There are some distinctive passages in Dostoyevsky’s great novella, Notes from Underground where the Underground Man, its antihero narrator, elaborates upon one of his perceptions. He is a kind of existentialist crank, a man who philosophically and literally chooses to look upon the sour side, to defend its subtleties, and even to revel in it. Here are his sensibilities:

‘Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment,’ I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan.

I’m provoked by the notion that there’s a kind of voluptuousness, a seemingly contradictory languor, in feeling sick. That absorption is more of a subtext in the novel, but it came to mind to me today, because for the past few days I’ve been recuperating from arthroscopic hip surgery, and I’ve been in an unsettled twilight state of narcotic pain killers, antibiotics, pain and sleeplessness. Getting up to crutch myself around the house has been a symphony of grunts and moans that would have made the Underground Man proud. And they are vocalized as much for my own satisfaction as to continually remind my mate that I’m in a tortured state. “I’m sick, I can’t be bothered being human!”

There’s a weird sensuality to having your standard bodily state altered, and it reminds me of how as writers it’s helpful, almost necessary to be able to change perspective, to put your snout in the grey areas, to dig in the dirt underneath the flowers. Drilling your bones with sharp instruments and filling your gut with brain-torquing substances is an effective vehicle for perspective change.

A Moment Caught in a Glass
I had a moment, lying in bed with my cotton head and splayed limbs, drug-dulled and addled, where I realized that for minutes I’d been listening—though not consciously hearing—a sweet, piping songbird repeating a trilling little enchantment. When I tilted my brain to actually process that song at a higher level, I also noticed that a ruby/violet colored light was dancing over my face, a reflection from a colored crystal that was hanging off the bedroom door. This was one of those weirdly transporting moments, timeless, in the universe’s endless shuffle of moments, that was richly satisfying—and could have only occurred with the strange cocktail of pain and pills that knocked my perspective. A songbird’s tune, a luscious crimson light, a held moment.

My diminished (or expanded) state is only temporary, but it brought to mind what a writer might do with illness. I wonder what effect that lupus, which eventually killed Flannery O’ Connor at 39, had on her astonishingly original, arrestingly grotesque and redemptive story writing. Would she have been less of a writer without it? Would Faulkner been a finer writer (imagine!) if he didn’t have such a taste for whiskey? I don’t know, but I do know Percosets really aren’t at the top of the healthy vegetable pyramid, so I’m dispensing with them for now.

Writing with Surgical Instruments
Surgical episodes can make for interesting writing forays. I worked some amusement into the tale of my vasectomy, yet for all the fun of the writing, I’d rather have been at the nail salon. And there were some light moments in a piece I published some years ago about a day with my father at the emergency room, but darkness was the prevailing tone. All in all, I think I’m happy my maladies are mostly on the temporary side of time’s dial.

Let’s end with a piece from T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton that has a flavor of that arrested state of illness (or of distortion) discussed here:

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.”


This is an IDEA (though it resembles a butterfly)

I’m a guy whose wishes are words. And whose wishes are FOR words. By the clock, the wished-for words are straight-spined and modest, assembling in tight, orderly rows. But when work gives way to whimsy, that’s when words can stretch, flop, and peep around corners to see who’s looking.

The division is due to the fact that I’m both a business writer and a fiction writer, and not only do the twain not meet, but the twains don’t even arrive at the same station. And that pun is not nearly as painful as trying to reconcile the two worlds of words.

Sometimes, there is a truce of sorts: a brochure on streaming video might have a little stream of consciousness, or a character sketch might call for a pencil tipped with the driest of logic. But most of the time, when I have to travel between the word-worlds, it’s a difficult, deliberate journey—an enterprise that requires even more than Thoreau’s dreaded change of clothes.

However, I want to avoid the sense that being a painter or writer or sculptor confers any elite status or implies some exalted perspective. I’ve been a staff copywriter, freelance essayist and fiction writer for years, and it’s often more a matter of managing deadlines than swooning in inspiration. Keeping the queries fresh. Being thick-skinned about the seemingly inevitable “no” that you get from most publishers. I’ve learned to just shrug and go to the next query or project.

Words for the Plucking
However, there are some moments in the writing process, where words seem to be bright objects that can be plucked out of the air and strung together in serried ranks of complement and charm. Out of nothing, a paragraph that prances—or one that cries and bleeds. In those moments, it’s less the affected pose of practiced art, but rather a kind of verbal husbandry, a farmer grateful for an unexpected crop.

This isn’t precious wordsmanship, it’s grace—and I’m grateful when it occurs.

What I’m getting at, is that at some times in the creative process, it’s less a “me” than a “Wow!” (Conversely, it’s more often, “That’s shit!”—but that’s realistic, not wallowing.)

But perspective is king: there can be beauty in the way a bus driver weaves her route, how a seventh-grader whistles a made-up tune, where the making of a good sandwich is an artful act. Those moments of grace can be fleeting, but a good sandwich is forever. Well, until lunch.

Consider this:

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. 
How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the
moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone;
life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his
fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”
— Vita Sackville-West

Keep hopping, and snap a net on that nervous mind.

A remarkable display of book-sniffing acumen. Or an example of obsessive-compulsive behavior you hope your children don’t emulate.

