S.K. Kalsi's Blog

Like millions of you, I am feeling depressed about the results of the 2016 election. Like millions of you, I am unsure what to do. Writing seems a poor effort in the face of such madness. Like millions of you, I was hopeful that with all of Trump's faults (too many to enumerate), he would surely lose the election and his brand of anger and hatred, fear and racism would be toppled for the sake of a decent, qualified woman who simply misused a bunch of emails. Surely, people would come to their senses and not give him a single state. Surely, "pussy-gate" would have toppled Trump, if not the disrespect he showed a vast majority of American people, veterans, the military, African Americans, pregnant women, etc. Surely the heartless idiocy on display on a daily basis would have weakened his chances of ascending to the White House, that symbol of all that is good in this country, the greatest seat of power for Good.

But what strikes me ironic is that by Trump being elected to President of the United States, the one country that supposedly stood for tolerance, decency, inclusiveness, whose motto was always an appeal to the vast displaced immigrant populations of the world, found a new voice in a man standing for divisiveness, hatred, and bigotry. He is exactly the type of President Osama Bin Laden would have wanted, for he has embraced all that is the worst in us as a country and people. He has revealed the dark underbelly of a United States driven by ignorance and hatred borne out of prejudice and fear and Terror.

Donald Trump is Bin Laden's legacy, for, according to him, to destroy America is to destroy her through fear. Destroy her by terrorizing her people, by making her hate the other and one another. Destroy her by demonizing what is good and decent, letting her believe that goodness and decency are inferior values, as weak values.

By electing Trump to the Presidency, the people who were swayed by his rhetoric of anger, have elected someone Bin Laden would have wanted: The Anti-Christ, an anti-humanist, an anti-Christian, a man willing to lie, cheat, steal, condemn, to get what he wants. Trump might not signal the End of Days, as prophesied in The Bible and Koran, but we are a nuclear strike on the Middle East away from that. Then Bin Laden's project will be complete.

Let me be the first to say it: I feel sympathy for Trump's supporters. Almost. Lured by the promise of making America great again, they have cast off the chains of long held but seldom expressed sexist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic beliefs and supported for President a man whose testosterone fueled megalomania, crass bigotry, blatant stupidity, bluster and stream of conscious monologuing have torn open the fault lines of racial divide in this country. In the process, he and they have stooped to conquer.

Unbeknownst to them, Trump's supporters (a hard scrabble lot unwilling to abandon their support in the light of, well, all negativity) have sold their souls by following a great blunderbuss who has by his words flirted with the idea of that great horror of the modern age, nuclear war. They have followed a man who views entire races inferior, religions he deems illegitimate, and the female gender serves as a mere tool to exercise male dominance. They have sold their souls to the worst in themselves at the expense of what their own Christianity teaches. Where is the appeal to the better angels of one's nature? Where is civil discourse? Where are the ideas for a better future based on facts and not emotional opinion? So where does Trump's failed candidacy leave them once he loses and they have wasted their efforts? What becomes of their lowly ideals of divide and conquer, separate and destroy, cleave and damn?

Will the demons they've unleashed shrink back into the dark corners of their psyches, or if after being exposed, will their demons scratch and claw their way at the light, darkening us all? Time will tell. What I know is that Trump's supporters are seldom capable of reflection, or if they are, they must reflect only what is worst in humanity--the fear, rage, shame, and paranoia of living amidst non-whites, immigrants, "job taking Mexicans," uppity women in pantsuits, uppity blacks, uppity Asians all of whom are nothing more than "beaners and niggers," "pussies," "dikes and kikes and camel jockeys" (Sorry for the crass language).

What I suspected back in 2015 when "Don-the-Con" descended the escalator to announce his candidacy has turned out to be the truth of his campaign: Trump's supporters were always on a suicide mission to destroy all forms of progress--social, racial, economic, spiritual. The unexpressed intentions of seeing trump as President was a dismantling, destroying. And he employed the catchy phrase, Make America Great Again, as a code for White Superiority, and perhaps, Anarchy! What is the logical conclusion when he crawls back to his tower with his tail between his legs? Armed insurrection?

God, I hope not.

