Is the Writer Obligated to Use His/Her Medium as an Instrument for Social Betterment?
A
writer’s first obligation is not to the many-bellied beast but to the many-tongued beast, not to Society but to Language. Everyone has a stake in the husbandry of Society, but Language is the writer’s special charge. A grandiose animal it is, too. If it weren’t for Language there wouldn’t be Society.
Once writers have established their basic commitment to Language (and are taking the Blue-Guitar-sized risks that that relationship demands), then they are free to promote social betterment to the extent that their conscience or neurosis might require. But let me tell you this: social action on the political/economic level is wee potatoes.
Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.
How many writers of fiction do you think are committed to
that
?
Asked by
Fiction International,
1984
Why Do You Live Where You Live?
I
’m here for the weather.
Well, yes, I’m also here for the volcanoes and the salmon, and the fascinating possibility that at any moment the volcanoes could erupt and pre-poach the salmon. I’m here for the rust and the mildew, for webbed feet and twin peaks, spotted owls and obscene clams (local men suffer from geoduck envy), blackberries and public art (including that threatening mural the smut-sniffers chased out of Olympia), for the rituals of the potlatch and the espresso cart, for bridges that are always pratfalling into the water and ferries that keep ramming the dock.
I’m here because the Wobblies used to be here, and sometimes in Pioneer Square you can still find bright-eyed old anarchists singing their moldering ballads of camaraderie and revolt. I’m here because someone once called Seattle “the hideout capital of the U.S.A.,” a distant outpost of a town where generations of the nation’s failed, fed-up, and felonious have come to disappear. Long before Seattle was “America’s Athens”
(The New York Times),
it was America’s Timbuktu.
Getting back to music, I’m here because “Tequila” is the unofficial fight song of the University of Washington and because “Louie Louie” very nearly was chosen as our official state anthem. There may yet be a chance of that, which is not something you could say about South Carolina.
I’m here for the forests (what’s left of them), for the world’s best bookstores and movie theaters; for the informality, anonymity, general lack of hidebound tradition, and the fact that here and nowhere else grunge rubs shoulders in the half-mean streets with a subtle yet pervasive mysticism. The shore of Puget Sound is where electric guitars cut their teeth and old haiku go to die.
I’m here for those wild little mushrooms that broadcast on transcendental frequencies; for Kevin Calabro, who broadcasts Sonics games with erudite exuberance on KJR; for Dick’s Deluxe burgers, for the annual Spam-carving contests, the cigar room at Dolce’s Latin Bistro, Monday Night Football at the Blue Moon Tavern, opera night at the Blue Moon Tavern (which, incidentally, is scheduled so that it coincides with Monday Night Football—a somewhat challenging overlap that the first-time patron might fail to fully appreciate); and I’m here for the flying saucers that made their first earthly appearance near Mount Rainier.
I’m here for Microsoft but not for Weyerhaeuser. I’m here for Starbucks but not for Boeing. I’m definitely here for the Pike Place Market and definitely not here for Wal-Mart or any scuzzball who shops at Wal-Mart. I’m here for the snow geese in the tide flats but not for the snow jobs in the State House. I’m here for the tulips but not the Tulip Festival (they’re flowers, folks, not marketing tools!). I’m here for the relative lack of financial ambition (which, alas, may be responsible for some of those Wal-Mart shoppers), for the soaring population of bald eagles, and the women with their quaint Norwegian brand of lust. “Ya. Sure, ya betcha.”
But mostly, finally, ultimately, I’m here for the weather.
As a result of the weather, ours is a landscape in a minor key, a sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tend to melt together, creating a perpetual blurred effect, as if God, after creating Northwestern Washington, had second thoughts and tried unsuccessfully to erase it. Living here is not unlike living inside a classical Chinese painting before the intense wisps of mineral pigment had dried upon the silk— although, depending on the bite in the wind, there’re times when it’s more akin to being trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; a dubious joint where gruff waiters slam chopsticks against the horizon, where service is haphazard, noodles soggy, wallpaper a tad too green, and considerable amounts of tea are spilt; but in each and every fortune cookie there’s a line of poetry you can never forget. Invariably, the poems comment on the weather.
