Force Without Law

"Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration." _ David Foster Wallace from the book Supposedly Fun Things I'll Never Do Again

Notes on: Force without law, working with others, writing fiction, Gordon Lish, Gilles Deleuze, Jack Gilbert, Flannery O'Connor, and Donald Ray Pollock's first book, Knockemstiff

Forty years I have labored for my bread, suiting up and showing up in order to pay my bills and raise a family. I have changed careers, first beginning as a construction worker and twenty years later by switching into sales. The people I have worked with have ranged from seriously deranged rednecks to self-made millionaires. But the one thing they all have in common is that none of them knew me, or really cared. O, they would say they did. But that's not true. I was as much a cartoon character as they all were. I worked side by side with people who never read the same book or ever knew what it was I was possibly talking about. I always found it disconcerting to me to discover daily that what I held in my heart most dearly my associates had only in passing heard of. Or so they said. They certainly couldn't expound. So I became accustomed to not talking about certain things in the workplace as it always made me feel more saddened and aloof when I did. But I wasn't afraid to stand on this difference, and I encouraged my wife and children to always do the same.

I was fortunate to have eventually married my true love over twenty-six years ago. It was like watching paint dry waiting for her. It took her another twelve years from the time we met at the foot of the pier to finally realize I was worth throwing herself in with. But she has been the one person I can always talk to about these things that clamor in my head. If it wasn't for her I do not know what I would have done for all these years while we worked and raised a family together. Most likely I would have slowly continued to kill my little voice with excessive drink and even harder living. But it was she who encouraged me to quit drinking and then to study fiction-writing under Gordon Lish when the opportunity first presented itself in 1995. It was then I was welcomed into a fraternity of sorts where the pursuit of fiction-writing became the impetus to work harder, live well, and possess oneself in order to make history.

After being engaged since 1995 in the commerce of attempting to produce great literature and how it is you go about it, it is not at all surprising to me when I think back on it how miserable and out-of-place I felt working side by side for forty years with people unlike me. I believe it was the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, who said "encounters that result in a decrease of power" as mine did, that "the affection produced is sadness". And I was really sad. He also said that "a body cannot gain power from something that does not agree with it", and never did I ever experience something as simple as that in my workplace. It is a large part of the reason I am quitting this career in a few short months and hitting the open road. I am getting old, and the time I have left I need to spend alone, or with my wife, or with others like me who are pushing forward toward the same goals and aspirations in art and living. In the world I presently inhabit I am constantly offended by those who hold supreme what is always popular over what is art's original style and truth and substance.

Most of the like-minded people I have gotten to know personally have studied, or studied under, Gordon Lish. And they were, for the most part, better read and clearly smarter than I was. Lish draws to himself smart people. And that's OK. I'm getting there. But there are others I have discovered in the virtual process of the internet and through their books who seem to have found their way regardless into the same mode of thinking by taking an alternate course. I was fortunate to have Gordon Lish to guide me, and I doubt I would have accomplished anything without his understanding, his teaching, and his support.

One writer I have recently discovered goes by the name of Donald Ray Pollock. His is an amazing new talent, with a first book of short stories that will immediately conjure up an almost voodoo-like presence producing visions of Flannery O'Connor in the room. But in reading and studying about this fellow Pollock I am heartened to say he is flattered by the comparison to O'Connor but still feels he has a long way to go in perfecting his craft. Pollock's stories bear witness to another quote by Gilles Deleuze that I hold true, that being, "The law of the world, and more generally the law of language, is that one always expresses oneself like the people of one's mental class and not of one's caste of origin." Donald Ray Pollock, like myself, grew up in small hick town, and he did not begin to write until the age of forty-five (I started seriously with Gordon at age forty), and as myself, he did so because he had to. After three marriages and five stints in rehab he was faced with his own personal waste, and wanted desperately the possibility of a life worth living. It is my belief that the desperation haunting Pollock induced his tremendous urge to write and was the only possible vehicle for his redemption. His first book of short stories published by Doubleday in 2008 is titled, Knockemstiff.

"Whoever disappears into the artwork thereby gains dispensation from the impoverishment of a life that is always too little."_Theodore Adorno

"Loneliness is the mother's milk of America."_Jack Gilbert from The Dance Most Of All.

"The heart is a foreign country whose language none of us is good at."_ Jack Gilbert from The Dance Most Of All.

All original text and photographs copyright 2010 by M Sarki