Blessings and One Small Curse. Maybe.

I woke up today and realized I’m a writer in his forties without a publishing deal — yet. And immediately I looked for a different pair of shoes to wear and also came to the conclusion that I’m now a middle-aged writer, a late bloomer whose little snow-white feet have taken an awful long time in the Salley Gardens.

I’m not begrudging the late bloomer or middle age. Not much I can do about time, but spend it.

And, anyway, this older writer shtick has its blessings. I have sampled more from the kinky bedroom, the pill cabinet, the lavish kitchen table, the infested ratskeller, the dusty attic, the undisturbed bathroom, the living room, the unliving room, the empty pantry, the stocked fridge, the parked car, the speeding car, the porch full of muddied boots. All of the life I’ve lived can drip intravenously (or sometimes pour, when the writing’s going well) into the fiction. And I’m thankful for that. Though again, life happens — I’m just glad I’ve been conscious of most of it and not one of those walking dead shuffling out of his mortal coil.

But there’s a curse, too. At least I think so. My particular curse. It’s that I am no longer young. Maybe curse is too strong a word. Maybe it’s more like a heavy dose of unease. Because being a young writer, I think you’re more prone to saying, “Fuck it” a lot. Being capricious, reckless, unfazed by failure, success, just tossing your young self onto the tracks blithely anticipating the oncoming train and the screaming passengers and the psychotic driver. There’s this sod-off resilience, this come-what-may-I’ll-slay-the-fray attitude. All good. All tested. All maybe precocious. And all in the past.

Or is it? Do I need to act my age as a writer? Do I have to be responsible, have it all sorted? Do I have to grow up mealy-mouthed when I’ve got a taste for the tongue of the fool?

You’re in your 40s, you bloody well ought to have it all figured out! You need to know what you’re writing and you need to know what it means right now. And you need to decide between genre or literary fiction, between bangers or the golden calf, and you’d better do it quick or else there’s a spanking coming. And not a nice kinky one, either. And you’ve got to be so intimate with Twitter and Facebook, they’ll hang between your legs like the balls you haven’t got. (Yes, this is gender specific because I’m a man, or thereabouts). Social media is publishing’s New Model Army and you must believe in the good old cause, we don’t need no royalists coming out of the cupboard saying they don’t want to be that kind of writer, they just want to write their novels. Plus, you need to know all there is to ever know about social media since it’s your savior, trust us, and you don’t want to get crucified on some solitary tree, it’s so damn barbaric. Oh, and you need to know your market, your author photo, number of copies sold, number of signed copies, number of people in the audience, number of adjectives used, number of darlings killed, number of hairs on the dog, etc, etc, etc. In the midst of my writing life I am in debt to everyone, it seems.

In my best Tom Waits: “I don’t wanna grow up.”

Don’t Try This At Home

Where I live has a certain bonhomie feel to it. There’s nothing exceptional or explicit or glamorous or trendy, though. It’s a dirt road and some white oaks and pines, silent and stealthy, some forget-me-nots and lupines and rosa rugosa, and a spiritual centre at the end of the road. It’s not like Amsterdam or Venice or Paris or Prague or Big Sur. But I like to think of it as an exotic spot, some literary escape, like the bubble in a spirit level. And in the long shadows and the early morning light, there’s a sense of Dostoyevsky’s “eternal harmony” and the magic of the youngest carbon meeting newborn beryllium.

I think the sight of the sea from my window helps to perpetuate this poetic mood.

Most days I just go about my living, not noticing that much, and then suddenly I happen to look out my window (a bit like Yeats becoming aware of a swan and it gave him such a shock, he wrote a poem about it) and something pierces my self-absorption and I see in a flash the extraordinariness of everything — well, except for conservative non-thinkers. It’s like an inner-city train that has ridden the particular tracks now rattles along the eternal. I get itchy atoms and I feel like a man on a buzzy tree and I’m walking in Henry Miller’s footprints around Paris and Greece, dogging Mervyn Peake on Sark, hopping on DH Lawrence’s back in New Mexico, groveling behind Rilke in Duino Castle, being a scarf tied in Angela Carter’s wild hair.

