Down the secrets of underground medicine
Mine, this character's, a poor city-dweller's, a citizen of the current recession, a woman living in fear of an acid attack, a homeless man in the park fearing the intervention of a cop or a vigilante, a child fearing the violent appraisal of a failed father, a mother fearing for her general well-being. If, from the very beginning, you are led to believe that your passion for union will do you well and that, as a life skill, it is the one to cultivate at expense of all others, what happens when this passion is compromised at every turn by alienation, weakness and refusal? Well, that's reality - in one sense - and one sense among many senses, I suppose. But I think it might strive for: better than what we worry we actually are. It's a big word used by early American philosophers to denote, well what? That nature will save us? That God is in the trees? I don't know really.
I think the biggest betrayal for the "lad" of the novel is that his abiding love for life, and for the world, must constantly combat the constant dissolution of love and community and transcendence. The plate tectonics of love which shift more timorously than any of the earth's bones. Of course, for better or for worse, I have to take into account the recent calamitious changes in my own life that rest themselves upon daily-shifting plates of illusion and ambiguity. This is best because it is the least likely. Of caves, and tunnels, and gardens, and hidden realms. For me, the best cover-story is something out of folklore.
It is my attempt, as a first-time novelist, to ring out a singular cover story for all the paranoias and fascinations and failures of a life up to the point of an early thirty-year old's. Often, language itself - as in when we say: I love you, or: I'm scared - are our only actions. The actions that accrue to fill your life are forever obscured by the language we enact to describe, expand, and rationalize these actions. A memoir then is twice-removed from the commentary that occurred in the inscrutable heat of certain moments. Your whole life is a commentary on your own life. You are asked, in essence, to write a novel. After all, when asked to write about yourself, you are asked to write about what goes in your head. The novel, itself, I realize is a shamelessly hyperbolic novelization of my memories.
That was the trip when we caught the dying butterfly, preserved it - and found, via photographs, evidence of a disturbing trap lain by vagabond criminals in the garbage-strewn woods fringing the dried-out river. I'm closing in on the end of the third book: a chaotic black journal I first purchased in Santa Cruz on my thirtieth birthday that is one part diary, and two parts working notes for stories and a novel. I have three fat scatter-shot notebooks that attempt to work out the "novel" I'm working on.