Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Write About One of Your Favorite Things

To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.

Well, true enough, any word worth repeating is greater than the sum of its parts; and the particular word-part Z—angular, whereas S is curvaceous — can, from a certain perspective, appear anally wired (although Z is far too sophisticated to throw up its arms like Y and act as if it had just been goosed).

On those of us neither prosaic nor jaded, however, those whom the Fates have chosen to monitor such things, Z has had an impact above and beyond its signifying function. A presence in its own right, it’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup.

Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type or pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill. This is partially due to Z’s relative rarity: my dictionary devotes 99 pages to A words, 138 pages to P, but only 5 pages to words beginning with Z. Then there’s Z’s exoticness, for, though it’s a component of the English language, it gives the impression of having zipped out of Africa or the ancient Near East of Nebuchadnezzar. Ultimately, perhaps, what is most fascinating about Z is its dual projection of subtle menace and aesthetic grace. Z’s are not verbal ants; they are bees. Stylish bees. Killer bees. They buzz; they sting.

Z is a whip crack of a letter, a striking viper of a letter, an open jackknife ever ready to cut the cords of convention or peel the peach of lust.

A Z is slick, quick (it’s no accident that automakers call their fastest models Z cars), arcane, eccentric, and always faintly sinister — although its very elegance separates it from the brutish X, that character traditionally associated with all forms of extinction. If X wields a tire iron, Z packs a laser gun. Zap! If X is Mike Hammer, Z is James Bond. (For reasons known only to the British, a Z 007 would pronounce its name “zed.”) If X marks the spot, Z avoids the spot, being too fluid, too cosmopolitan, to remain in one place.

In contrast to that prim, trim, self-absorbed supermodel, I, or to O, the voluptuous, orgasmic, bighearted slut, were Z a woman, she would be a femme fatale, the consonant we love to fear and fear to love.

The celebrities of the alphabet are M and Z, the letters for whom famous movies have been named. Of course, V had its novel, but as I can assure you from personal experience, in today’s culture a novel lacks a movie’s sizzle, not to mention pizzazz. Is it not testimony to Z’s star power that it is invariably selected to come on last — and this despite the fact that the F word gets all the press?

Take a letter? You bet. I’ll take Z. My favorite country, at least on paper, is Zanzibar; my favorite body of water, the Zuider Zee. ZZ Top is my favorite band, zymology my favorite branch of science (dealing, as it does, with the fermentation of beverages).

Had Zsa Zsa Gabor married Frank Zappa, she would have had the coolest name in the world — except, maybe, if ZaSu Pitts had wed Tristan Tzara. As for me, my given name, Thomas, is a modern, anglicized version of the old prebiblical moniker Tammuz. Originally, Tammuz was a mythological hero who served the Goddess simultaneously as lover, husband, brother, and son. Give me my Z back, and there’s no telling where I might go from there.

Before I go anywhere, however, let me lift a zarf of zinfandel to the former ruling family of Russia. To the tzar, the tzarina, and all the little tzardines! And as for those who would complain that I’m taking this bizzness too far, I say: better a zedophile than a pedophile.

Requested by Esquire, 1996

How Do You Feel About America?

America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn’t that fabulous? I mean, how could you fail to have a good time in a country like that? I could live literally anywhere in the world and do what I do, so, obviously, I live in America by choice — not for any patriotic or financial reasons necessarily, but because it’s so interesting there. America may be the least boring country on earth, and this despite the fact that the dullards on the religious right and the dullards on the academic left (the two faces of yankee puritanism) seem to be in competition to see who can do the most to promote compulsory homogenization and institutionalized mediocrity. It won’t work. In America, the chronically wild, persistently haywire, strongly individualistic, surprisingly good-humored, flamboyant con-man hoopla is simply bigger than all of them.

