Toward the Edge of the Hermetic: Notes on Raising Fiction from the Dead

One

Capitol thought, is matter moving through forms dead or alive?

—Kathy Acker

As always, I was awakened in the night by a dream. Somebody dead, a woman whom I admire, came.

In that liminal space between things, in the hours or pages spread out ahead of me, I saw that time had left her moorings and now spread laterally like a white web or the bones of an outstretched human hand. This was not a desperate image. Though mindless, it seemed to carry a precise logic, perhaps that of the body, or the imagination—the part of the mind that bypasses the mind.

Though the action was utterly unclear, I started out. I walked from the room which was my own to the city from different books. I used the image of the white web or bones of an outstretched human hand like a map. That city is formed like that; all streets, businesses, cultural movements, paths, human organisms, sewer shit and piss, politics, relationships and art, even rats radiate out from what is an unknowable center. Exactly like metastasizing cells.

There was something like a map, but there was no indication of a series of tasks to accomplish.

This map—this map was unlike what we mean when we say “map.” When we ordinarily say “map,” we mean something like “gimme directions,” “how do I get there,” “what is the route,” “what steps do I follow and in what order.” All of humans—the ones with education—know this. This is knowledge.

But this map was more like what it would mean if geography and the body were rejoined in a kiss. In that lipped spit hills would do their rising differently, and language, brought back to its free form, would again ocean the world. If I could traverse the distance of the bowl of textured and waxen lined skin of my belly from hipbone to hipbone with my outstretched fingers, if that crossing could be read not as a woman putting her hand to her flesh but reread as nomadic and wild with wind and sand and patterns of desert creatures, then that could be writing.

The words and voices and sounds of friends and colleagues and agents and editors came to me in great cacophonous waves. Echo effects of themselves. Nations of words. If you are not writing to reach the reader, this reader, an American reader, reader of all readers, reader of airport gift shops and grocery store lines, reader of Oprah book lists and New York Times lists and NPR interviews and Pulitzers and NEA’s and Guggenheims and local specialness, reader of stuffing one’s face at restaurants with meals costing more than the rents of the majority, reader of cruises and package vacations and world tours and five star hotels, of appetizers and 7 course meals and different wines with different glasses for every bite, of gluttonous continued eating on to the deserts whose forms mimic the breasts and flesh swells of women or men in magazines, or reader of benevolent travel visiting indigenous cultures and listening to music without an idea in hell what the drumming means the sweat of the marimba or the body’s undulations, eating some of the food but not all of the food and certainly not drinking the water and being sure to find toilets which are not holes in the ground, buying cloth and clothes and silver jewelry and hand-made stuff and woven thingees, reader of houses and cars and investments and retirements and pleasure, of educated classes, of pretty shoes and handbags, stylish glasses and leather furniture, pledger of allegiance to America reader, reader of snack food and junk food and sodas and fattish diets, reader of weight watchers and slim fasts and Jenny Craigs and bow flexes, reader of pill of the month prescription white coated haze-living, reader of super-model diet insider secrets and Hollywood couplings and severances and court cases, insuranced and clean reader, hair cut reader, reader with pets eating better than inner-city youths, television eyed-reader, mistake...