Materials for a Mixtape that never Materialized: Second Try at a First Letter
Hello my friends, it's me again.
Every so often someone tells me that they want to start a little press, a magazine, a reading series, and sometimes I'm the friend saying so. But it's so rare for these things to go any further than that. Why doesn't it get any further? And why does it fail just there, rather than before saying so at all, or after the first issue?
Two theories.
It could be the practical problem: maybe we just haven't been realistic about how hard it is. There's always twice as much work as just the stuff you want to do, someone's always angry at you on the internet, it isn't the same if it's just you, but you can't ask anybody else to work for free, to put their hobby on a deadline, or to send their best work to you rather than wisely and professionally placing it where it's less likely to be accepted but more likely to be read, or satisfying themselves with immediate expression. Talk to the people that are really doing the work, you'll see.
So sure, you might say, the great trees are falling, and saplings get more light. But we do so on the same ground, face drought, fire, fungus, and the saw. Pretty soon you're someone's desk, or maybe topping out a ten-a feet tall.
To be honest, I think it might be something else. The sign of practical problems would be a lot of people getting one or two issues in and folding. It's hard alright, but that isn't after all what stopped you. More likely you didn't even find out how hard it is. And besides, look what else you've done. Going hard was never the problem.
What I think is the real difference is that some fantasies are only apparently desire. As desires they're almost totally satisfied just by being expressed. Say I just wanted to express my nostalgic orientation, to say "where have all the public intellectuals gone?" or "criticism isn't what it used to be," or "I remember when we felt more like a community," or to call on the spirit of spontaneity, the informal collective.
It feels formally analogous to masochistic speech, where there's so much satisfaction in pledging themselves to it, telling you just how far they'll go and what they can take. But the type is more often a spectator than a player. I always find myself wanting to say something like, "Good luck! Try taking it easy. And why tell me?" This probably isn't an area where we can help one another.
Well, as I said the sad thing isn't that you didn't do what you said, but that you did nothing at all. Next time this happens, let's try to get out of our own way. Whatever that little magazine was supposed to enable, let's do try doing it immediately, without the permission-granting fantasy structure *. Fantasy reveals itself here not as the expression of desire, but as its deferral, as a container. Better as Wally says to "weep and step barefoot into reality," to reach the object, to be the contained.
Not to wait for the perfect kitchen—we can cook here, live like this, proof dough in a stockpot. For me that's meant doing a little bit of writing that's free of the next book, playing music without starting a band, reading socially in some of the rooms I actually find myself in (if there's one thing I really miss about twitter it was running these twitter spaces where we'd read long poems by Shelley), reaching for that word that probably isn't a real word in this language. We can look it up later.
Let's try everything. Newsletters, for example.
Peace,
Jackie
* Thomas Bernhard wrote about this, this is where some of his characters stick, with an obsessive preliminary construction of what will allow the true life. Rudolf, in Concrete, trying to secure the working conditions which will allow him to write the first page. Roithammer, in Correction, who at least succeeds in building the Cone, but a lot of good it does him or his sister. I wonder if I'll ever read Bernhard again, I'm not as tough-minded as I once was, I might understand him better but endure him less.