RIP William Diehl

One of my writing inspirations died Friday -- William Diehl. He wrote Sharkey's Machine and Primal Fear and was made very wealthy by his work. He inspired me because he was real and because he was smart and because -- truth be told -- he said I was a damn fine writer.

It was a set-up; he had no choice. My thesis director put him on the spot in front of an entire classroom full of people. He had no gracious way out.

I still hold him to it, though, took it right to heart, then immediately called him up and asked to come to his palatial home on St. Simons and bother him for an afternoon. Amazingly, he said yes. Sometimes my own audacity astounds me.

I interviewed him then (a little snippet of which appeared in Writer's Digest a looong time ago). I still have the cassette tape of our conversation. In the background you hear what sounds like someone hacking up a lung. It was one of his parrots, the one that could mimic a smoker's cough with uncanny parroty precision. The other parrot said nothing for almost the entire time I was there. On my way out, however, the telephone rang. And then it said, "Goddamn it!"

William Diehl taught me something I will never forget. "You won't lose your story," he said, "if you can always find its spine. Everything must attach to that backbone. It's how the story moves. Find the spine."

Death sux. But only for the ones of us still alive. A profound and vulgar friend once said that if there is a heaven, it is this -- to finally know it all, everything, and to understand it all, forever and fucking ever amen.

From what I knew of William Diehl, he would agree with this whole-heartedly, add his own vulgar hear-hear to it. His office overflowed, like he was trying to cram it all in -- live it, breathe it, suck the marrow from it (to paraphrase someone more eloquent than I). I believe he is there now, at last sinking into it with a big "ah!" Putting his feet up. Taking a drag.

What a mensch.

Fucking amen.

Empty Spaces

It was just a conversation, one of those eating-dessert-by-the-fire, reading-after-the-child's-gone-to-bed conversations. I was re-reading A Return to Love and my husband was paging through Scientific American. I don't remember what we were discussing, only that his point was that most people don't realize how ruthless evolution is, that the underpinnings of the universe aren't compassionate whatsoever, that competition is the engine that drives human life, all life. And it is a vicious thing, messy and lacking in aesthetics.

I told him to stop talking, that he was screwing with my spirituality.

Later, I was able to understand that what he was saying bears no relation on my spirituality whatsoever. Evolution is a bloodless machine, yes, and competition is its hard wiring. You cannot look for love in it -- it grinds out all love, all emotion, all spirit. It has a cold efficient beauty perhaps, in the end anyway. A breathtaking effectiveness certainly. A glorious watchmaker precision that runs on error, is fed by all that goes wrong -- such a concept, almost exploitive in its brilliance, like something Enron would think up, to drive the glory at my doorstep. The autumn leaves, the winging geese, the swirl of gold in the water bowl that is our pet.

But -- as I muse on my swing, lulled by the back and forth, the heartbeat of the universe -- I realize that what I am calling ruthless is in fact neutral. Competition is a word I judge, but it's really just a giant values sifter. I think of competition and I think of little girls not pretty enough for beauty pageants, crossing the finish line last, losing the big game. I bring to it the memories of an also-ran, of a sidelines girl. I invest it with psychic baggage. But it is neutral -- it brings to the top what we ask it to. If the values that we select for are compassion and consideration and -- yes yes -- love, then they will rise to the top of the machine as efficiently as ruthlessness.

Such is evolution as well. There is no poetry in it, only an equation. But perhaps that is poetry as well, even if it is an icy sort.

This is a conversation I had on my swing, with myself. My husband is not particularly interested in such musings. He will listen patiently -- a skill that has kept us married for fifteen years -- but it is the patience of an engineer who knows that if the wing strut is not adjusted just so, the whole thing crashes and burns. It is mumbo jumbo, like a Tom Cruise movie. He is not offended by my searching -- he doesn't tell me I'm a deluded wishful-thinking traitor to logic and reason, even if he thinks it. He tolerates my individual search for meaning. But it is very much an individual search.

My best friend tells me I think too much. She is Catholic and very happy being so, but she feels no need to conform to that playbook. She tells me I use too many big words. She says her conservative husband doesn't want her hanging around me anymore, that I'm a liberal nut job who's just gonna whack up her thinking too. She laughs when she says this because she doesn’t take him seriously.