In the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end, and the witch measles that meteorologists call “drizzle” are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk. Many are depressed, a few actually suicidal. But I, I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus. “What’s so hot about the sun?” I ask. Sunbeams are a lot like tourists: intruding where they don’t belong, promoting noise and forced activity, faking a shallow cheerfulness, dumb little cameras slung around their necks. Raindrops, on the other hand, introverted, feral, buddhistically cool, behave as if they were locals. Which, of course, they are.
My bedroom is separated from the main body of my house, so that I have to go outside and cross some pseudo-Japanese stepping-stones in order to go to sleep at night. Often I get rained on a little bit on my way to bed. It’s a benediction, a good-night kiss.
Romantic? Absolutely. And nothing to be ashamed of. If reality is a matter of perspective, then the romantic view of the world is as valid as any other—and a great deal more rewarding. It makes of life an unpredictable adventure rather than a problematic equation. Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a hundred times more sexy than a sunburnt palm tree, and more primal and contemplative, too. A steady, wind-driven rain composes music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things.
Obviously, then, the Pacific Northwest’s customary climate is perfect for a writer. It’s cozy and intimate. Reducing temptation (how can you possibly play on the beach or work in the yard?), it turns a person inward, connecting them with what Jung called “the bottom below the bottom,” those areas of the deep unconscious into which every serious writer must spelunk. Directly above my writing desk there is a skylight. This is the window, rain-drummed and bough-brushed, through which my Muse arrives, bringing with her the rhythms and cadences of cloud and water, not to mention the latest catalog from Victoria’s Secret and the twenty-three auxiliary verbs.
Oddly enough, not every local author shares my proclivity for precipitation. Unaware of the poetry they’re missing, many malign the mist as malevolently as the non-literary heliotropes do. They wring their damp mitts and fret about rot, cursing the prolonged spillage, claiming they’re too dejected to write, that their feet itch (athlete’s foot), the roof leaks, they can’t stop coughing, and they feel as if they’re being slowly digested by an oyster.
Yet the next sunny day, though it may be weeks away, will trot out such a mountainous array of pagodas, vanilla sundaes, hero chins, and god fingers; such a sunset palette of Jell-O, carrot oil, Vegas strip, and Kool-Aid; such a sea-vista display of broad waters, firred islands, whale spouts, and boat sails thicker than triangles in a geometry book, that any and all memories of dankness will fizz and implode in a blaze of bedazzled amnesia. “Paradise!” you’ll hear them proclaim as they call United Van Lines to cancel their move to Arizona.
They’re kidding themselves, of course. Our sky can go from lapis to tin in the blink of an eye. Blink again and your latte’s diluted. And that’s just fine with me. I thrive here on the certainty that no matter how parched my glands, how anhydrous the creek beds, how withered the weeds in the lawn, it’s only a matter of time before the rains come home.
The rains will steal down from the Sasquatch slopes. They will rise with the geese from the marshes and sloughs. Rain will fall in sweeps, it will fall in drones, it will fall in cascades of cheap Zen jewelry.
And it will rain a fever. And it will rain a sacrifice. And it will rain sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.
Rain will primitivize the cities, slowing every wheel, animating every gutter, diffusing commercial neon into smeary blooms of esoteric calligraphy. Rain will dramatize the countryside, sewing pearls into every web, winding silk around every stump, redrawing the horizon line with a badly frayed brush dipped in tea and quicksilver.
And it will rain an omen. And it will rain a trance. And it will rain a seizure. And it will rain dangers and pale eggs of the beast.
Rain will pour for days unceasing. Flooding will occur. Wells will fill with drowned ants, basements with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics will roam the dripping peninsulas. Moisture will gleam on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their rest in dead tree trunks, will clack their clamshell teeth in the submerged doorways of video parlors. Rivers will swell, sloughs will ferment. Vapors will billow from the troll-infested ditches, challenging windshield wipers, disguising intentions and golden arches. Water will stream off eaves and umbrellas. It will take on the colors of the beer signs and headlamps. It will glisten on the claws of nighttime animals.
