Forever Undone

--Nobody will care. That’s just the thing. Nobody cares.
--But why should they? Tell me that.
--I don’t know why. I just do these things and I guess I just need a place to put them. I need a place to put all of these things. I don’t have anywhere to put them anymore.
--That’s just a bunch of nonsense.
--It’s the only way I can explain it. And I do feel that people should care.
--That’s such egotistic bullshit. You should try being a nihilist. It’s much easier.
--Wha…?
--Nobody is going to always care about your little life and the things you do with it. They have their own little lives to lead and, if you can believe this, they think that their lives are important too. You ain’t that special. Why should somebody else invest their limited amount of leisure time in reading these little, um, vignettes? Whatever you call them. These things that you can’t find a place for. I mean, shit. I’m busy. I’ve got stuff going on. It’s baseball season.
--Ok. I understand these things.
--I don’t think you do.
--I just want somebody else to care.
--Nobody cares. Give me one good reason that somebody should care about what you’re doing say, um, like on a Wednesday morning.
--Yes. That’s just it. So, just hear me out.
--I’ll try. It won’t be easy. Like waiting for the Giants to score a run.
--So I’m working on this thing, well actually I’m just thinking of working on this thing. I do a lot more thinking about doing things than actually doing them.
--I know.
--It’s a story of some sort about a guy who spends some time sitting around downtown really early in the morning, like at five am or something, you know, just when the sun’s coming up and the fog is still smeared all over everything like mashed potatoes starting to get buttered.
--Starting to get buttered?
--You know, like when the sun starts getting all over the buildings and it looks like butter melting on all the fog.
--Is that what they call a mixed metaphor? Is that even true? I’ve never noticed anything like that at five am.
--Anyway. It’s really early in the morning and the city is just starting to wake up and people are starting to spill onto the streets coming out in larger and larger droves from the Bart stations and the buses. There is just a feel to that time of day, a sort of lingering energy that seems to suffuse everything, to slap motion and promise like a fresh coat of paint on the crisp morning air.
--Wait. Now I don’t know much, but I know what you just said doesn’t make much sense.
--That doesn’t matter. Just hold on.
--Sure thing.
--So this guy is going to just kind of hang around and watch things, look at them, wander around, check it all out…he’s going to get a cup of coffee at the Peet’s on Montgomery and sit outside the building and watch the shadows start to climb up the façade of Willis Polk’s Mills Building across the street.
--Sorry. I was waiting for a metaphor. Climb like…
--Peet’s is in the Russ building there on Montgomery. It’s an incredible building. A landmark. Neo-gothic, steel frame, thirty-two stories of terra cotta tile and brick. When it was built in 1927 it was the tallest building in San Francisco. Sometimes I just stand on the sidewalk and stare up at it until I get dizzy.
--Sounds like a blast.
--If I stare up long enough it starts to seem like I’m looking at it horizontally, like I could just walk right up the side of it like spider man.
--Please don’t ever try to do that.
--So I was going to have this guy in the story just sit there outside of Peet’s for a while and just watch things from there, notice things, describe what’s going on, that kind of thing.
--Sorry. I fell asleep there. What?
--But the thing is, I really wanted to do this good, make the thing really, um, descriptive.
--Really?
--So now I’m planning on waking up at the crack of dawn, you know, really early for a whole week, and going down to the Peet’s and get a coffee and just sit there with my notebook writing things down all morning.
--You have a notebook?
--Well, no. But I’m planning on buying one soon.
--What’s the story going to be about?
--Oh, I don’t know. Nothing really. I’ll figure that out later. It’s not very important.
--And you wonder why nobody cares about this shit?
--I’m going to walk all over the Financial District and watch people and look all around at the buildings and the shadows and the sunlight and the thin rectangles of sky between the buildings becoming blue. I’m going to drink my coffee and feel good about the world and write all of these things down in my notebook. These are the kinds of things I want to have in the story. This feeling about what it’s like to be up early and to be unattached from all of this busyness going on all around you, to be alone in this massive pulsating and always fast moving crowd, all these people marching purposefully towards nothing, trying not to be late and lost in their own little world of meanings. But it’s hard for me to wake up early. I don’t sleep well, you know, and any time before like ten is rough. I’m having a hard time not resetting that alarm when it goes off at five.
