Futile Horn

02.15.2005 - 3:10 am ("chocolate simulates the effects of love; have some chocolate, you look like you need it")

I forget if I mentioned this here or not, but one of my favorite teachers from high school died recently. I hadn’t even known she was sick, but I had been remembering her fondly the day I found out she had passed away. I wish I had known she was ill; I probably couldn’t have done anything more than sending her a card, but that would have been something. The last time I saw her was after Paul and the others were killed, and I remember thinking she had looked better so I wonder if she had been sick then. She taught me chemistry ably my sophomore year, but owe my debt of gratitude for my senior year when I was having what you might call emotional difficulties. She was generous and understanding when not everyone else was, and I needed all the help I could get what has certainly been the darkest and scariest part of my life.

I also remember her giving me a bit of grief for a detail of a story of mine that ran in the school literary magazine. I believe I described the release of bodily fluids at a man’s hanging with puerile enthusiasm, and she told me it had become a hoot in the faculty room. Oops. I hadn’t written that story for the purpose of submission, but apparently I had created a respectably complex character for a twelfth grader. By then I had wanted to be a fiction writer for a long time, but I remember thinking that even with the lukewarm assessment I’d given it, I probably wasn’t ever going to do any better than that.

I didn’t stop writing after that, but I didn’t write stories for a long time, or at least nothing that wasn’t just goofing off.

My novel got a bit lost for about a week, but I think I am back on track. Lately I’ve only been working on it about a page or so a day, I guess, and I hardly feel any of my attention is going toward it. All of my energy seems to be spent on reading The Tale of Genji and translating Cicero’s De natura deorum. Then again, I’ve been on this for six months, but for some reason I hardly recall exerting any effort on it, even though I have about 30,000 words and probably a hundred pages more of episodes, character sketches, and notes in some vaguely manageable state of chaos. I’m not saying it’s been easy, because it certainly hasn’t. I’m just saying I don’t remember it.

My mind is just elsewhere. I miss music. I miss singing my own songs. I miss (and yes, this even happened once or twice) hearing my songs sung. I don’t remember writing those either, or rather I remember a completely futile day having a song at the end of it.

I remember nobody really wanting to listen.

I remember deciding to write songs because nobody not even my friends wanted to read short stories, and I thought if I wrote songs it would be different because I’d only have to borrow about three minutes of somebody’s time and it would require hardly any energy on their part.

Now I’m writing a novel. Novels are much worse than stories and songs combined. People will scrub toilets to get out of the way of a novel.

Writing is communication, and if nobody’s listening you are talking to yourself. That’s what crazy people do. A person should stop talking to himself before he becomes crazy.

My late chemistry teacher read my stories, even told me what she thought, and I didn’t even have to persecute her to get an opinion.

At first I didn’t think I’d like The Tale of Genji because it seemed to be made up of a series of romances, and you don’t have to dig too far to find out there’s nothing romantic about me at all. But after a while (I guess I am about a fifth of the way through) I started to appreciate Genji’s dissatisfaction. If I recall, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera says there are two kinds of womanizers, the first in a futile pursuit of some impossible ideal of love, the other simply infatuated with knowing the particular secrets of the bodies of individual women. I wouldn’t say Genji’s not the second kind at all, but probably more of the first. I simply could never be bothered with Genji’s escapades, but what kind of ape would it take to be young and content? I think it’s like that; I think I’m never going to find a life I’d call myself satisfied with. There is too much knowledge and experience out there for even the idea of limiting yourself to be tolerable, and yet all your worthy passions keep badgering you to be exclusive, or at least pay a lot more attention to them, just like Genji’s women.

I miss my songs. I miss being a student studying antiquity and I want to learn Japanese. A book is such a big project. I decided to do it because I thought a novel would be interdisciplinary. I would have to juggle my obsessions, even develop new ones. This has proved to be more or less the case, but individually everything wants more of my time.

If I left the book for a while, it wouldn’t be there for me when I got back. I wouldn’t be happy if I stopped anyway.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn