Notes from the Underground
Notes from the Underground
I remain a bit pissed that Dostoevsky locked up this title Notes from the Underground nearly a hundred years before I was born. Apparently, it would have been the logical title for this Substack newsletter. I use the word “apparently” in full awareness that my using it suggests I either don’t know myself or exert no actual control over my own writing. Both statements are likely true. Do any of us truly know ourselves, even if we try to make a conscious effort to unearth our identities or face the person we see in the mirror? Speaking personally, I know I am a frequent practitioner of self-deception. As for not exerting control over my writing, well that truth is central to the larger purpose of this first Substack newsletter, as I hope I can eventually make clear, as it might be reflective in the title I have settled on in order to give Dostoevsky the space he still rightfully deserves two centuries after his birth: “Organic Matters.” I intend the title to suggest something about the space from which I write, applying the “organic” part of my title, that the ideas, characters, language of my work rises from the native soil of my imagination fertilized by my experiences in shared plots, and that some miracle of germination occurs. I wish also to take on myriad “matters,” wish that in a universe filled with diversity, I am free to roam and experiment and discover unlikely connections while pursing work that might also “matter” in terms of having some usefulness to others. Of course, I might be deceiving myself even in this moment, and my writing comes from and should return to an application of the full title and is “organic matter” of the smelliest sort.
Here is the crux of what I propose for this newsletter writing space: I not only write “organically” putting blind trust into the process itself and with no plan going forward, intent on discovering meaning and direction from within the writing itself, I believe all creativity comes from a place that is simultaneously within and beyond ourselves, that when we find quiet and focus, we enter a state where we can hear the texts we are writing. That much of writing is clearing space, making room for surprise. For me, that often means literally hearing the characters speaking as voices in my head. Even if I’m not writing a first-person narrative, I carry first person voices around with me, not as a schizophrenic but as someone who desperately wishes to hear intimate stories of those whose lives are so different than my own. These voices speak with the greatest clarity and frequency when I am at my writing desk, but because I believe we write twenty-four/seven, they are as likely to speak up in the shower, on a run, while vacuuming, sundry places where I seldom have a pen and paper. Before you think, “Oh no, one of those flaky, hippy-dippy dudes who wants me to stop showering and align my chakras,” (okay maybe a tiny hint of that, but not the “not showering” part), I’m really just talking about believing in the creative act of writing itself and of getting m into myself mindset where I can cast other things aside (the unpaid bills, the phone calls I keep putting off, the house that really does need vacuuming [a funny word that one, right? Or funny spelling at least, but true to its Latin roots and meaning: “a space entirely devoid of matter,” so you see a pattern emerging here {and, man, would the hard-ass who taught grammar at my former employer/university have a heart attack with this sentence, even if he would take perverse pleasure in having his students diagram it!}]), and let the writing take over. Or, in a less-laborious sentence fragment: quiet, focus, mental space, hear the text. So there is an alignment with things like meditation or prayer or immersion or whatever floats your boat. For me, if the writing is going really well—as in I’ve found a rhythm, largely stepped outside myself, quieted the inner-critic and have produced paragraphs or pages as opposed to spending a half hour tweaking one bad sentence—I tend to find myself on a slim ledge where if I lean one way, I will fall asleep, lean the other and I discover writing that moves the project significantly forward and with tremendous clarity. This is the headspace I trust the most and an extension of what I view as “organic matter.”
A good deal of what I mean by organic in creative pursuit is about trusting process. But ultimately it is also about trusting product. What I mean is that I believe the “text”—the novel, or story, or essay, or poem—is far smarter than I am. My job is to find things like unity in the text that emerges. To look for patterns. To see opportunities to enhance what is naturally occurring and for what is true to the nature of its ideas, characters, places, and themes. I am convinced that all artistic creation realizes moments of “spontaneous combustion” where the unexpected arises from within the work. Artists may have different interpretations of how or why this happens but I have never met a working artist who does not regularly experience the joy of surprise, the thrill of discovery, the sense of having been a conduit of something beyond self. It is the juice we are all chasing. In those moments, artists have harnessed subconsciousness. It has fueled their work. Some will suggest they have tapped into a collective unconsciousness.
Now, if your own process is entirely different—and most certainly it is—please don’t think we can’t have a conversation, for nothing could be further from the truth. If you are a careful planner, perhaps outlining every aspect of a book, conducting all its necessary research, organizing that research, your process certainly is every bit as “creative” as mine. Your discoveries and realizations and unearthing are every bit as real and as critical to finding the final book, they may just come in different moments than mine do. The shape of how we approach work might be different, but not only is one not right and the other not wrong, they are driven forward by shared beliefs that it is the story that will tell the story. Flannery O’Connor used to say that if someone asked what your story is about, the only logical answer is to tell them to read the story. Whatever process we use to arrive at the story, it is the story that holds the answers, including the answers for how to solve the hurdles/roadblocks/chasms that threaten to block the story when we are actively revising it. The shape of my revision is likely different from a writer who produces detailed outlines, but my “creation” or the re-creation that happens in revision is no more “spontaneous” or “combustive” than their own.
But back to Dostoevsky for a moment and all that underground business. The very word—and parts of its reality—has been a part of my artistic life for as long as I can recall. I have no idea why. I don’t really want to know how Freud might interpret all this. In my feeble mind, the word “underground” is inextricably linked to “organic,” likely because I am a visual writer and no matter the context in which I use organic, I picture soil. I smell soil. And I small it from the inside out.
