Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Thus far, a most entirely frustrating sort of a day. But no one wants to hear about that.
I'm listening to System of a Down and trying figure out where the day's gone. And how I could have accomplished so little in the last few hours. It's a fool's game. I should just accept it and move on.
I had an unsettling moment last night. I was suddenly certain that I was completely unsure why I'm writing what I'm writing, and that certitude of doubt set off a cascade of questions. This afternoon, the questions seem less urgent, but I suspect that's only because I've been avoiding them all day. But they seem so less urgent that I think I would have trouble simply articulating them. It might be that old nagging doubt which has always attended my writing fiction. For so much of my life, my primary concerns were scientific and, I believed at the time, matters of an objective, discoverable reality. Fantasy, though I enjoyed it immensely, was, by comparison, of little importance. My work as a paleontologist added to a great something, a something greater than myself. Bit by bit, I was aiding in the accumulation of knowledge. Even if everything I "discovered" turned out to be false at a future date (and I understood it most likely would; science works like that), I was still part of an essentially cumulative undertaking. Of course, we could argue endlessly about whether science is actually a cumulative enterprise. Personally, I'm no longer sure what I believe in that respect.
But art has never really seemed like a cumulative enterprise to me. It serves a fuction for a given time. Some art may, probably as much by accident as anything else, last for many centuries, even millennia, functioning across the ages. But most art is extremely transient. Like Shakespeare said, just a moment on the stage. However, despite the way I've become accustomed to thinking about art, a view that largely followed from my years as a scientist, despite that, I can see a cumulative nature to art. What I write is built upon all that has been written before me. Even if my work vanishes in a moment, it will most likely have left some small imprint that will affect what is to come (and perhaps what has come before, but that gets back to the temporal collapse, and I'd rather not think about that today; I'd rather not think about this, either, but I have to think about something).
Which is to say, perhaps art is at least as "progressive" as science, perhaps moreso. "Progressive" may be the wrong word, even qualified with quotation marks. The problem here is my need to feel a part of something larger than myself. To fit myself in somewhere, to serve a function. I do not write these stories solely, or even primarily, because I enjoy writing them. I'm writing them in the service of a collective mythologizing, one that few of us ever pause to consider. I'm talking in circles. Trust me, I can tell when I'm doing this. If I talk in circles fast enough, I can usually get a glimpse of my backside. But. I think the heart of the question I found myself asking myself last night was, "Am I telling the stories that need to be told, the ones that I need to tell." I'll probably never know the answer. Am I merely being self-indulgent, turning back to Daria and Niki and Spyder, writing more of the story begun in Silk? Was I behaving self-indulgently when I wrote Low Red Moon, revisiting Chance and Deacon and Sadie? Is self-indulgence at the heart of all good art?
I think I've lost the thread of my own thoughts.
Perhaps the upshot is as simple as, think less, write more.
Sometimes the counterintuitive is required.
We're going to try to get a couple of more unusual items up on the Cat Crutches Auction this evening (after the final episode of Buffy, of course). I have several extra copies of the Italian edition of "Souvenirs." It's a nice trade paperback, if you can read Italian. It's a nice trade paperback, regardless. Also, I have a copyedited set of galley pages for the Subterranean Press edition of Low Red Moon which I may put up. It's the original page layout, which is being redesigned at my request. So, you could be the very first person out there to read Low Red Moon. Be the envy or your friends and neighbors, etc., etc. I used to hang onto all the mss., but they're starting to pile up; half a large book shelf in my office is currently occupied by various drafts and CEMs of various books. Please, help me renounce my packrat ways.
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