Preface 2

November 13, 2006

I was writing this book, you see, whoever you are, based loosely on myself and my family. I say 'was' because I never found my voice and I gave up. I quit about one-quarter of the way. It wasn't the first time I had gone through this process of incompletion. I've been doing it for forty years. When I was in high school, I would write poems on thin calculator paper, a long spool, probably because of something I'd read about Kerouac in Life magazine. I wonder where those curled, skinny rolls of paper are now. This time, I had something like 17,000 words written and then it wasn't fun any more. I knew where the book was going, so it was already gone, it had arrived and was over. I had planted careful seeds of themes that would have flowered fully by the end and appear much more brilliantly and seemingly spontaneously than anyone could ever have predicted. It was all in my head, so beautifully, and because I was my own primary or even sole audience, one day, last night to be precise, while I was in between wakefulness and sleep, I realized there was no point in actually going through the motions of finishing the typing process. Now, I like typing as much as the next person, the fun of fingers flying over the keyboard, over my perfect, curved ergonomic keyboard, an extension of myself, more fun than masturbating and less messy, but it was time to take up another project, a new project, probably the one about the country church, East Bend, an actual intersection of the book I have abandoned. For a time, I thought the two books should be cojoined, one of those flippable books with two covers, like old Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novels, with one garish Pellucidar novel on one side, and flipped over, another adventure in the bowels of the earth. I wonder what happened to those books. Maybe they are in the basement. Maybe I threw them away.

Nevertheless, the narrative of the book I have given up writing wove its way from central Illinois, from a ramshackle house, where I still live to this day, and where I sit in my second floor office looking out onto the street, where it is raining and dawn has just interrupted my sightlines with details of the starting work day, and where squirrels leap from the evergreen tree to my window sill, and I'm always tempted to shoot them, but I don't have guns, an old house furnished and tended unintentionally on the style of disrepair in the mansion of Mrs. Havisham's cobweb-buried residence in GREAT EXPECTATIONS (with a tip of the hat to GREY GARDENS as well), to a road trip through Mexico with my son, Henry, as I sought to find myself during one of my periodic half-hearted nervous breakdowns. I liked to refer to this one as my Nineteenth Century Nervous Breakdown, because of my inexplicable affinity for the works of Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Melville, in particular Melville, and Poe, both of whose lives dissolved in bleakness and, in the case of Melville in particular, obscurity. Melville's obituary in the press was no more than a line or two, and he was misidentified at that. His name was misspelled. They called him Henry instead of Herman. I love that about him. He wrote these rambling, philosophical, bizarre, encyclopediac narratives, hardly what we consider narratives today at all. Recently, I read THE CONFIDENCE MAN in awe and semi-comprehension at the language and the inert lack of propulsion. It just doesn't go anywhere. Melville had this flurry of reknown in his day, embellishing his sea tales in the South Pacific to find fame, exaggerating his exploits, and then he became a dull desk clerk like his character BARTELBY and sank into obscurity, like one of his ships, like the lost Pequod. Poe's family woes are beyond recounting as he struggled in vain to have his own publishing company, trying to sell a story up to the last, when he wasn't drinking himself to death, which came to him at age 40. His own sea-faring novel, THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM OF NANTUCKET, had to have been based on himself, his fear and awe of the mystery of race and the extremes of nature. (The name "Pym," of course, had to be identified with his own name, Poe.) I once owned a beautiful copy of that novel, but I haven't been able to track it down, not in the basement or anywhere. I probably threw it away in one of my thwarted forays into the simple life.

Melville's sense of wonderment at the human race, black and white, was less visible throughout Moby Dick than in his novella, BENITO CERENO, also set on a ship, when the slaves end up slyly running the show.

But I do nothing but digress. Can one digress during the process of dissolution? A fine question.

I wish I had lived in America of the Nineteenth Century. Sometimes I try to catch the molecules of being, the scent of those times, and experience the feeling and mind of the times. We know time is illusion. I don't know why more people don't make use of this reality, why they cannot see that they are indeed experiencing an earlier time, or a future time, or a parallel time. I do. Something catches my nose and I am a child in Puerto Rico, waiting in anticipation outside the bakery of Aibonito, buying penny candy, rotting my teeth on guavas. The world has become homogenized. Travel to some new corner of the world is nearly impossible, since corporate exploitation has reached every corner, with merchandisers, with tourism agents, with amenities that make it no better than watching a big screen travelogue and eating at an ethnic restaurant. There's no risk, unless one is deliberately foolish, trying to climb K-2 or some other equally ridiculously dangerous quest, a packaged adventure which also has become without purpose, without exploration, just a retracing of steps established by others, a simulation. All those postmodernists, they knew what they were talking about, back when they cared. I used to want to visit Machu Picchu, but if I can't have it to myself, I have lost interest.

