I just scanned Sunless, published in 2007 and reread “Echo,” a story about attachment and loss as well as love. It is strange for me to look back upon what I’ve written. Often the sense is who wrote these thoughts. At times I am pleased with the way they have been written. When you add up the amount of stories I’ve written, it amounts to 42, 27 in a book about the Holocaust, the other 15 in Sunless. I began writing short stories because I found them a good way to tell a story with concision. The i Tetralogy was my first novel and it came in at 343 pages. Since then books of essays or memoirs averaged from 125 pages to 200 pages. I am writing less but I hope with greater intensity. NMM may come in about 130 pages. Insecurity settles in with the fear I am running out of steam after eight books. Perhaps.
I am free to do what I want as a scribbler; I write the book. I edit and self-publish the book, and I push it along with some publicity; then I add it to my shelf, an array of accomplishment. I hand out my books to potential mates on eharmony, or possible connections, to friends, to potential friends, as a greeting card which they are. NMM may become an active seller if places of bereavement, rehabs, hospices, mortuaries, et al are informed of its merit. The book is written from an existential and stoical point, god and religion are absent except for my left jabs at the systems. The book is not something Hallmark would merchandise. Essentially the book is one more memoir with a different point of view, but a memoir nevertheless. In my muted arrogance or blatant grandiosity, I feel I have something to say. My self-purpose is to have my say and then get the hell off this Hobbesian planet.
If I didn’t know how to write or to express myself in word, I would mourn like thousands of other men across this spacious country. But I can express myself, and it is not every man who can write about his wife’s loss with a measure of writing skill. For that I am fortunate. Years ahead, long after I am gone, Nina’s book may be picked up by a reader and offer some insight, some measure of human truth, and a measure of what it is to be mortal man enduring loss. The book itself is saturated with my historic thinking processes, my philosophy, my crankiness about death and dying, my stoicism and existentialism and my anger and at times, rage. Will Durant wrote of “the pertinacity of death.” A great turn of a phrase which I, sensing its worth, set to memory. I struggle with the shadows cast by death on a daily basis. I believe it gives gravitas to what I have written, what I write now. I spend some time considering the scenario that would play out upon my dying and death. It is scary, it is frightening, but I don’t avoid it, I struggle with it and I think how Zorba, close to his death in Zorba the Greek, challenges death himself to come wrestle with him.
I am sure that I will be less brave when the time comes. The thing about words is that you can make them express your better self, your idealizations. I write to explore my self. That is an honorable task for me and I set out to do it every time I come to write. At this very moment an internal cloud is within me and I am struggling to grasp it and then relay it to you in words. It is about what I do and how, I imagine, I go about doing it. I still struggle to articulate what I feel, that amazing transition from thought to word to writing it down. I am losing it, that feeling which distresses me, for I almost had it within my grasp. It is not the words, it is the pulse, the flowered impulse, the growing need to express an inchoate feeling that comes to me and in some way I have to feel it, get it emotionally and then finally write it down. And what I wanted to say was about what makes me write, what internal hormonal flow comes to me and needs to be channeled into words.I think, crudely, it has to do with a need to write, an impulse to express. All of my life, it seems now, at this moment, I have had a need to express myself and I was stymied for years, blocked and dammed up, until I found words. I could not play a musical instrument, nor dance, nor sing, nor reveal athletic prowess. I was a static young man. And that unbelievable frustration ultimately was broken through by chance, randomness, therapy, accident and adversity. It amounted to wanting to come in the heat of lust and passion and not being able to. I wonder of all the others, men and women, broken by the inability to be.
