tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post3827652364029070412..comments2023-10-20T07:18:17.884-07:00Comments on He who lives in the moment lives eternally: Dirty Laundry Lit (eary) autobiographic questionnaire of sunken light.. David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-50362870882613763802013-03-25T01:16:44.240-07:002013-03-25T01:16:44.240-07:00Writing fiction is a lot getting drunk off the dra...Writing fiction is a lot getting drunk off the draught of the keyboard (Home Row Happy Hour) and then squeezing your heart into an empty gin bottle and hurtling it as far as you possibly can into an ocean of unknown variables. You don’t know what sort of current your script will get caught in; how large the tidal wave will be. You have no clue how many seasons your heart will spend bobbing up and down, succumbing to the sloshes of nature, the indifference of mankind, the boiled insouciance of an accelerated society whose paws have more and more freely adapted to the rectangular scepter of the remote control and less and less to the tattered lapels of a book jacket. You have no clue what foreign shore will be privy to your psychedelic scribbles or if your heart will even wash up in the hands of an appreciable audience at all.<br />All you have (intrinsically, I think) is the joy of composition. The moment when that blank slate of the computer screen is gradually dotted with syllables and motion—the inward paradoxical feeling of having somehow, magically, traveled simply by sitting on your ass for eight for hours straight and tapping out crunches into a stream of jittery alphabetical shapes. You have that feeling of feeling less alone in the world, the feeling of connecting with something inexplicably spiritual. The feeling of devising a story, of living out that story through composition and in giving that story (and not caring, in a way, if the story ever quote unquote “makes-it”—in the immortal gothic cadenza’s of Black Sabbath “Give it all and ask for no return/and very soon you’ll see and you’ll begin to learn/ that it’s alright—yeah it’s alright” )<br />So true. Fiction as genre has been fuckin’ alright but it’s also been a nudist colony. Through the orgiastic process of group anonymity, we’ve been capable of sloughing our linguistic attire, unzipping the fly of our own inhibitions and anxiety and letting everything (from Prince Albert’s to lego lesbians to generously surfeited jello-tacos).<br />Being anonymous has also allowed me to be naked with many blithe and voluptuous creatures I’d NEVER have the opportunity to get naked with outside of the medium of fiction. What an unbidden voyeuristic delight to watch that sublime creature you’ve harbored a massive hardon on since ENG 101 loop accolades on your prose from across the classroom—knowing that she has your heart in the editorial palette and, judging solely from the winecooler-like color her face has gradually blushed into—she has fallen in love (if only for a moment) with everything left inside of you.<br />The beauty of anonymity is that it makes circulating fiction less authorial and more of an entitlement for the humanities. As poet Coleman barks once commented on the mystical renderings of Rumi “The fact that we are multiple is not so great as the fact that we are one.”<br />So go ahead. I fuckin’ dare you. We’re already naked. Put more of yer’ heart in that bottle. Open up a few veins and pinch the reader with something that has never been shown or said before.<br />What—are you scared to be naked? Are you scared that no one will like what’s left inside of you?<br />--written with zeal for George Chambers....attfuckingboy!David Von Behrenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com