R-90 The Muse: Goddess or Con-Man?

 “All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you’ve held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute.”

 — Samuel R. Delany, “Dhalgren”

Extremely difficult book, Dhalgren. I do NOT recommend it for anyone who doesn’t have a lot of time and a strong masochistic streak. I’ve spoken about it before here, and won’t cover the ground again. 

But I was considering the “what’s the point” part of writing in general, and this chunk of the opening pages came to mind. It’s all connections, isn’t it? Writing that is completely untethered from common experience is nothing but, as Paul would have it, “a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” of no use to anyone.

(This, by the way, and having nothing whatsoever to do with my main point because that’s just how I roll, is from the so-called “Love Chapter”, 1 Corinthians 13. This warm-fuzzy chunk of My Little Pony aphorisms, although a standard offering at your basic Christian wedding, is in fact Paul jumping in the Corinthians’ asses for allowing an unstructured charismatic-style worship service. Every babbling idiot who thought they had The Gift [Greek: “Charisma”] kept jumping up and hijacking the meetings to Be Important and Prophesy in Tongues [i.e., made-up gibberish no one could understand]. Romantic love? Paul didn’t even LIKE marriage. I mean, seriously. Has anyone other than me actually read this supposedly foundational book? Pfft. Don’t get me started.)

Where was I? Right. Untethered writing. Delany himself indulges in what can be called “difficult” conceptual writing. For example, the following chunk purportedly transcribed from a heavily damaged writer's spiral-bound notebook with many missing pages and notes pinned and folded into it. And yes, my sentence is on purpose; it's pretty ambiguous whether the writer or the notebook or both are heavily damaged...

“I guess,” I told her, “you can give it to somebody else when you’re ready to be among the dried and crisp branches, trying to remember it, get it down, thinking: I didn’t leave them like that! I didn’t. It’s not real. It can’t be. If it is then I am crazy. I am too tired—wandering among all these, and these streets where the burning, burning, leaves the shattered and the toppling. Brick, no bridge because it takes so long, leaving, I haven’t leaving. That I was following down the dark blood blots her glittering heel left on the blacktop. They slid into the V of my two shadows on the moon and George lit along the I walk on and kept. Leaving it. Twigs, leaves, bark bits along the shoulder, the hissing hills and the smoke, the long country cut with summer and no where to begin. In the direction, then, Broadway and train tracks, limping in the in the all the dark blots till the rocks, running with rusty water, following beside the broken mud gleaming on the ditch edge, with the trees so over so I went into them and thought I could wait here until she came, all naked up or might knowing what I couldn’t, remember maybe if just one of them. He. In or on, I’m not quite where I go or what to go now but I’ll climb up on the and wonder about Mexico if she, come, waiting.

This hand full of crumpled leaves.

It would be better than here. Just in the like that, if you can’t remember anymore if. I want to know but I can’t see are you up there. I don’t have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to”

[NOTE: That sentence fragment is the the end of the book, but seems to link directly to the first sentence of the book, which is another fragment standing on its own. An example of the estimated full metric buttload of time circles, Escher/Mobius weirdness, swirls, and insanity in this thing.]

You see? Nothing apparently ties to any common ground with the reader. But even so, there is a human pattern to it, the natural rhythm of the language, as Delaney calls it, the juxtaposition of words, often without discernible coherence, that fit like chaotic jewels into an emergent pattern that disappears as soon as any part is too closely examined. 

In the hands of a skilled master each meaningless and random single note or dot of paint merges into the whole until an orchestral phrase or pointillist masterpiece emerges. And thus it remains at least vaporously tethered to the one experiencing it.

With which observation, the point finally emerges:

How many of us think we have the “Charisma”, God’s Gift, the ability to create something tethered to the gestalt of human experience, but that pushes the boundaries somewhere new? How many are just deluded or are pretending because it increases status in the community, but are in fact only producing gibberish, unstructured, incomprehensible, and utterly unconnected to the human tribe?

And does it matter? It seems like it should, doesn’t it? 

Perhaps only when the delusion is deliberate. Which is to say that it matters when an author knowingly writes gibberish just because there will be wannabes who will hail it as genius, and thus his ego takes a positive stroke and/or he gets rich at it. 

Or is he just deluded and sincerely believes in what he’s doing — and can he or any of us know the difference?

As an example, even I classified "Dhalgren," as “an 800 or 900 page monstrosity … one of the most aggravating, self-indulgent pieces of high-concept bullshit that I've ever read.”

I've also mentioned it as some of the best writing I know.

And like the book’s imaginary city of Bellona, it unpredictably shifts and morphs with the chunks rated as pornographic twaddle becoming art, and the most affecting parts becoming gibberish depending on when it’s read and/or re-read.

So did he know - do any of us really know - whether what we’re writing is “good” or whether we’re as knowingly fraudulent as L. Ron Hubbard (although probably not as slavishly followed by morons)?

And, to repeat: Does it matter?