nathan’s Reviews > Discipline > Status Update

I didn’t write my novel to become immortal, I say.

A fossil, the placard read, isn’t a bone embedded in stone, but in fact the deposits of minerals carried by groundwater that have crystallized in the shape of the cells of the original living creature. Not the bone, but the stone’s memory of the bone.

Writing didn’t require my body, not the way painting had; in fact, writing asked me to absent my body, to forget it for long periods while I worked. Language was supposed to be my perfect transmission, my power, my mark.

Sometimes it feels like there’s a voice in my head, a distorted, fucked-up voice that tells me it’d be easier if I didn’t exist. But the only thing, the only thing that makes it stop, even just for a little bit, is the work. If I can prepare a canvas, I have something to work on for the next day.

And you’re supposed to be happy about being alive. You’re supposed to be glad you exist. But there’s something wrong with me. I can’t do those things, those things that seem to come so easily to all the other animals. Sometimes I can’t move. Sometimes for days.

But it had always come from life; the life it came from was mine.

In the novel I made them fight more, architecturally, baroquely, when in real life we had hardly clashed; it was I who always acquiesced to his demands. At a certain point the book stopped being an exorcism and became a project of craft and form. Then I grew totally absorbed in the writing, in the tuning and pitching, bleaching event into fiction.

What was the core pain of nostalgia—that it wasn’t true, or that it didn’t last?

It’s helpful to declare those things about myself, he said. The things that are good, the things that I’ve gained. Otherwise, that whole experience, my whole reason for changing my life, becomes a black box. It’s too painful, and I can’t go in there…Do you feel that I’ve become boring? he asked me.

There was a stage that clay got to, I knew, before it was fired in the kiln, where it had lost some of its moisture and arrived at something called leather hardness. It was still a little flexible then, dark in color, not brittle or powdery, and it could be trimmed with a sharp tool. The walls could be thinned, the curvature of an undulating knob or the lip of a jar more clearly defined.