The Demon Seated, 1890 by Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910)
The Misfortunes of Silenus (detail), c. 1500 by Pierro di Cosimo (1462-1522)
One out of several humiliating features about writing fiction for a living is that here after all is just about everybody else, all along the capitalist spectrum from piano movers to systems analysts, cheerfully selling their bodies or body parts according to time-honored custom and usage, while it’s only writers, out at the fringes of the entertainment sector, wretched and despised, who are obliged, more intimately and painfully, actually to sell their dreams, yes, dreams these days you’ll find are every bit as commoditized as any pork bellies there on the financial page. To be upbeat about it, though, in most cases it doesn’t present much moral problem, since dreams seldom make it through into print with anything like the original production values anyway. Even if you do good recovery, learning to write legibly in the dark and so forth, there’s still the matter of getting it down in words that can bring back even a little of the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience. So it’s a safe bet that most writers’ dreams, maybe even including the best ones, manage to stay untranslated and private after all.
Barthelme, however, happens to be one of a handful of American authors there to make the rest of us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight “reality.” What he called his “secret vice” of “cutting up and pasting together pictures” bears an analogy, at least, to what is supposed to go on in dreams, where images from the public domain are said likewise to combine in unique, private, and, with luck, spiritually useful ways. How exactly Barthelme then got this into print, or for that matter pictorial, form, kept the transitions flowing the way he did and so on, is way too mysterious for me, though out of guild solidarity I probably wouldn’t share it even if I did know. The effect each time, at any rate, is to put us in the presence of something already eerily familiar … to remind us that we have lived in these visionary cities and haunted forests, that the ancient faces we gaze into are faces we know.
From Thomas Pynchon’s introduction to The Teachings of Don B. The introduction was republished yesterday in The Paris Review in a version that omits the first two paragraphs. You can read the full version of Thomas Pynchon’s essay on Donald Barthelme at ThomasPynchon.com.
Predator, 2004 by Eteri Chkadua
Window at Night, 2017 by Zoey Frank (b. 1987)
Berlin Windows #6, 2018 by Zoey Frank (b. 1987)
Night Nurse, 2017 by Van Arno
The shabbily dressed man spoke to his students at their first class as follows. The best service he could perform for them was to persuade them to give up writing fiction as soon as they had finished his course—or even before then. The writing of fiction was something that a certain sort of person had to do in order to explain himself or herself to an imagined parent or an imagined loved one or an imagined god. He himself had had two novels published more than ten years before but had had nothing published since then and had no intention of writing so much as a sentence of fiction during the remainder of his life. He had stopped writing fiction after having been shown a sign. He had had to write or to prepare to write fiction in order to be shown the sign, but having been shown the sign he no longer wished to write fiction. The shabbily dressed man then said to his class that he had probably said too much to them already and had probably confused them thoroughly. He then said that their first class was over, that their classes for the next month were cancelled, and that they should go away and write their first piece of fiction and deliver it to him three weeks later so that he could prepare photocopies for the workshop classes that would occupy him and them for the rest of the year.
From Gerald Murnane’s short story “The White Cattle of Uppington,” (1995); collected in Stream System (2018).
The Pomps of the Subsoil, 1947 by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)
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Landscape with Couple Walking and Crescent Moon, 1890 by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
The Wandering Moon, 1820 by William Blake (1757-1827)
“The Starlight on Idaho” is the second of five stories in Denis Johnson’s collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Apart from the collection’s title story (which I wrote about here), “The Starlight on Idaho” is the only piece in Largesse to have been previously published (in a different form in a 2007 issue Playboy). You can read the story online in full here, and watch/hear Johnson read excerpts from it in this video:
My impression after reading Largesse the first time was that “Starlight” was a good story, but also perhaps the weakest in the collection. Reading it again this afternoon, I see its inclusion in Largesse as vital. “Starlight” engages with the book’s overall themes of repentance, regret, and forgiveness—as well as the act of writing itself—more overtly than the other four stories in Largesse. In a sense, the story bridges Johnson’s earlier work (like Angels and Jesus’ Son) more directly to the late (and more complex) narratives in Largesse, like “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist” and “Triumph Over the Grave.”
