What Then?

When you are writing, what is it about? Is art your business or is business your art? Are you writing about anything that says something? About humanity? Can we write about anything else? Are you saying anything worth listening to, worth reading? What if everything is worthy? What then? What are you left with then? What do you have?

There’s more underneath, isn’t there?

AIS 0025

I wrote this after reading a lot of commentary on Gene Wolfe’s magnum opus The Book of the New Sun. I also reflected on Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany and ended up in an unintentional comparison-contrast sort of exercise. Both books are not very straightforward and somewhat long for their day. Both are much more than they initially appear to be, yet arguably are also mostly meant simply to entertain. I definitely prefer the queer aspects of Delany's book to the intensely Catholic trappings of Wolfe's. And while neither world is one we'd likely want to sign up for, they're both essentially our world. (I'll leave it at that.)

Anyway, that was the catalyst, not the point.

The point—or rather pointing—is to the work of the substrate, its construction and the life that happens very near it. Almost no one will look there. Do you look there? Do you know what I mean?

Sometimes I pull things down—all the way down—or edit in such a way to give the impression of something having originated from beneath. That is another form of ornamentation. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn't the same thing. I can't know for sure, but I feel like this is what Wolfe did with The Book of the New Sun whereas Dhalgren seems to have begun down below, at that level.

Irrespective of the factual truth of either of those ideas, the feeling is useful. Like a magnetic compass. This way is north, this way south.

What’s a method you use to find your way?

Xoxo,

T