“If we can share our brokenness with each other” posted on January 29th, 2010
If it takes a death in the family (the literary one, that is) then so be it. I’ve been meaning to put this forth into the AB blog world since December. And now an outpouring of Salinger gems seems absolutely necessary. So thank you, Seymour: even in death, you are the ass-kicking your little siblings need.
For years, listening to Antony Hegarty has given me hope. And that particular kind of hope that is genuinely luminescent, in all its glowing-through-struggle luster. I had never heard him speak about his art before, which I recently got to do when I internet-stumbled upon the documentary
The Eternal Children by David Kleijwegt. It features illuminating interviews with Antony and Bianca Casady of CocoRosie, as well as dear Vashti Bunyan and captain-of-things-most-strange-and-sweet Devendra Banhart, along with rare and radiant performance footage from the lot.
Like when, in the midst of a show, Antony breaks his own heartbreaking line and starts laughing while singing: “one day I’ll grow up, and I’ll be a beautiful woman.” He starts talking to the crowd right then and there about how hope, for him, comes from pushing through layers of shame. “It used to hurt so much to do it, and then what happens?” he asks, laughing again. And I was left wondering how funny it was that I’d never really thought about his thoughts on the topic; it was inherent, for me, in his music. Now I was left with the question I had been wrangling with of late, posed otherwise: how to create hope in an authentic, non-ironic way through art? And concurrently, how to work through shame not by way of the self-deprecation towards which I tend but by allowing vulnerability to be raw and pose the possibility of beauty. And therein, to hide and seek and find connection.
“One day I’ll grow up, I’ll feel the power in me
One day I’ll grow up, of this I’m sure
One day I’ll grow up, I’ll know a womb within me
One day I’ll grow up, feel it full and pure”
* * *
“Suddenly there was this frolicking group of outrageously colourful young people with their eyes wide open but not, like, naïve, but almost out of instinct, almost rooting from a basic need to survive and to live and to grow into sunlight.” Antony says in an interview in the film, referring to the documentary’s other subjects. “There’s something very primary and very beautiful about what they were doing: creating spaces that had the potential for hope to exist in them. That’s where I spent the last half of the nineties, trying to find a way to have hope. It’s not cynical—that’s the thing—which is what I was fighting for ten years: irony and cynicism.”
Bianca Casady talks about combating shame as good exercise later in the film. Did she mean in living? I wondered, or in creating? Both, surely, but I don’t imagine it as combat fighting but as using it, living it, being it, not denying that experience. “No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge” wrote Kerouac. Because that shame brings apprehension, at best, and its best friend self-criticism-cum-deprecation, at worst—I should know. But that’s a part of the process, too, I also know. The process of living and of creating, both—true. An integral one, at that, to many a creator. This is where I felt the indelible link of what these, my most beloved musicians, were saying, to the TED talk Agi posted last month by Elizabeth Gilbert. So it takes me a while (to address that crippling self-d.) but it comes through, someday, sure enough…
As per Ms. G.’s and my own above rambles, our common conception of genius comes off, it seems, as the illusion—a face—of no self-doubt. But belief needs no illusion; illusion is what unbelievers see. Or, better put, we imagine self-doubt and belief in self as—interchangeably—reliant upon results, end-products. But it’s not the brilliance of the result we need to learn not to doubt—that is not the genius part. The genius is in listening to the fairy, in Gilbert’s words: the showing up, or, the process itself, the work—as with any work—of creating, when one decides to try and communicate one’s own experience through art. Genius is that magical place where you have to suspend your rational, irony-filled, self-deprecating, you’re-stupid-if-you’re-not-cynical disbelief. Do it anyway a wise woman once said. That mantra has been running through my mind since summertime, to find me mid-winter…
…and it didn’t seem all that different, of a sudden—amidst this web interconnection—from another line that had been mulling through my mind for years like a mantra, too: Seymour Glass’ advice to his little brother Zooey in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey: “Do it for the fat woman” he told him. Old J.D.’s final word of advice in that favourite book of fifteen-year-old me has stuck since then. I guess I always wanted a resident big brother with indispensable-yet-authentic and precisely true-to-me-whilst-simultaneously-expressing-a-universal-truth advice. Sometimes I found it in books, sometimes in songs—we grow up, yeah, a lot changes, sure—but like coming home again, also: ten years have passed and nothing has changed at all.