The title of the story refers not to the literal starlight on the literal state of Idaho (where Johnson lived for some years), but rather to the “Starlight Addiction Recovery Center on Idaho Avenue, in its glory days better known as the Starlight Motel.” The story’s narrator is Cass—Mark Cassandra—and he is in this California rehab “because the last four years have really kicked [his] ass.” Cass summarizes those four years a few times in “Starlight,” including this charming list:
Just to sketch out the last four years – broke, lost, detox, homeless in Texas, shot in the ribs by a thirty-eight, mooching off the charity of Dad in Ukiah, detox again, run over (I think, I’m pretty sure, I can’t remember) shot again, detox right now one more time again.
Our hero has hit rock bottom and now writes to family members, friends, the devil, and other folks. As he puts it, Cass is “writing letters to each one of you lucky winners who has a hook in my heart.” The epistolary form allows Johnson to explore issues of regret and religion through the lens of a defiant but wrecked soul, who at one point tells his reader that “I’m not about to get on my knees.”
Cass’s detox is a metaphorical descent into hell. He writes to Pope John Paul; he writes to Satan. At one point in the middle of a letter to his brother, he sneaks in a letter to God:
Excuse me, I have to burn this page and write a letter to God while it’s on fire. Question is, God, where are you? What the fuck on earth do you think you’re doing, man? We are in HELL down here, HELL down here, HELL. You know? Where’s Superman?
“The Starlight on Idaho” ultimately reads like one long letter to God. We learn much about Cass’s family (fractured, foul, awful), but Cass never uses them as an excuse for his behavior. He knows that his alcoholism and drug abuse “was a button [he] could push to destroy the known world.” Letter writing is part of restoring Cass to the world again. He has to find a way to tell his story.
Similarly, listening to other people’s stories is part of Cass’s recovery. Key scenes in “Starlight” feature Cass attending to other people’s tales and empathizing with them. “Starlight” climaxes not with Cass’s own story, but with the story of a man named Howard, a former undercover narc who has royally fucked up his own life. “My story is the amazing truth,” Howard declares, and that story ends with God squeezing Howard’s soul, intensely, always. This squeezing brings Howard closer to God.
Cass tells Howard’s story to his brother “John the Strangest Of All us Cassandras” in the final letter in “Starlight.” In the letter previous—addressed to Satan—Cass signs off as “Mark Cassandra, a more or less Christian.” In the final letter to John, Cass signs off “Your Brother In Christ, Cass.” Is the conversion complete and true? I think so. Johnson loves his characters and often drives them to a place of salvation.
For some readers, this insistence on redemption—and here a specifically Christian redemption—might be a bit too much, even a bit too on the nose. Cass certainly has a Jesus Christ complex. In the depths of detox, he despairs:
Why do I think I might be Jesus Christ and I’m supposed to come here and suffer, really suffer, suffer past your most excruciating fantasies of torment and why do I think everybody’s looking at me because they know this about me?
Johnson lets it drop more than once that our narrator is about to turn 33, as if to underline the point. However, he’s a disciple, not a messiah. He’s Mark Cassandra; his brother’s names are Luke and John. Those guys wrote a few letters, right? And then of course there’s that pagan last name, Cassandra. Is Mark a prophet? And will his prophecies be ignored? Who are they for? Who reads his words? Well, us of course.