Anthem, Avon Books, 1997

NOTE: The preceding was written several years before the military— industrial complex first seized and then cemented total control of the U.S. government, a coup d’état that would have failed without the active assistance of a rapidly growing population of fearful, non-thinking dupes; “true believers” dumbed down and almost comically manipulated by their media, their church, and their state. So be it. Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America’s masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed. In the wake of the recent takeover, our prevailing national madness has been ratcheting steadily skyward: the pious semi-literates in the conservative camp tremble and crow, the educated martyrs in the progressive sector writhe and fume. It’s a grand show, from a cosmic perspective, though enjoyment of the spectacle is blunted by the havoc being wreaked on nature and by the developmental abuse inflicted on children. We must bear in mind, however, that the central dynamic of our race has never been a conflict between good and evil but rather between enlightenment and ignorance. Ignorance makes the headlines, wins the medals, doles out the punishment, jingles the coin, yet in its clandestine cubbyholes (and occasionally on the public stage) enlightenment continues to quietly sparkle, its radiance outshining the entire disco ball of history. Its day may or may not come, but no matter. The world as it is! Life as it is! Enlightenment is its own reward.

What Do You Think Writer’s Block Is and Have You Ever Had It?

I’m not convinced that there’s any such thing as “writer’s block.” I suspect that what we like to call “writer’s block” is actually a failure of nerve or a failure of imagination, or both.

If you’re willing to take chances, risk ridicule, and push the envelope, and if you’ve managed to hold on to your imagination (the single most important quality a writer can possess, even slightly more important than an itchy curiosity and a sense of humor), then you can dissolve any so-called block simply by imagining extraordinary, heretofore unthinkable solutions, and/or by playing around uninhibitedly with language. You can imagine or wordplay your way out of any impasse. That’s assuming, of course, that you’re talented in the first place.

Asked by New Times, 2002

With What Fictional Character Do You Most Identify?

I’ll take Gorodish. And, no, I’m not trying to order the daily special in a Hungarian restaurant. Gorodish happens to be the name of the middle-aged character played by Richard Bohringer in Diva, the flashy/spiky 1981 film written and directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix.

Gorodish spends much of each day sitting in a bathtub in the center of his large, virtually empty Parisian loft, smoking cigars and meditating on the undulating blue water in one of those plastic wave machines. He has a teenaged Vietnamese paramour for whom he cares but of whom he is not the least bit possessive; and on the rare occasions when he leaves the loft, he wears handsome white suits and drives a gorgeous vintage white Citroën. As his young friends keep getting into trouble with gangsters, he comes to their aid, swiftly, effectively, and forcefully, but always with faint amusement and the kind of grace that never expends an erg more of energy than is absolutely necessary.

Serenely unattached yet wryly compassionate, Gorodish is coolness personified, the most Zen character in the history of cinema. He’s my ideal and, naturally, I want to emulate him, right down to the tub and the cigars — though I know I’ve got a ways to go. In fact, my own paramour insists that the fictional character I most resemble is not Beineix’s Gorodish, but Twain’s Tom Sawyer.

Solicited by an editor for inclusion in a survey book not yet published.

Is the Writer Obligated to Use His/Her Medium as an Instrument for Social Betterment?

A writer’s first obligation is not to the many-bellied beast but to the many-tongued beast, not to Society but to Language. Everyone has a stake in the husbandry of Society, but Language is the writer’s special charge. A grandiose animal it is, too. If it weren’t for Language there wouldn’t be Society.

Once writers have established their basic commitment to Language (and are taking the Blue-Guitar-sized risks that that relationship demands), then they are free to promote social betterment to the extent that their conscience or neurosis might require. But let me tell you this: social action on the political/economic level is wee potatoes.

Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

How many writers of fiction do you think are committed to that?

Asked by Fiction International, 1984

Why Do You Live Where You Live?

I’m here for the weather.

Well, yes, I’m also here for the volcanoes and the salmon, and the fascinating possibility that at any moment the volcanoes could erupt and pre-poach the salmon. I’m here for the rust and the mildew, for webbed feet and twin peaks, spotted owls and obscene clams (local men suffer from geoduck envy), blackberries and public art (including that threatening mural the smut-sniffers chased out of Olympia), for the rituals of the potlatch and the espresso cart, for bridges that are always pratfalling into the water and ferries that keep ramming the dock.