My other best friend isn't speaking to me anymore; he's never said why. We used to have these long talks on faith. He was an agnostic who really wanted to be an atheist but couldn't quite pull it off. We debated whether religion was primarily a biological or socio/political construct. We discussed whether someone like him could maintain a relationship with a fundamentalist evangelical Christian girlfriend, a person who thought he was hot, yes, but who also thought he was going to hell. We told each other stories, like I'm telling stories now, and he listened this way too, with his full attention. I am guessing that in all that talking and listening, he finally ran up on something he couldn't say, that he couldn't have me hear. But it's all a guess on my part, an attempt to make our narrative into an arc that makes some sense to me.

Here is my point. I think we make stories to express a truth. But all truths -- even the kind that keep airplanes in the air -- have holes in them. My husband knows this -- he learned it at Georgia Tech in a class called differential equations. There are some values you cannot solve for -- you have to know how to fill in the blank and move on. In my world, a more right brain world than his, stories help us find out what might go in our empty spaces. They span them, like bridges, with their own rules of physics. They help us connect stars into constellations.

Because we talk of stars, of drinking them in. Starshine, stardust, star stuff. We adore our stars, make love to them with sonnets and telescopes. They define our nights. But in reality, if you stand outside and look up up up, what is chiefly visible is the darkness.

From "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who finds our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Autumnal

"By now, the wind has emptied the milkweed pods. The goldenrod has gone mousy. All the leaves are down, except for a few tenacious oaks and beeches and an ornamental dogwood that is a reprise of the entire season. Each tree looks more singular — and the woods more intimate — in this bare month than in the thickness of summer. October’s memory seems a little lurid from the perspective of mid-November. The sumacs down by the road might have been reading Swinburne the way they caught fire and expired, vaingloriously, in last month’s light.

But now the drama is over, as if the year had come up hard on a plain, Puritan truth and was the better for it."

From "A Private Month" by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the N.Y. Times

Why, Stevie, Why?

Miss Hisler, Stephen King's school principal and (perhaps) his first critic, said, "What I don’t understand, Stevie, is why you’d write junk like this in the first place."

My first experience with Stephen King wasn't writing – it was the movie Salem's Lot. Nothing – before or since – has terrified me quite so viscerally. It is the boogey-man of my generation, this movie. I watched it alone in my parent's bedroom, surrounded by every stuffed animal I owned. I sat there through all four hours of it, eyes fixed on the tiny black and white TV in the corner, protected only by pastel CareBears and litters of Pound Puppies. They were -- as expected -- useless. All it takes now is the memory of fingernails on window glass and my stomach juices congeal. I didn't sleep without nightmares for two weeks. My parents blamed Stevie.

He's continued to scare the bejesus out of me ever since. And now that I am daring to call myself a writer too, my respect for what he does with words has grown. He taps the deep primal, the dark vein. It's present in all of us, which means we guard it well, and yet we let him slip the needle in, over and over again, knowing it's coming -- the sharp prick, the bloodletting. I still bare my jugular for him, but not because I have a taste for being tasted by monsters. Not anymore. I have different appetites now.

In a 1993 essay, King wrote: “The question which haunts and nags and won’t completely let go is this one: Who am I when I write?” That's why I read him now, with incantations on my lips that maybe he'll find the answer, and that if I keep the faith and keep reading -- words like tea leaves -- I'll discover how he did it. And then maybe -- maybe -- I can see the answer for myself, blooming there in the bottom of my own cup.

Stories are Medicine

" . . . Whenever a fairy tale is told, it becomes night. No matter where the dwelling, no matter the time, no matter the season, the telling of tales causes a starry sky and a white moon to creep from the eaves and hover over the heads of the listeners. Sometimes, by the end of the tale, the chamber is filled with daybreak, other times a star shard is left behind, sometimes a ragged thread of storm sky. And whatever is left behind is the bounty to work with, to use toward soul-making . . ."

"At the Gates of the City of the Storyteller God"
Clarissa Pinkola Estes