And it will rain a screaming. And it will rain a rawness. And it will rain a disorder, and hair-raising hisses from the oldest snake in the world.
Rain will hiss on the freeways. It will hiss around the prows of fishing boats. It will hiss in electrical substations, on the tips of lit cigarettes, and in the trash fires of the dispossessed. Legends will wash from the desecrated burial grounds, graffiti will run down alley walls. Rain will eat the old warpaths, spill the huckleberries, cause toadstools to rise like loaves. It will make poets drunk and winos sober, and polish the horns of the slugs.
And it will rain a miracle. And it will rain a comfort. And it will rain a sense of salvation from the philistinic graspings of the world.
Yes, I’m here for the weather. And when I’m lowered at last into a pit of marvelous mud, a pillow of fern and skunk cabbage beneath my skull, I want my epitaph to read, IT RAINED ON HIS PARADE. AND HE WAS GLAD!
Asked by editors of
Edgewalking on the Western Rim
(Sasquatch Books, 1994)
What Was Your First Outdoor Adventure?
I
got interested in the outdoors after robbing a bank.
It’s true. When I was seven years old, my friend Johnny Holshauser and I robbed the local bank. This was not a joke. We were absolutely serious. We went in with our quite authentic-looking cap pistols and held the place up. It was the early 1940s and Blowing Rock, North Carolina, a small Appalachian resort community, was still mired in the Great Depression. Our strapped parents were not ungenerous, but we figured we deserved more money for candy, comic books, and other preadolescent accouterments.
In those days there was a fireworks device known as a “torpedo.” Torpedoes, incongruously, were round, resembling dry, gray gumballs or jawbreakers. When you hurled one of them against a hard surface, it exploded with a loud report, like a good-size firecracker. Unbeknownst to Johnny or me, the Blowing Rock bank tellers had torpedoes on hand. When we stormed in and demanded cash, one or more tellers began surreptitiously throwing the things against the marble floors and walls.
Not surprisingly, we thought we were being fired upon. Panic-stricken, we fled, absolutely convinced there were bullets whizzing past our heads. We ran to the end of town and high-tailed it up into the hills, where we concealed ourselves, certain the police—or maybe a posse of armed men—would soon be after us.
In many ways, that day on the lam turned out to be one of the finest days of our childhood. We gorged ourselves on huckleberries and teaberries (the source of the unique flavor in Pepto-Bismol). At one point, we actually caught a fish by splashing it out of the water onto the bank of a shallow creek. The fish was only about four inches long, no more than a sardine, but we built a little fire and cooked it, not bothering with the formalities of fillet. We ate it insides and all, and we ate it with gusto.
In the area where we were hiding, there was a fairly spectacular waterfall. Several adults had been injured while climbing Glen Burney Falls, and rumor had it that one climber had actually fallen to his death. That day, Johnny and I climbed Glen Burney without a qualm. (Later, unbeknownst to our parents and to the horror of my female cousins, we were to scale it on numerous occasions.) Above the falls, we discovered a ring of rhododendron bushes. In the circle’s center, the moss was as soft as nouveauriche shag carpet. Protected by the bushes and a rocky little grotto, it made an ideal hideout, one which we were to make advantageous use of over the next several years, although our life of crime was mercifully short-lived.
Eventually, it grew dark. Owls started hooting and unidentifiable things began to go bump in the night. Scared, cold, and no longer captivated by the gastronomic charms of berries, we lost heart and, circumventing the falls, sheepishly made our way toward home. All afternoon, the story of our “robbery” had been circulating in town and, to their good credit, everybody, including the bank tellers and our families, seemed more amused than outraged by it.
Hands uncuffed, legs unshackled, necks unnoosed, the robbers were given dinner, baths, a stern lecture, and sent to bed.
It may or may not be true that crime doesn’t pay, but our little caper had a happy ending, the best part of which was an introduction to life in the wilderness. From that day on, I spent as much time as possible in the outdoor world, finding there the kind of inner nourishment that others are said to find in the mosque, the synagogue, the church—or the bank.
Asked by
Trips,
1989