I’m here because the Wobblies used to be here, and sometimes in Pioneer Square you can still find bright-eyed old anarchists singing their moldering ballads of camaraderie and revolt. I’m here because someone once called Seattle “the hideout capital of the U.S.A.,” a distant outpost of a town where generations of the nation’s failed, fed-up, and felonious have come to disappear. Long before Seattle was “America’s Athens” (The New York Times), it was America’s Timbuktu.

Getting back to music, I’m here because “Tequila” is the unofficial fight song of the University of Washington and because “Louie Louie” very nearly was chosen as our official state anthem. There may yet be a chance of that, which is not something you could say about South Carolina.

I’m here for the forests (what’s left of them), for the world’s best bookstores and movie theaters; for the informality, anonymity, general lack of hidebound tradition, and the fact that here and nowhere else grunge rubs shoulders in the half-mean streets with a subtle yet pervasive mysticism. The shore of Puget Sound is where electric guitars cut their teeth and old haiku go to die.

I’m here for those wild little mushrooms that broadcast on transcendental frequencies; for Kevin Calabro, who broadcasts Sonics games with erudite exuberance on KJR; for Dick’s Deluxe burgers, for the annual Spam-carving contests, the cigar room at Dolce’s Latin Bistro, Monday Night Football at the Blue Moon Tavern, opera night at the Blue Moon Tavern (which, incidentally, is scheduled so that it coincides with Monday Night Football — a somewhat challenging overlap that the first-time patron might fail to fully appreciate); and I’m here for the flying saucers that made their first earthly appearance near Mount Rainier.

I’m here for Microsoft but not for Weyerhaeuser. I’m here for Starbucks but not for Boeing. I’m definitely here for the Pike Place Market and definitely not here for Wal-Mart or any scuzzball who shops at Wal-Mart. I’m here for the snow geese in the tide flats but not for the snow jobs in the State House. I’m here for the tulips but not the Tulip Festival (they’re flowers, folks, not marketing tools!). I’m here for the relative lack of financial ambition (which, alas, may be responsible for some of those Wal-Mart shoppers), for the soaring population of bald eagles, and the women with their quaint Norwegian brand of lust. “Ya. Sure, ya betcha.”

But mostly, finally, ultimately, I’m here for the weather.

As a result of the weather, ours is a landscape in a minor key, a sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tend to melt together, creating a perpetual blurred effect, as if God, after creating Northwestern Washington, had second thoughts and tried unsuccessfully to erase it. Living here is not unlike living inside a classical Chinese painting before the intense wisps of mineral pigment had dried upon the silk— although, depending on the bite in the wind, there’re times when it’s more akin to being trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; a dubious joint where gruff waiters slam chopsticks against the horizon, where service is haphazard, noodles soggy, wallpaper a tad too green, and considerable amounts of tea are spilt; but in each and every fortune cookie there’s a line of poetry you can never forget. Invariably, the poems comment on the weather.

In the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end, and the witch measles that meteorologists call “drizzle” are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk. Many are depressed, a few actually suicidal. But I, I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus. “What’s so hot about the sun?” I ask. Sunbeams are a lot like tourists: intruding where they don’t belong, promoting noise and forced activity, faking a shallow cheerfulness, dumb little cameras slung around their necks. Raindrops, on the other hand, introverted, feral, buddhistically cool, behave as if they were locals. Which, of course, they are.

My bedroom is separated from the main body of my house, so that I have to go outside and cross some pseudo-Japanese stepping-stones in order to go to sleep at night. Often I get rained on a little bit on my way to bed. It’s a benediction, a good-night kiss.

Romantic? Absolutely. And nothing to be ashamed of. If reality is a matter of perspective, then the romantic view of the world is as valid as any other — and a great deal more rewarding. It makes of life an unpredictable adventure rather than a problematic equation. Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a hundred times more sexy than a sunburnt palm tree, and more primal and contemplative, too. A steady, wind-driven rain composes music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things.

