Happy December.
This is an attempt to explain a little more about what goes into the composition process of each issue. I think it's important that writing gets understood as creative work. Craft isn't so much a tool as knowing how to use your tools to resolve a series of problems. So I think, in order to explain what I'm talking about, I have to make a few things apparent about the next two issues.
You'll notice that when Issue #25 and the next non-music issue come out, the opening section of each issue is, essentially, memoir. I can't tell you how uncrazy about this I am.
During my early days as a fledgling writer I was much more traditionally autobiographical. Which is the temptation of youth, when you don't have much experience in the world. As a writer grows, their range of experiences allows them to tap into shades of connotation and inference they didn't have before. Whatever happens on the day to day isn’t immediately material, but when I try to recreate how something felt, need something to write about, or something that just fits, I have to go through what looks like a massive filing cabinet of reference material to create from. I don’t care as much about the life of the person archiving the world, and much more about using those tools to create an image of the world as close to what I’m seeing. I am more concerned with preserving my vision than an exact replica of my eyeballs.
Because, at some point, if you write about your life primarily, or your past, you become your material. You start carving your body up and doing whatever you want with it: grinding it, painting it, flattening it, so on. And for a variety of reasons, mostly artistic, I got sick of it. It relied so much on the audience enjoying my specific voice and finding the character I was writing about (me) , interesting. And that requires myself to believe in it. And in order to sit around and believe I'm interesting, I have to think about myself a lot. And then at some point, naturally, you have to become somewhat narcissistic in order to think you're interesting. If you think you're so interesting, you can just sit around and get lost in your dusty mind palace all day. And as you walk around in there, you start seeing spiders and whatever other shit winds up on your floor (crumbs, mouse shit, Magic the Gathering lands). In order to write about yourself truthfully, then, you have to show everybody all the crap on your floor, and at some point, the audience has to become rooting for the shit to never get picked up, because it creates tension. Nobody likes when a good story ends.
And that's not even including the fact that I'm Buddhist and attachment to your own ego is just perpetuating your own suffering in a cosmological sense, which is a more Buddhist way of saying what I said above about the crap on my floor. Most of my religious work, and the religious work I've found very difficult, is the attempt to quash any attachment I have to my concept of myself and trying to orient my life away from destructive expressions of ego and whatever desires I have. And one strategy there is to attempt to sublimate myself into my creative workl. In order to live the creative life I want to live, one that lines up with my religious, metaphysical, and existential beliefs, writing about myself is not so much banned, but I don't like doing it. I'm not going to do false self-effacement and say I don't think I'm interesting, because that, in and of itself, is an injunction of the ego, an attempt to snuff out a flame with your hand instead of letting it die out slowly. I am not so secure in my practice to say I'm divorced entirely from my desire to not wish to be interesting, but I can say I find a billion things more interesting than me, including the story I am building up to.
The story I am finally going to be telling is the story, essentially, of a tragedy I witnessed during one of my many jobs. Ever since the day it happened, I've thought about it, and it's because of lingering guilts I've had about it that I do. Whether that guilt is logical or it's another injuction of ego, I am not sure. I am going to be telling this story because I believe it deserves telling, because it has an uncanny similarity to a period in my life I've chewed on quite a bit. But they are not truly similar, and in fact, in some of the differences lies the tragedy of the story.
At the crossroads where my story and this story converges tells a story of Richmond that you can spend a lot of money and time avoiding. And it's the very avoidance, the city's insistence on doing everything it can do to avoid its issues, that create tragedies like the above. That tragedy is not only a personal one, but has definitive forces behind it that can be named, and a counterexample can be given.
What I hope will be made clear by the time we get to this story is that there was no better counterexample I could think of but myself. Because when we get there, the story I'm going to tell can only be told if my story didn't end, and there were factors that kept my story from ending in the spot it did. And to be frank, one of the big factors is the subject of my next issue: Virginia Commonwealth University. While there's ostensibly nothing wrong with a college, walking through VCU's campus gives one an odd feeling, like that you are standing in an eddy stirred by unending development. This development can and only result in the continued expansion of the University, and not everybody goes to the University. VCU in its own way is a Vatican inside of Richmond, to the point it has its own police force. This is not rare for colleges, but that it is situated in a central hub of the city is something. The lines between the city and the college are blurred; parts of Richmond you’re in VCU, and you can see VCU from every vantage point in Richmond. As somebody who has a) both been a VCU student b) lived in the city as a worker and c) can do an okay job of watching city trends as they affect people’s lives, VCU exists as a stark contrast to the lives of some Richmonders, and the very act of going to VCU is going to put you on a different playing field than Richmonders.
Specifically in the field of mental health.I’m sick of even hinting that I’m writing about my mental health. Over time, I’ve felt less like any of my maladies (to go ahead and do the bio thing: I’ve been diagnosed with chronic depression, major depression, panic disorder, and ptsd, and those are the official ones; I’m not seeking anymore, this shit is enough) are grand heroic conditions and they’re simply diseases you either have adequate care for or not. A great example: I’m currently fighting with seasonal depression. But there’s nothing special about it. My brain needs serotonin, and when the sun goes down early, I get less. Am I “depressed” and thus sick? Yes. But after a point, no matter how long you wonder what the point of mental illness is, it’s really a distraction from the fact that illness doesn’t need a point or reason. You can jury rig a lot in the meantime, but without a level of stability, you can’t.
However, I did put more stock into my diagnoses when I was younger, that there was some meaning to me being a depressive who had panic attacks. I had not yet been diagnosed with PTSD, which would have helped a lot. So writing about myself from 2011-2013, I’m writing about somebody who didn’t have the full story of their own health yet, wasn’t on a medicine that worked for them, and essentially living as a teenager without a lot of supervision and a set couple of responsibilities, which means I cared about the sort of things a teenager did. Maybe all I need to say is: if I’m annoying you, I’m writing about me as a teenager, and in order to get the point across, I have to remember what it’s like to be a teenager.
The way forward through this issue is going to have to cut through that territory and my hope is, no matter how sharp or dull writing about my past is, it’s some version of a machete to get to the story at the middle, to create resonance there, and make some overall points about what life is like in the city for two different kinds of people. An imperfect instrument may still get the job done.
The holidays are always difficult. My plan is to work on a few things concurrently to get us in a good spot before December lets out.