#191

One of those little blessings in life is that you cannot go back and tell your teenage self that they completely fucking suck at what they are trying to get away with. I am sure that you can tell your past self things in the dream world, but that's one thing; actually being able to take your own face in your hands, look yourself in the eyes, and tell yourself that you do not blame yourself, but it is a cold fact that you are painfully deluded about the scope and quality of your abilities exactly where you believe that you are strongest.

No, it is for your younger self to present you with physical evidence that this is so, by way of the works of your own clumsy hands. Not to mention the hindsight that allows us to remember the stupid and terrible things we have said with such particular acuity.

Ordinarily I am a diligent and merciless deleter/burner/shredder of old work, but every now and again material will escape the steady culling and survive for years. I had the singular opportunity (here I use the word opportunity with incredible resentment and disgust so complete that it fills my body like a terrible flood of static and makes me break out in actual hardcore uncomfortable goosebumps) to come across work I had last touched at the age of seventeen in a neglected external hard drive. Seventeen, hard as it is for me to believe, was nigh-on thirteen years from this day, and what I beheld within that text file is a punishment from God*. This is how I am punished for the arrogance that I once fostered in my wretched teenaged breast.

Bad, friends. It is bad. It is bad writing by a kid that thinks he is a cool genius, a devil-may-care trickster badass. I thought I had amazing ideas and kept it real despite my expansive vocab. I believed I was writing the great modern epic of multidimensional pulp fantasy (with time travel, and the fuckin' apocalypse, and the main characters breaking out of my version of Hell on a motorcycle giving the finger to my version of the Devil [seriously. Like on the cover of the Meatloaf album, Bat Out of Hell. I never got that far, but reading it has forced me to acknowledge that this was my plan. I wanted to have this happen. I was thinking about how best to execute this idea]). It would be funny if I had thought it was funny. I thought it was fucking important shit. I thought I was radder than a fighter pilot whose jet is a handicap because he's fucking Superman]).

Seriously this document contains the most hellaciously bad writing I have ever read in my entire life. I had no idea how people talked--it may be that I had not yet had an actual conversation, I don't know! This evidence would make any reader doubt it. I understand with renewed clarity the mechanism of "improvement", but also how it may slow down; I had forgotten that I was ever this raw, that the bad writer that I more easily can avoid being truly was me. When I look my writing, the slightest little thing that reminds me even a minuscule bit of how I used to write, well, I know it's gotta go right out the god damn window, red pen, blue pencil, whatever you use; X, gone, kill it, say goodbye, burn it on the cutting room floor, but I'd forgotten it was me that I was reminded of: for a while now bad writing has felt impersonal to me, like a storm I left behind me miles and miles ago on the highway. Bad writing comes to be something that exists and, like, gets writers, catches them unawares despite themselves. Everyone knows how to write, one begins to feel; they just need to learn to outrun the storm.

Nope! We are babies, and once did have to learn. Even the most basic, elementary things, like getting food into your own mouth by yourself, were once a project. I am merely looking at version of my writing that has food all over its stupid face, but you know, it's a baby. Maybe, to another, this could even be cute. To me it is like a close-up image of a ruptured, infected cyst, with the word "moron" spelled out in tiny cysts.

You would think that this is comforting to me. Haven't felt this way about something I've written in over five years, I would say. I agree that this is a very unmistakable sign that I have improved my craft, and that it is useful to be reminded that I, me, am capable of bad writing and the reckless, self-astonished hubris that produces the unique flavor and so accentuates the absolute laughable badness can always dominate my mind once more. But I do not feel this feeling, which is precisely why I avoid keeping old work around; I skip straight to the paranoia that my current level is equally shameful in relation to some imaginary level that I ought to be at already, and experience paralysis, the urge to delete every text file on my computer, and the terror that all publishing is a terrible mistake. 

*

Happily, this paranoia is rendered null in the face of two printed books and so many blog posts. And that chrononormative bullshit about having to be a certain kind and quality of successful with art at any point, and being judged thereby: absolutely a load of crap. You can do whatever you want, however you want to do it, for however long you want to. I'm going to make myself read the whole thing (I literally cannot for too long at a time, I start to feel very weird and my vision blurs) but I will learn from this pain. It is a pain I try to put off through a different kind of pain I like better, and that other pain has served me well, but this is important too. Forward, forward! Ever forward! 

Do you think the people who painted the walls in Lascaux give one cold fuck that you don't know their names, or exactly what they meant by what they were doing? Do you think the millions of artists whose work turned to dust a thousand years before anybody wrote down a single word don't count because nobody can have an opinion about them? Man, just make art and do whatever you want with it. If you can't make a living at it, that's not the best luck, but not being able to make art should feel like much worse luck, so if you are able to, be glad about that and enjoy the use of a blessed life.

*

Also despite what I am saying here improvement probably isn't real. What is it? It's more complicated a question than I seem to have spent most of my time thinking, and I've never exactly sat easy with it.

Who knows? Not me! No, sir.


--JL

*this, I think, is the only way heavenly justice is, properly speaking, meted out--always and only it is your own hand on the blade.