A depression in three parts.
I.
A comment on the last one sent me off on the research spiral, thirty, fifty, a hundred minutes seep into the background radiation as I let nested references do as they will in the age of the hyperlink. Let my brain steep in it, without really getting to any depth. And to think, people used to have to keep track of all this by keeping notes and stuff! In the final analysis it kind of bums me out: I was never, truth be told, a particularly gifted academic, and the internet has, if anything, further softened my discipline. It’s way too easy to fake it. In college I was prone to surprising flashes of synthetic intuition and a sort of intensely voluble verbal acumen that tended to get superlatives attached to my intellect. What I remember is a comment a professor who wrote tests too difficult to be graded by a teaching assistant left on one of my Physical Chemistry tests: “you got the hard ones but gave back points on the easy ones.”
The primary conclusion my meandering aside of research left me with was that I should probably stop messing around and try to slog through Arthur Koestler again (the two books I attempted and failed in my teens, The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine, seeming apropos). The internet, doing it’s thing again, also lets me know without my having asked that Koestler was likely a violent, misogynistic serial rapist, so I set out to write a little maudlin, fragmentary memoir instead. Res ipsa loquitur. All that from half a paragraph of John Crowley!
II.
I probably would never have come across Crowley on my own, tending towards the scientific than the fantastic end of the speculative spectrum (not that it’s fair to consign Crowley to such a genre restriction, or that such dichotomies are really meaningful, still, they put a little sticker on the spine, and it’s either a spaceship or a unicorn, you know, and since high school at least I mainly stuck with the spaceships). A girl introduced me to him, a woman I should say, and (somewhat alarmingly) I find I can’t recall with certainty which of two particular women it was. In my defense both of them gave me a certain amount of trouble within a pretty narrow time frame, but still. The list of women who have given me trouble is not a long one, and these two were not really alike at all. I try to imagine the remembered conversation about the book in question, Little, Big - either of their faces seem perfectly natural attached to it. Not that any of this is either here or there.
Little, Big is the sort of book that strikes a discomfiting chord in me, full of muscular philosophical forays wrapped in a lot of intricately woven prose, alternately lyrical and mundane and enigmatic. It had the contradictory effect that I ended not wholly satisfied with the product (or perhaps my success at reading it) and yet wanting or wishing to create something like it, not to do it better, maybe just to be able to understand it, for once. I can scent all the connections teeming under the surface, that world I dream about but never really see. But I don’t quite make it. I recall having this impulse at least once before, reading Mark Helprin’s (who actually seems like kind of a dick, thanks again, internet) Winter’s Tale. Which inspired me, as I recall, to write a poor short story, though I couldn’t provide any details since I sent that to the fire, along with very many personal things, in a particular mood, over a series of days, in the summer of 1994.
Despite being Crowley’s most popular book, Little, Big is only intermittently in print, and Crowley relates glumly in a recent entry on his weblog that his “books don’t sell very well.” Ain’t that just the way.
III.
I pose myself this hypothetical: if you could choose only one, would you create the important work of art that deeply affected people’s lives, but which failed commercially, or would you produce something superficial, but which would in its success give you financial freedom?
In the darkness of my heart I suspect I would opt for the latter. I sometimes question (heresy of heresies) the true value of great works of art. Despite the fact that I am deeply drawn to them, but so what? What good do they really do? Everyday crap at least relieves the unrelenting monotony of the teeming masses. I’ve been thinking about it lately while listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. We finally moved the stereo out of the basement the other day which triggered an interest in the boy to actually play music on the thing, as opposed to just playing with it and making Daddy nervous. He particularly likes the old 8-Track that a dead-technology-loving friend gave me as a gift a few years back: the tapes are big and easy to handle, Daddy doesn’t get uptight about him handling them the way he does with the CDs; it makes noises like CHUNK and CLACK while it’s working. He started playing Glass Houses, which I probably had not listened to in something approaching 20 years, but when we were kids brother, sister and I had it on LP and we played that thing to death. As soon as it started I realized I still basically knew it note for note, pretty much all the words.
We’d all like to think we’d opt for the higher choice, that we would take the principled stand if we had the misfortune to land in Dr. Milgram’s experimental box, that we would refuse to press the button when the screaming started, no matter how the men in white coats told us we had no choice in the realm where white coats ruled the day. But the statistics don’t lie and the statistics aren’t encouraging. I guess in that context making an inoffensive pop album is a minor crime. Of course the hypothetical question of great art versus commercial success is moot: I’m quite sure I lack the capacity to do either.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 7, 2009 at 1:26 AM
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