First line: Borges too said he had but one character—himself. I may be wrong in detecting the influence of Borges in your letter—I’m not sure you have read him, or you may simply find comparison to that giant of little works to be too gaudy—nevertheless, in your letter of almost precisely two pages, and as you seem to have overheard in the course of composing it, I saw very much an artist. Of course I use the term loosely—how can we distinguish between a thinker and a creator of worlds? The answer may seem simple, but as you, and Borges make clear—even in the denial of our artistry, the evasion of worlds, and the withdrawal into the self, we, paradoxically, create (or find) worlds on a smaller scale, or as Borges might say, worlds reflected in the mirror of the self...But this is all nonsense—to the point—I enjoyed your letter.
You are correct in noting that this correspondence is hardly a continuation of the past, it is a commentary on the past, part I suspect, of the project you see before—I’m listening to Bach at the moment, so perhaps commentary is too weak a word—your literary project is a fugue—a play of voices, various selves, growing more and more complex—and this letter, or rather this now chain of letters, is a variation on that theme—the interplay of the many selves of two distinct voices...But again, I’m spinning fables—letters ought to be personal.
I have to admit that there is something self-conscious in my asking you to start a correspondence, or asking various other friends to do the same for that matter—it seems to me that any serious writer ought to have a corpus of letters, informal strokes of genius and reflection. I say this only because it strikes me that sub or self or (both) consciously I have a desire to write. My overt reason for writing letters is far more pragmatic—it is the best way, in my experience, to work thoughts out into something with real shape and force. Letters are just a way of turning stray ideas into a straight line. Writing and receiving letters is, or rather has become, an indispensable part of my intellectual development, on par, I think, with my constant desire for conversation.
I was always, throughout high school, and part of college, restless, unable to be alone, texting, or emailing, going online, meeting friends—I suppose with the same impulse—the impulse to discover something about myself through dialectic. (The avoidance of loneliness notwithstanding). Now, I’m far, far more content to be alone and to reach out to other people more patiently, with more craft and control. The sign of the artist, I suspect, is merely this sort of self-consciousness (spelling errors aside).
You demonstrate this overwhelmingly well in your letter—this is my thesis: Both of us, two or three years ago, whatever it was, had a vision, about the same time, of what we felt we were, and/or wanted to be. That vision, in scope and impossibility, was terrifying. The only option, as you pointed out, was to become more “Realistic.” (I have said something similar about my own development many times.) But—here is the main idea—that shift was and is not genuine...merely a literary evasion.
We have merely, at least for the moment, forced our outrageous egoistic/artistic aims back into our sub-consciousness and adopted, and convinced ourselves of a more practical stance. But this is only a trick to trick ourselves into achieving our original, youthful (we’re still youthful, just less so) aims. I will cite Borges for clarification:
On the final page of the Quixote, Cervantes says that his intention has been nothing other than to mock books of chivalry. We can interpret this in two ways: we can suppose that Cervantes said this to make us understand that he had something else in mind, but we can also take these words literally, and think that Cervantes had no other aim—that Cervantes, without knowing it, created a work that mankind will not forget. He did so because he wrote the Quixote with the whole of his being, unlike the Persiles, for example, which he wrote with merely literary aims, and into which he did not put all that was dark and secret within him. Shakespeare may also have been assisted by distraction; it may help to be a little distracted in order to write a masterpiece. It may be that the intention of writing a masterpiece inhibits the writer, makes him keep a close watch on himself. It may be that aesthetic creation should be more like a dream, a dream unchecked by our attention. And this may have happened in Shakespeare’s case.
This makes clear the paradox of creation. The paragraph I cited comes from an essay on Shakespeare, or rather a defense against the various claims that WS didn’t write his own works. This theory, if you are at all familiar with it, springs from an intuitive disbelief that the greatest works in Western Lit could have been written by a country bumpkin and character actor. To me, no one but a country bumpkin, small bit actor, or similar non-entity could have written the works of WS. They are a miracle of nature—anything more than the slightest touch of literary self-consciousness would have obliterated them. WS, by what little accounts we have of him, cared more for being a country gentleman than a Homer or Ovid. Michelangelo, similarly, cared only for restoring his family’s wealth and honor, which (I believe) was squandered by his father.
