Kathy Acker, Peter Greenaway, and Storytelling

Posted on June 10, 2019 by Lee

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Hollywood films and popular novels are made with certain audience expectations in mind. They have a story to tell, and they are structured so that this story is easy to follow and understand. Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 – we can usually tell how much of a film is left to go by what is happening on the screen.

Structure and story tend to fit together neatly in a Hollywood film or popular novel. The structure is designed to fit the story: beginning, middle, and end. Or “orphan”, “wanderer”, “warrior”, “martyr”. The audience know what they came for: a drama in which a hero runs into trouble, learns a lesson, and meets with surprising consequences. (Recently I read Story Engineering by Larry Brooks, which explains the elements of storytelling really well.)

Sometimes it can all seem quite shallow, especially if it’s not done well. Or if it’s done so neatly that there’s just no surprise, not really. You knew from the beginning that it had to go one way or the other, and – Oh! – it went this way and not that.

Perhaps one day you’re feeling tired of the shallowness of much of popular culture – one “psychodrama” after another – and you decide you’ll try something different. You won’t try to deliver a story like that at all. Instead you’ll play with moments and textures and let a like-minded audience come to you. And perhaps you’ll feel some satisfaction in doing that for a while.

But what if, having done all that, you find you want to tell stories after all? What do you do then?

Structure is essential. But that doesn’t mean you have to revert to the Hollywood-style, story-guided template. There are all kinds of ways you can introduce structure into your work, by putting the requirement for structure before the needs of the story.

“John Cage had made a record in the ‘40s called … Indeterminacy? … for which he collected a hundred tiny narratives, fragmentary fictions. Then he looked for a structure: he would tell each story in exactly one minute. No matter how long the story.”

And that’s just one way to do it, described by Peter Greenaway in an interview with Kathy Acker. The structure is not only external to – meaning, not determined by – the stories, but it’s also utterly arbitrary: why one minute, after all? Acker explains the effect this arbitrary structure had on the storytelling:

“A very short story had to be read so slowly that it became incoherent; a long story so fast, equally incoherent.”

But structure is essential: you need something to get you started.

How can an arbitrary structure be essential? Isn’t this a contradiction? Isn’t “arbitrary” almost the opposite of “essential”?

It’s best not to think too much about it. Accept the paradox. Otherwise you’ll never begin. So he just gets to work.

So Peter Greenaway moved from abstract to “narrational” films while remaining “a lover of abstract systems.” This determined the kind of storyteller he would be. Some people are natural storytellers, while others find the process of making stories up to be a bit silly or trivial, and are ashamed that this is how they want to spend their time.

“Tell stories … without embarrassment.” You’ve done it on your own terms, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of. (There was never anything to be ashamed of, of course, but we get in the way of ourselves.)

The main thing is not to lose your own vocabulary in the process of becoming a storyteller. I suppose this is why we often feel that Hollywood films are less valuable then “real” works of art: they are so often created with a ready-made template in mind, so the original voice seems to have been lost somewhere along the way, if it was ever there at all.

What are you interested in? What are you trying to do? Why do you need to tell stories? I feel like I can tell when a writer or director has asked themselves these questions earnestly again and again all the while they’ve been working. A sense of purpose keeps the work real, keeps it from being trivial.

And not compromising. In this case, not compromising means not simplifying. All the depth and texture you wanted to get across remains and it’s not just a story but a story that’s your own and has meaning.

(Image is from Pixabay.)

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Henry Miller’s Destination

Posted on June 3, 2019 by Lee

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In Chapter 9 of Nexus, Henry and Osiecki are looking for a place to drink. It’s Osiecki’s birthday. Henry didn’t want to come out, but Osiecki offered him a bite to eat, and he couldn’t turn that down. He eats a sandwich and drinks three cups of coffee before they really hit the town.

A cab comes by. “Looking for a place?” asks the driver, and the two men get in. Henry isn’t too happy: he doesn’t like the idea of getting into a cab to “destination unknown.”