So, I feel some sympathy for his supporters, the duped, but not much, for they have annihilated themselves. Making America great again should never have been about one man's quest for power, a demagogue articulating a problem that never existed except in his narrow, uneducated mind and the narrow, uneducated minds of his conspiracy theory followers. Making America great should never have been about racism, sexism, xenophobia, the detonation of humanity's core values of decency, inclusion, respect, honor, charity, faith, love, and truth. They should have realized that America was never not-great, just in transition to a better way where "Progress," in the great words of Barack Obama, "takes time and is never easy." They should have realized that America is a social and economic and spiritual work in progress that advances each year by the collective effort of its noble people, and its elected officials who must (if failing) be held accountable to the people's will. They should have realized that to put their faith and trust in a man whose only convincing argument is "Believe Me" should have not just been a red flag but a siren call to run away.  But, I get it. We live in an entertainment culture and Trump embedded the entertainer come politician. People were awed by the "something new, something different," enticed by the glamorous spectacle of the billionaire with his Stepford Wife and statuesque daughter and Patrick Bateman sons, the 1% family's family. People were stirred up to a froth by the hard-talking divisive speech, speech that was visceral, unflinching, unrepentant and ignoble, a man who spoke "from the heart," but actually from the recesses of the unbridled sub-conscious. People had found a man whose Freudian Id spoke to their own buried desires, where penis jokes and the stultification of white pride became beacons and where disparaging POW's. Gold Star families, and the disabled were fair game. Here was wealth (or the appearance of it) shouting to the commoner that the America and the world has gone to Hell. Here was a man blaming "disastrous" trade policies for the loss of jobs and opportunities while benefitting from those same trade policies. Here was a man preying on people's desires, after all he himself said in his book that he "played to people's aspirations." Here was a showman over promising, seducing simpletons with simpleton speech, asking people to "Believe Him," this Pied Piper of the lower classes, this charlatan with the orange skin and full blown hypocrisy and bad hair.

Now that his candidacy is almost over, I wonder, What's next?

I wonder, since we have sunk so low, is there a new bottom where we can sink? At the bottom of the abyss is there still a deeper, darker abyss our moral and political instruments cannot calculate, a new darkness no venerable light can possibly penetrate? So what lies beyond the black hole? And I wonder what awaits us next time around, in four years, what new demon will materialize out of our darkest shadows? What new demon lurks beneath the pits of hell of the now decimated Republican Party, the party of Lincoln that once stood for so much decency and good intention? What prowls beyond the blind patriotism of the Conservative Right whose message seems so out of touch with the modern age of egalitarianism and "stronger together"? Who will their new savior be?

I am afraid to find out. . .

Beside my bed sits a brass fountain pen and inkwell. Beside it a small sheathed dagger used by Sikhs to cut the ceremonial sweet dough after prayer. Books by Alice Munro, John Cheever, Andre Dubus flank a rosewood box containing the ash-remains of my beloved dog Hemingway. A teak box intricately carved with a quincunx design holds various designer wristwatches, their batteries run down. In the same case, above those two wooden boxes, stand more books, hardbound copies with their spines facing out of works by Faulkner, Lahiri, Steinbeck, and others. At the very top shelf is a small statute of Garuda, the bird god of Hindu myth, carved in Indonesia. I am not sure how it came into my possession.

In my bathroom a cream-colored built in cabinet stretches along one wall, flanked by two doors, each leading to the walk-in closet. The cabinet faces a Jacuzzi bathtub that is seldom used. In the bookcase rest more books and objects, for instance a Porsche ball point pen given to me as a gift by my son's godparents, various coins, perhaps wrinkles receipts. A book of poems by Langston Hughes sits alone on one shelf, Hughes's handsome face gazing out at me as I brush my teeth with the electric toothbrush or shave with my safety razor. There are books by Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Browning, and Dickinson in the bathroom, because I believe that poetry is a cleansing art, more akin to music and the reveries of revelation than its connection to literature. Poetry is alchemy whose practitioners crack open our hearts so we too feel the richness of nature and love, and the pulsating darkness of death and the void. What thoughts to contemplate after drying oneself off with a bath towel?

On my toilet sits another book of whatever it is I am reading at the moment. This week it is the Collected Stories and Writings of John Cheever. I like to revisit books, books I've read before, because each time I read them I, like so many of us who enjoy reading, discover them anew. We discover a detail we've missed, and it gives us both thrill and frustration: Thrill that we have rediscovered something meaningful that touches our hearts and expands our minds, and frustration that we didn't see it before.

