NO CHOICE BUT TO WRITE

and then there are some of us/ be sure to put this properly in your proper query to your proper editor-slash-agent; they’re all suits/ who do this shit/ who write this stuff/ who put it together/ who paint it/ scream it/ perform it/ i would say teach it but i am not sure it fits here, teaching/ teaching is not doing it’s teaching/ it’s not the risk this is/ this is you’re putting it out there and you’re standing behind the thing because you believe in it/ usually with your hand out/ i have known famous poets who lived in one room sro hotels/ who had no idea where their next meal was coming from/ who stared fate in the eye and dared it/ smokin’/ and then there are some of us who do this because there is no other choice/ at all/

Tim Barrus

http://after-the-last-collapse.tumblr.com/

The media (movies and books) have so convinced the general public that writing is a kind of talent like embroidery or piano playing except that now and then there is a genius who in agony brings forth masterpieces.  No mother wants that for her child, but every mother would like a child who writes some nice poetry or a little story for an upscale market.  This mythology dominates, even as everyone mocks grammar and rails against the sedentary life.

The invention of movable type brought forth raving Bible thumpers who could read the Book for themselves, esp. their fav parts, as well as novelists who did scandalous things and pretended they were only stories.  (What a hoax!)  Two kinds of publishers evolved: those who saw that a book is a product that can be managed and sold as such and those who were idealists who saw a book as a carrier of important and beautiful ideas.  The first kind of publisher has by now nearly crushed the second kind.  Even academia is no refuge.  Now authors speak on TED or The Edge, so we can see who they are.  Respectable?  Presentable?  Did he look suicidal to you?  The first kind of publisher sees the advertising possibilities:  “building a platform” they say.  The second kind of publisher is acquiring velocity, hurtling through the pelting rainstorm of new data, new theories, new paradigms, but nearly blinded -- operating on faith.

There’s a certain kind of writer who has not changed, though maybe before literacy was widespread he or she played a lute or a drum and sang or chanted the words.  Danced.  It’s a kind of visionary madness, a shifting of the brain that makes words into drugs, story into hypnotism, and yet there is a clarity to it -- even a usefulness.  Scholars veer off from direct experience, but study it all afterwards.  Once in a while there is a time and place Dionysian enough to celebrate it, offer it an ecstatic home.

This is what Tim is talking about above.  People wonder why more Native Americans don’t write.  The ones who write this way are generally killed early, because there is enormous vulnerability.  The ones who are tough, even callous, don’t write like this.  Maybe something like the same with women.  Who are the great United States mystics?  Brautigan?  Dead.  The black ones go to jazz.  Miles Davis?

This kind of writing can’t be taught but it can be learned.  It is a matter of brain management, identity ransacking, censoring only for dishonesty rather than for propriety.  It takes time and the agony sometimes begs chemical amelioration, so this sort of writer doesn’t generally manage a day job.  If you go to the library looking for this kind of writer, tell the librarian you want poetes maudit.  War creates them, so they tend to be French or maybe South American.  There are probably more, but we lack translators.

I do not QUITE write like this.  My morning blog is five-finger exercises so I could if my heart went into a wringer.  Maybe if I weren’t such a stick-in-the-mud straight-arrow -- that seems to be my true nature.  Yet Tim breaks through to me.  My fingers grow strong.

I don’t KNOW Gide and Burroughs or even Ginsberg or Kerouac.  I don’t read them.  So I can’t approach Tim as a scholar.  My efforts to read up on sado-masochism made him laugh his butt off, though I thought it did help understand his books.  No one understands sm except sm people and they like it that way, but there are little signals so they can recognize each other.

WHAT IS IT?  What makes Tim write like that and me (and others) appreciate it and want to reach out to him?  It’s not his careful grammar or dazzling vocabulary, his revelations about misery (misery is tedious), his willingness to go into risky territory.  It’s not even the waving veils of video, the cascading dance of images.  I’m a lousy agent and don’t see the commercial value.

It’s feeling, poetry.  He’s so human, this former whore who innocently signs his emails “hugs,” or -- in a grateful mood -- “I love you madly.”   (Does anyone want to be loved madly?  Be honest.  OF COURSE.)  He is a flayed man of ceramic hips, steel shoulders, blown veins and a nervous system so ablaze that electroshock torture would be redundant.

Does he lie in bed suffering and weeping?  No, he seizes the night to post images and poetry with lines separated by backslashes so the internet won’t make hash of the line endings.  Nearly five hundred posts to “After the Last Collapse” right now, each with its image, and yet there are others that I remember vividly from years ago that aren’t here -- must be lost.  

They say that the virus is in his brain cells now and the meds are molecularly related to LSD or the ergot that made Puritan girls go mad.  It seems to clarify the poems, untangle them a bit, slow down the tarantella.  I stay up late in the Montana winter cold, thinking “oh, this might be the last,” and get up in the snow-blue morning to find on my screen that Tim is working on a new poem, having made coffee, walked the dogs, roused the boys, done his medical rounds among them.  I marvel.  I take notes.  I write my blog.  I fail to shovel the walk.  I play opera very loud.