“my heart is like a broken cup; I only feel right on my knees…”

I’ve had very little to say for months now; even my internal dialogues, usually so rich with words yearning to be written, seem strangely mute and barren. Never did I think that I would be unable to write, to create, yet now I fear that my intellectual decline has decline. Perhaps it is only melancholy, or depression. Perhaps it is too many years of loneliness, disappointment, and estrangement. Perhaps it is merely ennui, or a normal fallow period of life. Rilke, after all, waited years to complete the stunning Sonnets to Orpheus after the beguilement of an effortless beginning. Words may yet return to me. And yet…

And yet I notice changes deep within my heart which make me fear that I will never again experience the thrilling intensity of daily life itself. I rarely read anymore, for one thing. Books are no longer a comfort. Even the deep feeling of music escapes me. I am changing in ways I don’t understand yet; I don’t particularly like the person that I am becoming. Perhaps, now that I think about it, I don’t like the person that I’ve been all along.

I know there’s a place you’ve walked
where love falls from the trees
My heart is like a broken cup
I only feel right on my knees
I spit out like a sewer hole
yet still receive your kiss
How can I measure up to anyone now
after such a love as this?

You. You. You. Ah, you.

No One’s Sleep (The First Published Excerpt)

Baltimore, a bright Saturday morning in early August. All my nerve endings on fire, in pain that becomes more intense by the hour, sleepless for days, unwashed, sick from withdrawal, sick with worry, and sick in heart and body, I step out of my apartment building on North Eutaw Street, take a wistful look south at Camden Yards a few blocks away, and then walk the half block to East Fayette.

“Yo, Ed,” Outlaw says, standing down the street at the intersection with North Howard. The blue and white light rail train clatters by, maybe on its way south to the airport, I think.. “Hurry up. I told you I have to catch the bus.”

I give him a brief wave, more of an acknowledgment than amity (I‘ve paid him more than enough when we‘ve done business before that he doesn‘t have the right to tell me to hurry), and walk across the street toward the KFC and the pawn shop on the corner–the pawn shop which already holds my notebook computer, Citizen Eco-drive watch and lovely, beautifully-grained, hollow-body Epiphone guitar. I haven’t had so much as a dime in over a week. I’ve been drinking tap water just to stay alive.

Please click on the link below for reader comments on this section of the book.

http://edlynch.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/no-ones-sleep-the-first-published-excerpt

World Leader Pretend

The greatest fear of any writer? Being unable to write, of course. And though some have posed that Hemingway’s suicide was because of a loss of faculty, it’s Hemingway himself who wrote late in his life that the process is always there in the conscious mind, that”all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written…it was good and severe discipline.

I’ve been thinking a lot, obviously, about the act and process of writing. I’ve been thinking about writing, I must admit, because I haven’t been doing very much of it for months now. I’ve been wondering if I can still write, and if I can, if what I write will be any good. I’ve been wondering if I still have a modicum of talent, if I’m still a writer at all.

Other needs have conspired, so to speak, to silence me. The fact that these needs are costly and destructive have done little to deter them. The fact that they have stalled a book-in-progress shames me, however, and hopefully will be one of the reasons (reasons, plural…it will require much help to get going again) that I will be able to once again call myself a writer. I’m facing a series of walls. But “it’s high time I raze the walls that I’ve constructed…”

*R.E.M., “World Leader Pretend”
1988 Nightgarden Music

“the last thing that you said as you were leaving…”

The morning I left Pennsylvania, I drove south without looking back. There was no final, bittersweet, last visit to the pub. There was no final walk through the town. There was no final look at the Penn State campus, with people just beginning to realize their dreams. There were no goodbyes; there was no one to say goodbye to. I left the same way I arrived: with a car full of books and clothes, and a mind full of hopes, ideas, ambitions, and dreams. I left with little; I left with the things I came with. I left with the things which can never be taken away.

