Metamorphing, #1

Packing it In

1992

It was the middle of August, the hottest day of the hottest month in New York, and I was sitting on the floor of my apartment, papers strewn everywhere, packing boxes. I was sweating and flushed, there was no air-conditioning, only the limited cross-ventilation of two fans placed at diagonally opposite ends of the L-shaped studio. The fans ruffled the piles in which I was trying to organize the papers, blowing them into one another. When I grabbed them to pull them back in place or examined a new specimen for clues to which pile it fit in, droplets of sweat fell onto the pages, causing the ink of handwritten paragraphs to run and typewritten sheets to wrinkle damply. Everything was sweating in this fourth-floor walk-up — the sink full of unwashed dishes, the platform bed with foam mattress, the table with an overflowing ashtray and second-hand Compaq computer, the metal filing cabinet and makeshift shelves that the floor’s chaos had emerged from — and I had no idea why I was doing this, only that I had to, as if by post-hypnotic suggestion.

All I knew was that I had to collect all the notebooks, manuscripts, multiple versions of magazine articles, pitches, rejections, pay stubs from temp jobs and the Village Voice, letters from collection agencies, cancelled checks, pitiful bank statements, a decade’s worth of artifacts of life in the literary demimonde, and put them in boxes labelled by month and year which I could stack up one on top of another. Somewhere at the end of his process, I believed with a dim fanaticism that drove me onward, lurked a revelation, an insight that would make all these things meaningful. An obsessive-compulsive mysticism in which the containment and ordering of the clutter of my life would release an energy beyond the power of its individual elements. It was only later that I realized that what I was doing was packing up, assembling my stuff in preparation for letting it go, saying good-bye to my literary self and leaving New York.

It’s hard to describe the pain of giving up writing. The funny thing is that writing was seldom pleasurable for me. Usually it was agonizing. Turning and twisting the words, waiting for the ideas to take shape. And then, when I had the ideas, terrified that I would not be able to sustain them. Bouts of self-doubt about the plainness and triteness of my sentences, the prolificness that just wouldn’t come, the words that gave up in exhaustion at my lack of inspiration. Stopping and rearranging to make sure each sentence laid the basis for the next. Unable to flow. A combination of performance anxiety, anality and perfection poisoning

So, it was not so hard to give up the act of writing itself. Everyone knows Dorothy Parker’s famous preference of having written over writing. But that wasn’t what it was for me either. What kept me going was not the writing or the having written, but the having to write, the need to express, to make my thoughts known and my experience meaningful. This was the need that kept me going through all the agonies of literary creation, that made me come back again and again to the forced march through my neuroses till I finally reached the Zone, and this was the need I had to forcefully wrench from my being, the ambition to express, to participate, to be part of my times, to matter. I had to reprogram each moment of experience to be only itself, not an incomplete corpuscle awaiting the alchemy to turn it golden with significance. I had to accept experience as all, with nothing necessary beyond it. Eventually, I realized that this is how most people live.