There’s a lot of buzz (with stings) in the air on the topic of bookstores closing because of the ascendance of electronic books, and the inability of the publishing world to react with much other than fear to changes in their old-school model. However many teapots are broken in this tempest, I would hate to see the world with greatly fewer bookstores, because of the many hours I’ve taken pleasure in them, wandering aisles, picking up, thumbing through and sometimes buying books that I’d never have made the tangible—and telling—acquaintance of were I shopping on Amazon. For me, it’s often been the accidental blundering into a book’s arms that has been the romance for me, and I think those chances are lessened with perusal of publications in the ether.

But in thinking of that, I harkened back to my two stints as a bookstore employee, and the kinds of strange things that happen in the retail world. I was the assistant manager of a crabbed little suburban-mall bookstore in Seattle. The store was a chain, owned by a Canadian firm and managed out of Toronto. And I mean managed. We had to obtain authorization, on paper, for EVERYTHING we needed at the store, including toilet paper for the employee bathroom, the wretched inkless pens they sent us, and on. The corporation specialized in the lowest rung of the ladder in store supplies, sending us plastic “Sale” signs where the ink had dripped down in long black tears from the letters. Very classy. The company is long bankrupt, but not before much hair was torn out in trying (and failing) to get them to stock any local books or things relevant to our actual location.

A Scented Stroll(er)
I’m not sure our customers would have noticed though. One time I was stocking an aisle, and I noticed the telltale aroma of poop. “That’s poop!” I said to myself, astutely. I was baffled as to its source, but then I started tracing my way through the aisles, and saw that there were intermittent lines of fresh feces on the floor. I actually followed the trail up and down several aisles until I’d made it almost to the front counter, where I saw that a woman was rolling a stroller out of the store, a stroller carrying a child whose robust production had burst his diapers and made its way down to the wheels of the stroller, and on to our hallowed floor. I started to chase mom just to inform her of her child’s crimes, but then stopped weakly at the door, resigned to my fate. Think of how long it took to requisition supplies from Toronto!

So true that I resented mom for her unconsciousness (or her plugged nose), but I resented more a customer who loudly berated me at the counter for not being familiar with the “Delderberry series,” which she complainingly made clear was a literary summit for some kind of romance literature. I can remember with exquisite clarity her shaking her ponderous head as she sniffily left the store, bellowing about “what kind of a bookstore employee isn’t familiar with the Delderberry series?” Guilty.

Literary Showers
I was grateful to leave the stifling florescent-light hell of that mall environment, and to become the manager of a lovely bookstore/cafe in Santa Cruz a few years later. Little did I know that there a customer would regularly lock himself in our restroom, where he would take full showers, so that when you walked in later, there was about 1/2 inch of water on the floor and EVERY paper towel was used, and on the floor too. I often wondered if that was the same guy who instead of using the toilet, left the full (and I mean full) expression of his bowels a couple of feet away from the toilet. An art project? Either way, I was pleased he hadn’t entered the store in a baby stroller.

But I still love being on the other side of the bookstore counter. (Although from my stints at stores, I can tell you they aren’t merely hotbeds of intrigue—they can be actual hotbeds, when I reflect on all of the thermal mingling that used to take place among employees after the doors were locked.)

Kindles and iPads, glorious devices all—but don’t forget your local bookstore. You might be able to pick up the latest in the Delderberry series, and take a quick shower too.

Ezra Pound had some unsavory racial and political views, but he did trot out some intriguing verse. The rhythms below from his “Winter Is Icummen In” are germane to today’s topic:

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham,
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.

Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.

Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

I couldn’t agree more (and have particular fondness for the line “An ague hath my ham”). As days grow short, I am seized by Seasonal Affective Disorder (also known as SAD, but I prefer “Goddamm”).The waning of the light curdles my thinking, and my liver turneth. I’m never far from a sour turn of mind anyway, finding a fellow traveler in the Woody Allen-as-child character in Annie Hall who tells his therapist “The universe is expanding—someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!”

I know just what he means.

So when the pall of low light strangles the sun, my ruminations naturally turn to thoughts of beloved pets that died cruelly, the knowledge that the price of stamps will spiral ever upward, and the notion that Newt Gingrich will in my lifetime be elected Emperor (and Sarah Palin will be his Moose Queen, you betcha).

Write Light
This time though, I’m not going to let that winter furze settle about my face and person. I will take Dylan Thomas’s adage to heart: Rage, rage against the dying of the light! Rather than wearing the clammy cloak, I’m going to toss it off and self-medicate. My prescription:

• Read more Mark Twain, David Sedaris, Dave Barry (and maybe a bit more Mark Twain)
• Put all political ads in the compost, unread
• When the sun does come out, revel in it, drink it up, dance its warmth

In the last few weeks, I’ve returned to writing fiction, which is a warmth to me all its own. I’ve revived a novel that stalled a couple of years ago, and its lead character is a kind of hapless boob, though a well-meaning one. I had so much fun yesterday putting him in a dreadfully compromising position that I barely noticed the gathering clouds and low light of the late afternoon.

It’s storming here today, and the sky is a dark, roiling thing. Man, my protagonist is in for a heap of trouble.