So now I’m going back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
they’re an illusion to me now
some are mathematicians
some are carpenters wive’s
don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives
but me I’m still on the road
heading for another joint
we always did feel the same
we just saw it from a different point of view
tangled up in blue*

If you’re busy enough and manage to distract yourself enough, you can convince yourself that you’re not homesick and that you don’t miss the people that you love. At least, not that badly. There’s always a holiday coming up, some time off from work, a long weekend to look forward to. There’s always something to hold onto. But someday, no matter how strong you are, those dates on the calendar are no longer enough. You need to see them more often: the people that you love. And when it comes to children, you cannot help but wonder: do they still love you? I thought about that as I was leaving…and I realized that I just didn’t know.

I can’t remember the last thing you said as you were leaving
and the days go by so fast**

Through Maryland and West Virginia I wondered. As I finally entered Kentucky, I still wondered. I didn’t know if my sons would welcome me back to Lexington, or if they would view my return as another retreat and failure. But this time, I had a story to tell and a book to write, and it wasn’t going to be written in Pennsylvania. I was coming home with a purpose, and that, I hoped, they would understand. If I was to become the writer I always wanted to be, first I had to come home.

Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, wrote that distance is essential in writing of closely held emotions and experiences: “…in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself…and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.”

Substitute emotional distance for geographic distance, though, and you essentially accomplish the same thing. The key for any writer is maturity, perspective, and command of your material. That I have. So it really doesn’t matter if I write in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, or Katmandu. I remember the old question: who, after all, is a writer? One who writes…of course. We make this alchemy seem too complicated sometimes, I think. Words turn into pages turn into chapters into books. It’s not that difficult, is it?

No. It’s really not. And it’s much easier when you can simply drive across town and spend time with the people that you love.

*Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue” (from the album Blood On The Tracks)

**Counting Crows, “A Long December” (from the album Recovering the Satellites)

the writing life

Writers, it seems, sometimes like to read about the act of writing as much as we enjoy the alchemy itself. The image of a young Hemingway in Paris is part of my consciousness; many, many years ago, A Moveable Feast became my standard of how a writer should work and live.

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write…

We know now that the mere act of sharpening pencils was part of Hemingway’s process for writing, a means to put himself in the right frame of mind for creating stories from memory and imagination. We each…procrastinate…a little before losing ourselves in the solitary and frequently frustrating act of writing. What writers don’t ordinarily admit, however, is that part of the delay is based on fear: fear that the writing won’t go well, that the feelings and stories we wish to express will evaporate before our eyes, that we lack the talent or vision to express what we secretly feel. Writing is a brave act, much more than what Fitzgerald wrote about “swimming underwater and holding your breath.” It’s an act of faith and hope and dreams, of laying your soul bare before the world. It’s a tightrope act, walking a wire without a net and never knowing if you’ll keep your balance or fall (and fail) in the attempt. It requires more than a little courage, not to mention the unshakable belief that the writer’s vision and belief is truly worth exploring. It’s not self-aggrandizement or justification;  it’s the eternal hope to make the reader feel, to touch someone’s heart and inspire that little glimmer of self-recognition in the stories we tell.

Annie Dillard, also, wrote eloquently of the process in her book The Writing Life:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.

So, hold nothing back, then.  Something else, Dillard writes, will occur to you later. It always does, in one form or another. To be able to write it well, though, requires a form of concentration, talent, and a sense of hope and wonder that most persons do not possess. I make no claims to the talent part. But I have never, ever, given up this thing we refer to as hope.

“beside the green apple sea”

Tonight I’m thinking about my many…faults. Last night at the bookstore I told a friend, “I  am a perfectly imperfect person.” I must have heard it or read it somewhere, as with so many of the words I live by. Sometimes I live behind the words of others; sometimes everything that I’ve read and heard and learned and lived with coalesces into something that, on my very best days, might pass for some sort of minor originality.

it’s 4:30 A.M. on a Tuesday
it doesn’t get much worse than this
in beds in little rooms in buildings in the middle
of these lives which are completely meaningless,
help me stay awake, I’m fallin
asleep in perfect blue buildings*

I am, after all this time, learning–especially about myself. I’m building a new life in a city where I know hardly anyone, and I can’t help but wonder: is this my fault, or is the task of finding true friends as difficult as it sometimes seems to be? Questions. There are always questions.

