Usual wishful ramble

Here’s the next page from my book of 300 Drawing Prompts (for the previous page, see the previous page) – it’s just a few zigzags.

Dear diary,

Why do I think of Dostoevsky as living in the future? He died in 1881, which is in the past, thus he must have lived sometime even before that; so it’s impossible that his time is yet-to-come, unless the years begin to reverse their direction again, like they did in BC (Before Christ).

So if I’m alive right now (which is debatable), then it could be that I end up as Dostoevsky. For someone who we know will eventually exist requires nothing more than a living body, which I have (tho, again, this is debatable); therefore no one can tell me that it’s impossible to achieve Dostoevskyhood, provided that we’re right about him being a future-soul. For the only bodies disqualified from “winning the Dostoevsky sweepstakes” are those that can by no means ever be born.

• The bodies that are now alive might be him;
• the bodies that are soon-to-breathe might be him;
• and ditto for the bodies that have passed, once they get re-inflated.

But what does it mean to be Dostoevsky? I’m not an expert (so my answer is just one datum for you to tally in your logbook; one subjective opinion to report back to Science), but I say that to be Dostoevsky means to be sad. That’s how it seems to me. Also a little angry & annoyed. So my answer is average, I suspect; cuz farsighted people are often sad, angry & annoyed.

What I’m trying to do with this entry is answer two questions:

1. What am I going to be when I grow up?
2. Why is it so hard to say what it means to be Shakespeare?

The first question can be answered, as we did above, with the legend Dostoevsky; but I think it actually makes more sense to say Melville. Here’s a quote from an introduction to a collection of the latter’s writings (by John Bryant, tho I lightly edited it):

He had to innovate. He played with genre. He experimented repeatedly…
     Because Melville was a writer such as this, he was finally not a very successful author. Like the most successful authors of his time—[name redacted], [name redacted], [name redacted], [name redacted], and [name redacted]—he played the author’s game as well as he could. But unlike theirs, his publications simply failed to sell. To his friend Hawthorne he wrote: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,” which is to say: “it will not pay. Yet, altogether write the other way I cannot.” Writing the “other way,” with certain effects and resolutions for popular consumption, seemed a physical impossibility for him. Not only could he not keep himself from writing, but his writing always made him dive, as it makes us dive, beyond the depths we think we know.

So Melville appeals to me because I am a failure. And, for the same reason, Jesus appeals to me. But Jesus is in the distant past and wrote nothing. So he’s more of a “first attempt” type of personality. Melville seems more like an “OK this is almost better; now let’s just try to figure out how to click ourselves into the economy” type of soul. Cuz we’re all pieces in a great puzzle, and it’s everyone’s individual misfortune that we don’t click properly.

But if Jesus, after giving up the ghost, said to his killer, Jehovah, in the afterlife, “I see what I did wrong; now let me play the game just one more time,” then, via resurrection, he got reborn in New York City – the third child of a merchant in French dry goods, as it is written:

Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; “Come from the four winds, O breath, and inspire this slain messiah, that he may live.”
     And the breath came into him, and he lived, and stood up upon his feet: the thirdborn son of a merchant in French dry goods. (Ezekiel 37:9-10)

I say, if Jesus got born again as Herman Melville, what can we say that he learned? What improvements were made?

Well, the one major advancement that I can discern (again, I speak only as an ignorant “man on the street” offering my two cents) is that, instead of abjuring writing, Jesus-as-Melville has, in this new life, embraced writing, even obsessively, albeit a form of writing that, so to speak, sacrifices itself. But that trait is probably “built in” to his character.

And what improvement, if any, was made by Melville becoming us (you and I: the dream team: wandering journalist and creative misreader)? For one, at least we did not bear any children. For, if you have no kids, your kids cannot commit suicide. Both Melville and Jehovah understand the depression that follows in the wake of a self-slain child. But the thing that we lack as Bryan-Ray Melville, when compared to Jesus Melville or Jean-Pierre Melville (the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Grumbach, while with the French Resistance during World War II, adopted the nom de guerre Melville as a tribute to his favorite American author), I say, when compared to our forerunner, our main lack is that we were afraid to set sail in a sieve; thus we squandered our gusto. We just sat indoors and scribbled, for most of our life.

But you can imagine what it was like to be Franz Kafka—that’s easy: ANXIETY. That’s why we all relate to him so much. We moderns, I mean. We postmoderns, I mean. And, as was established above, Dostoevsky equals sadness plus a dash of anger and annoyance. But when you try to think what it was like to live as Shakespeare, you’re left with a blank. Not that there’s nothing there, but that there’s maybe too much to articulate. Like how light contains all the colors.

