The Concrete Calliope
When you're dancing in a circle and falling down. Kafka in Tokyo.
To the hundred or so people subscribed: it’s been awhile. Herein you may grasp some understanding as to where I’ve been at. And, if you’ve forgotten you were even subscribed at all — stick around. Next post will be fiction.
The easier life gets the more you fuck it up. The more precious the thing in your hand, the more likely you are to break it. Ever feel that way?
Scaling the mountain, reaching the prize, that’s easy: determination, grit, passion. On the way down, jewels in your pocket: you’re sprinting tumbling no longer self aware and then — disaster strikes. You hit your head and then you hit your head again. You thought you were going up and coming down fulfilled, but no.
You were spinning in a circle, my friend. Spinning like a top to the concrete calliope. Visions of peaks and baubles abound in a blur. Illusions.
I’ve got the dancing plague. I try, I fail, I sleep, I forget to try, I fail, I sleep. A year goes by. I look around. I’m not pleased. I go back to sleep. Hear the tune?
I don’t like the options I have, as a writer. To submit and sell and socialize. The very idea of participating in creative life on any level pains me. I am, routinely disgusted by everything I see.
To participate in this thing there is a prerequisite lack of shame required. Which may be called bravery if we’re being generous, but should be called egotism if we’re being honest. And it’s difficult for me to play it out. To navigate this modern thing, sell myself as a product, do it with a jig and with dignity. How?
I’m trying for more honest thoughts than what I’m used to seeing so coyly cultivated here on Substack. From what I can tell this platform is as much to words as what Instagram is to images. Masturbation. Slick and self-satisfied and always, always written for some or another pocket community waiting for just the thing. There’s almost no fiction. The nonfiction, frankly, I can hardly comprehend. Cultural criticism or some vague contrasting of one idea with one extreme. All contingent, always, upon the awareness of some unpleasant social group that’s somehow both exclusive and rife with the most boring people you have ever met in your entire life.
At the lectern of these cyber councils I wonder if I were called up, how autistic would my contribution be? Clearing my throat, licking my lips, and asking without a hint of malice: “Who. The fuck. Cares?”
Clearly somebody does. Or at the very least they care about the social dividends garnered by participation. Every week that goes by I’m further disinterested by the state of it all, fatigued in its mere contemplation.
But we must ask: to what order are my feelings insecurity; how much is truly my character, and does it not stink a bit, just a bit, like genuine manic depression?
Tough to say!
The issue I have with writing or “writers” in general is austerity. I have always been this way. I can sense the precious voice immediately. It’s like some sort of pre-consciousness animal sense was beaten into me at birth. The moment I sense affectation I can’t help but spit and bite. The moment I sense ‘cool’ I see the beast in its entirety and I want to run it through. In High School ‘cool’ was a pathetic, but admirably savage necessity. I enjoyed High School. But I am an adult now.
It’s difficult for me to care enough to try and differentiate this critical sense of ‘austerity’ from what can be, from the right writer, sincerity. I suppose this is why I am compelled to write fiction. Because I have difficulty expressing myself, and I have almost no interest in the mawkish self-expression of others.
So around and around I go, waking up and writing a bit and haranguing my loved ones and petting my cat and trying to make some money and then going to bed. And I love life, I do, easily I do, every day. But it’s not enough. The hole there, the desire here. My oh my it is a widening widening gyre.
And speaking of…
Six years ago, listless and alone in the height of my picaresque, I read Kafka in various hotels and bars and cafés across Tokyo. I had fully submitted to this idea that I would be swallowed by my own loneliness, a black hole opening inside and vanishing me to some other end.
What I really wanted to do was write. Because I couldn’t. My claims were that of a writer from a very young age, eight or nine. But words are words and they’re nothing, aren’t they? I only wrote when I was compelled by school (and I rarely went to school).
We had these poetry contests — I’d lay stomach down on my Mom’s bed with a pen and paper and I’d think really hard about certain words I liked and the sounds they made and I’d connect them all together in a beginning and middle and end. What sprite of talent I had helped me ‘win’ those poetry contests (this was high school) but it wasn’t until Tokyo, while reading Kafka, that I wrote truly for the first time. I was 23. Hardly Rimbaud.
Before then, when I tried to write it felt like wading through chest-high mud. It was impossible. The sheer potential of the page, the overwhelming intensity of my own expectations. I’d sit and tell myself I was supposed to perform a magic trick but I’d just drown.
“Abracadabra!…. fuck it I’ll just play Halo.”
I figured it out in Tokyo though.
What I did was I took one of Kafka’s shorts, ‘Children on a Country Road’, and I typed it out in full.
In another tab, I began re-writing it but replaced each sentence noun for noun, adjective for adjective, verb for verb, with my own words. Like I was dressing Kafka’s skeleton. It took a while and it felt honest.
In the end it was just this weird, plagiarized Frankenstein story.
But I saw sentences and paragraphs and concepts that, realistically, only made sense to me. And by that, by some weird cannibalistic recreation, I found myself suddenly alleviated from this pressure, this sense of heaviness at the prospect of coming up with one sentence and then another. Following this, I read The Castle three or four times until I was properly neurotic, and then I left all my books somewhere in Tokyo and began, finally, to simply write.
Now when I sit and write, I am either, you know, experiencing Blake’s idea of “eternity being in love with the creations of time” (myself the conduit) — or I’m thinking that there is something physically lodged inside of my brain that makes me incapable of mustering a single word, much less a pretty sentence, and so I should smash my head into the nearest sharp corner.
That’s just the way it goes.
The rest of my time in Tokyo? Hm. It was long. Writing garbage. Eating snacks. Walking around. Like Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ except with Asians.
I guess I wrote this piece out, three or four times. Always deleting my rants and my ravings. Trying to excise all criticisms. Begging myself off, don’t vent don’t whine don’t complain. God I fucking hate writing about myself.
Just know that if you read, if you subscribe, or if you sense you admire anyone trying, genuinely, to write anything good — you are participating in the only known counter ritual to the slow, painful danse macabre into nothingness that is ours: the most moronic, most creatively barren period in the history of mankind.
And for that you should be admired.
More writing to come. Sometimes these things get thousands of reads, and I’m sure a good deal are bots, but, ya know — feel free to comment, lurkers.
Bren.
Dancing in a circle, falling down a hill and waking up on a sofa with grass stains everywhere. Good stuff. Enjoyed this article!
>>> “I don’t like the options I have, as a writer. To submit and sell and socialize. The very idea of participating in creative life on any level pains me. I am, routinely disgusted by everything I see.”
My feelings exactly. However, I have found quite a bit of fiction, but most of it is as empty as the non-fiction on Substack.