Reality Hunger (47 page)

Whether we’re young, or we’re all grown up and just starting out, or we’re getting old, or getting so old there’s not much
time left, we’re looking for company, and we’re looking for understanding: someone who reminds us that we’re not alone, and someone who wonders out loud about things that happen in this life, the way we do when we’re walking or sitting or driving, and thinking things over.

The right voice can reveal what it’s like to be thinking: the inner life in its historical moment.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Pascal. Rousseau. Nietzsche. Cioran.

We don’t come to thoughts; they come to us.

Hamlet, dying, says, “If I had the time, I would tell you all.” The entire play is the Hamlet Show, functioning as a vehicle for Hamlet to give his opinion on everything and anything, as Nietzsche does in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. The play could easily be broken up into little sections with headings like “Hamlet on Friendship,” “Hamlet on Sexual Fidelity,” “Hamlet on Suicide,” “Hamlet on Grave Diggers,” “Hamlet on the Afterlife.”
Hamlet
is, more than anything else, Hamlet talking on a multitude of different topics. (Melville’s marginal comment on
one of the soliloquies in the play: “Here is forcibly shown the great Montaigneism of Hamlet.”) I find myself wanting to ditch the tired old plot altogether and just harness the voice, which is a processing machine, taking input and spitting out perspective—a lens, a distortion effect. Hamlet’s very nearly final words: “Had I but the time … O, I could tell you.” He would keep riffing forever if it weren’t for the fact that the plot needs to kill him.

Plot isn’t a tool; intelligence is. I don’t derive meaning from intellect but from the illumination it pries out of unmediated experience. Though nonfiction has as much “fiction” in it as fiction does, its aims are different: the mediation between writer and reader is thinner. Serious nonfiction removes fiction’s masks, stripping away monuments to civilization to arrive at truths that destroy the writer and thereby encompass the reader—the last shred of human expression before silence seizes all words. The novelist invents a story to highlight his craft. To a younger reader, stylistic bravura is a revelation of the imaginative life, but to the mature adult, craft per se isn’t revelatory, merely a demonstration of cultural refinement and a parable of the power of storytelling, all in the interest of proclaiming the writer an artist. Fiction mimics interest in God’s intelligent omnipotence: there’s a plan (plot), no matter the story’s tragedy; the most horrific story is softened by the author’s presence, seeking, no matter how faintly, to educate us on the limits of disorder held together by the civilizing process of creation. Lyric essay tells a story at a baser level: irrational, plotless, characterless, or repetitiously characterized, it informs by serial enactments of the mind’s processes prior to writing the story. The goal isn’t to get to the point of wanting to write
the story (or fulfilling society’s need for it to be fictionalized); the goal is to bare the elements not as narrative but as life. Serious essay, disallowing the writer the privileged position of living only in his head, unravels within life’s chaos, confirming the chaos. Fiction seeks eternal rationality. The burden shouldn’t be for me to find myself in the work of the great fiction writer; he seeks to escape his head by allowing me in through exegesis, a game that pretends to reward the best chess players. I prefer essayistic impulse: violently bumping up against the other at the flashpoint of instinctual reaction. I don’t want to be inside the fiction writer’s head unless he first agrees to kill his characters. After two decades of playing rock ’n’ roll, Lou Reed put out an album of white noise called
Metal Machine Music
—could be brilliant, could be bullshit—to get himself out of a record contract to a label he hated, but it’s become influential. The advice in his liner notes: “Kill your band.”

So: no more masters, no more masterpieces. What I want (instead of God the novelist) is self-portrait in a convex mirror.

autobio