The National, singing in Fake Empire, a song which recently achieved exposure during the closing moments of Southland, a new cop show set in LA, directed in the unforgiving glare of the sun and the submerged, deep shadows of the LA night, with pin-sharp, brutal clarity. The track contains a multitude of emotions tightly wrapped in the beaten cadences of Tom Waits’ poetry and the loneliness of Jack Kerouac’s American nights. The moment when despair and hope collide and it could go either way. This constant wonder of being alive. Everything is bright, everything is in shadow, and you go quietly through the shades in the valley of the sun, because to go any other way might make it all real, and you don’t know yet if you want darkness or wonder. Tiptoe, then, for now. Just like falling for someone, just like writing a novel; you plunge in with abandon and yet you tread carefully, because you don’t know yet what this thing may be, what it could become. You sense its power but don’t know it, although you want it more than you can say. You can only will it into existence. You want it, you want him, you want her. It’s all so close in your mind, so faraway from where you are. The chorus of the song tells us: “we’re half-awake, in a fake empire.” Maybe that’s the state we’re all in. Maybe that’s what it means to be conscious, to be human. To feel, to be in love. It’s our job as writers to find this out; it’s something only we can do.
Author D
"the worst of us are a long, drawn-out confession; the best of us are geniuses of compression…"
Words from U2’s latest album No Line On The Horizon, released this week; a quiet, hypnotic set that yet thrums with the hidden but sensed force and latent danger of distant power lines. Occasionally thunder breaks and a storm races through, but the insistently meditative rhythms soon resume to carry us to the album’s Sopranos-like sudden conclusion. In the lines quoted above, Bono is writing in the character of a war correspondent, but those words could apply to all writing, that character could be any writer: “I’m here because I don’t want to go home,” he sings at one point. Writers take the long journey away from themselves, like actors, even as what they write or perform reinforces who they are; who we are. Throughout the album, Bono, perhaps the only rock star to truly channel the kinetic, elusive spirit of the Beats, attains sharp, brutal poetic heights: he has never been such a genius of compression as he is in these songs. “I’m running down the road like loose electricity,” like Kerouac in his original scroll for On The Road, full of restless, shifting energy, the need to escape, to move, to be alive. U2 channel the Beats, the rawness of punk, the immediacy of Japanese poetry, and even Ezra Pound, for they always follow his command to “make it new.” Take everything you know and remake it. That’s what Shakespeare did by turning established stories into new plays; that’s what Baz Luhrmann did when he adapted Romeo & Juliet into an utterly contemporary, furiously edited masterpiece of kinesis. That’s what U2 always do, to varying degrees. Achtung Baby was likely the biggest leap they have ever taken, from the traditional sincerity of The Joshua Tree to the new, heavily disguised, digitized, synthesized sincerity of Zoo Station and The Fly. The Zoo TV live show, while on the hand being utterly of the moment and groundbreaking and new, still carried echoes of Ezra Pound’s Blast magazine, published in 1916, with its one-word-per-page slogans, its cutting up and fragmenting of the cultural norms of the time, its exploding of conventions. The form was deconstructed and technologically rebuilt; this is what U2 have been doing ever since The Fly‘s distorted sonic reinventions. By the time of their Pop album, Bono was openly referencing William Burrough’s philosophy of cutting up the past and re-forming it. True invention and innovation demands the highest level of sincerity and dedication, to the soul of the piece, to the craft of realizing it. No Line On The Horizon is a beautiful, almost silent meditation on a long journey with no end in sight; it’s also sonically, musically and lyrically inventive. Unlike Achtung Baby, that invention is here absorbed by a minimalist soundscape. It takes many listens; all of U2’s layers are compressed into a smoothly digital rendering of loss and hope. It’s a writer’s showcase in many ways; whether you write poetry, music, lyrics, stories, screenplays or novels, at some level the same needs and demands will eventually apply.