So I took this advice, then, as ‘doing it anyway;’ not knowing where your words were going, but by imagining the other empty can at the end of the string of communication, regardless. Because you have to. See it as hope, that is. As working through the anxiety shaken up inside by thinking only of the final product you’re working towards. As that unearthing belief-through-suspending-our-disbelief mechanism that assured me my words would fly in the wind like birds to just the place they belonged. Or needed to be. I didn’t need to know where, and that wasn’t even the important part, anyways. I just needed to show up, do my part, pour my heart out and let them fly… I repeated the words over and over to myself in a mumbled self-made beggar’s prayer in half-mad Franny Glass style for years. Do it for the fat woman…
Which brings me back to Eternal Children and to something Bianca Casady says in the film, describing her and her sister’s Sierra’s art and process, which resonates with the echo of those tin cans: “For us, we are connecting to and honouring that which is very innate in the child. It is a freedom of spirit, a lack of inhibition, and it’s like being able to be purely in the moment and to be creatively available in each moment. And I think as a lot of people grow out of childhood, they abandon that part of themselves and they put it away as an aspect of being children and I think it’s something that we’re always trying to cultivate and that we’re connecting very much to our work. So for us it’s not necessarily child-like, it’s just something that children know.”
A lack of inhibition as being purely in the moment, as being creatively available in that moment, as a way of combating shame, as a way of creating hope, as a way of communicating through invisible across-the-street-and-under-ground-wires that connect us all…. yes yes YES. It was all so clear of a sudden: they were expressing the same experience, my imaginary family, strewn across varied generations and art forms… and then some other long-favourite words whispered in my ear: #29 on Kerouac’s list of thirty essentials or, “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose” aka words to live by (See #24 above): You’re a Genius all the time. Thank you Jack, thank you Elizabeth, thank you Antony and Bianca and Sierra and yes, even you, old J.D., even you…
So I’m trying to make a conscious effort, now, to combat this crippling whilst using it to grow into sunlight (see photo above: a reminder). I guess he still is my big brother in a way, ‘cause here’s what Seymour had for me this morning, almost ten years later, writing to another younger brother, Buddy, this time—not the actor but the writer, how apt—in another Glass chronicle: Seymour, An Introduction. In response to Buddy’s latest short story shared he writes:
“I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don’t you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn’t that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn’t sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something you think is universally considered very funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgment. It worries me enough. But I’m also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you. I want your loot.”
* * *
So I’ve been drawing out stories like mad all Fall-into-Winter. I’ve been reading so slowly I’ve basically been reading two books for two months—including the above—in that way that you don’t want to leave a lover in bed in the morning when life requires you to get up. It’s just so nice here, really, where else is there to be? Why wouldn’t we linger awhile instead? So it took me a week, maybe more, to get to this next part, after the demand for loot, just two pages away. If you’ve made it this far, here’s the gold:
“You must know that this story is full of big jumps. Leaps. When you first went to bed, I thought for a while I ought to wake up everybody in the house and throw a party for our marvelous jumping brother. What am I, that I didn’t wake everybody up? I wish I knew. A worrier, at the very best. I worry about big jumps that I can measure off with my eyes. I think I dream of your daring to jump right out of my sight. Excuse this. I’m writing very fast now. I think this new story is the one you’ve been waiting for. And me, too, in a way. You know it’s mostly pride that’s keeping me up. I think that’s my main worry. For your own sake, don’t make me proud of you. I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. If only you’d never keep me up again out of pride. Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.
Excuse the underlining, but that’s the first thing I’ve ever said about one of your stories that makes my head go up and down. Please don’t let me say anything else. I think tonight that anything you say to a writer after you beg him to let his stars come out is just literary advice. I’m positive tonight that all “good” literary advice is just Louis Bouilhet and Max Du Camp wishing Madame Bovary on Flaubert. All right, so between the two of them, with their exquisite taste, they got him to write a masterpiece. They killed his chances of ever writing his heart out. He died like a celebrity, which was the one thing he wasn’t. His letters are unbearable to read. They’re so much better than they should be. They read waste, waste, waste. They break my heart. I dread saying anything to you tonight, dear old Buddy, except the trite. Please follow your heart, win or lose. You got so mad at me when we were registering.
Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions.
If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.
Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a story, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart. The Bank Dick is at the Thalia. Let’s take the whole bunch tomorrow night. Love, S.”
* * *
Yesterday, talking to a friend about J.D.’s passing, he said this: “I don’t know. There’s just not much to say. It’s sad but not that real. The J.D. Salinger we know will never really die.” So there it is. It seemed to me just the thing. Beyond these rambles, I have no words, but bow my head, and honour. By showing up. And jumping.
