11/29/2024
Valentines, Vandalism, and a Humble Admission of Defeat:
Week 4 of November Writing Challenge
Today, the 29th, at 4:??am, I am a full week of poems behind. I've already fastened the celice, already tied the fraying rope to my tender chest. I've done my time and I've reconciled myself to falling off. It happens.
Sometimes you fail. I've simply been distracted by reading and traveling and eating and drawing and painting. Most importantly, I've been talking to people. I've been writing to people. I've been yearning. In the airport on the way to Vermont for thanksgiving I finished reading I'm Very Into You, a collected correspondence between Kathy Acker and Mackenzie Wark.
Replete with typos and ramblings and rantings and sloppy, rhetorical double-backs, these e-mails between two vast and crackling intellects were exactly what I needed. This whole month you may have noticed, dear reader, that I've had something of a creative crisis. I've been too project-focused. Disconnected from raw, reckless creativity. They were written for one audience, artfully riding the line between performance and vulnerability. Please like me. Like me as I am.
Their emails covered everything from the inherent eroticism of stuffed animals to the pitfalls of a rigidly defined gender binary. Meandering, playful, and gorgeous, they write to each other in their inimitable styles, but without a thought for posterity. The result feels urgent and in the moment, supercharged by its hyper-specific context. Letter collections like that always resonate with me. The voyeurism of them, the focus. I like how we talk to each other. I like how we write to each other.
I always close the book on a letter collection inspired, not to write poems or essays, but to fall in love again with the art of correspondence, with the thoughtful and meticulous craft without crowd. It reminds me to be present when I send someone a message, however trivial. I'm loathe to mention a book that's been so thoroughly talked about by popular culture but I'm Very Into You also brought me back to the splendor of first reading Ama El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War.
A perfect blend of science fiction and epistolary novels, the plot follows two enemy combatants in a temporal war, trying desperately to circumvent and re-pupae each other's butterfly effects before they result in victory. The women, known only as Red and Blue, find a begrudging respect for each other's artfulness. Neither had seen such a deft manipulator of time before they saw each other, and so they strike up a correspondence. More than the beauty of the letters themselves, the book treats the reader to Red and Blue's elaborate means to deliver them. They tuck their insults into the ash of paper not yet burned, their challenges into the taste of water left boiling and abandoned, their eventual love letters into the mournful sound of wind through scrimshawed bones. The mediums of their messages are messages all their own.
The novel is a celebration of that most delicious and elusive of experiences: courtship. I love courting. Maybe I'm a romantic, maybe I'm a hunter, but the ways lovers cast spells on each other seem to never lose their novelty. Whether it’s a stranger I’ll likely never meet outside of a handful of Grindr messages or my partner of many years after we’ve learned every haptic response and shortcut to each others’ hearts.
When I flirt over text, I dream of my lovers revisiting the message again and again. I delight in making a lasting impression. It becomes a game, an exchange of gentle fantasy, like Persian merchants of old, playing chess on their boards of air and memory.
Sometimes I feel like I do my best work, my best writing (certainly my most joyous writing) in messages to lovers and friends. I never leave any toys in the chest, invoking every book I've ever read, every movie I've ever seen. It's simply too fun not to. I want to delight in all things. It is only more pleasurable that these writings are limited to their audiences. I feel no pressure but fun and the pure joy of creation, no hunger for feedback but a simple reply.
One of my friends, possibly one of the best writers I've ever met, puts all their work on the fanfiction website Archive of Our Own. Using original characters and obscure tags, they hide their masterpieces amidst thousand page Sonic the Hedgehog smut novels and multipart Stranger Things AUs. To her, the true joy is in the writing, in the plotting. She paints with her eyes closed. For someone like me, who struggles to keep private even the most intimate of creative endeavors (I literally just waxed rhapsodic about my sexting, for goodness' sake), I both adore and covet this approach to creation. It baffles me. I write to publish, to perform, and somehow a part of me will always dream of the kind of self-assurance it takes to toil in self-sentenced obscurity. Like the nuns of eighteenth century France who created detailed miniatures of their own devotion cells, this friend of mine writes to reflect, to pray, to understand. Moreover, her work, buried in others' work, turns an eye to Archive of Our Own itself, and all its mad geniuses and fools that fill its Borgesian library of dreams. She honors the medium with her message.
The medium can also be incorporated into the message as a counterpoint. Less a harmony, more an act of vandalism. Another friend of mine will toss the breadcrumbs of her writing into discord servers where dozens of libidinous porn enthusiasts masturbate over voice calls.
Recently, Kevin Killian's posthumous collection of Amazon product reviews were released as a book. As much as I appreciate the blessing of another Kevin Killian book in the world, something is lost in removing his playful acts of painstaking hijinks from their original context. Stumbling upon a purple, loquacious, decadent review of Robert Zemeckis' Polar Express or a Wood Diner Birdhouse changes how we look at the chat GPT'd pulp ocean of text that Amazon has become. Killian's act of seeming self-sabotage, stuffing his considerable knowledge and skill into as easily overlooked as Amazon Reviews is a noble one, an artistic one. I am humbled by its largesse.
And so, to my failed month I prostrate myself. I whip myself wincing and bleeding. But as December 1st comes, I will salve my wounds with all the words I've written to lovers, to friends, to no one. I may not have risen to my writing challenge, but only in technicalities. This month I have wooed. This month I have won. This month, with seven poems between me and victory, I feel gleeful as an ingenue with a letter clutched to her breast. The right readers will find me, just as the right lovers have.
Many already have.
Yours with an open mouth,
-B