Obviously, then, the Pacific Northwest’s customary climate is perfect for a writer. It’s cozy and intimate. Reducing temptation (how can you possibly play on the beach or work in the yard?), it turns a person inward, connecting them with what Jung called “the bottom below the bottom,” those areas of the deep unconscious into which every serious writer must spelunk. Directly above my writing desk there is a skylight. This is the window, rain-drummed and bough-brushed, through which my Muse arrives, bringing with her the rhythms and cadences of cloud and water, not to mention the latest catalog from Victoria’s Secret and the twenty-three auxiliary verbs.

Oddly enough, not every local author shares my proclivity for precipitation. Unaware of the poetry they’re missing, many malign the mist as malevolently as the non-literary heliotropes do. They wring their damp mitts and fret about rot, cursing the prolonged spillage, claiming they’re too dejected to write, that their feet itch (athlete’s foot), the roof leaks, they can’t stop coughing, and they feel as if they’re being slowly digested by an oyster.

Yet the next sunny day, though it may be weeks away, will trot out such a mountainous array of pagodas, vanilla sundaes, hero chins, and god fingers; such a sunset palette of Jell-O, carrot oil, Vegas strip, and Kool-Aid; such a sea-vista display of broad waters, firred islands, whale spouts, and boat sails thicker than triangles in a geometry book, that any and all memories of dankness will fizz and implode in a blaze of bedazzled amnesia. “Paradise!” you’ll hear them proclaim as they call United Van Lines to cancel their move to Arizona.

They’re kidding themselves, of course. Our sky can go from lapis to tin in the blink of an eye. Blink again and your latte’s diluted. And that’s just fine with me. I thrive here on the certainty that no matter how parched my glands, how anhydrous the creek beds, how withered the weeds in the lawn, it’s only a matter of time before the rains come home.

The rains will steal down from the Sasquatch slopes. They will rise with the geese from the marshes and sloughs. Rain will fall in sweeps, it will fall in drones, it will fall in cascades of cheap Zen jewelry.

And it will rain a fever. And it will rain a sacrifice. And it will rain sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.

Rain will primitivize the cities, slowing every wheel, animating every gutter, diffusing commercial neon into smeary blooms of esoteric calligraphy. Rain will dramatize the countryside, sewing pearls into every web, winding silk around every stump, redrawing the horizon line with a badly frayed brush dipped in tea and quicksilver.

And it will rain an omen. And it will rain a trance. And it will rain a seizure. And it will rain dangers and pale eggs of the beast.

Rain will pour for days unceasing. Flooding will occur. Wells will fill with drowned ants, basements with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics will roam the dripping peninsulas. Moisture will gleam on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their rest in dead tree trunks, will clack their clamshell teeth in the submerged doorways of video parlors. Rivers will swell, sloughs will ferment. Vapors will billow from the troll-infested ditches, challenging windshield wipers, disguising intentions and golden arches. Water will stream off eaves and umbrellas. It will take on the colors of the beer signs and headlamps. It will glisten on the claws of nighttime animals.

And it will rain a screaming. And it will rain a rawness. And it will rain a disorder, and hair-raising hisses from the oldest snake in the world.

Rain will hiss on the freeways. It will hiss around the prows of fishing boats. It will hiss in electrical substations, on the tips of lit cigarettes, and in the trash fires of the dispossessed. Legends will wash from the desecrated burial grounds, graffiti will run down alley walls. Rain will eat the old warpaths, spill the huckleberries, cause toadstools to rise like loaves. It will make poets drunk and winos sober, and polish the horns of the slugs.

And it will rain a miracle. And it will rain a comfort. And it will rain a sense of salvation from the philistinic graspings of the world.

Yes, I’m here for the weather. And when I’m lowered at last into a pit of marvelous mud, a pillow of fern and skunk cabbage beneath my skull, I want my epitaph to read, IT RAINED ON HIS PARADE. AND HE WAS GLAD!

Asked by editors of Edgewalking on the Western Rim (Sasquatch Books, 1994)

What Was Your First Outdoor Adventure?

I got interested in the outdoors after robbing a bank.