All around my house are books, books, books, and objects, objects, objects that refer me back to places I've been, things I have touched, decisions made, courses traveled, people I have been, and activities abandoned. Nowhere is this more evident than in my writing room ( I loathe to call it an office). A wrapped chocolate cigar announcing the birth of my son, a 19th century surgical device in a corrugated box, a brass lock taken from my parents' house, a pice of anthracite with both shiny and dull surfaces, a fossilized rock in which a trilobite lies embedded, a whiskey flask with the Jolly Rogers skull and crossbones, a postcard of a gargoyle from the Notre Dame cathedral, and a piece of driftwood from a beach in Big Sur. Placed before my books, other objects sit, stand or lie, dormant yet charged with memory. The thrill of seeing them, touching them, holding them, is to ponder the person I was, so they in some real sense serve as portals to other places, other times. They also serve as representations of my subconscious, and things of inspiration.

Though once abandoned, they have landed on my shelves, in my bedroom, and bathroom, and writer's room, they still have use, though to what use I put them solely relies on my imagination, or I may never put them to use. I like to revisit them time and time again, to discover new details about them I had missed before. These objects are a lot like people. I often think that if I don't put them to some new use, they will live only in the real world as mysterious things.

After I am dead, maybe someone will collect them and attempt to infer from them the person I was. They will make decisions about me, then place those keepsakes in a box and set them out by the trash bins. But if these things happen to make their way into stories which others may read, they will be transformed into what TS Eliot called Objective Correlatives, or they may populate a story as simple objets d'art. 

I think they deserve a new life. They deserve to be repurposed, like the reclaimed oak table that sits in my family room. These objects are not unlike the characters and people we pass through, brush up against, live out of focus of the corner of our eyes, people and characters who deserve their voices heard, their eccentricities exposed, their lives entered and reconstituted by a writer's imagination.

If the people who have voted for Donald Trump can stop for a moment to reflect upon his words and deeds, would they not see him for what he is? An empty suit. The amount of doggerel that flows through his mouth is enough to fill the Grand Canyon.

Hyperbole aside, I have yet to see his appeal. But there must be something I am missing. So let me try an experiment. Let me empty my head of rationality, of compassion, of logic, of sensitivity. Let me drain my soul of common sense, intellectualism, reason and decency. Let me replace these qualities with pettiness, bullying, melodrama, anti-intellectualism, bravado and bluster. Let me point to circumstances that never existed, rationalize my infidelities, my bankruptcies, my failures as a businessman. Let me deflect criticism about my hiring illegal immigrants, or creating my products in the very countries I now hold accountable for manipulating currencies or sending us their worst, their rapists and drug dealers.

Add a heap of narcissism and sexism, racism and xenophobia, and let me tout my success with manufactured statistics on my popularity amongst "the highly educated, the poorly educated, women, evangelicals, hispanics." Ah, there it is, the ingredients that comprise his appeal.

Never before in the history of this great country has a "politician" surfaced that is so unencumbered by facts as to greed his way to the most powerful office in the world. And for what? To reinforce the warped notions of self, to tout his own masculinity, to increase his own brand.

California tried once and elected a non-politician/celebrity to the governorship after the debacle that was Gray Davis. Arnold all but bankrupted this state. We suffered record deficits, unbalanced budgets, shortfalls, and our GDP shrunk by tens of millions of dollars. We lost jobs. We suffered mightily until Jerry Brown rescued us from the brink of collapse. Do we want to try that experiment on a national scale?

I long for a politician with the grace and magnanimity of a Barack Obama, the charm and charisma of a John F. Kennedy, the compassion of a Jimmy Carter, the soul of a Lincoln, and the courage of a Roosevelt.

Where are they? Liz Warren? Gavin Newsom? Kamala Harris? These people are the future of this country, but only if The Donald never steps foot in the White House except as a guest to a dinner honoring the great liars and narcissists this country has ever produced.