It struck me as strange to read this, to think that Henry Miller was ever troubled by a momentary loss of control, that it would trouble him to put his life into the hands of a cab driver. But now it makes sense to me.

It seemed strange because Henry Miller can seem like the writer of “going with the flow.” He’s all about acceptance of fate, for better or worse, and the fact that you can never know to what heights misfortune can take you. And indeed, he gets a good story out of this adventure, which he goes on to relate in the chapter.

But of course, half of Henry Miller’s life-story is that he always knew where he was headed. For all the ups and downs, he knew he would be a writer one day, provided he could keep body and mind together. He wasn’t following fate blindly, but always on alert for opportunities that were thrown up at him. So it shouldn’t be surprising that, since he’d already got what he needed that night – the sandwich and coffee required to keep going – he wasn’t too keen on this mysterious cab headed for who knew where.

As I’ve said, Miller did in fact get a good story out of the experience. But at the time he hadn’t even figured out how to write yet: he was still attempting to write fiction and hadn’t even thought of writing about himself. He had only the vaguest idea of the direction his own life was taking him – his goal to reach the mysterious state of being a writer. And he was always wary that a misstep would finish him before he even reached his destination. So it’s not surprising he was nervous about that enigmatic cab driver.

(Image is from Pixabay.)

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Labyrinths

Posted on May 30, 2019 by Lee

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A labyrinth is a structure from which you cannot escape.

Kathy Acker writes about the labyrinth, and how it was built to hide away the Minotaur, the illicit offspring of King Minos’s wife. The King didn’t want people to know about his wife’s unnatural sexual desires – lusting after a bull – and so he built a labyrinth to keep the Minotaur inside, to hide the secret.

Perhaps this was the first labyrinth, but it wasn’t the last.

A labyrinth is a structure from which you cannot escape.

Life is a labyrinth: there’s no escape from life. Death, you might say. But life and death are one. Life is a one-way journey to death, and there’s no getting off before you reach the destination.

Kathy Acker writes about the idea of a labyrinth as a straight line. I believe Borges wrote about the same idea.

You don’t have to think of life in this way. Somewhere you decided that death is inevitable and permanent and the end of life. Why did you do this? How did your life become a labyrinth?

It’s through the stories we share with each other that labyrinths are created.

A labyrinth is a structure from which you cannot escape.

Acker writes that a story becomes true as soon as it is told to another person. There is no such thing as a false story, unless you keep it to yourself.

Writing is a good exercise because it takes those things you might keep to yourself and makes them true. Writing, for Acker, is communication.

A labyrinth is a structure from which you cannot escape. Some stories become so powerful there’s no getting outside them.

And so, by the time we reach adulthood, we’ve been told the story again and again: and this is how it becomes true that there is no escape from death. And this truth can make us afraid, so that we don’t ask questions. You know there is a labyrinth, but you don’t dare ask what is hidden at the centre of it.

If everything is true as long as it is communicated, then we’re living in a world where contradiction is possible. It had better be possible, if the life-death story is true. Because the opposite has to be true too, for there to be any hope for humankind.

You need to experiment with different truths to open up new possibilities. The trouble with having just one story is that you get trapped in it and can’t see it from the outside.

A labyrinth is a structure from which you cannot escape.

Acker thinks a labyrinth could be hexagonal too. The good thing about a hexagon, compared to a straight line, is that it seems like something you might be able to escape from, if you were lucky or very clever. It’s more complex than a straight line, and so there might be a trick to it, some detail you’ve overlooked until now.

You need to construct new stories in order to see the old ones from the outside.

If you could see a labyrinth from the outside you would be able to find the way out, and it would cease to be a labyrinth.

A labyrinth is a structure from which you cannot escape. Even those stories that do not come to dominate an entire culture tend to remain: we cannot escape any truth that has become true. The only way out is through the labyrinth: stories and more stories, labyrinths and more labyrinths.

A labyrinth is a structure from which you cannot escape: it always comes back to the form of the labyrinth, the form of truth- and story-telling.

(Image is from Pixabay.)