--I bet. I still can’t see much of a readership for this thing.
--Yeah. But that doesn’t matter. I just want to do this thing, to have this plan of this thing I’m going to do, to have something that I’m working on, a project, a purpose. It’ll feel good to be out there like that in the early morning. I used to do things like that all the time when I was younger, just because I liked doing them. I didn’t have to force myself to do enjoyable things back then. Now, I’m not so sure anymore. Is it really worth it? Is anybody going to care?
--But why should that matter? You shouldn’t even be thinking about that. It shouldn’t be of even the slightest fucking concern to you what somebody else is going to think about this thing. It’s you story. Make it like you want it. And have a good time doing it. You shouldn’t have to force yourself to have a good time. The doing of it is all that matters. Everything else is just gravy.
--I hate when people say that.
--Why?
--I don’t know. It just bothers me. Maybe it’s the word gravy. It sounds too similar to my name. Like when somebody says, “baby carrots,” and I turn around.
--So…who cares what the final outcome of all this is? It is the living of life that matters, not the writing about it afterwards.
--Make your art in how you live your life, right? Something like that?
--Maybe. But no. You should try to make art in your life too, or, art in your art? Life in your art into life? Life into…?
--Stop it. So I guess my main problem with the whole thing is that I know it will be a failure. It’s impossible for it not to be. I have this idea of how it will be in my mind, of how it is supposed to turn out, and there is no way it could possibly live up to this impossible set of expectations I’ve set up for it. It’ll never be what it could have been. Just another magnificent mistake. But in the end if it isn’t entertaining, if people are not entertained by it, then I guess people won’t have a reason for reading it. That’s mostly what people want, isn’t it? To be mindlessly entertained, to be passive, inactive, reduced to the least common denominator of their being?
--I think you may not be giving people enough credit.
--But really. Is anybody going to care? I mean, take this for example. I was going to have part of my story be about the guy staring at this building at 130 Bush. It’s this really tall slender building that’s squashed between two much larger and much taller buildings. It was built on a lot that was only 20 feet wide and eighty feet deep. Originally it was a necktie, belt, and suspender factory. It was built in 1910, and at the time its ten stories made it the tallest building around. It’s got a gothic façade and it’s faced with glazed terra cotta tiles, and each story has hammered copper tiles outside and bowed windows with prisms that direct the sunlight into the narrow interior. The Grant and the Shell buildings smash the thing in from both sides, seeming to squash its narrow frame and cause the bowed windows to bend. It’s a great optical illusion of a sort. So, I was going to have this guy stare at it for a while and think about all these things and about the building and its history and the history of the world going on around it, and all this really being just a disguise for the character thinking all these things about himself, about the way he is and why, and the whole history behind that. It’s just this idea I have about objects merely being a reflection of who you are, like what you see is what you want to see, what you superimpose on the object making it something more or maybe less than what it really is, but never really what it is.
--That’s a mouthful.
--So everybody sees something different when they look at the same thing. And whatever this character sees and describes is really just a way of expressing what is going on with him, inside his head.
--You’re right. That’s not going to be very entertaining, except maybe to you.
--Nobody is going to care.
--Isn’t there a sushi place in that building on Bush?
--Yeah. It used to be a restaurant called The Iron Duke. It was really popular when they finished the Crown Zellerbach building across the street in the sixties.
--You really know a lot about this damn building, don’t you?
--I guess so. It’s really something. You should check it out sometime.
--I just might do that. Though according to you I won’t really be seeing the building. At least not in the same way that you do, right?
--Well, not really. It’s hard to explain.
--Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if you worked on figuring out what you really wanted to say, and made it clear and less abstract, and if you got across what all of this really meant in a way that’s not obfuscated and muddled and rambling and incoherent, maybe, just maybe, it would matter to other people. They would start to…care.
--But that wouldn’t be real. That wouldn’t be genuine. It wouldn’t do justice to the kernel of the idea of what all of this really is, this life we are leading, these things we observe and digest and spit out, and they come out just the way they are because that’s just how they happen to come out. I can’t change them anymore than I can make myself start breathing without any oxygen or tell a leaf to stop being a leaf and turn into a cow or turn my arms into wings and fly away. It’s just how it happens and there’s nothing I can do about it.
