Monday, November 10, 2003
I think that I am certifiably chronophobic. I didn't just make that word up. Chronophobia, I mean. A morbid fear of time. I didn't make it up, though sometimes, like last night and this morning, I do feel as though I might have invented the malady it names. Unlimited, unbounded, incomprehensible time. Unstoppable, and, for us, tragically one way. How can someone not fear time? How can someone not lay awake at night with no other thing in their mind but its passage and consequences, the sheer, elegant terror of it? I can't recall when I first began to fear time. I was still a child.
Yesterday, we finished with Chapter Two and read Chapter Three of Murder of Angels. So, we have done 138 pages, and have 428 to go. We need to make it through chapters Four and Five today, which would finish up Part One of the book. Also, I have to get the final draft of "Mercury" (and its cover) off to Subterranean Press.
After supper, Spooky and I watched The Player on IFC, because she'd never seen it. After that, we read Maureen F. McHugh's "Presence." By then, Spooky was feeling bad again and dozed off. I stared disinterestedly at the television for a little while, then forced myself to go to bed about 12:30. Spooky feels better today. So does Jennifer.
Because I seem to have little to say this morning, a couple of e-mails:
Dear Caitlin,
I just wanted to tell you that I (and I believe many, many other readers of your work that I have known) do not agree with Mr. Daniel Jolley's impressions of your characters. I, personally, love them. They are more real than life, and know of love and heartache and pain and beauty (and other things) more than most of us living in this world ever will be able to. Your characters in Tales of Pain and Wonder, and the world they inhabited (a character itself, for me) was more meaningful and compelling than my own. They kept me alive, I'd say. I fell in love with your work first through the characters and then through the craft of your words. It began with Magwitch and Salmagundi and Jimmy de Sade and Lark and Crispin and has yet to end. And something that impressed me was that there hasn't been a character in any of your works that I have so far read that I didn't adore (though many of them I'd never want to meet in real life). That said, I haven't read Low Red Moon yet, but am waiting for it to come through the mail to do so. Bah Humbug to Daniel Jolley's dislike of your characters.
Saba Razvi
And now a very long one:
I’m reading Low Red Moon and I’m thinking, This is some of the best goddamn prose I’ve ever read...and the hollow of my torso – despite all the organs and meat and inner-physiognomy that constitutes my physicality, I still think there is space for the soul, somewhere in this microhollow – feels like it might be housing a wind, a wind that swells up from deep inside of me upon exposure to these words, has the potential to lift and carry me forever, forever, forever; another part, a more analytical and temporal sector, is categorizing this rupture and burst of impressions I similarly experience only when I am reading work that has brought me to tears, body-convulsing tears that are an emotional reaction to melancholy, happiness, hope, joy, sorrow...and pain and wonder. Ironically, to use a cliché, these works are few and far between: Harlan Ellison’s “Grail”; Ray Bradbury’s “The Lake”; two stories by Anthony Doerr – “The Caretaker” and “Mkondo”; Richard Adam’s novel, Watership Down; Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn; Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. Not just true, pure prose, but stories told in such a way that the words conjure personal experiences from the deepest, darkest, labyrinthine recesses of the brain and pulls them on a thread to the forefront of your consciousness. A process so intimate you feel like you’re friends with the characters, or you are the character(s), and you feel like you’ve lived the events before. Or that you have been waiting for them your entire life.
There is that adage, if that is the correct term, that, as writers, as storytellers, as artists, we write the stories or create the art that we would want to read, would want to see, would want to feel, would want to live. The stories and art that no one has ever produced before: that is why you are creating them, so that they exist, and in their existence, you can, hopefully, be satisfied. You’ve created something new, something that you think is special because it’s something you’ve distilled from all your beliefs about stories, characters, and art, presented and birthed in such a way that has all your dirty, little fingerprints all over it – this story or work of art that came from you and bares your imprint and is just the thing you wanted to experience. If I were a professional writer, Low Red Moon is the type of novel I wish I had written. Part of me is jealous, perhaps I’m mistaking jealousy for awe; wait...no, I am jealous. I think...I think this is one of those works that isn’t only the type of work I could produce but is also one of those works that just feels technically and aesthetically perfect. You can flip to any page and be drawn into the story, the characters, the beauty of the prose with all its poetic assonance and dissonance and rhythms and metaphoric language, you can be possessed by the mind of the writer, Ms. Kiernan, as she spins her yarn, images fluttering from her fingers, images that coax and guide you and tip you off towards the right archetypes of the human experience that are important and beautiful about, not only dark fiction, but the collective world of fiction...the book is so fuckin’ good I find that it justifies the importance of the role of the writer/poet in this world.
Jesus, bold words, bold words. But I believe they are true.
You see, I’ve been going through a crisis of faith lately, a crisis of vocation and avocation, a crisis of who I am. I surround myself with stories in the form of books and movies and music and poetry to an extent where I can’t be quantified as normal. I try to work on my own writing to the point where my friends and family question my solitude, my lifestyle; lately, I’m discovering how socially inept I am with relationships and the fuckin’ caveat is that I feel I’ve read so many goddamn books I know a good deal about human nature yet I can’t even socially navigate my way to a healthy relationship with a member of the opposite sex. In Michael Chabon’s novel, Wonder Boys, Grady Tripp, downtrodden and miserable and questioning his art and its effects on other people, says, “Books. They don’t mean anything to anybody. Not anymore.” To some people, and I am not denying that the people who can appreciate writing and writers and novels are rare, books are still important. These things are important. They matter. But sometimes, during those periods of doubt, it’s hard not to think that Grady Tripp might be onto something. I was morosely connecting to Tripp's words today, but when I started reading Low Red Moon I found myself gripping the book, slipping into the world created therein, oblivious to the commotion going on around me. Captivated and excited and enthralled, a thought was slowly wading out of the pools of my unconscious reservoir into my conscious: All the pain, all the sacrifice that an individual goes through to create art is worth it; if it comes out like this, like this novel I’m fondling in my hands, then goddamnit, it’s worth it. If I could write anything that is half as good as this then I will gladly accept my sacrifices.
Books are important. People who think otherwise are damn fools.
This book matters to me, and I hope these words can do justice to the appreciation I feel for you and your work: What you do, your work, and what you write in your online journal, is important to me. And I know it's important to other people. So I hope what I've written expresses this appreciation.
Thank you for writing this novel. I look forward to re-reading right after I re-read Threshold.
Sincerely,
Terrell Garrett
I hope it disappoints no one to learn that these sorts of letters, this sort of encouragement, in very important to me.
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