It’s true. When I was seven years old, my friend Johnny Holshauser and I robbed the local bank. This was not a joke. We were absolutely serious. We went in with our quite authentic-looking cap pistols and held the place up. It was the early 1940s and Blowing Rock, North Carolina, a small Appalachian resort community, was still mired in the Great Depression. Our strapped parents were not ungenerous, but we figured we deserved more money for candy, comic books, and other preadolescent accouterments.

In those days there was a fireworks device known as a “torpedo.” Torpedoes, incongruously, were round, resembling dry, gray gumballs or jawbreakers. When you hurled one of them against a hard surface, it exploded with a loud report, like a good-size firecracker. Unbeknownst to Johnny or me, the Blowing Rock bank tellers had torpedoes on hand. When we stormed in and demanded cash, one or more tellers began surreptitiously throwing the things against the marble floors and walls.

Not surprisingly, we thought we were being fired upon. Panic-stricken, we fled, absolutely convinced there were bullets whizzing past our heads. We ran to the end of town and high-tailed it up into the hills, where we concealed ourselves, certain the police — or maybe a posse of armed men — would soon be after us.

In many ways, that day on the lam turned out to be one of the finest days of our childhood. We gorged ourselves on huckleberries and teaberries (the source of the unique flavor in Pepto-Bismol). At one point, we actually caught a fish by splashing it out of the water onto the bank of a shallow creek. The fish was only about four inches long, no more than a sardine, but we built a little fire and cooked it, not bothering with the formalities of fillet. We ate it insides and all, and we ate it with gusto.

In the area where we were hiding, there was a fairly spectacular waterfall. Several adults had been injured while climbing Glen Burney Falls, and rumor had it that one climber had actually fallen to his death. That day, Johnny and I climbed Glen Burney without a qualm. (Later, unbeknownst to our parents and to the horror of my female cousins, we were to scale it on numerous occasions.) Above the falls, we discovered a ring of rhododendron bushes. In the circle’s center, the moss was as soft as nouveauriche shag carpet. Protected by the bushes and a rocky little grotto, it made an ideal hideout, one which we were to make advantageous use of over the next several years, although our life of crime was mercifully short-lived.

Eventually, it grew dark. Owls started hooting and unidentifiable things began to go bump in the night. Scared, cold, and no longer captivated by the gastronomic charms of berries, we lost heart and, circumventing the falls, sheepishly made our way toward home. All afternoon, the story of our “robbery” had been circulating in town and, to their good credit, everybody, including the bank tellers and our families, seemed more amused than outraged by it.

Hands uncuffed, legs unshackled, necks unnoosed, the robbers were given dinner, baths, a stern lecture, and sent to bed.

It may or may not be true that crime doesn’t pay, but our little caper had a happy ending, the best part of which was an introduction to life in the wilderness. From that day on, I spent as much time as possible in the outdoor world, finding there the kind of inner nourishment that others are said to find in the mosque, the synagogue, the church — or the bank.

Asked by Trips, 1989

Do You Express Your Personal Political Opinions in Your Novels?

Since liberation has always been a major theme of mine, I suppose there’s an undercurrent in my novels that could be interpreted as political. On the other hand, it doesn’t toe anybody’s party line and it’s rarely event-specific.

My approach has been to encourage readers to embrace life, on the assumption that anyone who’s saying “yes” to life is automatically going to say “no” to those forces and policies that destroy life, bridle it, dull it, or render it miserable. As an advocate, I’m more akin to Zorba the Greek than to Ralph Nader.

Elliott Bay Books Newsletter, 2003

How Would You Evaluate John Steinbeck?

Maybe what I admire most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his forty-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower. Choosing to travel among downtrodden dreamers rather than the tuxedoed tiddly-poops of the establishment, he brought both a rawboned American romanticism and an elegant classical pathos to the stories he told about their undervalued lives. Any writer who can’t be inspired by that has put his or her own heart at risk.

Asked by the Center for Steinbeck Studies, San José State University, 2002

Tell Us About Your Favorite Car

When I drove off the used-car lot in my first Cadillac, I felt like I’d finally grown up. I mean, that car had “adult” written all over it. Unfortunately, I only kept it ninety days.