But again—I digress, and have barely said a word about myself, as I wanted to do. Too much has happened in my life to give any sort of concise and honest account of. I have traveled, and I have dedicated myself much more completely to reading. Writing is still more of a longing than a reality. Poems here and there. Startings and stoppings of prose. Most of my writing has been for class—philosophy. I went through a real existential depression last summer. That, now that I think of it, was the most important event, or rather, period, over the last two years. It forced me, at least for a short time, to seek happiness without the illusion of immortality youth grants us. Art became for me, to roughly paraphrase Wallace Stevens, a salvation to replace God. Not that I ever was a believer, but I had never really considered the implications. So for me these days it’s a steady diet of poetry, fiction, philosophy, film, essays, letters, and travel, all for the vague purpose of cultivating myself, growing my artistic powers, and achieving, no doubt, some sort of material salvation. This is a pattern—I say this with modesty—that most writers seem to follow. Beckett, as I read him in his recently published letters (Beckett 1929-1940) reminds me of myself. In mood at least. The typewriter is out of room, so, abruptly, in deference to your rule, adieu.
July 1, 2010
1st line: I was strangely moved by your interpretation of Hamlet—so much so that I couldn’t respond, or rather didn’t know how to respond for 24 hours. I suppose the way in which I was moved could be called cognitive rather than emotional, though it was not without emotion, however uncanny. Your version (or vision) of Hamlet may or may not be universally appealing, but to me, it humanized a play that I had previously grasped only abstractly. It is not even that I thought your interpretation is at all correct if we judge correct by some approximation of the artist’s intentions—no, it was merely that Hamlet’s vast—Bloom would say unlimited—intellect can only be appropriately matched by itself. The great strangeness of Hamlet, as Eliot pointed out (though he drew a bizarre conclusion) was that Hamlet is too big, too expansive a soul for the confines and rancidity of Elsinore. Hamlet’s sentiments are sublime, but his play is not.
There is something to me, though I cannot really describe it, very beautiful about the transformation of Elsinore from reality to ideality—as if each character—almost universally empty and idiotic—king, queen, Polonius, R+G, Horatio and so on, perhaps exempting Ophelia, gains some dignity as symbols in Hamlet’s myth-making mind. Dignity is perhaps not the right word—almost too moral—they gain some sort of double dimension. Imagine, in your interpretation, that the characters in Hamlet’s dream are, of course, representatives of ‘real’ people, players in the court—they are then not WS’s characters but, as you, and perhaps Bloom, would say—Hamlet’s. Bloom does suggest, on many occasions throughout his essay on Hamlet, that Hamlet becomes a ‘free artist of himself,’ so what you and I are saying is hardly original in that sense—it is building upon Bloom’s idea. My point, which I am coming to slowly, is that the appeal of your interpretation, as I see it, is romantic (in the poetic sense), insofar as it gives us the ultimate triumph of the imagination. I was moved, because I see in your Hamlet, a symbol for all artists, all idealists, all believers in a salvation of the mind, or at least an exaltation of the mind. If Elsinore is a dream, it is an improvement of reality—it represents Hamlet internalizing reality, and obliterating it, himself included—triumphing, unconsciously, or semi-unconsciously over the given conditions of existence. The silence between Acts 4 and 5 is a mythic silence—the silence of the artist who at once grasps his object. Silence. Not death precisely—but the muting of consciousness, of what Bloom would call ‘cognitive music.’ As you seemed to point out, Hamlet, or dream Hamlet, or dreaming Hamlet finds fixity not in triumph or revenge, but in death, and so drives himself on to the dream of death. It is indeed in death, in silence where waking and dreaming meet—for the only power over reality the waking mind has is to end, and while the dreamer (or artist) is a god, they too have a power to end, to fix a silence, and so it is only through death that the waker can become a dreamer and the dreamer a waker. And is that not the task of the artist—to drive his work to the point of silence, to exhaust and obliterate his imagination. If Hamlet is a dream, and Hamlet the dreamer, then it becomes not only a pinnacle of human art, but the cipher of art itself. Hamlet the freest and truest of artists—
When asked at the end of the library scene if he believes his own theory—Stephen replies, ‘no.’ I suppose you could say the same of me, via your original insight. Can we ever really prove or disprove anything about WS? I doubt it. But, again, as Bloom would say, Hamlet, and many other of his characters ‘got away from’ him, escaped the control of the artificer. So, we are free in a way, to make of Hamlet what we want, to adopt him, or rather his imagination, as the proto-imagination of all would-be imaginers. There is no certainty in such an act—but an interpretation such as yours, I think, is worth far more than mostly everything that passes as literary criticism—academic criticism. I find reading the letters of artists—not just writers—to contain far more insight into the great works than almost all and any academic criticism. I read Bloom—he is an intensely personal critic—an artist in spirit—an idolator of the imagination.
