Strange road to a cross town connection

Sitting here in my ashram of literary ritual, draped across my twisted second hand aluminum chair rescued from the Everest heap of Americana consumer drek. Nothing worth looking out of the window for, whatever is there has no use for me. The keyboard! The keyboard resting on a low steel countertop cluttered with sad pocket notebooks, screaming ashtrays, groaning coffee mugs and accumulated poesy all bitching at me like a frustrated lover, 'Please Michael, you've ignored me all day, come to us and write again.'� Now, there are other rooms spanning frenzied electric distances of fishbowl globe, all laboring over commas and colons and adverbs. What deliverance in this vast network of wild manuscripts that amounts to an eternally peaking American mind. Such behavior this writing is, it is a sea captain's work, or the town crier's work, an isolated individual weaving a tapestry to be hung in royal hallways, with full meaning never to be seen or appreciated.

Words, words the stem cells of thought. The immaculate conception given form in holy wordlessness and the word was, God. Perhaps, writing is an expression of reality or is reality the embodiment of thought as expressed through words? A far more social exercise of bringing into light what Kerouac called 'The unspeakable visions of the individual'� is included in the writing practice. After all, aren't words very purposes to communicate? Can art exist without a social content or context? Still, not all writers play the same.

I remember many moments of vast starry alone times, and I think of these fellow wordsmiths. I inhabit the lives of these types getting published in New York or San Francisco, always taking calls from starving agents--setting up 'gigs'� and enduring the endless torrent of those diseased and catatonically wealthy, the nouveau trended people, omniscient media slugs in their lives always in and out of suffocating apartments, relationships and talk shows. These culture parasites, emotionally anesthetized, mouthing 'You'll be at the party, right, everybody will be there.'� Drifting from the spa to rehab living life on the installment plan on a red carpet. Words dribbling like excrement, devoid of life and a media equally devoid of any substance.

All that is fine or divine has been sacrificed for the buck. The literary dealings whose work glistens on mega displays of shopping mall bookstores, bright and blinding glossy covers with embossed print, those harlequin romances, blood thirsty true crime storytellers obsessed with a pathos that sells, and the insulting Oprah's book club. You suffer through this popularly driven drool from people on the street or in some foolish gathering where they confide in you like that guy all about plastics in 'The Graduate'� and advise what you should write about because it's HOT--it will sell.
So there are many breeds of us who write. But there is one particular mutation that stands alone. There, hunched over a mailbox against the rainy night depositing thirty-two cent postcards with a seriousness as howls of the wind between great maples are battered-hair and eyes become mere swinging impressions. That treacherous mailbox all a fumble with cold wet hands holding dense stacks of messages destined for the other side. This is a writer in the throngs of a writer's 'deep play.'�

This is the writer in 'deep play'� who writes for keeps. For those captivated in 'deep play' writing appears symptomatically as a ravaging fever or tantalizing thirst. This feverish writing is more than 'making a living' or a need to make something pretty. Writing becomes a way to return from the bottomless edge you've just gone over after experiencing a world full of suffering. 'Deep play', when writers are concerned, is when nothing matters accept for art. Mania consumes, you don't eat much and you run real with the speed of Achilles. Settling down and procreating is not on the top 10 to do list, when you know you're doing exactly what you should be doing, or when the walls of Troy are crumbling and burning in the totality around you and you're at you're desk adding a verse.

Why do it? Why get involved in such a racket? Why enter such a hustle? For me it is a search for something, something I've been searching for my whole life. That something that I've been haggardly wandering unseen dirt roads in misty Louisiana and forgotten New York hoping to discover that there is something left on this karma earth that is real and true -blessed. Sadly, there is something in what I create, in what I see and in what others do and see that is plain off. The best way to describe it would be that life in modern times is like walking through a grand museum with that noble atmosphere filled with images of perfection, but they are all hung off kilter or upside down. I want to see the world that in some way makes a little sense, a world or a life that I can undeniably know from within myself is real and true and worth believing in. Perhaps, what I observed as I walk this quest and document life on this desperate planet I will in some way add to a human puzzle that, unfortunately, with every piece added it gets re-carved into a more complex configuration.