Having read the “how to” write fiction works of such esteemed writers as Janet Burroway, John Gardiner, Lagos Egri, Francine Prose, Jane Smiley, Ambrose Bierce, and Syd Field, among numerous others, I have reached the conclusion, as William Golden had writing in his book on Hollywood “Adventures in the Screen Trade, ” that no one knows anything. Not a single thing as to what makes fiction work.

Ideas, theories, postulations, conventions, appeals to historical evidence, methods, treatises, maxims, these are all bunk. What worked for Anton Chekov did not work for Fyodor Dostoevsky. When we marvel at a sentence by Marilynne Robinson, it is not the same aesthetic at play in W.G. Sebald. What makes a Dickens plot so compelling is not what makes a story by Hemingway work. There are different aesthetic principles at work, different modes of organization, different tools, and I hate to say it, “tricks.” But tricks they are, and I don’t mean that pejoratively, because writers are essentially craftsmen, using the tools and tricks of trope, grammar, syntax, sentence variation, paragraph structure and story organization, and a whole mess of other stuff to reach beyond the artistic boundaries of the past and forge a new way of doing things, making their novelistic works “novel.”

Novel, not novelties. The distinction is important. We as writers are not engaged, and should not be engaged, in cleverness, or trickiness, or quirkiness for it’s own sake, reducing things to cause and effect. When we reduce, we distort, we engage in cliche and melodrama. We create sentimentalities and thus difficult/complex characters become simple statements of logical reasoning and temporality. Why did the father drink so heavily and beat his children, oh, because of such and such event or series of experiences in his childhood. Why did the waitress steal from her boss, oh, because she was poor and needed the money for an abortion. Why did that kid shoot you his school, oh, it was a lack of love in the home, or structure, or too many video games. Such one to one relations are silly and abject. But I digress.

No one knows anything. Not a goddamned thing. Except the writer who by his ingenuity and artistic sensitivity, who by his sheer force of will and madness and singular vision van reach into the hearts of people and crush and terrify and ennoble and exult them, can blaze a new path forward by making, as the self-spoken postman said to Pablo Neruda in the wonderful movie Il Postino, “Maestro, make it new.”

But what do I know? What is new is old and what was in vogue yesterday is not in favor today. What do I know except that I know nothing, not a goddamned thing, and perhaps that’s a way forward to making things new.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Starving Review: The Stove-Junker by S. K. Kalsi.

 

Thans jbgarner for a wonderful review of my novel.

Tip One: Read

Tip Two: Write

Tip Three: Step away from your draft

Tip Four: Rewrite

Tip Five: Repeat steps one through four.

The truth behind this banal lesson is this: there are no secrets to better writing, no short-cuts, no methods, just tools. The tools are always as good as whom uses them–neither better nor worse.

The greatest tool is time. If one hopes to slow down the reader’s sense of time, one must take one’s time in creating. And so it takes a wise person to know how to use one’s time to squeeze the proverbial juice from each moment. Time and also patience.

In a society that judges artists and people based on their output, quantity over quality, and also dismisses people for the lack of output, it takes a perspicacious person, a thoughtful and secure soul to understand that there is no race to be won in the pursuit of Art, and nothing is proved by being the most prolific or the most popular.

So take your time.

Get the words just right.

If there is one thing which everyone, be they a writer/artist or layman, must do and can do it is not just to live passionately (which is very important to do), but also to live thoughtfully, deeply, with interest paid towards the simplest, commonplace things: “Eternity in a grain of sand.”

An artist’s private life is on display in his work. The work is for public consumption. The work is usually filtered by technique, taste, selection. Like the glimmers on a lake surface, the work dazzles. Lurking beneath the surface are all the feelings–fears, animosities, regrets, joys, pains–of lives deeply felt. It is feeling, then, that gives art its weight and worth, for art without feeling is quickly discarded as the work of mathematicians posing as artists whose clever algorithms reveal a world unconnected to the tragedies and ecstacies of ordinary life. I am thinking of the disparity in art, between say, Thomas Pynchon and James Agee, or to put it in a contemporary context, Mark Z. Danieleswki whose brilliant, complex novels, like House of Leaves conceals even as it reveals, and Alice McDermott or Alice Munro or Marilyne Robinson, whose small, private stories –Someone, The Love of a Good Woman, Gilead–feel intensely intimate, unsparingly human, real: One plays to intellectualism, wrapping its emotion in complexity, the other to feeling. Both types of writers are seen as Gods to us mortals, the mere scribblers.