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Kindred Spirits (Notes on Henry Miller’s Nexus)

Posted on May 27, 2019 by Lee

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Chapter 8 of Henry Miller’s Nexus is about the role that other people can play in the life of an artist, for better or worse. Life can seem lonely for an artist, without anyone in the world who understands you, and Stasia wants to leave New York for this reason.

She is disgusted with the “beehives” of New York: the skyscrapers that house all those “monsters”, as she calls the people of the city. She wants to go back to Nature.

She remembers her innocence: “I was so aware. Often I got down on my knees – to kiss a flower … Yes, I knew how to commune with Nature.”

Getting away from the monstrous people of the city is everything now. She doesn’t seem to care about finding like-minded souls, people who might recognise her struggle as an artist. In fact, it is such souls that she blames for her loss of innocence. They told her she had talent, that she was an artist. And with those words they took something away from her:

“The flowers no longer spoke to her, or she to them. When she looked at Nature she saw it as a poem or a landscape. She was no longer one with Nature. She had begun to analyse, to recompose, to assert her own will.”

It made her believe that the truth lay in what was artificial, and so of course she was soon attracted to the idea of city life. She was now far away from the flowers and trees, from the things that previously had really inspired her.

While Stasia seems to believe that escaping human society altogether might solve her problems, we know that Henry will never quite come around to this view. For all he might have craved a bit more peace and quiet in later life, hiding away in Big Sur, he remained to the end of his days a social animal. And for now he seems to think staying in the city is the answer. After reading the biographies of a number of writers he dearly wishes to emulate, artists who struggled on until they eventually found success, he asks himself:

“And I, was I to add my name to this host of illustrious martyrs? To what further depths of degradation had I to sink before acquiring the right to join the ranks of these scapegoats?”

He seems to believe in this moment that he is on the right track. Since all artists before him have suffered, then he must accept his suffering here in New York. And one day his purgatory will be over and he will be allowed to become what he is, a writer just like those he admires.

There is talk of going to Europe, but this will mean more suffering too. What’s important is to take your punishment, wherever you happen to be, until the time is ripe.

In a way, Stasia appears to have been right in this case, and Henry wrong. Henry did have to leave New York to become an artist. Later he will say that if he had never left for Paris he would have remained forever in the gutter. You can’t just wait for change to occur: at the vital moment you have to make it happen.

But while Stasia wants to commune with Nature, Henry wants to commune with artists:

“Stasia’s words came to mind – the need to meet a kindred spirit, in order to grow, to give forth fruit. To hold converse (on writing) with the lovers of literature was fruitless. There were many I had already met who could talk more brilliantly on the subject than any writer. (And they would never write a line.) Was there anyone, indeed, who could speak discerningly about the secret processes?”

It’s the secrets of writing that Henry can’t get access to here in New York, any more than Stasia can get access to Nature, pure and unspoiled. New York is artificial, full of critics and experts, with nothing of the real human spirit. Since it’s in the depths of the human soul that real art and literature are created, he needs to get down beneath the surface if he is to discover how this creation can occur.

Henry sits in the public library, barely glancing at the book in front of him, dreaming about the novels he will write. He is writing “in the head”, since he isn’t able to put pen to paper just yet. The critics and professors of literature wouldn’t call this writing at all. But Henry doesn’t believe that you should go to the critics and professors if you want to discover the secrets of becoming an artist.

And since Henry doesn’t know yet who you should go to for such secret knowledge, for now he will sit in the library and commune with himself.

(Image is from Pixabay.)

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Hegel’s Scepticism

Posted on May 23, 2019 by Lee

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Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is an exercise in scepticism.

People who call themselves “sceptics” often pride themselves on having their own ideas about the world, and trusting the evidence of their own senses. This is better than accepting established truths and arguments from authority. The sceptic says: Think for yourself!

But Hegel thinks that sceptics can be just as bad as those they criticise: holding fast to your ideas and impressions just because they are your own is no less dogmatic than holding onto ideas because you learned them in school.

