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The tears surprised me. It was hard to remember the last time I’d cried. Fortunately, in the Polish culture of complaint and PDA—Public Display of Animosity—weeping on the bus wasn’t about to attract anyone’s attention. I figured out that I was crying because I knew that I wasn’t doing
what I wanted to do with my life. Yet here I was, age 21, college dropout, no money, riding a diesel bus through the Polish night, having indentured myself to a year of penury and disillusionment and being lied to—and this time round, without the excuse that I didn’t know what to expect.
I did it for what I thought was love. High school and my aborted first stint at university were times of, um, enforced celibacy. Enforced strictly by every girl I wanted to date. (I used to read Kafka in the stacks, nodding, a little worried that the next unpublished fragment would explain my suffering so well that I would
run out and do something a tad rash). Now in Poland, beautiful women of the class I would never have tried to approach back home were approaching me. So no surprise that I wound up in this relationship that I was sacrificing a year of career to.
But at that moment on the bus, the trade suddenly didn’t seem fair. The spontaneous flow of tears was proof that I was heading in the wrong direction, that, as I said, I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. But what was that? I’d always vaguely wanted “to write.” I’d won some high school writing competitions and taken fiction
workshops and generally admired myself for my noble/Nobel ambitions. But the fact was I didn’t know what to write about. Everything I tried came off laboured and inconclusive. In reading my own work, I couldn’t seem to tell even myself what I wanted to say, so how was I going to tell other people? Like most wannabe writers,
I started to ask myself the deadly question, Why bother? Like, why bother, man? Why do you let your vanity stop you from seeing that no one cares, that no one could care? I soon gave up. Meanwhile, to fill the days, there was that relationship and those annoying classes to teach.
There was a book exchange at the school. Soon after my outburst on the bus, I stumbled on these shelves while looking for whiteboard markers. There was the archival smell of acid yellowing and embrittling the paper, and nothing published past 1990. The cabinet had been sealed up like a tomb since then. I can remember first
reading Great Expectations, Orwell’s Burmese Days, and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song from that defunct book exchange, along with other books I’ve forgotten and didn’t understand well enough to finish. Also, there was a slim volume with some crazy cover art called The Crying of Lot 49. I’d never been to an auction and took
the title as an imagist’s trope of a parking lot clinically depressed by the weight of all the shoppers’ cars stationed on it. Also, the title reminded me of my own crying a few days before, and get this, the number of the bus was 48 or 94 or something like that. Eerie, dearie. Forty-Nine turned out to be one of those very
few books that I really couldn’t put down. After burning through it in a night, I felt that blend of envy and inspiration of wanting to write like that. At that time I knew sweet F-all about figures in contemporary fiction and literary reputations. I thought I’d found an obscure, book-length unpublished fragment that I could
keep to and for myself. What a let-down later to learn that Pynchon was not exactly terra incognita. Instead of confirming your good taste, it’s more of a humbling moment when you find out that virtually everyone else knows and loves what you love. Kinda makes you one of them.
Since that time I’ve continued to read and laugh along with and be infuriated by Thomas Pynchon’s novels. This isn’t the space to go into lit. crit. mode about them, or a disquisition on the fan-based Pynchon-as-reclusive-cultural-ninja cult of cleverness (see DeLillo’s Mao II). Besides, I don’t think the books respond
well to the scalpels of theory. On a basic level, what I’d say the guy does for me, is accept and write about the world, warts and all, from a humorous POV that rarely slips into cynicism, going-through-the-motions satire, nihilism or self-indulgent goofiness. He’s not trying to be serious and say something because underneath
all that obscure whimsy is the world, our world, trying to get out. In recording all its wild trajectories and fiascoes, there’s no point in making an authorial statement. Wallace Stevens asked if we could have “not words about the thing but the thing itself.” Pynchon gives you neither, but the characters’ schemings and
weird sex scenes help you forget about Stevens’s koan.
For example, these days I’m reading Mason & Dixon, Pynchon’s historical novel about the two famous English surveyors whose job it was to demarcate a certain line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. It’s a wild eighteenth century ride of sea battles, astronomy, talking clocks, American history, hookers and ghosts, fueled
by caffeine, tobacco and alcohol, told in a bizarre “period language” full of intentional and hilarious anachronisms. It’s not serious but it is moving. I read it and I stop worrying: historical figures were just as confused and addled as us! Or at least it’s impossible for us to know them any other way.
The teaching job, then later the relationship, came to an end. I moved on. I realized that being unable to put down my deep thoughts on paper might mean that my thoughts weren’t so deep and I didn’t know everything. I no longer style myself a Pynchon fanboy and copycat, but I still read the prolix bastard because his cosmic
sense of humour matters to me. It’s a great antidote for taking anything—especially yourself—too seriously. |
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