You said, in your first letter (I am adopting your structure—because I too cannot connect my thoughts seamlessly) that our goal is still existential permanence or more precisely, ‘immortality in existential terms...meaning in my own.’ It occurred to me that there is a great difference between ontological stasis and a meaning that gives structure to ever-changing reality. (Forgive me for the terminology, though in all fairness you too are guilty of this pseudo continental-philosophy jargon) (it’s not so bad though) What I mean to say, is that preserving our name is a worthless ideal, or at least, a less worthwhile goal than finding meaning. I want fame through literature perhaps only as verification of what I sense in myself—this is merely an insecurity. What I really want is to change myself through art—to use writing (I suppose my de facto tool, lacking other abilities) as a path and an end, or at least to use the experience of creation as an end. It is not happiness per se—I am a happy person, and have been lucky enough to have had a mostly happy life—but an inner flourishing, a deeper happiness I guess. Some kind of inner knowledge that is greater than the fluctuations of everyday existence that I am currently, and always have been, at the mercy of...NO. Maybe that’s too ideal. Too fictive. Too cooked up for kicks—to hear myself think. I want to make something beautiful for the sake of the love of a woman—to express myself in such a way that some soul like mine can find me. I’m sorry for all the dallying—that’s my real point. I want to write, we all want to write or create because it is an expression of love—a plea for the restoration of wholeness. That is why we exalt and envy artists, because they are lovers, and if artists are not lovers, then they are not really artists...I suppose this statement cannot really stand up, that there exists some good, obvious counter-example—but I think it is a superior fiction. It’s not so much that my previous conception of the artist—as the giver of meaning, was false merely for being fiction—but for being an inferior fiction. Woody Allen says that the only thing that makes life worth living is a little human warmth. I think that’s truer than all the vast structures of philosophy and religion that have been erected to give us meaning and comfort. It is not so much that I do not think I can find love without being an artist, but that I cannot be the kind of lover that I want to be without art. But perhaps this is incompatible with the simple truth of Woody Allen.
Perhaps it would be better if I gave up my pretensions and lived simply, unheroically—even let myself become fat and ugly. Art, artistry is perhaps a way of retaining beauty through old age, of retaining some value as a lover as physical beauty subsides. I think there is some uncomfortable, pragmatic truth in that.
I will leave things there—I leave July 16th—so if you are to write, write before then. Your letters are beautifully crafted, but perhaps too much so. The thing I like about the typewriter, is that after about one paragraph in, there’s no starting over, or at least there’s no starting over without a significant waste of time, paper, and ink. If you are worried about archiving—I save all of the letters I receive—so you should not be concerned about lost thoughts. But of course, you can write in whatever manner you like—truthfully, your letters so far have been challenging, at times exquisite documents, so I am not complaining. I am only encouraging you not to hold onto letters until you feel they are perfect—I think such perfection cannot belong to either of us, but can only lie somewhere in the middle—in the exchange.