“It’s the ghosts one misses most.”

It helps my writing, no to mention my spirit, to believe I’m living apart from the maddening crowd in some pastoral glade or idyllic landscape or remote hilltop or seaside hamlet having my very own small literary sprees full of capers and mint and the occasional reddest, stolen, cherries. And I know I have to rub Schopenhauer’s bald spot between his wings of white hair: “Seek out solitude, other people rob us of our identities.”

Yes, it may be fanciful to see my life living and writing by the sea as some romantic ideal, but isn’t the tiniest act of will better than having none at all?

Of course, there’s a downside to pretending you live a life of literary adventure: you never want to leave.

Luna Transgressions

Last night I accidentally left the outside light on and woke this morning to unexpected guests.

No, it wasn’t the proverbial relative soused to his hereditary genes and singing a rousing chorus of “In the cowslip’s peeps I lie/ Hidden from the buzzing fly.” And no it wasn’t a stray dog with devotion in his sad eyes. And it wasn’t even the unwanted Bible thumper with strong legs and very deplorable shoes on his feet.

It was a plethora of moths like scattered gems on my deck. Everything from a space-age luna moth to a raspberry ripple kind to a handful of pearly whites to one that looked like a crumpled leaf to a massive nocturnal beast of fur and spatula antennae.

Having no respectable employment at the moment, I think I might open a wayward home for moths. Cover my entire deck and roof and screen with the insects. Then charge suburban mothers with dreams of educating their little ones to Nature’s big house of fun. Although I’m sure the moths would complain: “It is the greatest misfortune to be unable to be alone.”

Oh, and at long last, a job at the end of the universe has answered my distress signal. I have an interview for an adjunct position teaching English. The pay is less than an electrician could make on Electric Avenue, but, it’s work I want to do. I think if I had been a sensible lad, I’d have sniffed this gig a lot sooner so that I didn’t have to take pittance in my 40s. But I was never the sort of Welshman to sell his leek for a millstone. And it’s not like I can punch the gift horse in the mouth. That’s animal cruelty. Best to take it if I’m offered the position, get some experience under my habit, and cudgel my way into a better-paying position farther down the boreen.

I’ve been so determined, even though I lack the essential qualifications, to break into the teaching profession I’ve been reciting Keats’ “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” to myself whenever I lay me down to sleep. I’ve been living off the stored-up fat of my imagination and sucking the lemon of resilience that I’ve not been taking no for an answer because either my resume went to the wrong person or else I wasn’t asking the right questions. And I’ve shut out the voices who’ve said, politely or directly, you shouldn’t go down that road, it’s littered with the bones of writers and teachers with empty alm bowls. I’m not troubled by such voices cause I’ve got Goethe on my side: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now”: Rilke: “Trust to the difficult”: and Marwood (the I in Withnail and I): “Even a stopped clock tells the time twice a day.” You’ve got to make your own way in this world even if you don’t have Virgil or a Baedeker or a professional protocol droid to guide you.

So there it is, my life’s story in a couple of cuckoo trills.

Kimchi And Grooving Off My Own Portable

The sun has risen in Maine.

Have you ever noticed that those who make the most noise are the conformists grumbling downstairs?

Deep down in a vegetable part of myself, I feel like fermented cabbage. I suppose it helps to have taken a sudden liking to kimchi.

Sometimes the world delivers: the UPS truck drives up and hands you an unexpected parcel. Other times, nothing. But I’m not the kind of person to go down on his knees and pray. I tend to get on my bike and shout: “I’m not impressed at all!”

God, the sky is that rich blue with drifting clouds and the sun is hanging there in fiery suspension of belief.

Last night I put on headphones and listened to Roxy Music’s Avalon followed by New Order’s Lost Sirens. I slept well, only once turning over to glimpse Morrissey pouting in the corner because I hadn’t listened to him.

I am a man who loves to fill a basin with literary quotes and bathe my perambulating feet. Here’s one by Virginia Woolf that gets right between the toes:

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”

You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby

“Hello.”