My poet says, and I have always tried to remember, “…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”**

Patience, then. We must all be patient. I must be patient, as I am slowly and inevitably learning. I’m learning that my talents are somehow still intact, and I am learning that the writing I’m doing now is going well–even if some of it, as I noted elsewhere, is like Gertrude Stein’s admonition to Hemingway, inaccrochable. Which doesn’t mean the prose or the story is poor, of course. It’s just not something I can blog about. And besides, it’s for my book.

Did I mention that I’m learning to read again? I’m speaking, of course, of the kind of reading I used to do: ravenous and focused. Some of the books I’m turning to these days are old friends, while others of course are new. I’m still…learning…as always. I’m learning about my art and my strength (which I didn’t know I still have) and most of all, I’m learning about myself.

Thankfully, my latest lessons don’t involve a great deal of “fear and self-loathing.” I’m trying to be the artist I thought I could always be, and the kind, patient man I’ve always wanted to become. The work itself is unfinished, of course, will always be unfinished. I am unfinished, as we all are. And if you think about it, that’s the most important and pleasant answer that we can ever hope to have.

*Counting Crows, “Perfect Blue Buildings”
**Rilke, from Letters To A Young Poet

“borne back ceaselessly into the past…”

Not sleeping, except for an occasional and all-too-brief nap after work, has taught me a lot about endurance and perseverance.  As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ve come to believe that reliability…answering the bell every day…is the most fundamental key to success (however you wish to define it).

Sleep deprivation, of course, is cumulative. Going for months (or in my case, years) on a couple hours sleep per day isn’t compensated by even a twelve-hour sleep fest. My body just…crashes…sometimes. I readily admit that. But day after day after day I’m in the office early, sometimes even after having worked in the middle of the night only a few hours before. Do my colleagues know that? Nah…but I know, and through determination and the sense of having to prove myself all over again, somehow the work gets done. I have something of a laser focus these days, and for that reason I’m doing my best work in years.

Somehow I just keep…going. Part of that is my love for what I do and the opportunity I now have; part of that is the resurgence of the ambition I once was known for. I am, as a friend recently said to me, somewhat of a victim of early success. In a small way, I look to my role models for precedents. Like Scott Fitzgerald publishing This Side Of Paradise at age 21, or John Lennon finishing with the Beatles at age 30, I enjoyed my own (admittedly minor) successes at a very young age. But life has a way of  bringing you back down to earth, and by now I’ve been humbled, hospitalized, forgotten, even ridiculed. But now I awake (well, when I do actually sleep) with a renewed sense of determination and purpose. I enjoy a wisdom that I’ve never known before, and I’m somewhat hellbent on not letting my family, my colleagues, or even myself down. Yes, I admit it: especially myself.

I remember a boy sitting at a glass-topped kitchen table in an apartment late one  night in Lexington, struggling to write a draft of a novel and listening to the rain through the open patio door. He was in love with someone with a musical, lilting, Appalachian-tinged voice; he was in love with books and writing and possibilities and especially life itself. Perhaps he was even a little in love with himself; it wouldn’t be the first time a young person had made that mistake.

Tonight the setting has changed and the boy has long since grown into a man (and hopefully a kind, thoughtful one at that). But the window is open again to the rain and “words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.”* I’m a little older now, and hopefully a little wiser. But inside me still is the boy who wants to write, to teach, to leave something of a legacy behind. “I’m looking back and I can’t see the past anymore,” Pete Townshend once wrote. For me, however, the past is ever-present…and I’m trying in my writing to make what sense of it that I can. As Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

*The Beatles, “Across The Universe,” copyright Maclen Music/ATV Songs

“Of Time And The River”

For someone who truly enjoys the company of other people, I’m beginning to face the fact that in some ways, I’ve always been sort of a loner. I believe it has something to do with the state of exquisite melancholia sometimes necessary to fuel or express great creativity; I like people too much to consciously avoid the company of others.