This was no adolescent rite of passage. It was 1981 and I’d been legal for so many years I could do it in my sleep. But my previous car, a hand-painted old Mercury convertible, had an air of youthful frivolity perhaps not befitting a successful author.

That Caddy, however, was solid citizen. A maroon ’76 DeVille sedan, its plush interior was the color of the cranberry sauce at a Republican fund-raising dinner. Into it, I could fit my entire volleyball team, our equipment, a couple of girlfriends, and a case of beer. It was as quiet as a cathedral and so smooth it was like riding on Twinkie cream.

Problem was, it made me feel like a middle-aged Jewish dentist. Now, there’s nothing wrong with middle-aged Jewish dentists: they dig impeccable root canals and make, I’m sure, fine fathers, friends, and neighbors. Well and good, but the image fit me like a mouthful of metal braces — and I had no access to laughing gas.

When my embarrassment level reached the point where I was slumping down in the seat and shielding my face while driving, I took the Cadillac into a General Motors dealership and asked to have it tricked out: wire wheels, pinstripes, landau top. Naively, I suppose, I was determined to somehow make it cool. Since I had to leave it overnight, the dealer offered to provide me with a loaner. A diabolically clever fellow, he nonchalantly sent me home in a new gold-and-black Camaro Z-28. Wow! Good golly, Miss Molly! Flying chickens in a barnyard! I’d never piloted anything remotely like it. After no more than twenty zippy miles and eight tight corners, I’d fallen hopelessly in love. The next day I zoomed back and traded in the Caddy.

I’ve been happily Z-ing ever since. The Camaro holds only half a volleyball team and is like riding on peanut M&M’s. But it’s more responsive than three June brides and a dozen bribed congressmen— and nobody asks me to cap their teeth.

Asked by Road & Track, June 1987

What Is Your Favorite Place in Nature?

Back before the earth became a couch potato, content to sit around and watch the action in other galaxies, it displayed a talent for energetic geophysical innovation. Among the lesser known products of our planet’s creative period is a scattering of landlocked “islands,” dramatic humps of preglacial sandstone (covered nowadays with fir and madrona) rising out of the alluvial plain on which I live in northwest Washington State.

Although rugged and almost rudely abrupt, there’s a feminine swell to these outcroppings that reminds me of Valkyrie breasts or, on those frequently drizzly days when they are kimonoed in mist, of scoops of Sung Dynasty puddings.

One of the larger outcroppings — called simply The Rock by its admirers — can be partially negotiated by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. I hike the last one hundred yards through tall, dark trees, and at the summit find that the hump goddesses, as usual, have rolled out the green carpet for me. There’s spongy moss underfoot, a variety of grasses and ferns and more wildflowers than Heidi’s goats could chew up in a fortnight.

In a few more yards, however, I find myself standing on virtually bare sandstone, and that sandstone is falling away away away in a plunge so steep it would be terrifying were it not so beautiful. Perched like Pan on a damp and dizzy precipice, I can look down on gliding eagles, into the privacy of osprey nests, across a verdant luminescence of leaf life and a hidden, lily-padded pond, where in spring a trillion frogs gossip about Kermit’s residuals.

To visit The Rock is to visit a natural frontier both dangerous and comforting, hard and soft, familiar and mysterious. And like Thoreau’s Walden, The Rock defines the boundary between civilization and wilderness, existing as it does twenty minutes via jeep from a bustling town, two seconds via daydream from the beginning of time.

Asked by LIFE magazine, 1987

Send Us a Souvenir From the Road

A few years ago, I was sitting at a battered desk in my room in the funky old wing of the Pioneer Inn, Lahaina, Maui, when I discovered the following rhapsody scratched with a ballpoint pen into the soft wooden bottom of the desk drawer.