one path through the wilderness
In The Living Mountain, excerpted in Ali Smith’s fascinating anthology The Book Lover, Nan Shepherd describes the moment when flowing water becomes frozen: “…the struggle between frost and the force in running water is not quickly over. The battle fluctuates, and at the point of fluctuation between the motion in water and the immobility of frost, strange and beautiful forms are evolved.” She could have been describing the process of writing. In the process of evoking a particular truth, new truths emerge, in the capturing of “the moment of equilibrium between two elemental forces,” the writer and the world. The moment of fluctuation becomes the moment of equilibrium as the writer makes the choices, transforming the endless torrent of beautiful possibilities into something new and unusual; finding its one true form; or at least, the form that is true in that moment. It’s tempting to say the process is never truly over. As writers we observe our chosen world flowing around us while we stay still; when the moment is right, we reach out to feel, and to bring something of that world back to the page. The wild rush of life in motion is given permanence, a lasting shape in words. It’s a process that we return to, that we obsess over, giving form to dreams. As Neil Davidge, one of the fundamental figures behind the group Massive Attack, has said, “I’ve locked myself away for days to stay in the same emotional place, capture something, and see a piece of music through to the end. You’re always chasing what you imagine in your head, so you just keep going.” The elemental forces: reality and creation. In the song Life Itself from his recent album Working On A Dream, Bruce Springsteen evokes the first of those forces: “You were life itself, rushing over me, life itself, the wind in black elms…” He wants us to feel the reality of the character, and so he takes that wildness and gives it a smooth form, choosing just one of the infinite ways he could have used; taking one path through the wilderness.
"…[the novel’s form] arises in a freedom that no-one can delimit and whose evolution will be a perpetual surprise."
Milan Kundera speaks in concise philosophical truths. His recent essay in seven parts, The Curtain, is a characteristically precise analysis of the art of the novel, and the art of being a novelist. He wields a critical scalpel like a master conceptual surgeon, with complete steadiness of hand and purpose. The text is studded with hard gems of insight. “Description: compassion for the ephemeral.” His cultural world-view can be rigid, and he admits as much, although he follows this by letting us know that it’s the correct view. We can allow this; he’s earned it. “The unbearable lightness of being,” “the beauty of a sudden density of life.” Even in translation, his aphoristic tendencies survive with clarity. He marshals a global coterie of authors, and culls their writings (novels, stories, letters) to weave a tapestry of thought and novelistic philosophy. In the process, he generates a steady stream of ideas, any one of which could fill a chapter, or even a book. It would be breathless were it not for Kundera’s utter control of the material, his iron grip on the evolution of the novel across societies, cultures, nations and moments in history. Naturally, any writer reading The Curtain will find resonance with those ideas that most closely dovetail with their own, but there is much to learn in this book, from the many writers included within. Kundera calls on Flaubert for assistance on multiple occasions, most deeply when he quotes the author of Madame Bovary talking about his mission as a novelist: “I have always done my utmost to get into the soul of things.” What more could we ask for from a novelist? By truthfully, genuinely getting into the soul of your story, your characters, everything else will follow. As Kundera says, “in the art of the novel, existential discoveries are inseparable from the transformation of form.” It’s the one and only real rule of writing: be true to the story. Get into the soul of it, and it will take the shape it needs. The characters will inhabit their organic world, truthfully. Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth, a brilliantly composed contemporary noir thriller about werewolves and dogcatchers in LA, is written in brutally spare, beautifully simple blank verse. When asked why, Barlow described how, once he started writing it, starting deep in the heart of the story, the form it had to take became apparent. From Flaubert’s cinematic journeys into the modern consciousness, through Kundera’s conceptual renderings, to Barlow’s lovelorn wolves howling up at the dying skies of LA, one thing is always necessary: get into the soul of it; or, as Oasis put it in their most recent album title, dig out your soul. The truth will be there.
making the choices
Evolution, transformation – perpetual motion. New shapes, new forms. Having finished the novel some time ago, after multiple edits, it became clear that one more pass at it was necessary. An intense experience, to take the apparently finished product, and find it opening out again to reveal new shapes, new chapters, a different structure. Editing and revising can sometimes be the most rewarding part of the always intense experience that is being a writer. I used to find the complete opposite when I was starting out. The initial burst of creation was the thing back then; the beautiful coalescing of underlying emotional structures, the elements of a dream forming into a specific memory. That draft would contain all its possibilities. I used to prefer that stage, because it contained the possibility of the final perfect version of the vision. One of the most important things I learned though, was the importance, and the sheer joy, of locking in the possibilities. Making them real and vivid. Making the choices. In the first draft, all the different directions, mixes, and edits are all there. It’s like the demo version of a song, or the rough cut of a movie. It seemed like a herculean task to move the piece beyond that stage. But the process of editing is now the most exciting part of the enterprise. Taking that raw material and shaping it, sculpting its new form, its true beauty. Adding the soundtrack, fixing the visuals, moving scenes around, shooting new material. Adding the sheen that pulls everything together. And the momentum continues when you adapt the work from one form to another, changing everything, throwing it all into a new light. A story becoming a poem, a novel becoming a script; evolutions and revelations abound.
dreaming between the lines 