I had floated the idea of doing this Substack with a couple of friends, one of whom referred to the diary Steinbeck kept while writing The Grapes Of Wrath. I’ve never warmed up to Steinbeck as much as some of his contemporaries, and I prefer Of Mice And Men or Tortilla Flats to The Grapes Of Wrath, but of course I recognize its greatness, and (as the son of a labor organizer) I appreciate Steinbeck’s support for migrant labor issues (the more things change …) — we must admire his heart and humanity. Though I don’t think of Steinbeck as a strong influence on my own sensibility, we have very different artistic concerns, yet the diary really hit me where I live.

My life isn’t very long and I must get one good book written before it ends. The others have been make shifts, experiments, practices. For the first time I am working on a real book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.1

Bang. I’m the nail for that hammer.

Steinbeck was already a successful author when he started on The Grapes Of Wrath, yet he is haunted by his feelings of inadequacy, overwhelmed by his ambition for the novel.

… I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I’ll just have to work from a background of these. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it is all I can expect of my poor brain — never temper a word to a reader’s prejudice, but bend it like putty for his understanding. If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time. Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity.

At times his anguish pushes him to the brink of mental breakdown.

The despair came on me for a while but although still nervous from it I think I am recovering. … Let the damn book go three hundred thousand words if it wants to. This is my life. Why should I want to finish my own life?

There are a number of passages like that one.

William Blake, The Creation, 1825

As for me, lately there are days when I am so panicky I cannot work at all. Many another morning I go to the desk full of anxiety, fearful even to look at what I wrote the day before. And few are the days I don't despair of ever being able to finish the “the damn book”, let alone publish it — and then, my god, what if people laugh? — I don’t want to be one of God’s fools!

Why make art when the making of it can be such torment? Why invent such problems for ourselves, isn’t life hard enough all on its own? We are so fortunate just to have the luxury of indulging such problems, aren’t there healthier ways to employ our privilege?

The plain fact is that if you don’t have a problem, you create one. If you don’t have a problem you don’t feel that you are living. ~ UG Krishnamurti

Are we compelled to be miserable?

And still a stranger question is this: why, to begin with, do our projects of imagination, which we conjure from the air, cause us so much angst? The absurdity of it, being terrified of something you only made up! The worst ogres are the imaginary ones.

There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius … In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel: a tattered, painted bag of clothes; a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity. ~ Nietzsche

Aye, there’s the rub. Would we be even worse without our struggle, in denial of our genius? Must every genie be a demon?

I think of the great adventurers, the sailors, climbers, explorers: voluntarily they spend their lives in physical peril, in insufferable conditions and difficulties: they need these challenges more than they need comfort and security: they need to push themselves beyond their own limits: that is, to go beyond themselves.

Ernest Becker wrote that we all invent an “immortality project”, something into which we try to install our identity, as a way to outlive the fragile flesh: we need some defense against the terror of mortality. Merely living well is not enough. Viktor Frankl believed that our central motivation is meaning. I think there’s much in common between Frankl and Becker.

The world of imagination is the world of eternity. ~ Blake

In Tarkovsky’s Stalker the Writer says to the Professor:

[A] man writes because he’s tormented, unsure of himself. He has to keep proving his worth to himself and to others. But if I’m convinced I’m a genius then why do I need to write? … At any rate, all your technology — all those blast furnaces, wheels and suchlike hustle and bustle so that people can work less and consume more — they’re all crutches, artificial limbs. Mankind exists in order to create works of art. At least that’s unselfish compared with all other human activities. Great illusions. Images of absolute truth.

I often think to myself that the best art is that which is made by the artist as a gift of love to the world. And that’s the attitude I should like to take toward my writing of the Swan.

Eternity exists, and all things in eternity, independent of creation, which was an act of mercy. ~ Blake

1 Steinbeck excerpts from DeMott. Working Days. New York: Penguin, 1989.

That is the opening of the tenth book of The Swan Of Antares, aka “The Book That Ate My Life”. It has occurred to me this week the several ways in which the creation of this journal may be compared with the writing of Book 10.

I’m sure I’ll go further into this in a future dispatch, but here I’ll just say that, despite its great length, the Swan is not just a sprawl, there’s a lot of structure to it. At the grossest scale, it consists of two “volumes”, each comprised of seven “books”. I’ve written each “book” in a different “voice”, employing a different narrative technique, a different timbre. Some are fairly straightforward, others more psychedelic. The conceit of Book 10 is that it is the journal of Gaven Dekkman, one of our two heroes. So in this sense Book 10 could be called epistolary.