I had wanted this book to be funny and yet philosophical, a narrative that hinted at the hero's possibility of suicide and his sacrifice, his refusal to Since the book was about a man who systematically

Wanted to reveal everything, explain the odd circumstances of having a very rich life -- travel, family, dining, theatre, art, pleasure, adventure -- and yet not having much money, ever. Being poor, probably in the lower

I know those previous sentences are unfinished. No need.

Things just came free to me somewhat, when I was younger. It was what I sought. Others wanted to work on Wall Street. I never understood that. Everything was a gift anyway, I thought. Free money, as Patti Smith sang. Free money. Abbie Hoffman, too, thought it was all free. He committed suicide, probably because the government persecuted him, toyed with his time and realities. And the Grateful Dead. They gave their stuff away, in a sense, even if it didn't always work properly. Music and drugs, they gave it away.

I never recovered properly from the Sixties. I couldn't help it. It was my time. I was a true believer. I never went after money. Alan Watts told me money wasn't wealth. I believed him.

I also wanted to end a book with the word mayonaisse, as Richard Brautigan had, before he committed suicide. I wanted -- perhaps at some point, long past -- to astonish people, to make them laugh, laugh at me if needs be, make words pop in their heads as they read about some new punk band or movie. I did that for years, getting all bloated by seeing my name in print, a critic just like Edgar Allen Poe. We were both addicted to being published. Then it all was discarded. It hurt to give it up. But at some point, I had no more interest in writing movie reviews of the latest remake of THE BAD NEWS BEARS or SAW and telling people whether it was worthwhile to see, giving a star rating. I never understood star ratings or how some movie might be worth money.

And yet somehow, despite the liberty of renouncing excessive possessions, all of reality always seemed to be about money, the lack of and my bizarre lack of wanting it. I remember in Mr. Takacs high school history class, I was drawing a flag while he lectured on the Civil War, because we never got much beyond the Civil War in history classes in school, drawing dollar signs instead of stars. Mr. Tacaks pretended to be expounding on the Confederacy, strolling down the aisles between the student desks, and he walked up behind me and suddenly ripped my nice drawing out of my hands and turned all red in the face, shouting at me. He supported the Vietnam war and I was just daring to realize that I need not do so. I'd never had a teacher be so angry and hateful, as though something I had dared to think had punctured his very soul. He died soon after I graduated. He wasn't very old. Certainly I was swayed by the times, the late 1960s.

Everything gets destroyed. It is entropy. It is natural. My favorite movie growing up was the adaptation of the play YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU, the all-American anarchist family, brewing dynamite in the basement or feeding the pet snakes or composing a musical extravaganza, having fun, being creative. But the title was important, because money wasn't important. At a very early age, I determined that -- even though it was fun to make money, to be enterprising -- this was a false sense of creativity, and I renounced it. Right there in Mr. Tacaks class. Perhaps it was an epiphany.

But as you can see, I am swaying again, misleading myself into prolonging this suicide of a book, when, if I were completely honest, I would simply

There is that great rush, that thrill of throwing something away, something valuable, something you thought the world needed, something could hardly live without.

I'm having that sensation of liberation at this very moment, knowing full well that I am abandoning this book. It's not the first time. I once wrote a mythological, symbolic autobiography, its actual poetry was undeniable, it was good, and there were some very fine chapters, about my father's trip to Poland after the war, and about the time I spent on the farm with my family of the girl I thought I would marry, only to have her write me a Dear John letter during the time I spend in jail. I wonder where it all is at the moment. Where is that book? Probably stored on some computer disk format that has become obsolete, 5 1/4" floppy disks for an operating system I no longer use, no doubt. Gone. That book, just gone.

And then I fell in love with the writing style of Jose Saramago, the Nobel-prize winner, who is Portuguese, but lives in Spain, I believe, and I read his books in Spanish because it takes me so long and I savor and examine them, and he writes without quotation marks (or very many periods, either, for that matter), but he can do that. I had thought about calling this book, the one that I am now in the process of renouncing and abandoning, the one I am about to stop explaining before I go swimming, Vas a Morir Sin Embargo (You're Just Going to Die Anyway). That was going to be one of the subtitles. I think people might have enjoyed reading that book. Or maybe not. In the long run, no one will care that I stopped writing that book, no matter what it was called.

Nothing more to throw away this morning. Time to swim. I have written 2,058 words.