--I’ve completely lost you. Slow down.
--Ok. Let me see. This story, when and if it happens to be written, by me, will be a random assortment of chaotic things all jumbled together, a hodgepodge or a gallimaufry of ideas just flowing by, a feeling, a sense, a stone a leaf a door, memory, all these things fluttering in the breeze of imagination, and they are all just going to happen as they do. Nothing can change that. I don’t want anything to change that. Whatever the end result is doesn’t matter. It’s the act, the process of creating the thing that is important.
--So what you want to do, and let me know if I’m correct here because I’m utterly befuddled by all of this and really fucking confused, is to create this “story” or whatever it is that you want to call it, and you want other people to care about it, but you don’t care what the actual story ends up being on the page. All you care about is the process of writing the damn thing. But at the same time you have all these ideas that you want to explore and make other people see while they are reading the thing, but you only want to hint at these ideas in some metaphorical sort of way, like you’re making a puzzle that you expect other people to want to put together without any help from you. In fact, you want to make it extremely difficult for people to figure out what the hell is going on. And you want to do all of this spontaneously, without really trying to do it, while at the same time not being entertaining in any sort of traditional way, going off on all kinds of tangents and digressions to the ultimate distraction and perturbation of the reader, and putting in all of this stuff about old buildings and esoteric architecture and sunlight and shadows…am I missing anything?
--Yes. You are missing everything.
--Ok. Please. Enlighten me.
--Don’t you think people will feel somehow rewarded when they figure the thing out? Won’t they want to bring their own lives to the story, to think about themselves in the shoes of the character, and won’t this make it seem important, if not urgent, that they get to the bottom of this thing? And maybe they’ll have a better appreciation of the world going on around them afterwards. Maybe they’ll see things with new eyes and maybe have a little more appreciation of beauty, or at least a better sense of things…of the fact that none of us knows what the hell is going on. That we are all alone and that we just spend our lives pretending that what we do matters. And in the end that is what makes everything meaningful. Nothing matters so everything is important. The world and our lives are only what we make them. We make our own meaning.
--It’s like when you were talking about people only seeing what they want to see, that superimposing of their own lives on to objects. They’ll come to your story with all of their own baggage of experience, all of their own ideas about things, and they’ll put all of those things onto your story. They’ll see themselves in the reflection of the story. The story will be the object that they are superimposing themselves on. Nobody will see the story in the same way. There will be no story at all. Am I getting close?
--I think so. I like that. There will be no story at all. There’s something comforting in that.
--And you are going to do all of this without really trying?
--That’s harder to explain.
--Oh shit.
--Just wait. I guess it’s part of the same thing. There is this theory I have about energy…
--Another theory? Hold on, let me get my pen. I think I might need to take notes on this.
--It’s like entropy. Kind of. First you have to realize that writing, like any art form, is a very high-energy activity. It takes a lot out of you. It involves a huge amount of concentration and focus. A lot of zeal. You have to really believe in what you’re doing and you’ve got to put a big dose of yourself into it, and you’ve got to have loads of time to do nothing but write for hours and hours on end. It’s not how I’d recommend spending your life.
--So why do you do it?
--I don’t have any choice. It chooses you. You don’t choose it.
--That’s stupid. Go on.
--Ok. So as I was saying, there is a huge expenditure of energy any time you attempt to write. And this energy has to come from somewhere, and once it’s gone it can’t be replaced. No amount of caffeine or amphetamines or whatever can make up for it.
--I’d beg to differ.
--You’d be wrong. Trust me. I’ve tried. I’ve spent my whole chasing this phantom of expendable energy. Nothing can take its place. If it’s not there, it’s not there. Nothing can change that. You just have to wait. And when it comes sometimes you’re not ready for it, you can’t make anything happen. People talk about inspiration. I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’ll I know is that nobody is going to care.
--It must be frustrating.
--No. It’s probably one of the most worthwhile things you could do with your time. But you only have so much of this energy and so much time to use it and once you use it up that’s it, that’s all you can do, and whatever happens on the page, well, you can’t change it, you can’t put more energy back into a closed system. Any changes you might make would ruin the thing that you’ve created.
--So what you’ve created is still born. It’s dead, fossilized, set in stone. With all of its imperfections and blemishes and tiny built-in disasters.