When I still worked in state government, I would often take lunch alone and just sit in my car somewhere relaxing for a bit and often listening to NPR (back when I still listened to the radio). I remember one winter in particular when I would park in the Frankfort cemetery, near the bluff overlooking the Kentucky River, the bridge, and the Capitol, and just sit there thinking how lucky I was to have an office looking out on the building’s front lawn (fourth window from the left, if you ever see a picture). I felt pretty important then, to be honest about it; I felt very young. But life has a way of leveling things out, and although I didn’t know it then, my day would come soon enough. I was headed for a reckoning I could never have anticipated, and to this day one I’m not sure I truly deserved.

“April is over,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “April is over.” I’m not sure what month it is now (although the calendar says almost September).  But I know that’s life’s transient joys are worthless without someone to share them with, and that even for a writer, even the best solitary memories are fated to end up as mere words on a page. Without friends, even the best moments of happiness are little more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

For someone who truly enjoys the company of other people, I’m beginning to face the fact that in some ways, I’ve always been sort of a loner. I believe it has something to do with the state of exquisite melancholia sometimes necessary to fuel or express great creativity; I like people too much to consciously avoid the company of others.

When I still worked in state government, I would often take lunch alone and just sit in my car somewhere relaxing for a bit and often listening to NPR (back when I still listened to the radio). I remember one winter in particular when I would park in the Frankfort cemetery, near the bluff overlooking the Kentucky River, the bridge, and the Capitol, and just sit there thinking how lucky I was to have an office looking out on the building’s front lawn (fourth window from the left, if you ever see a picture). I felt pretty important then, to be honest about it; I felt very young. But life has a way of leveling things out, and although I didn’t know it then, my day would come soon enough. I was headed for a reckoning I could never have anticipated, and to this day one I’m not sure I truly deserved.

“April is over,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “April is over.” I’m not sure what month it is now (although the calendar says almost September).  But I know that’s life’s transient joys are worthless without someone to share them with, and that even for a writer, even the best solitary memories are fated to end up as mere words on a page. Without friends, without someone close to your heart, even the best moments of happiness are little more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

the best part of yourself…

Sometimes you must destroy something in order to build again. It seems nonsensical, but it has the ring of bitter truth. And perhaps that something, even if it is your way of life, becomes somehow stronger than before. At least that is a shred of hope to hold onto.

This is my world

And I am world leader pretend

This is my life

And this is my time

I have been given the freedom

To do as I see fit

It’s high time I’ve razed the walls

That I’ve constructed

This is my world
And I am world leader pretend
This is my life
And this is my time
I have been given the freedom
To do as I see fit
It’s high time I’ve razed the walls
That I’ve constructed*

Everything is gestation and birthing. Rilke said that, although I did not recognize how truthful he was until just now. There does come a time when we must reinvent ourselves, and if we are very lucky, we become better people than we were before.

I have my books (or what is left of them), my writing, and the will to create. I still have love, even if it  is, for the moment at least, from a distance. I still have the joy that I find in being alive. Books on Lincoln, Franklin, writing, and spirituality await me. And there are some new translations of Rilke which I haven’t read yet. I’m holding on, rather fiercely, in this red hill town. Where the lights go down. I even bought a new leatherbound journal and a lap desk to work in bed when I don’t feel like sitting at the computer. Wasn’t it Proust who wrote in bed? Some of my best prose and insights come to me when I’m trying (usually unsuccessfully) to sleep.

Now that I think of it, I’ve written entire novels in the course of one night (or at least imagined them). I’ve fished my favorite lakes, hiked my favorite trails, and watched the full moon rise over the darkened hills. If I could just recreate one of those books, just one, I could bring an entire world to life. It would be the world as I know it, but perhaps it could still be recognizable to others who peer deeply and with great longing into their own world. You might, if I am very good and very, very, lucky, even recognize the best part of yourself.

*World Leader Pretend, words and music by R.E.M. (Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe)

if you were forbidden to write…

From Rilke, for everyone who is called to write:

There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple, “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

From Letters To A Young Poet