(Dekkman’s symbolic number is 5 — so it’s fitting that he authorially debuts in Book 10, just as Book 5 was the first book centered primarily on him, not the other guy. This is how my mind works.)

Drafting the first nine books has taken me from six to eighteen months apiece. I’ve been working on Book 10 nigh a year. It’s been a struggle — in several ways — not least because, as you can see from that excerpt, Dekkman’s style is eccentric, even tortured: densely allusive, digressive, paradoxical. (But then again, so am I.)

Now Dekkman’s journal is aphoristic, taking its inspiration less from ships’ logs than from philosophers like Nietzsche and Cioran. His entries are titled rather than dated, and like our journal it begins with an entry called “Preamble.” I hadn’t thought of this echo when I wrote and titled the first dispatch, but there it is: the creative imagination is always getting up to tricks, and now and then, to my amusement — or my shock — I catch it out.

Dekkman never settles on a name for his journal, just calling it “Our Book”. It is “Our Book” rather than “My Book” because in it he refers to himself in the second-person plural. And it is “Our Book” in the sense that it refers both to his book and my book; therefore, insofar as I am writing this section of my book through him, we, Dekkman and I, are co-authors. And it is “Our Book” in the ergodic sense that the book solicits the reader’s active cooperation in its imaginative construction — it is yours and mine together.

And the thing is that Dekkman, while keeping this “journal”, is also cracking up. His writing is both a defense against his psychic dissolution and a record of it (cf Gogol’s “Diary Of A Madman”). In another entry he says,

Yet There Is Method In’t. — We write whatever lies upon our minds, with no particular respect for chronology, each entry on a single sheet, sometimes both sides, and arrange them all together to our likings, cutting and trimming our puny sails of paper to our whims, like eyelids, tossing and pasting, shuffling off and shuffling on, these are the days of our lives. We totter upon the brink of recursive absorption, the more we scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr. Monkey, the more our scribbling lies upon our mind, our mind, a singular word for a multifarious effluence, a singular flock of flying thoughts, our mind is like a swarm of hornets from which we flee into a lake of fire. AOI.

Likewise I suspect that one of my impulses in undertaking this journal is self-defense.

It’s a curious thing how we both reveal and conceal ourselves in language. The tornado is our anxiety that perhaps the only thing we actually are is this shifting constructive effort: what we secretly fear is not that we are not the story which we’re telling but that we’re nothing other than the teller telling — that, just as a dance exists only while dancing, so when the teller falls silent she vanishes.

These selves which we think we are, they’re like houses built of words, mortared with grammar, whirling in a tornado. The writer’s work is to pull these bricks in mid-career and rearrange them. Perilous creativity! These days, writing a mad book in a mad world, I feel myself, with Dekkman, coming unjointed.

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In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. ~ Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

When Virgil penned

I sing of arms, and of a man, a fugitive of Fate …

did he already have it in his head that he’d knock out the great Roman epic? Or somewhere along the way did the whole thing just get completely out of hand?

When Proust jotted down

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

did he say to himself, "There it is! Just another million words or so and I'll have this lad in long pants!"

Because what if you did? What if you said to yourself, "What's the best piece of work it is possible for me to create?" What if you throw off every constraint — disregard doubt, deny time, defy convention? What if I just dare myself to discover what I'm capable of? What if I do it out loud?

So it was that in the summer of the 2,014th year of the Common Era I embarked upon my fifth novel. Hey, I'd already written four books — I thought I knew what I was setting up for. Oh hell no.

In a sense, all creative work engenders a new world, a new universe of invention more or less (mostly less): but this book — The Swan Of Antares — tipped the scales far more than I had anticipated. It transmogrified. It metastasized in scope and complexity. It ate my life.

Notwithstanding what I said above about “denying time,” I supposed initially that my grand voyage of discovery might need five years. That's all Darwin needed on the Beagle. That's all Captain Kirk needed to discover strange new worlds. — Five years later I figured I still needed about five more. And now, after more than ten years, I still think I need about five more. We'll have nuclear fusion sooner.

So maybe it's time to take stock.

In these dispatches I intend to report on the lunacy of constructing a very long and very strange novel: to say something, week by week, about the thrills and the terrors of creating an impossible work of art. In short, to demand of myself some answers regarding a novel about questions:

Who do I think I am? How did I get here? And where the devil is the exit?

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