For Hegel, real scepticism means being willing to let go of whatever ideas you have, however you acquired them. Few people are willing to be sceptics in this sense, because it means following a path of “despair,” where every belief you hold and cherish is held up for questioning and will, most likely, be cast aside as you progress.

But Hegel warns us to take care as we progress. It’s not as simple as throwing everything away until you are utterly free of beliefs. Nihilism can be a form of dogmatism. It can be a comfort to reject every truth as having no value altogether. Life becomes easy for the nihilist, who only has to find the negative in a thing in order to cast it aside, and never has to find the positive in anything.

Scepticism has value only if we also keep in mind the principle of “determinate negation,” which means looking for the positive in every negative. No idea or belief or impression is so false that it has no value whatsoever, and every negative result, every failure of consciousness to find the truth, can itself be turned into a new starting point. In other words: we can learn something from every wrong turn we make.

Determinate negation is the principle of the Phenomenology because it allows Hegel to proceed along the sceptical path of doubt while also constructing a systematic account of all the various errors that human consciousness can run into as it searches for the truth. Every time consciousness is proved wrong a new starting point is created from that failure, and so consciousness’s adventure can continue from where it left off, and the Phenomenology can recount its story.

(Image is from Wikimedia Commons.)

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Notes on Henry Miller’s Nexus: Burying the Past

Posted on May 20, 2019 by Lee

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In Europe, Henry will acquire “a new body and a new soul”. Then he can make use of his experiences: what he has taken from New York, and from all his life so far.

We’ve seen throughout Nexus that Henry is never short of ideas. But they come so thick and fast that he can’t keep up, and his mind gets entangled. A new body and soul will mean he can finally make use of the ideas that come to him. He will be mentally and physically agile enough to keep up with them, and catch them, and bend them to his will.

It’s a spiritual transformation he’s looking for, not an intellectual one. He’s not going to understand life any better, but he will know better how to “drink of its undying essence.”

With his new body and soul he will acquire a new constitution, which will allow him to take life as it comes.

Heading out for his daily walk, Henry runs into MacGregor – a friend he’s been trying to avoid. He talks to him sharply, wishing he would “go to hell.” But now they’ve parted he’s feeling remorse for the way he’s behaved. He felt his friend needed some harsh words to stir him into action, but is that any way to talk to someone?

Get down off your high horse! he tells himself. He had blamed MacGregor for lacking any seriousness or purpose in life, but in doing so, he realises now, he’s overlooked the one thing they have in common: “plain ordinary human weakness.” It wasn’t for him to judge his friend, but to share in his suffering, to make life easier for him in that moment.

Looking back at his judgemental attitude he can see that he’s still trying to analyse and take apart life, rather than drinking of it unreservedly. Set aside judgement and what’s left? Compassion, love … all the things that make life worthwhile. To drink of that moment with his friend would have meant kindness rather than judgement.

Later it’s Henry’s turn to receive some advice. Sid tells him: “You’ve got to bury the past!” He thinks Henry’s success is certain if only he’ll look forward to it instead of remaining stuck in his old conceptions. Henry is always complaining about America and his own people, blaming them for all his ills. It’s not until he lets go of this bitterness that he’ll be able to move on to the next stage.

It’s ironic that this is the way to become a writer: burying the past to be able to write about the past. Once it’s buried you can unearth it in your own time. Carefully and deliberately. Master of the material now, rather than the victim of the painful memories.

I think this tension always existed in Miller – it’s this paradox that defines him: a demand for life, which means unreserved enjoyment, versus a demand for writing, which requires understanding and deliberation. Somewhere amidst the confused and contradictory statements Miller makes lies the truth of the matter. But can this truth ever be unearthed?

(Image is from Pixabay.)

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Silence

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Lee

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When interviewed, Andy Warhol could appear aloof and arrogant. He famously preferred to give one word answers – usually “Yes” and “No” – or even just to nod or shake his head. He preferred even more not to give interviews at all.

When famous personalities behave like this it can seem that they consider themselves superior. It can make people dislike them.