“The Starlight on Idaho” may end on a note of religious redemption, but a subtler motif lies under the narrative’s surface. Johnson’s work has never struck me as overtly metafictional, but “Starlight” is clearly about writing itself, and foregrounds writing as vital to Cass’s recovery. Cass and the other “inmates” of the Starlight Addiction Recovery Center are like participants in a writer’s workshop, only one with much higher stakes. These recovering addicts are making their fractured lives cohere through narrative power. The trick of “The Starlight on Idaho” is to withhold the product—the life narrative—and give us instead the process, the pieces, the fragments themselves. Mark Cassandra’s letters may not be addressed to us, but of course we are his readers and his witnesses.
Girl Reading, 1961 by Richard Diebenkorn (1922 – 1993)
From Joseph T. Shipley’s The Origin of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.
This one speaker Howard had us all frozen up, we listened to him stock-still for forty-five minutes. He started out simple, comes out of high-school, tries the infantry, finds the service kind of boring without a war. Drinking on leave and weekends. Gets his discharge, goes to Santa Rosa Community College. Going for a business degree. Drinking on weekends. Itchy and discontented. One night, he has this friend who’s a cop in SR, guy says, ride along with us and get a taste. He says two hours into the ride I’m feeling like I never felt. These guys tell a citizen what to do, he better do it. They give orders and they’re obeyed and I never knew how bad I wanted that. Zip into the Santa Rosa police training program, then I’m a cop, got three girlfriends, one black, one Asian, one white, cruising in a squad car all night long, kicking ass, busting heads, top of the world, man. One year in I’ve got a sweet little wife and a six-week baby daughter. Two years in they put me on Narcotics and Vice, undercover. My job is to hang out in bars and party like Nero. Can I do that? Hell, what do they think I’ve been doing every free minute anyhow? And will I buy drugs? Gee, okay, I’ll give it a shot. And Howard, they say, listen, sometimes in the course of your duties you will have a line of coke laid out before you and in the course of your duties you’ll just have to put your head down there and suck it up. It’s part of the ride, okay Howard? Yeah, I say, part of the ride, and inside of six months I’m the biggest coke-head, the biggest dealer, and the crookedest cop in Northern California. I did armed robberies on dealers and drugstores up and down Highway 101. I had seven girlfriends and I was pimping every one. My sweet little wife divorced me and took my daughter and I never even noticed. The force gave me a thousand a month to buy coke in little bags and turn them in, and I had thirty thousand under my bed in a shoebox next to three or four kilos of coke the force would never see. I’d wake up in the afternoon and fare forth and wreak havoc. I murdered three guys I still claim the world is better off without, but I’m not the judge though, am I? But I sure thought I was. I took the lives of other human beings. I thought I was God. I looked in the mirror and said so — looked in the mirror and said, You are God. When God decided to prove me wrong, it all came down like a mountain of dogshit on my head. They rolled me up and socked me with so many charges, including at one point second degree murder, that if they stacked them up and ran me through I’d be doing time a hundred years past my natural death. I’m lying in jail and that cell is sucking the drugs and the fight and the soul right out me and giving it to God and God is squeezing it in his fingers, man, every last fiber of my soul in the almighty grip of the truth. And the truth is that everything I’ve done, every thought I’ve thought, every moment I’ve lived, is shit turned to dust and dust blown away. God, I said, fuck it, I’m not even gonna pray. Squeeze my guts till you get tired, that’s all I want now, because at least it’s real, it’s true, it’s got something to do with you. So then I think I died. I think I died in jail. My life itself just left me, and who you see before you now is someone else. So I wandered like a ghost through the court system and came out with a sentence of ten years. Did seven, one day at a time. Prayed every day and every night, but only one prayer: Squeeze till you get tired, Lord. Kill me, Lord, I don’t care, as long as it’s you who kills me. Just got out eight days ago, and rehab is part of my parole. And nothing to show for thirty-six years on this earth. Except that God is closer to me than my next breath. And that’s all I’ll ever need or want. If you think I’m bullshitting, kiss my ass. My story is the amazing truth.
Gleaming Connection, 2018 by Wiley Wallace
Biblioklept 