“Hello, sir.”

“I’ve come about the author’s job.”

“I’m afraid that position is filled.”

“But you still have a vacancy sign in the window.”

“That is correct. It’s there to inspire.”

“So there’s no author’s position available?”

“Afraid not. Far too many to begin with.”

“Is there anything available? I’m quite devilish with a fork.”

“Well, we do have a position in accounting.”

“I’m terrible with numbers.”

“So is the accountant.”

“Would it help to say I’ve got a book?”

“Afraid not, sir. They all say that.”

“I have a pretty face? Lovely locks of hair?”

“That would be a lie, sir.”

“Sorry. How about I’m young?”

“That would be stretching the truth a little, sir.”

“How about I’m good friends with Patrick McCabe.”

“The butcher’s boy? Sorry, his favours have expired. Had you said Stieg Larsson, you might have got somewhere.”

“But he’s dead.”

“Indeed.”

“Can I level with you? I’m desperate. My family is starving and the penguin needs a new igloo and I want to be published like everyone else and make a living.”

“Are your family really starving, sir?”

“No, but, please, don’t you have something, anything?”

“Well there is something. There’s a position for a maid-in-waiting for Gillian Flynn. Or a butler for James Patterson. Or I might be able to squeeze you in as a nanny for EL James.”

“Does she have kids?”

“Does it matter?”

“Look, I appreciate what you’re doing for me, but couldn’t I just get a job covering some artist’s songbird at night, say for some writer who’s not so glossy, so perfect, so judicious, so stable, so secure, such a safety box of words and degrees and honors and titles and an armada of marketing experts?”

“An artist? Oh, dear me, sir, you are all muddled up. Maybe you’d better try the hedged-in place down the road. They’re always in need of an idiot.”

Absolute Beginner

The rain it raineth every day in Maine! And someone on my street is getting a well drilled. Why not just set out a few buckets?

Had we but world enough, and time…. Actually, I do have enough time on my side and I have been doing some light reading: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Calvino’s Cosmicomics, Duncan’s The Last Werewolf, Swamplandia, Simmons’ The Terror, Saunders’ CivilWarLand,Donald Barthelme’s short stories, and Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad.

My job search is still a work in progress. I have applied to everything from a post at the Republican Journal to a freelance copy editor job at HBO to working as a faucet in the kitchen sink.

“This is one moment,/ But I know that another/ Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.” TS Eliot

I’ve also been applying for a teaching gig, but, get behind the fool if it isn’t almost impossible to break into this line of work without a bruiser or simony. I don’t have enough teaching experience, and won’t get any if nobody takes a chance on me, Abba-style, and adjunct positions are now the new feudal economy. It bites the biscuit. And I have an MFA but I can’t teach high school English!? I feel like an English aristocrat with a big manor and not money to buy himself a fucking brolly. I sometimes think Jude the Obscure and I would have a lot to talk about in the pursuit of happiness. But, then, I’ve never done things according to civilized conduct.

“I’m all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily….”

I feel mildly like what’s his name, you know, Caedmon, that herdsman in Whitby around AD 680 who rushes back to his cows instead of singing at the feast.

Where’s a Gilles de Rais when you need one?

And between me and my shadow, the writing world can sometimes, well, loose its romantic ideal and give way to routine. And everywhere I look now all I see are writers loaded down with degrees and accomplishments and happy, professional smiles. What the hell happened to writers who are exiles, outsiders, runaways, castaways? Did I fall asleep like Rip Van Winkle while somebody pinched my idea of a writer? As someone with an MFA, whatever happened to writers whose imaginations detonated life? Or writers who didn’t come out of the binding fully formed without a blemish, without a writerly deformity or failing? Am I not reading enough? Am I living too much a sheltered life in my cosmos while the incandescent form around me? Is my individual path as a writer merely atoms scattered in curved space? And when they kick down my front door, how am I going to come, with my hands on my head or on the trigger of my gun?