July 10, 2010
As I’m writing it is raining for the first time in weeks—it’s Saturday morning. Surely, you are enjoying the rain at this very moment. This is relevant to our ongoing discussions because, at least for me, it is mornings like this—sitting on my porch, with a cup of tea—sensations like this, that I want to capture in writing. I was reading Wallace Stevens a moment ago—because he seems to me to be the master romantic of the ordinary. A man who by all accounts was an unexceptional insurance executor his whole life—and yet was keenly aware of the music that surrounds existence. I can enjoy broadly absurd comic books, books w/Byzantine plots, like Pynchon or Foster Wallace, but it seems to me that there is a deeper mastery in describing things the way they are. A Thing and its Being, are not ordinary, or superficial things, they are to me at least, objects of the imagination. Shakespeare, of course, could grasp nature through a mind. When I think of certain characters—Lear and Macbeth in particular, they shape a cosmos w/their words, their imaginings. I suppose this is not a broad call for contemporary literature to turn towards some neo-neo-romanticism but merely a recognition that my own course is such. Perhaps labels are meaningless—whatever one wants to call the sensations of drinking tea and listening to the rain. A strange starting point for an aspiring writer, but still, a starting point—an inner guide, intuition. I’ve realized, that even if I attempt to write in prose, I have little interest in writing a novel of ‘informations’ by which I mean a novel where characters, settings, and their feelings and actions, are patiently described and layered. At this point in my life, my own aesthetic inclinations are perhaps, at least in prose, closest to something like V. Woolf’s ‘The Waves.’ Or maybe that’s just the mood I’m in now. Objectively, I think it’s better to be like Joyce or Beckett—Irony.
August XX, 2010
I spent most of my evenings in the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, in the reading room—either reading or engaged in conversation. I spent nights along the Seine with a notebook and a bottle of wine, and once, on such an occasion, I met a girl who, as we have so often discussed, could ‘understand me,’ and w/such immediacy and certainty, that even at the present I’m not sure of her effect on me. It was a glimmer, a preview of another life, but so fleeting and intangible that, being home, I feel, or am beginning to realize I feel, a dangerous sameness.
And it’s not like any one book or city or person can lead us to a higher world, but they are signposts—what I must do, I realize, is [blank] the pragmatic certainty that my friends will not understand me. I felt free in Paris not because of some metaphysical effect of the city on my soul—but because I had no history there, no expectations, and that I could shape my conversations to suit my interests, and not the other way around. That if I wanted, I could even imagine myself as part of the ongoing history of Paris—its writers, artists, and lovers.
August 2010
It is good, finally, to have an opponent (in the most benign sense) of formidable intellect. To have a reader, and a critic, who is capable of approaching a poem not merely subjectively or technically but objectively, or universally. A reader who places a poem within the context of a larger Idea of poetry and measures to see how well it fits.
But we ought not assume—not that we are—that the critic—at least in an exchange such as ours, risks nothing—in responding to my poems you say much about the poems that you may or may not have written yourself but must feel yourself to be capable of writing.
I could just as well you see, assert my genius, assert my intellectual superiority and ignore all challengers...and so could you. We may even have good reason to do so—because, for people like us, reading and writing are magical acts—they are a dark magic—they are acts that are not seemingly subverted to the laws which govern regular reading and writing. We can exist without paradox so long as we do not encounter other people of Ideas, other intuitors—then we must make a choice—then we have a crisis of faith...
Poets are maggots in the corpses of dead giants, we must feed on the dead in order to grow. I can feel my ideas germinating within this style that is not entirely (but not entirely his either) my own. As a proper reading of Bloom reveals—the anxiety of influence is not accidental. Not entirely.
I have talked very little about my own poems in themselves. But the particulars of old poems are hard to reengage—they are fragments written by a dead self, a self cast off by a snake skin. They are objects now...I am just another reader. A critic of my own work. [How I OPPOSE that]
You suggest my poems are obscurantist. This may be so—but in representing the obscure, how else may we proceed but obscurely? The feeling or rather the fusion of thought and feeling that I am trying to achieve in (most) of my poems is the feeling of thought—the latching on of feeling to some uncanny Idea. The perception of an unimaginable Idea beneath things; the feeling of glimpsing that underneathness.
I have said nothing...No, the simple function of poetry is to make us see in new ways. To take a thing—a table a chair or a scene—the sea, the garden, the park—and add life to the concept. Do we see these things or scenes in new ways after we’ve read a poem. If the poem is successful, we do. If it is middling, we are utterly unchanged. If it is failure, we, as readers, are dulled.