In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol there’s a lot that seems sincere, amid all the jokes and absurdity that make the book so great. One thing Warhol says that I believe is how nervous he would get about TV interviews. I’ve never had my 15 minutes of TV fame but, from the small experience I have had of public speaking and performing, I can relate to what he describes: the constant silent mantra he repeats over and over “I’m going to faint. I’m going to faint. I know I’m going to faint. Have I fainted yet? I’m going to faint.”

Some people say it’s a good sign if you’re nervous. It means you care about what you’re doing. But it can make things really difficult too.

Warhol always said he wanted a TV show, and perhaps one of the less serious reasons he gives for not wanting to talk on TV is that he’s so jealous of the host for having a TV show that he can’t speak for the seething envy. Even if he’s just joking, I think we can see a human side to Warhol here: his lack of cooperation comes not from a sense of superiority but from inferiority. He doesn’t have a TV show of his own so he sees himself as a failure in this respect.

Andy Warhol says he likes “Talkers”. He admires them because they are creating something: all this talk. So rather than thinking of him sitting aloof there, we should imagine him enjoying the conversation around him, admiring the Talkers who, again, are managing to do something he’s incapable of.

By all accounts, Warhol could really talk when we was off the television. But talking on TV was something he just couldn’t do.

Somewhere – I can’t remember if it’s in this book or not – Warhol says he likes people who talk because it means he doesn’t have to. Again I can relate: who likes to carry the conversation?

Far from seeming alien or superior, Andy Warhol’s silence on TV now seems more like common sense to me.

(Image is from Pixabay.)

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To Own an Inch of Earth

Posted on May 13, 2019 by Lee

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Neal Cassady wrote to Jack Kerouac that when writing “one should forget all rules, literary style, and other such pretensions.” And what he wrote next was really beautiful:

“… Rather, I think, one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly and sincerely putting on paper that which he saw and experienced, loved and lost; what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires …”

This seriousness of the task of writing that Cassady evokes is what I find so stirring in this passage: humility and sincerity are the virtues of the writer, and it’s by taking the task of writing seriously that you find real freedom in it.

According to Barry Miles, Kerouac was impressed with Cassady’s advice and took it to heart. Kerouac had already written a novel, but from now on he would write memoir: stories about what really happened, as close to the truth as he could tell them.

In his novel there had been a scene where three women – Mrs. Martin, her daughter Ruth, and a cousin called Leona – sit on the swing in the back yard under the moon. The cousin exclaims “Ooh! ain’t the moon grand!” at which point Mr. Martin mimics loudly from the kitchen: “Ain’t the moon gry-and!” And then when Cousin Leona has just sighed at the moon about “the irony of this life,” out charges Mr. Martin, again with his vicious mimicry: “Oh, the irony of liaf.”

Kerouac pours scorn on Mr. Martin, for having missed the significance of the moment, and for mocking something he didn’t understand:

“The women rock back and forth in the old creaking swing, reaching mechanically into the popcorn bowl, musing, contented, belonging to the wonderful darkness and the ripe June world, owning it, as no barging man of the house could ever hope to belong to any part of the earth or own an inch of it.”

What Mr. Martin was lacking was the humility and sincerity that’s required in order to belong to and own the present moment. Presumably, Kerouac had found himself lacking in that seriousness from time to time, as we all do too often. And so Cassady’s words resonated with him. Kerouac’s task as a writer now is to recapture, in the process of writing, that seriousness that enables a soul to own an inch or more of earth.

(I’ve been reading Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats by Barry Miles and The Town and the City by Jack Kerouac. The image is from Pixabay.)

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Love and Understanding (Notes on Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City)

Posted on May 10, 2019 by Lee

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To children and writers, a landscape presents mysteries to be contemplated rather than solved. Jack Kerouac opens his The Town and the City with a description of the course of the Merrimac River, its “broad and placid” flow “broken at the falls to make frothy havoc” until, foaming on, it “suddenly swings about in a wide and peaceful basin” before it disappears entering “an infinity of waters.” The river has flowed on and on for all time, fed by “endless sources and unfathomable springs,” and we, as readers, are invited to contemplate its mysterious endlessness.