--It’s hard to even look at it sometimes. You lose that, um, I don’t know…that ecstatic moment that just happens before you could ever think to invent it. I think Keats called it a spontaneous overflowing of feelings. There is really no way to describe it, but when you have it you know it, and there’s nothing you can do to force it to happen, it just has to happen, and you can’t spend time worrying about commas and compound words or paragraphs or you lose it and you might not find it again.
--Does this certain strategy of yours ever work? I mean, does the thing say what you want it to say? It doesn’t seem like you are very careful about it, like you’re not very methodical about it or even think about what you’re going to do at all, like maybe you think it’s all subconscious or even effortless.
--Not effortless…but made to seem that way. Um. No. I’m not sure. Writing is just that act of constantly giving away little pieces of yourself to others.
--Tell me some more about the bricks in those buildings downtown.
--I think I was talking about the Mills building at some point. The shadows creeping up its yellow-buff brick walls that have all of these very intricate designs done in terra cotta. The bricks just look old, kind of ochre colored, weathered I guess you’d say. But the bottom part of the building’s façade is all white marble, I think it’s from Inyo County or something, and the entrance arch is really something. It’s very high and grand, very Romanesque, with all these Doric pillars or columns and there are also these intaglios, or maybe etchings in bas-relief all over the top of the entrance, I can’t remember exactly. I was going to have the character walk around for a while just noticing things like this. I was going to have him walk by the old Pacific Stock Exchange building, which is now an Equinox gym, and sit around on the steps for a bit, maybe have him walk down to check out the Newhall Building with its rich red brick piers, the ornate cream terra cotta decorations, the eagles in the spandrels of the top floor, that wonderful Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation designed by Mr. Lewis Hobart way back in nineteen hundred and ten that is still standing ten-stories tall on the corner of Battery and California. Maybe he would start to wonder about what had happened to all those years, all that time, all those things that had happened for almost a hundred years on these streets and in these same buildings, all of it gone yet at the same time still there. Maybe he’d go and sit in St. Mary’s Square and stare up at the tall buildings that seem to be hemming him in from all sides. Maybe something would happen to him while he is sitting there, or he’d go off and look up at what he believes to be Grim Reapers glowering down at him from the 23rd floor of 580 California. Or he’d remember about Muriel Castanis and her ideas about “Corporate Goddesses.” He’d wonder about the certain way the sun has of hitting the windows across the street from his house for just a moment at a particular time of the day so that he’s blinded from where he sits and watches TV.
--I wish you had a better memory. You seem kind of hazy on details. All this limning. It’s kind of skimpy.
--Well, you can’t put everything in there. You’ve got to leave a bunch of stuff out. That’s really what writing is. You spend most of your time paring things down, filtering out the unnecessary, separating the chaff of experience from the grain of life. What’s left is just a tiny remnant of what reality might once have been, a tiny pebble on the sands of experience. And if you’re lucky what you are left with will be maybe one hundredth of what you wanted to be there when you started off, and that’s if you’re lucky. It’s a very low percentage game, like baseball I guess, but even lower. I was even thinking of having the character wander into the Cala Foods on Hyde. He was going to kind of go into a trance staring at the giant wall on the north side with all the windows in it.
--Oh yeah. All those rectangles lined up like some kind of, I don’t know, checkerboard?
--No. But yes. Those windows. They kind of remind me of a bad piece of modern art you’d find on the walls of a dental office or something. You can see these rectangular pieces of the houses and buildings across the street through them. It’s like somebody’s been putting together a puzzle that is a photograph of the buildings over there when it’s done, but they’ve only been able to put together these rectangular parts and the rest is just the white of the wall. Does that make any sense?
--No. Not at all. I just don’t get what you are trying to do with these diversions. Do you expect the reader to follow all of this nonsense? Who the hell is Muriel Castanis?
--I’m not really sure. I guess it’s just something to pass the time.
--I’d rather pass my time getting dragged through the street tied to the back of a speeding car by a chain.
--If you had your druthers.
--I’d rather.
--You’d rather. D’rather. Druther. Get it?
--No.
--Yeah. I don’t either. I think it has something to do with Hart Crane or something.
--What the fuck are you talking about?
--Nothing. Nobody cares.
--You’re right about that.