My poems, I think, are not without this ability to make us see again. They do not build a smoother Borgesian bridge from the inexplicable to the explicable—and that is a failure of my own abilities...But they do I think, at least shadow, a little more deeply a few things...[losing his own poem] Whether my feeling is more universal only time can bear that truth out...
If you are writing, and you say you are—you must follow whatever it is in your writing that is outside of you—that is to say—whatever it is that moves you, that enriches reality as the clouds or the rain or the sun do. As pictures or music do. As Shakespeare does. We recognize those infinitesimal bits of natural genius that somehow are born into our work.
Paris: All that matters is the spirit in which you live there. The Seine at night will be your teacher, follow it. Read Hopscotch by Cortazar if you have not. If you have, read it again after you’ve spent a week there. Go out each night, alone, expecting to meet the woman who will understand you.
“I wonder how many people really feel the impact of time passing through them, passing around them...It seems to me that the purpose of the artist is to do their remembering for them...that that is becoming more and more important”
So to your story: it is partly a step forward, partly and in several different ways, a step sideways. Technically, in terms of prose construction, there’s very little you could do, or could want to do to improve. First of all, that question, the question of fundamental skill is not pertinent here...rather, when I think about Your writing, I think about questions of will, of attitude, of psychology. There’s still something definitively arch, definitively mannered about your Borges story: the very deliberate allusions to Joyce and Coetzee and the general strategy of absorbing Borges’ metaphor for Shakespeare and personality into a metaphor for Borges and personality. And not that these things are in themselves bad...but there’s just that slight but palpable feeling of deliberateness, of neurotic distancing that prevents the story from being something truly original, truly wise. And why? Because in a certain sense, this story enacts the same crime against the self that your novel fragment did: it subordinates the particular to the general. There are very beautiful breakthroughs of a particular, especially in the short passage about being served tea and wanting nothing, or well, there are beautiful moments all throughout the story...but they all come to the reader through a very particular filter, the distance, the mirror within a mirror sense of reading a story ABOUT Borges which often seems like a story about someone else, about DB himself...Here is the problem, and forgive me for working my thoughts out live, on the page: no matter how skillfully you constructed this story—and you DID construct it skillfully—you are still, ultimately, writing an allegory of Ideas, and Borges’ ideas at that. What you’ve done is lyrically recast Borges’ own myth of personality, or impersonality; you’ve added a sidegarden to a house that has already been built. By comparison, for all of Coetzee’s metafictional games, one senses that he is always attacking a very particular, historically rooted and psychologically oriented problem. Your story reminds me of his novel, The Master of Petersburg—and this is the unfairness of my criticism—in certain ways, in your capacity for muted prose lyricism, you are not really inferior to JMC, not at all; but where he’s got you is in his willingness to commit fully to the emotionality of the otherwise muted fictional situation. The metafictional game—Coetzee inside Dostoevsky—is less literal than the metafictional game of DB inside JLB. And granted, I might be making massively unfair presumptions about your intention—but any honest interrogation of a piece of literature has got to take those kinds of chances.
DISTANCE, DISTANCE...Only a sideGARDEN, and not a house...But at 3, 4, I wanted to be a gardener, not a firefighter...I wanted to bake, not to be a policeman...Or a doctor...I wanted to feed people—with bread, with beauty—rather than to save them...Rather than to be upfront and seen and recognized and lauded, for my work...I WANTED to be forgotten, as I have always wanted to be forgotten, too, in a way...Even as I am so COMPETITIVE...Epic and evasive, I want to be both...Gardener—but how Archimboldo was a gardener, not an architect, in his life...But in his work? Maybe the point is, in his work, he did create houses, there... —but maybe I only want to create a sidegarden...To LISTEN...To get people, to get the inhabitants, the largely unwitting architects (which everyone is, creating their selves/lives), to get them to really look at their house...To get them to come OUTSIDE...To see the flowers, yes, but also to see their house, from the outside...With the promise of fleeting beautiful FLOWERS...Sin Fragancia, In the yard behind my parents’ house...To make the house seem more beautiful, but really just to uncover the beauty that was also in the house, just not totally revealed, not totally seen, without the frame of the flowers around it...