“My life had stood – a loaded gun.” Dickinson

“Life was beautiful in those days.” Calvino

I know, I should Twitter about my frustrations and get a jolly following of custard pies.

Instead, I’m listening to the 80s Scottish band Lowlife. Damn if the lead singer doesn’t have a voice like a fallen angel walking Dante’s dark wood. And I’m lounging with Pigbag, post-punk English band with fusion running in their musical veins.

The Present Is Unavoidable

I haven’t blogged in a while.

There has been a reason: I have been in flagrante with incidents and situations from common life. I have been dabbling in the infinite complexity of pleasure and pain.

Let me put it more plainly in a demotic tongue: I got laid off back in February from my job as a copy editor and I’ve had things on my mind.

But didn’t Wordsworth write about emotion recollected in tranquility? Well, I’ve had so much solitude and tranquility, I’m close to hearing voices.

It is said that the big things in life are never planned.

This wasn’t. It came like a mouse at the door that roared like a lion. But the first horror is there’s horror, right? But let’s get one thing straight: I don’t miss my job. It had become nothing more than a cross I was nailed to with no possibility of salvation. Not that I have any delusions of the religious kind and wanted to be saved.

I just wanted adventure in my life again! And, presto, I got what I’d been secretly wishing for.

Eleven years at the same job just begs some Shakespeare: Horatio, darling, don’t you know there are more things in heaven and earth than security, conformity, and conservation?

And bosses…. If you’ve had one lousy one, then you know the torment of Prometheus having his liver pulled out.

It hasn’t been easy, though, lest you think I’ve been sitting on the summit of idleness. The last few months I’ve felt like I’ve been jumping off the roof of my own house, over and over again, like a bad rerun of To the Poorhouse Born. But it’s better than being pushed off the roof.

With no job to keep my trousers up, I’ve been seeking a new one, sending out my resume like Childe Harold on a pilgrimage. (Maybe that is why I haven’t netted anything yet!) But what are a few months compared to a life of uncertainty and the creative spirit unbound? Nothing now is certain, every thing is in flux, there’s no firm ground to stand on because I’m grounded in the unknowable. Sure, every day I wake to certain facts, but I’ve always taken more pleasure in seeing life as a fiction.

“Keep the heart awake to love and beauty.” Coleridge.

Plus I’ve been busier now than as a man with an unpromising career in the magazine business. I have finished my dark, modern fairy tale set in the Twilight of the Third Reich, which is being considered by an agent; I’m now into a new novel; and have been writing, editing, and sending out short stories that nobody seems to know what to do with except send back to me.

I think I have entered a transitional stage. I hope so or else I’m on a very sloppy, slippery ride down into farce. And the ground I stand on is one of definite uncertainty, and in a strange way, it has given me more of a vivid life, more of a present life lived in the moment. And come to think of it, that’s what life is, the messy bits of doubts and caprice, joy and pain, and lots of exhaustive waiting for what’s around the perpetual corner. I think we’ve been swindled into believing it’s all about the future at the expense of the present and the liquidation of the past. Sometimes I wish as a species we weren’t cursed with always thinking about the future, any future. I wish I could just learn to focus better on the present and enjoy things a bit more. And I try to. But it’s hard to put a spring in one’s heels when there’s the chance of getting a boot in one’s face.

I think as a person, and certainly as a creative one, you have to be willing to take risks but also willing to accept uncertainty. And anyway, uncertainty has been around much longer than social media and its lively camp of We Exist Now, Don’t Mess With Our Plan. Plus, if light can exist as both particle and wave, then what’s so bad with being an individual who has no idea what path he’s on or where he is heading? There’s a certain attraction to this as much as the mind wants to squash the quantum mystery with reason and practicality, two conditions I’ve never had much heart or mind for.

I’ve read that in the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. So, in the economy of my self, I’ve going to let come what may….

Oh, and write more. Because if there is a future, then it’s got to contain me as a writer living off his writing, not out of some arrogance, but out of a desire to see what kind of man I might turn out to be if left to my own vices.

As Dr. Dee once told his acolyte: You can’t have transformation without an alchemy of the self.