What must exist in the American pallid to mold such mad creatures as myself climbing out of the depths like this? I've been playing this game since my early teens, a late arrival when compared to some, and all I can come to is that there is a visceral feeling somewhere kept within a clandestine place that tells me I could never bring myself to write something that would be included with the rest of the crap you find on the best seller list. I need to find an essence of meaning in my experience that I find valuable like . . . I don't know, what did John Lennon say, 'Gimme Some Truth, All I Want Is The Truth!'� And it is the truth that I am after when I write, or why else do it. I cannot see another direction of passion in life than the need to find out that there is a foundation that my heart can, with gratitude, accept.

As for anything symbolic of choosing this manner of living that could in someway create a satori of sorts on the American blend of malts I have to return to the assumption that the writer is an isolated individual. I take a look at my undertaking with writing, the physicality of it, sitting alone silently or with music I can vibrate to and drumming away at keys or having a chaotic marriage with the pen in a room that no one wants to be in while I'm at this.
Every writer needs his or her space; some go to woodland get-a-ways, some cold-water flats in foreign lands, for me it's a house in rural upstate New York that is painfully wedged between other desperate single-family houses. I walk in the door and find no reminders that I am in the correct house or of my life because nothing of myself is displayed in the slightest. I walk up a flight of wooden stairs to a doorway and another flight of blazing Jamaica green stairs that begins to remind me that I actually live in this house. That steep flight filled with anticipation that I can resume what I do is a feeling that I should explain. Maybe I'm young, but there is a sensation that comes over me, a recognition of, yea, I do read, yea that's the couch that my friends relax on, oh, over there that's the furniture I've made and the color of the tired cracked plaster walls finally appeals to me because I put it on that way. Waves of security start to flow over me.

I don't know if this is shamefully materialistic or not but it is this attic where I'm away from the howling streets and growling noise and where there is always a stock of notebooks, pens, and a word processor. It is these simple objects at my disposal and, number one, the distance between the fright filled world and me that has afforded me the opportunity for 'deep play' writing and being able to say - to shout anything I want no matter how crazy or garish. I exist in my writing, I couldn't be without it and if you want to know me, you are going to have to learn to read.

This is an unknown attic filled with unknown activity where there is total freedom and out of this there is a sense of security to be myself and without this I would feel like some psycho organ merchant stole a kidney as my eyes drifted. Other writers talk of this, Hunter S. Thompson had his Woody Creek for instance, places where you can play any tune flooded with any emotion, a place of limitless possibility.

This place, this point on latitudinal lines, has molded me more than any factor I can think of. As I sit at that mighty countertop where strange men in photographs stare, befriend me, and whisper to me emulsified secrets from beyond the relentless slaughter of their worms. They are good company as piano comps beat an injection of soul cannoning onto my keys. Charles Mingus wrapping his strings and chords around colossal BOOM! Also, saintly Coltrane and his tenor shouting a yogic OM in 'A Love Supreme' as I feel it and splash fingers across keys. All this buzzes and gesticulates while words and characters form on the page as I sit in my sad chair in nothing attic of joy in the void.

There are also times of stark catholic silence, when, around 1 AM, I'm really in total isolation and as the world sleeps I travel galaxies of thought and style. What would I be without a place, it's like stealing a musicians horn-criminal! I could not keep the same keel on this stormy vessel in this American life.

My slice of the American experience, my spirit filled mountains of song, demonstrates to me how deep the incision of the concept of the isolated individual inside America is. It seems that in isolating oneself that one joins the community. It is only of recent times that the true fruit of this American mythology have begun to display itself. Never before in American history has there existed such a feeling of fragmentation and disunity where all inhabitance are living solitary lives. What I realize through the tender intervention of the matrix internet and academic readership of my work at writing has found a destiny, a home that it was created for.

A reader, another isolated individual, is the real link of all writing, which is the same community that I spurt my truth essences for. This 21st century development is a prayer that has freed my writing from the incorrigible dead letters office. To create a human response to my work is where the isolation ends and where the true purpose in any writing lie. From room to reader a child is born. Both conditions are necessary in this stew of language, both equally getting kicks in one way or another. To understand that there is a human family is to look at this situation of isolated individuals with completely alien understandings and seeing a positive discourse ensue.

Of this 'alien understanding'�, it is not a place where theirs and my sense of self is created? For my practice and for me, place is a library of material found in real life experience, but the diversity of places that create connections through words mystifies me. It is evidence; real understanding of what it is to be human that far exceeds any literature. The identity formation of place is nullified by the ability to create an intense human connection, although a place is a requisite for that connection to arise.

Logging off, Michael Guichard.

Want to comment on this Creative Non-Fiction? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Creative Non-Fiction and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...