With the exception of Judith, your poems as I have them, lack a necessary heat and light. It is as if you are recalling a very old memory, one which you cannot quite feel anymore. An echo...but there is a gentility and fineness of expression which is missing from the other poems. In the maturity of mind I urge you to let unfold within yourself, this particular sensibility is what would blossom and burst with color.
Your reflections on my poems are highly astute. The most penetrating remark is your speculation on what separates us—it is true that I discover as I write, and from what you have sent me both in your letters and your pieces—you write what you have already discovered...
because I’m trying to trace a theory of objective ideality—objectivity revealed through a flash of ideality...The ideal impressions of the poet as a bridge to the dazzle of things in themselves
I have included a new batch of poems—more assorted than the last bunch. I do not want to make it a habit of burdening you with my work every time I write, but I wanted to purge myself of the last of the poetry I have written this year.
I am not hopeful that anyone will publish my poems—at least anytime soon. You said you were my ideal reader—you may be my only reader as well.
It is a perverse thing to think oneself great-souled
Truth and doctrine are only useful insofar as they help create the worlds of our imaginations.
In our minds we can dissolve all contradictions. That is the real source of our superiority.
To have this constantly coming back to you The light of the sun and your Mother’s voice waking you up for school The solitude that was given to you The tenderness with which you were raised The selflessness and the love The poems that come to you are miracles They are more human than you are And the sadness is unbearable This gift is yours, it is only grief For the world which is always passing Through you like a prayer You know that soon they will be separate From you and that you will be alone And that just to be with them again would be like heaven
The body is the great teacher of the artist. All of our joys and fears are rooted beneath the neck—the head just transcribes the music of the heart-rooted soul...
Life is perfectly simple. We must love ourselves, love our families, love our communities, love our artists and their art. I fuck up that simple truth almost everyday—but to live it even for a few hours like I have today—to live on the bread of air and light and music and movement...it is the greatest joy. It will give me strength for many weeks now, just this single day.
If I were to reread this letter I would most likely scratch it all out. But this is who I am at this moment, in a few minutes I will be someone else. To be an individual even for an hour is to be a weak-shouldered Atlas. I have to put the world down soon, but I am building up my strength. Each foray into the real, the authentic, the beautiful, the Greek I build my strength. This is the task of life. My life, your own, all who seek to call themselves artists.
The critic must be able to bend the work of art, but not break—the artist must bend, but not break...In terms of spiritual priority, faith in self must come first for the artist—even close, respected peers as yourself in relation to me—must come second...The alternative is a kind of aesthetic death, I think, a willlessness in art. A spring of self-trust, self-admiration, self-revelation is a kind of eternal-life-in-life for the artist—something he may always return to, drink from, and restore himself.
You are probably the only person, aside from myself, and from my sister, who I truly see the capacity in for a depth of thought and expression to rival those thinkers and poets and novelists who have survived in time. No doubt this is a grandiose statement—but indeed it was grandiose for Keats to assert that he “would be among the English poets”—when he was dying and unknown and if known at all for being BAD. All faith, as Kierkegaard points out, is an absurdity—faith in oneself-as-a-writer will never cease to be absurd. There is no end to your questions of self-as-writer, there can’t be. There can only be a moment of faith, or an anti-faith, an acceptance that faith will not come. Perhaps you think my faith in you is misplaced—though on some level, I know this letter will spark that voice inside of you that must shout—yes, I am an artist, I always will be. But ultimately the call to be an artist must come from within not from without, you know that certainly, and so this letter can only serve as a gentle cajoling to search out that voice, and interrogate it once more.
Yes, I do think I am and will be an artist, a very great one. I don’t know why. I just feel that notion, that I am an artist, vibrating too loudly in my brain to deny it.
My best moments are as you indicate they are for you—are when I cry. When I am flooded with emotion. That seems to me to be the key to nourishing the soul—to flood it with feeling—to never let it dry up.
[Et toi?] It is a necessary question—no one can go into the darkness alone.