I embark on this newsletter, and commit to its evolution and maintenance, on the same day that my novel titled Man, Underground makes its debut. Now, before you arch an eyebrow and say, “Aha, more shameless promotion, another marketing ploy!” let me acknowledge that you’re not wrong. Firstly, you are correct about the linkage between this newsletter and this new novel because that book is foremost in my mind in this moment. Secondly, let me make the admission that I wouldn’t be writing a newsletter at all if I did not wish to engage readers in a larger conversation that would have no reason to exist if I were not a writer with books seeking readers out in the marketplace. Thirdly, (he says, hating numerical lists and cliched transitions) few writing projects in my career have felt more organic than Man, Underground, something that I hope will feel revealed in the nature of the book itself. These admissions made, some context behind the literal newsletter and about this underground nonsense. I have in the loosest possible application of fact, been the writer of a “newsletter” for a couple of years, one that I actually write and send, with no pattern or regularity, perhaps twice a year. Hardly effective in sharing news, cultivating an audience, or having a conversation, and entirely opposite what any intelligent business person would advise. Why have I been such a shitty newsletter correspondent? All the shortcomings have been entirely of my own creation, of course, and most originate in another sort of personal headspace: the strange, oppositional mix of discomfort of sharing work with others at all and the necessary craving of speaking with others about the ideas that inform my work. For my failed newsletter, no matter how fervently I tried to highlight books I had fallen in love with or to celebrate other authors, many of whom were friends or acquaintances whose work I respected and wanted to introduce to others, there was always a portion of the newsletter that was prompted by “news” of my work—a contract acceptance, a cover reveal, a book launch—and as a result I was always keenly aware of the newsletter being rooted in commerce/propaganda/selfishness. And, of course, there is a Catch-22 for all artists, even if their interest in their work has little to do with selling the work, most of us can’t continue to produce work without selling it, as in there literally is not enough time in the day to produce creative work, usually because we are all working for a paycheck at some other gig. I don’t like the spotlight generally and I hate marketing. Writing, for me, is not “relational” in regards to my thinking about how to sell work or trying to decipher what I think what will sell. I don’t see a book as a transaction. Plus, I’m shamelessly selfish. I want to write what I want to write. And I’m shamelessly elitist to boot, for I think the ideas I want to write about have meaning beyond entertainment, even if I value the mechanisms through which entertainment/transportation/escape can be a portal to ideas. I’m far more interested in “relational” relationships; the exchange of ideas, the sharing of wonder about nature and humans and culture and stories. The newsletter never felt it offered that. Nor did I ever allow it to become a truthful exploration of my writing or of the ideas that were obsessing me at the moment, the sort of stuff that sometimes made it into the understory of my work and always made it into the pages of my journal. But then I started hearing people I admire, people like Montana’s Poet Laurette, Chris LaTray talking about the creative value he was finding in producing his Substack newsletter and the exchanges it had opened with readers. Which led me to reading Substack newsletters by writers like George Saunders and Chuck Palahniuk and Roxanne Gay and I found writers engaged in fascinating explorations of their writing process, their current obsessions, their root philosophies as artists. I heard writers sharing their worries and vulnerabilities. Some literally opened their work in progress. Nearly always the reader comments and exchanges were as enlightening as the “newsletter” that prompted them. Reading such material has felt like peeling back the pages of their personal journals. Often I find myself gob struck by something they say seemingly off the cuff about writing or culture or process. Reading such material can sometimes be like attending the book club where the author is present and you get all the best of the beauty of the finished book alongside all the discussion of the backstory that led to the book, the unveiled realizations along the way when writing it, the happenchance of a universe that seems to offer up the things needed to find the story, the gossip, the heartache, the salvation. I can only rarely be profound—maybe once every seven months if I eat and exercise right and steal thoughts from others. I can’t promise to be as funny as I occasionally find myself. I can promise always to be honest. I will definitely commit to being weird, given that I have little choice on that front. And I can guarantee I will be eclectic, in part because I get bored easily, and in part because I honestly do find nearly everything about this planet, the people and other life forms that inhabit it, and the cultures that emerge from trying to live together endlessly fascinating and nearly always surprising.
I promised more about the underground, and only touched on one tiny aspect of it via the publication of a novel that includes the word in its title. What I can start with is that while the “man” portion of that title gives me fits because it is inherently sexist, as is the term from which it is derivative “mankind,” but it is a book, despite being a comedy, in which I wanted to explore a particular aspect of the “human” condition and our desperate need of help from others (and I do wish to explore this “man” conundrum further in another letter [notice now I have dropped the “news” portion of “newsletter” {and reverted to layers of brackets like a jungle canopy}]). I’ll leave it at my belief that “Underground” alone did not work as a title and “Human, Underground” or “Person, Underground” didn’t have quite the same ring—of course now I wonder if I haven’t got that all wrong (and we need to talk about that comma in the title). And then there is the fact that last year I published an long, braided, eccentric essay titled “Underground” in The Wrath Bearing Tree, an essay that links an exploration of certain cultural patterns as presented via television (starting with the underground of “Hogan’s Heros”), an attack on a reality show politics, and the inordinate amount of time I spent as a child literally playing underground. Apparently, “underground” has a stranglehold on me, something I attribute in part to a childhood home with a great crawlspace and to “growing up nowhere,” my nowhere being Wyoming in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as something to do with the gorilla warfare that I think is essential to much good art (and nothing to do with mining or graverobbing or spelunking [another word we should investigate just because it is so wonderful—and by the way: apparently there is controversy between “caving” and “spelunking” among the cave enthusiasts, and this, in the UK they call it “potholing”]). It occurred to me at the outset of this letter that this whole underground obsession probably needs some, pardon the pun, exploration, but I’ll leave that as a tease, as I did above with the various complexities of the word “man” and promise some future topics for this space. If you’ll consider returning, that is. I hope that you do.
Meanwhile, here’s hoping I have inspired some fall gardening or soil overturning or, applying either as a metaphor, some writing.