I prefer the latter to the former, but deeply respect the former. What both types of author (I’ll call them the Platonist or Hegelian author vs. the Aristotelian or Kantian author) share in common is the intense desire to reveal the private self, its interests, troubles, and phobias (real or imagined) about the world in which we live and navigate. Both types of author seek to stem the tide of loneliness and connect with others. However, isn’t it always a grand bargain when creating art; for an artist cannot reveal everything. The first rule of creation is selection. He must select, and so the picture he creates always forces the question, What else? What else is there that’s not on the page, or canvas, or music, or inherent in the marble? What else is there?

Hermeneutics aside, what stands outside the artwork, what exists in the margins, are the deeply private thoughts and feelings of the artist that never make it into his work. Like Hemingway’s iceberg theory, these things sexist beneath the surface. All those collected journals, notebooks, photos, videos, the recordings of the artist’s voice as it struggles to complete a thought or phrase, a melody, are at once revealing and deeply upsetting. The artist is human after all, not a God! A demigod, perhaps, one who sinks into himself to swim in the deepest parts of that lake, dredging up from the silty floor worms and dead fish and a few stubborn blooms. All that private stuff matters. For what? Not for us. To uncover, discover, reveal for himself what stirs in his soul, and that has ultimate value for the world.

Remember this always: You are not one person but two. You are the conscious mind that prepares coffee, showers, brushes his teeth, takes out the trash on trash day, walks his dogs, eats his meals, converses about the things he knows, offering opinions on things he has only a hint of understanding; and yet this public person is not your entire self. That other self, the unconscious dreamer, the playful child, the builder of sand castles and slayer of dragons, the tree climber and cloud counter and the one who sees tortured faces in stone, the rock collector, bottle cap spinner, music maker and doodler, sign maker, investigator of fox holes, gopher holes, snake holes, who fears the dark and yet feels mystified in its presence, he is the one your art is made from. Believe this always: To silence the petulance, fickleness, shiftless, maudlin weeper of dead bees, that silly, improbable one inside you, is to stifle the one who sees connections the conscious mind cannot, will not; for the conscious mind looks upon the builder of dreams as the public to Noah building the Ark: What is this madness? What is this nonsense? But be stubborn little child within, do not be dismayed, and carry on. Just as you need the conscious mind to shape your crude etchings, doodles, your erratic words into something meaningful, the conscious mind needs you to see the importance and dearness of life. So when your uncertainties descend you into a slough of despond, release the playful side of you, play on the page, the canvas, the marble block, the piano keys or strings, beat your drums, play and play and play, let loose, whip the trees with your wild sticks, create knights slaying dragons in the sky in those shapeshifting clouds, stir the waters of your unconscious with rods charged with lightning and then step back, sigh with relief that your play has been worthwhile and sleep, then let the conscious clean up your beautiful messy play.

My former creative writing professor Nina Schuyler once told me that a meaningful fictional world begins at the sentence level. Every aspect of the sentence, its grammar, punctuation, syntax, the literary tropes utilized, like allusion, metaphor, metonymy, alliteration, et. al. and how to deploy these tools for maximum impact on the reader so that the sentence(s) in a paragraph simply sings, takes decades to master. Like my literary ambassadors of style, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and most recently Alice McDermott and Paul Harding, I love long sentences. But to create a long sentence, to stylize it artfully so as to retain and expand and build on its meaning is not just a trick of clever wording, of laborious effort, but of a mind attuned to the nuances of life and character.

Like painters and photographers, musicians and sculptors, who reveal theme with color, staging, light, perspective, the nuances of sound and rest, the materials of marble, granite, metal or clay, to create visual or auditory art (art whose meaning reaches through the medium and rattles the viewer’s spine), it is too obvious to say that a writer uses words. It is how those words exist on the page and whether or not those words contain rhythm, light, perspective, and whether or not those words sound hard or soft, grating or jarring, feel expansive or minute, abstract or specific, make all the difference between a work that lifts and plummets, or sits inert in the imagination. For that is (or should be) the goal of all art–to move a person, to expand his/her notions of self, to allow him or her to dream, plumb deeper into the mysteries of life, swim in uncertainty, and leave the work of art as a changed person.