On 7 April I will be giving a reading with other authors at a local branch of the Southwestern Authors society. I will read “Little Errands,” a story from Down to a Sunless Sea. A story as simple as that of a man trying to mail a letter, it becomes an act of obsessive-compulsiveness brought to a heightened extreme. I had read Kafka’s stories, particularly “In the Penal Colony” and “The Burrow.” Both stories are bizarre, thus their appeal, and very much grounded in detail and nitty-gritty realities The burrow story drove me to distraction, for it is so neurotic in nature, so stressful and frustrating that one can easily read into it a metaphor for the species. And what do we identify with? If memory serves me correctly, it is some kind of gopher. As this creature struggles underground in the maze he created, to find egress — but continually blocked and frustrated in his efforts, the story drives the reader into feeling the neurotic strains Kafka plays with. So, in emulation, although I cannot remember the inspiration for “Little Errands” exactly, I attempted to do the same in my story.
I find that everything is in the details when I come to write. When a character blows his nose, that is sufficient, in some cases, to simply state so. Other times we may want to examine that wet, semi-fibrous stuff. And, indeed, we should call it “snot.” It all depends, it all is determined by the writer. I don’t think it is a matter of taste; I believe it is a sense of observation, of seeing accurately. I recall very early in my writing “career” that I took a course in Greenwich Village given by the noted Marguerite Young, a relative of Brigham Young, that savage and murderous Mormon charlatan. Famed for having written My Darling, Miss Macintosh, a two volume behemoth that she devoted years to writing, at the time she was living off that reputation and in her late sixties or seventies. Sitting beside her was a blond-haired young man wearing a short black cape, a literary sycophant that served apparently to soothe her in her dotage — a bit much. In any case I dropped out soon after but not before she said something in class that I am sharing with you and that I have always found of use. In essence she said to throw everything you know into your writing, the “kitchen sink” she said, given that you don’t clog the arteries of your narrative. I found that insightful and I continue to do so.
When I reread portions of The i Tetralogy from time to time, I sense that the book’s richness comes from my having lain down “pilings” of details on which the story is scaffolded. In an earlier blog I gave the parable about the fly caught in the vat of milk and how through his efforts to escape he turned the milk into cheese. It is this kind of interesting detail that I am using to advance the novel as well as to deepen it. Goddam it, all I am doing is to trying to make the read interesting, to use the tangential in powerful ways, to not let a whisker disappear that I can use to embroider my design. Perhaps it is a serendipitous consequence for my not having learned to plot my books — I feel my life is plotless so why struggle with that device. I just sink into the tar pit, just play dinosaur and wallow into it until I disappear. I guess my hope as a writer is to intrigue you with how shit clings to the shoe, how gum sticks to the hand, how Scotch tape clings aberrantly and annoyingly to the fingertips.
So in “Little Errands” the obsessive-compulsive behavior is tweezed out and enters the perfume of the story by my own anality, detail embossed upon details so that a Klimtian effect — damascene — is achieved in that the character merges with the details and almost disappears.
