The Grey Pen Goings

Navigation through a World that's Wild at Heart and Weird on Top.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Anniversary




October the 27th marks the one-year anniversary of when I started my novel. I still remember that night clearly. We had done a Modern Drama Reading Group at Dana Pitts’ house, just five of us plowing through Enemy of the People, a long though pleasurable affair that didn’t get out till one in the morning. I didn’t get home till two, but by four that same morning I had the first 9 pages of Ouroboros. By Saturday (two days later) I had twenty-five. In the first three weeks I had seventy.

(Progress has since slowed considerably.)

But the actual origin of Ouroboros was born two nights earlier, on a Tuesday, when my friend Mark came home with my roommate Suz and I to have a post-pub beer (Oh, to be unemployed in Austin again! You never truly appreciate unemployment till ya get a goddamn job!)

We were getting there, the three of us, when Mark, sage and loquacious photographer that he is, made the offhand comment that life behind the camera was like living your life through others.

What would be the opposite of that? I immediately wondered. The model, my mind reasoned, who has to live all these different lives that for other people. She’s different and yet the same, like the other side of an equation. For some reason, this stuck with me, and I began to make more combinations as I fell asleep on the living room floor. The builder and the architect, the murderer and the victim, the colonizer and the colonized, the black and the white, different sides of the equation…

The week before I had read White Teeth by Zadie Smith. In it she mentioned the term ouroboros, which I was forced to look up. Ouroboros is the figure of a snake eating its tail, forming a union through its own death, and for some reason it stuck with me: Ouroboros. It was important. I wrote down its definition in my journal, unsure why it had to stay near the front of my mind.

And this is how art works sometimes: for some reason, the next day, when I woke up, these two things were all I could think of. The photographer leading his life through others. Ouroboros. The model living others’ lives for them. Ouroboros. My heritage, my halfbreed heritage—which side of the equation did it put me on? Ouroboros. Why did they fit together like jigsaw pieces? I don’t know. But they did. Everything wanted to fit together so, so badly, and I began to type.

Now, it’s hard to imagine I’ve been working on it a year. Certainly factors have slowed me down: a job, teaching that university course, moving abroad and training here, inexperience, laziness, other mental factors. But it’s getting there. I can honestly say it’s getting there. The hardest part is that it just requires more work and revisions than you want to put into it—the first chapter, for example, has been edited five times, and several chapters have been completely rearranged and rewritten. Over thirty pages have been straight cut when I decided to go in a different direction. This is the process. In terms of length, I’m about 60% through. As for being finished with it, well, that’s another matter.

Whether this thing ever sees the light of day is beyond me. In truth that’s only a part of why I write it. It means a lot to me. It’s very autobiographical in its own fantastical way. So, without further a due, here’s the Prelude of Ouroboros as a sort of teaser. The rest of the book follows different patterns, and only intermittently returns to this style and theme. Please don’t think it’s always so esoteric, but I hope you enjoy anyways. It’s been a strange, wild year.


Prelude

And if all you were left with was a box?

When you’re not left with the clearest of moments. When all that remains of your neighbor, Claudia—who your parents encouraged you to call Grandma—is the jaundiced, dried-up rosebud she gave you the last time you saw her (because even if you didn’t know, she did). That and her four-leaf clover coffee mug. Or Uncle William, stolen by cancer, whose entire existence has been distilled into a mulberry sports coat that drapes below your knees.

Or your best friend from second grade, Will Monroe, in that tiny starfish of a scar on your forehead from when you both tried to head home the same soccer ball.

Or the handmade Valentine’s Day card from the first girl you swore you were going to marry, Michelle Bost, that know you can reread with an ironic smile and point out the subtle hints that your relationship would soon be downgraded to “friend” status.

Or:

—the shirt you got when you and your father went down to watch Spring Training, just the two of you, and he caught a foul ball bare-handed. He said it didn’t hurt at all. You know the shirt, it’s got too many holes in it now but you still wear it to sleep.
—the bits of hotdog your mother would mix into your mac-and-cheese.
—the air brush set you only opened twice, now stuffed in the back of you closet, next to a remote-controlled Corvette and that lacrosse stick you borrowed from Steve Dixon.
—how your kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Moore, taught you to hold on to your shirtsleeves when you put on a sweater so they wouldn’t get bunched up around your elbow. You reveled in this secret and always thought of her as your “school mom.”
—Craig Biggio’s Donruss rookie card, the corners bent from being looked at so much.
—the silver-chained necklace with a small pendant of Ganesha your father embarrassedly gave you for your 13th birthday. He walked away before you could thank him for it.
—your life lying not in the things all around you but in the invisible, interlocking web that connects them to you and other people, which is only able to be expressed through words like “borrowed” and “bequeathed” and “stolen” and “gave.”

And if you were left with a box?

Ten little Indians and then there was one.
He looks around and what’s to be done?
Ten little Indians and then there were none.
…………………………………………….

And if you were left with a box?

And think maybe you don’t know. Just maybe, maybe, you don’t.
Things would make so much sense in other, more fantastical ways.
There should be leaves after all. Certainly branches. Maybe an owl
Looking preciously out the hole in the trunk. And there is none of that.
Even the roots are conspicuously withered and threadbare…So…?

(“What the hell are you?” Frank Lee, your chemistry lab partner, used to ask. As if human wasn’t enough. As if saying halfbreed meant more. As if being from one definable race coming from one definable country gave you your own history book. So you called him a dog-eating communist, even though you knew he was Taiwanese.)

Look down at the cardboard wrapped in glossy tape.
Smoke a cigarette about what may be inside. Nod to yourself.
Close both eyes for a second then get out your scissors. Open gently,
Because this is a matter of extremity.

And if instead of a family you were left with a box? Rolls of film?



208 pages and counting. (cracks open Pilsner Urquell) Here’s to Year Two.

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