A child sitting on the river’s edge is content to contemplate such a great thing, enchanted for hours and hours by the sight and sound of the water rushing by. A writer like Kerouac has the same childlike impulse: to simply watch, and be content to describe the endless movement of the river without ever solving its great mystery.

Grownups don’t have time for such things. They work in the factories pressed together in the midst of this landscape – “brick, primly towered, solid” – and when they do not work they eat and rest with their families. There are mysteries to be contemplated here at home too – for example, Francis Martin, George’s third child, who nobody can make out. He’s “always moping and sulking,” and it’s easy enough just to say he’s crazy. But his mother is more sensitive: “You can’t expect too much from Francis … He’s a strange boy, you’ve just got to understand him.” “Understanding” here to mean accepting the mystery, like “being understanding” rather than analysing the situation: Francis is who he is, and you’ve got to accept him for all his mystery, just like everyone else.

Writers, like children, have time for mystery, and so Kerouac would never just dismiss someone like Francis as crazy. Love and understanding are the basis of writing. Like the children described on the first page of Kerouac’s first book, sitting contented beside the river, we also must have the patience to simply enjoy the mystery of what is before us, if we are to acquire the true understanding of a writer like Kerouac.

(Image is from Wikimedia Commons.)

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Getting into a Rut: Notes on The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Posted on May 8, 2019 by Lee

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Andy Warhol writes about time spent alone – in a “rut”, as he calls it.

How he gets into a rut: “Go to my room, fluff up the pillow, turn on a couple of TVs, open a box of Ritz crackers, break the seal on a box of Russell Stovers, sit down with the latest issue of every magazine except TV Guide from the corner newsstand, then pick up the phone and call everybody I know to ask them to look in their TV Guides to tell me what’s on, what’s been on, what’s going to be on. I also enjoy rereading the newspaper.”

Sometimes people call him up when he’s alone like this, to talk about business. They always apologise for interrupting his rut. “They know how much I like it,” he says.

I think “rut” is such a good name for it. It makes me think of dirt, and I do always feel sort of grubby after a long enough time spent wallowing in the sort of way Warhol describes. Today it’s box sets and instant messaging.

I think Warhol explains well why time spent like this is so enjoyable. It comes down to the fact that when you’re not doing anything then it seems like time isn’t moving, and life might continue forever like this.

When time moves, things happen: new people, new problems. Warhol likes to keep things standing still for as long as possible.

Warhol doesn’t have much to say about death: his chapter on the subject is only a paragraph long. So perhaps he isn’t worried about that. Rather than trying to make himself immortal by doing nothing, Warhol is just trying to stop any more things happening for a while.

Warhol isn’t afraid of death, but he is afraid of “problems”: he just wants life to be as easy as possible.

Time spent in a rut is an intermission, or an “innermission”, he writes. You retreat into yourself, into an inner space where nothing is happening. Things only happen out there, in the world. If you’re here, where nothing is happening, then time isn’t moving, and you won’t have any problems for a while.

If you go out and do things, like going around travelling all the time, then life is going to move really fast. “I don’t like to travel,” writes Warhol, “because I really like slow time and for a plane you have to leave three or four hours ahead of time, so that’s a day right there. If you really want your life to pass like a movie in front of you, just travel, you can forget your life.”

Life is the opposite of a movie, for Warhol. Life shouldn’t just flash by. This explains why Warhol’s movies were so un-movie-like: he wanted to capture life, passing by slowly, so you almost can’t tell time is passing.

In his painting he aims for “quantity” above all else, he says. Doing the same thing again and again is the ideal: it’s easy, and there are no problems. Repetition is a way of staying in the same moment.

When we talk of someone “getting into a rut”, we usually mean to say: that person has a big problem. They’re stuck and they can’t get out. What Andy Warhol explains is that the reason we get into our ruts – to begin with, at least – is that they can seem like the perfect way to avoid the problems of the world altogether.

(Image is from Pixabay)

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