The Silence of Choices: A few lessons from Tillie Olsen

Silence is a real fear for writers. Not silence as in the absence of sound, rather silence as an inability to hear what the imagination wants to bring into the world. For whatever reason, writers are egoists and need to leave imprints of thoughts and stories for people to find. Somehow there’s an instinctive sense for most of us that at least a smidgeon of what we are trying to provide readers is unique, at least partially interesting, and would never have come into the world had we not forced the issue.

Imaginations are funny things. When they work properly life has meaning and literally everything and anything is possible. It’s a great feeling to be in flow with words and filled with the life force one feels being creative with versions of new meaning. But when imaginations are spent, or for whatever reason the gears of thought can’t turn, it only takes a few days of silence and a sense of emptiness before we either feel pointless and inconsequential or, worse, forget that wonderful feeling of surprise and connectedness that is the creative mind at work.

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The Sound of Trumpets In All of This

The great Lester Bowie in his white lab coat

I first came to an awareness of the connecting line between music and linguistic consciousness when I began listening carefully to the guitar work of Jerry Garcia, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, et al. Guitar solos of all kinds are like a special language that would be spoken by the human soul before it is born into the world. Everything from gentle, dancing sonic expressions of love and joy to the waling and shrieking sense of desperation anyone would feel before they had learned to speak about this world where so much unnecessary hate and selfishness get in the way of human growth and dignity.

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My Problem with Death as a Storyteller

I send a lot of stories off to literary journals for publication. A number were published in 2020, some are lined up for spring publication this year. All told, though, my stories were rejected or “declined” over 100 times by fiction publications during the two year period of time I was submitting them. Still, I’ve had about a 10% success rate in the past year. It might have been higher, though, if I’d made death part of more of my stories. But as a writer I have a problem with death and dying (among other things dark and nasty) in the stories I concoct. Death can be too easy.

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“Learning Mode:” Melbourne Culture Corner (Australia)

I knew it was going up in their second edition, but somehow with the U.S. election and the intransigent presidential impersonator we’ve all been forced to manage for the past four years, I missed the tweets by Steven Pearman and team. However, at some point or another today I felt I could finally look away. Sure enough, I learned that the wonderful new Australian-based literary journal Melbourne Culture Corner posted it’s second edition on November 6, and my small story “Learning Mode” is in there (go to pages 15-16 in this PDF).

I am tickled pink to have a piece published out of Melbourne. I lived there a long while back for a year with my family when I was eleven. I also lived in Brisbane for a year when I was six.

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Two Days Before the Election: Careful With Your Endings

The best story I ever wrote came about this summer of all summers. It’s called “Animals with Nowhere to Go.” I’m still working on it. This has been a year that makes it nearly impossible for writers to end their stories. I read that compendium of fiction published in the July 12, 2020 New York Times Sunday Magazine section. None of those pieces seemed to end properly. I can only imagine each writer — great writers! great stories! — had to fight hard to stay away from endings that finish with question marks.

I’m having a difficult time figuring out what tense to use as I write this essay because I can’t tell if what we’ve lived through is still being lived or whether we are actually on to something else.

There are things you depend on in order to create fiction that actually means something. Those things had vanished for most of us by the middle of 2020. We were in new territory. This year may well be as close to chaos and Kurtzian horror as we’ve ever been (although I’m beginning to have grave concerns for 2021 as well).

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T-Shirt, Bumper Sticker, Mask: Who Am You?

We know this. Ever since human beings got to talking to each other (and themselves) the fundamental question — Who am I? — has gotten a lot of play. I’m getting up there in age, but I still ask myself that question at least twice a week (usually in the shower looking down).

So, yes, “Who am you?” as my father sometimes asked me when he was either exasperated or, occasionally, impressed. “Who am you, boy?”

Humanity has tried all sorts of ways to answer that question, or at least to facilitate the means by which folks can at least lay claim to attempting an answer. One can argue that all the weird stuff in cultures beyond satisfying basic needs is definitely in the “Who Am I?” facilitation category — haircuts, clothing, special scents, artistic endeavors, piercings, how you dance, what your team is, etc.

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Queequeg

I had been ill and disjointed for many weeks and that can be quite an assault on the mind. I am writing in the year of coronavirus and the beginning days of what is quite properly being called an uprising and it’s worldwide. My illness carried with it all the signs of coronavirus covid-19 SARS-CoV-2, but with a powerful preponderant emphasis on gastric turmoil and effluvium. Those symptoms would rise up and then subside every few weeks beginning in late April. This ebb and flow went on for three months until we realized it was all due to my handling a cardboard large trunk of old correspondence brought up from twenty years of basement storage. Letters, cards, drawings, and photographs were fully populated with mouse droppings, fur, and urine scented nestings. Likewise, I am sure that every packet or two of memories that I took up to sort through emitted strange, ephemeral mixes of old dead rodent bacteria and virus along with mold and mildew spores and the very dried saliva of death itself.

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Entering The Spouter-Inn

Ishmael enters the Spouter-Inn and encounters a curious, hard to discern large oil-painting, all the while speaking in the second person past: “But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.”

Such brilliance describing a mysterious “besmoked” image, somehow connecting storm and night and ship at sea. “Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant.” And eventually landing upon the idea that it was somehow a whale about to impale itself upon broken masts.

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The Carpet-Bag

Who would have thought that Melville was such a sweet heart and so sensitive. I realize I’ve only read the first two chapters of Moby Dick, but certainly his early intention is to be gentle and loving towards his reader and to approach his story with grace and humility.

I am 713 pages from the Epilogue, but so far I am entranced, although I must admit that I’m as well a bit flummoxed by all the biblical references. Quite early on I decided to keep my mobile phone nearby which contains the “Dictionary.com” app because there are a good many words unbeknownst to most of us here in 2020.

grapnel, hbo, gregale, Euroclydon, cope-stone. I did not know who Lazarus and Dives were either.

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