Knockin on Heaven’s Door…

“Half my life is in books' written pages,
Lived and learned from fools and from sages
You know it’s true –
All the things come back to you…”
Aerosmith

So, this is it. The rundown. The race to some other artificial fucking finish line but truth be told this is really the real one, the homestretch before the foretold rapture or calamity that 2012 is supposed to be.

I’ll be thirty-one years old in one month and one week, and so I guess it’s still safe to say that there’re more stories inside me, more than the simple twenty or so that I’ve put out.

Around my bare new apartment are the perfect props for a scene such as this, for the character I’ve become: rum, the obligatory bottle of Coke, books, a pen, the camera, the computer, no other furniture but my workstation and the chair in which I’m sitting, half a dozen coffee cups but no coffee and no stove to make it on as yet.

They support this premise that at times seems more fictive than documentary, that there is this writer and he is involved in something deep and meaningful, not simply something more added to the world but something which holds up a mirror to the world’s face and by that reflection causes the world to change.

I’m listening to my ‘Contemplative Playlist’, an eclectic bunch of shit that features anything from Enya to Alicia Keys but the only music that’s touching my soul right is classic rock – Meatloaf, Aerosmith, The Eagles, and Lynyrd “Free Motherfuckin’ Bird” Skynyrd.

And I swear to you, as I am typing this, Meatloaf is plaintively crooning “Some days it don’t come easy/Some days it don’t come hard/Some days it don’t come at all and these are the days that never end”. Those latter days, those days when nothing comes at all, I’ve had a few years of those, three to be exact, ever since I wrenched those words that comprised my premature last book out of myself.

These days however, the words may not be coming easy but the things which start them are, the ideas, the epiphanies which tap into a particular vein, veins which spout both blood and ore, the gilded gush of words that I know I can look back upon on any day in the eternity that exists from the moment they find their way on to the page and still see them as worthy of sharing.

But this is the thing – what’s the fucking point? I keep thinking about the inimitable Borges, and his particularly excruciating imprisonment, being trapped inextricably within Borges, and I begin to see some of that imprisonment myself. I personally know about six people, possibly seven, who I can put into a room and be able to listen to – from them – a cogent discussion of my work, my tiny oeuvre. There may be about ten times that fucking number who’ve actually read my work in the first place, and ten times that number who know I’m a writer and who might have read this blog, or an article or two, but when it comes to the literary work are woefully unaware.

Sometimes indeed it feels like the songs says, that I’m frozen here on the ladder of my life, that no fucking thing will give, that the veil may be thin but it’s elastic and the most each probing scribble of the pen can do is stretch it to a certain impenetrable tension.

This may be my personal mythologizing of myself, this identification not only with the metaphysical aesthetes whom I admire and emulate – Borges and Nabokov – but also those motherfuckers who lived and wrote in blood: Hemingway, Greene, London, Roth, Mailer.

I think that writing should be should come from life, a deep engagement with it, its vices and glories. After ten years at this, pour exemple, I believe that, to paraphrase Nietzsche, intoxication is a prerequisite for great art, the ticket and the train to this transcendental experience and while the shamans of the past had their peyote or whatnot, I have my little bottles of D’Aguiar’s Xtra Mature Rum (Premium Blend), the aptly colloquialised ‘grenade’ because halfway into one of those fuckers on a good night, Aerosmith blasting ‘Dream On’ in my ear, and the page explodes, beautifully, rapturously.

Yeah, and I love women. Not in the pejorative sense used of those misogynistic skuntholes who make a sport of the amount of vaginas they’ve entered which is usually just a compensatory mechanism for cock or esteem issues or to erase the memory and implication of that juvenile mutual masturbation with the buddy friend incident/phase or more ominously that hazy nightmare when Uncle or Daddy got really creative with the tickling… nah, I love women in the Hank Moody sense of the term, in that I want to inhale them, wrap myself in them, taste them on the tip of my tongue, like some panty fetishist let loose in a girl's dorm five minutes after the Rapture.

Misogyny, machismo, men’s clubs, anything that involves the elevation of status exclusively or primarily based on the possession of a cock is really, by implication, gay; and if you’re a man and subscribe to any of that shit, you might as well book yourself as a model for the pending global Mapplethorpe revival that the rising popularity of faux-hawks and Kanye West glasses, and Kanye West, seems augury of.

There is one great benefit to being a man, and that is – and I mean no disrespect to my friends of the fudge-packing persuasion – to interact, to converse, to connect with, to make sweet slow love to, to create life in conjunction with these heavenly fucking creatures that we happen to find ourselves stranded with on this remote island in this great ocean that is the universe.

And I love my son. For the past four years, I’ve been working on this story, the theme of which is fatherhood and I suppose the fulcrum on which the piece rests (and you there, in the back of the class, I hope you’re taking notes) is the paragraph which reads.

“Fatherhood is this strange gift, an ecstasy comingled with something subtly darker, this inextricable grief existing at the very core of it, the spectre of the sadness of Laocoön, a nebulous, miasmal fear seeping ever outward in some blind, unconscious quest to poison and corrupt the heart.”

Bleak I know but it is also sublime, this thing that comes over me in his presence, this quiet awe that I cannot recall ever encountering in literature, and I realise now that in all the books I’ve read, poetry or prose, there is nothing there about the quotidian bliss and dread of fatherhood – this thing so powerful that it can only really be communicated in extremes, the melodrama of movies like The Champ.

Tonight again, I’m going to get back to the writing. These days, like I said, the ideas are flowing – in the past week, I’ve sketched the outline for a movie script, a sci-fi story, and a short fiction retelling of a Greek legend. The jury may still be out on the great motherfucking why of it all, the vexing question of use or legacy, but when that moment comes you sing it, you sing the shit out of that song that comes through you, because without it, everything else, the women, fatherhood, manhood will not be done the justice they deserve.

Dream on, dream on, dream on…