Or scratch that: I’d rather not define Shakespeare as “All or Nothing” but as elusiveness. Because elusive can be definite but hard to catch. That seems right, for Shakespeare: he’s not God the Father who contains the whole world all the time and thus bores us to tears cuz there’s nothing to do but hover there in the sky, with the cloud layers wrapped around your ingredients so that nothing spills out, like the perfect burrito. No, Shakespeare is more like a dark stranger who wanders into your town in the old Wild West and makes all sorts of remarks to the patrons of the saloon, and the things that he says seem interesting but not divine when he’s addressing you all face-to-face, but then, after he leaves town, you realize how brilliant his words were: now that he’s gone, you regret that you didn’t treat him with greater respect when he was among you; you now want to canonize his speech into a scripture, but you already have The Bible, so you shrug and reluctantly make a new cubbyhole among your bin of scrolls: so henceforth there’s not just one but two categories: “sacred” and “secular”.

So I’m an admirer of Shakespeare. I’m a believer. And I believe in Jesus, too. I think Jesus was important. But with Shakespeare, the weird thing is that he leaves no imprint of himself: he’s such a clear medium. Maybe Jesus was like that, too, which is why the gospels that tell what he was unwilling to commit to writing himself—his teachings and life—all take on the color of the personality of the respective biographer: Matt, Mark, Luke, John... & didn’t Harold Bloom observe that when, say, Saint X sets out to write the story of Jesus, she ends up writing the story of herself: Saint X? Thus, since I wrote Rumors of Sarah, I myself am Sarah. That seems half right. I wish I were Sarah. But I know I am Jesus. So, again, it’s about improvement: revision.

We’ve strayed far, but our goal was to say one simple thing: If Kafka is fear, and Ol’ Dosty is outraged sadness, then what is Shakespeare? How come Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have one dominant mood or tic or vantage or passion or stance? He represents every mood tic vantage passion and stance, somewhere in his compositions, but not one of them sticks to him; he’s not stained or tainted. Or if he’s most “personal” in his sonnets, then maybe his flag equals love-on-the-sidelines… or I was gonna write “indifferent affection” but he’s not indifferent; he’s even fiery, altho he’s barred from the playing field.

Now I realize I’m doing to Will what Saint X did to Jesus. For I’M the one who’s barred from the field, which is why I claimed to be the Second Coming of Melville minus adventurousness and with no more to say. The Second Coming of the Failed Aspect of Melville.

Being a book on a shelf, tho: what’s the boon, if humans do not survive and want to read you? For it seems that humans may not even survive the next couple generations, for various reasons. And even if humankind lives healthily, who’s to say that anyone will want to spend time with your compositions? Yesterday I heard a popular talk-show host say that TEXT (my preferred medium) is too slow, too simple, too flat, too one-sided, too inexpressive, not articulate enough, not detailed enough, unclear, primitive. If this is how all the people of the future are thinking, then I’m a sucker for investing so much effort in textual composition. And yet, what should I be doing otherwise? Making money selling products? No, I’m too much of a hunter-gatherer to play the product money-sham. I only believe in giving freely. But when I asked about what I should be doing other than writing words, I meant: Is there another type of art that will be favored by futurefolk? This question leaves me stumped.

I know movies, music, and text. Those are the forms that ruled my generation. And already movies have died: nobody watches silent films, and very few people will watch black-&-white films from the 40s-50s, which is one of my favorite eras; and pretty soon no one will be willing to watch anything that isn’t 3-D and interactive (presented in “virtual reality” or whatever they ultimately brand it). So movies are dead, cuz I don’t know where they’re going and I can’t keep up. And the second of the three artforms that I understand is music, which seems dead too: cuz nobody listens to music with any presence of intellect, it’s all backdrop-wallpaper, so the part of your artist’s mind that wants to communicate thots messages prophecies and visions must take a back seat, must sit and wave a paper fan while the listener is fed grapes by the shallowest pleasure principle. I know I’m being unfair to modern music, but just let me state my opinion as if it’s the truth: music is stone-dead in the grave. So all that’s left is text. And text is alive, barely, because a few people still read for fun, but I fear that these creative-minded readers are all being killed off by the…

Actually I now realize that all I wanted to do in this entry is scold my family: Why does my sister love astrology and all these pseudo-sciences? I mean, I hate True Science as much as the next guy, but to become a card-holding pseudo-scientist is as silly as rejecting the Bible’s God by worshiping the Bible’s Satan. Blasphemy and belief are flip sides of a coin from a marketplace that I only want to escape. And why does my mom care so much that she has inherited a grandson? Why is the mere continuance of the Ray flesh-line so important to her? I thot she was a Christian; and don’t Christians say “Fuck flesh; we side with SPIRIT”? It’s like the abortion debate in the U.S., which goes: Save all the fetuses of this nation, but don’t help them one iota once they get born, just send them to war so that all the foreign fetuses can be aborted.

I feel better now, having complained a little.