Saxaphone

Saxiphone

Saxophone

Saxyphone

Saxephone

Saxafone

Obviously, some unknown traveler — drunk, stoned, or simply Spell-Check deprived — had been penning a postcard or letter when he or she ran headlong into Dr. Sax’s marvelous instrument. I have no idea how the problem was resolved, but the confused attempt struck me as a little poem, an ode to the challenges of our written language.

I collected the “poem,” and many times since, I’ve fantasized about how the word in question might have fit into the stranger’s communiqué. For example: “When I get back from Hawaii, I’m going to blow you like a saxophone.”

Or, “Not even a saxophone can help me now.”

Or, “Here the saxophone (saxaphone? saxofone?) is seldom confused with the ukulele (ukalele? ukilele? ukaleli?).”

Black Book, 2002

What Is the Function of Metaphor?

If, as Terence McKenna contended, the world is actually made of language, then metaphors and similes (puns, too, I might add) extend the dimensions and expand the possibilities of the world. When both innovative and relevant, they can wake up a reader, make him or her aware, through the elasticity of verbiage, that reality — in our daily lives as well as in our stories — is less prescribed than tradition has led us to believe.

Metaphors have the capacity to heat up a scene and eternalize an image, to lift a line of prose out of the mundane mire of mere fictional reportage and lodge it in the luminous honeycomb of the collective psyche. They can squeeze meaning out of the most unlikely turnip.

On a personal level, I was asked at a bookstore reading once if my fondness for metaphors wasn’t a gimmick. In response, I asked the questioner, “Were Hemingway’s short declarative sentences a gimmick? Were the long convoluted sentences of Faulkner a gimmick?” In both instances, the answer is emphatically no. When Hemingway and Faulkner distilled their respective realities into language, what we encounter on the page is the stylistic reflection of those realities. It’s how those two writers saw the world. Or, more accurately, it’s how they were compelled to represent what they saw. In my case, because I’m fascinated by words, mythology, and transfiguration, it’s hardly surprising that I’d refract life through the polychromatic lens of metaphor and simile.

Admittedly, I get a kick from simply playing with language, but I try to make it a point not to create metaphor for metaphor’s sake; to never fashion them carelessly or employ them arbitrarily. I insist that whenever possible they not only spring out of trapdoors or closets but that their “Surprise!” has contextural pertinence.

Ultimately, I use such figures of speech to deepen the reader’s subliminal understanding of the person, place, or thing that’s being described. That, above everything else, validates their role as a highly effective literary device. If nothing else, they remind reader and writer alike that language is not the frosting, it’s the cake.

Asked by Inside Borders, 2003

Are You a Realist?

According to Fellini, “The visionary is the only true realist.” Before we dismiss that declaration as the ravings of a… well, a visionary, we should consider this:

Most of the activity in the universe is occurring at speeds too fast or too slow for normal human senses to register it, and most of the matter in the universe exists in amounts too vast or too tiny to be accurately observed by us. With that in mind, isn’t it a bit unrealistic to talk about “realism”?

What Tom Wolfe and the other champions of naturalistic writing would have us accept as realistic content is actually the behavior patterns of a swarm of fruit flies on one bursting peach in an orchard with a thousand varieties of strange fruit stretching beyond every visible horizon. Granted, those fruit flies are pretty damn interesting, but from the standpoint of “reality” they are hardly the only game in town.

Since the so-called fabric of reality has been historically perforated with false assumptions, and is continuously stained by myriad hues of subjectivity, any of us poor fools who believe we’re writing something real may actually be the unwitting butts of a fiendish cosmic joke.

On the other hand, there’s a point of view shared by most mystics and many theoretical physicists that purports that everything in the universe, large or small, is simply a projection of our consciousness. So, one could make a case for all writers being realists, including those who write about the secret lives of inanimate objects every bit as much as those who focus on jury deliberations or coming of age in rural Nebraska.

Asked by Contemporary Literature, 2001

What Is the Meaning of Life?

Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being; to return to Eden, make friends with the snake, and set up our computers among the wild apple trees.

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution — a melding into the godhead, into love — is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to acknowledge that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or, barring that, to turn out a good thin-crust pizza and a strong glass of beer.

Asked by LIFE magazine, 1991