(This document is my working draft right now, so will change now and then. Please don't link to it w/o letting me know,Thx.)Inspiration is properly understood as a form of psychosis. "Properly" may be too strong a term here -- allow me to backtrack and assert instead that the model of psychosis can allow us useful insight into inspiration,(1) into creativity, into the events surrounding Daniel Haskins' composition of "Silent Rain" -- the story that comes most immediately to mind (along with the rest of the like-named collection) when discussing Haskins' contributions to literary form.
We know that Haskins started writing his magnum opus in 1997 (though of course the more analytically inclined critics have located the roots of this work in Haskins' early childhood(2)) -- the astute observer will note that Serpinsky's Fool's Gold was released that year, and it is certainly tempting to ascribe some influence to that film; but we know that Haskins told my colleague Douglas Hastings he had not been able to sit through the movie. There is a memorable line in the interview that Hastings published as "Speaking with the Poet" where he mentions how he left "John [Skullet] staring reverentially up at the screen, and stumbled out into that sickly yellow lobby..."(3) Skullet's name will never be more than a minor footnote to the history of the Entornic movement, but it is worth noting that he spent nearly a decade trying (ultimately without making any publication) to translate Serpinsky into a written form.(4)
Haskins' previous volume Pause had generated a bit of excitement among poets but had met with critical disdain and lack of interest. He had spent most of the focusing on his teaching, with no publications in that decade.(5) His home life was falling apart, as is detailed in the memoir Clara Etchevery published during their divorce proceedings. Haskins had become "obsessively focused on absence;... I could no longer identify my husband's empty face."(6)
I am convinced that the absence on which Haskins was obsessively focused, was that of graduate student Felicia Morel, who had died the previous year. Haskins had been overseeing her dissertation and had begun, as Skullet told Hastings, to view her work as having one of the most important, most promising new voices in American poetry, as having a real potential for innovation. He had also (in Etchevery's eyes) falling in love with the poetess or with her voice, in the course of his and their marriage's collapse. Her death played into the thinking about absence that had already been foremost in his work for years to produce the absence of voice which we see fully expressed in "Silent Rain."
fn1. cf. Marlson's study on disease and art, Dying Slowly, 1961.
fn2. I cannot speak to this criticism; interested readers should look to the work of Chen and of Atkinson.
fn3. "Speaking with the Poet," from Hastings' seminal collection Echoes of Rain, 2112.
fb4. Hastings, "Fumbling with Emptiness", op cit. This piece also appeared as a series of posts on the Entornic web site Water and Space over the first three months of 2005. [http://entornia.org/blog/?k=fumbling]
fn5. Like most of our knowledge of Haskins' inner life, this is documented in Hastings' interview.
fn6. Etchevery, Empty, 2003.
Clara's absence troubled him. He couldn't understand the coldness. As he went about his day he fretted and felt unable to concentrate. Powerless to do anything about it anyway, he would close himself off and work on his poetry and let what happened with his life take its own course. Daniel sipped his coffee and closed his eyes.
That evening he would be sitting at his desk looking at the white rectangle of paper on his desk and at the blackness of the night outside, framed in the open window's rectangles. Cicadas whirring, unable to concentrate on the task at hand -- he would give himself up to the cool air blowing in, try to listen to the shifting regularities in the night noises. As he stumbled almost sleepily down the warmly lit staircase and came out to the dark porch that moment would come back to him, walking out on Fool's Gold, the exasperation with John, the sudden light of the lobby. He heard a door creaking and clicking shut down the street.
Daniel struggled with a wish that he might vanish, might become a part of this vast, insensate silence. In his mind's eye he saw the sheet of paper, blank atop his desk, superimposed on the window, dark opening on the wall. He shook his head to clear the image away and went back inside. Who to talk to? He thought of emailing Skullet but decided against it, just listened to some music, stared at the ceiling.
Clara was in the room reading. He glanced over at the contours of her shoulders, the folds in her blouse running down, could not make anything of her expression -- blank in an unnerving way -- he blinked. Time to get some dinner together.
He had been in the kitchen when he learned of Morel's death. Tonight he just wanted to eat a bite and then try and think some more about what he was writing -- he did not have a name for it yet which was proving an impediment to figuring out what it was. He looked around the room trying to remember where he had left the notebook -- thinking the screen's mellow colors would be better than the black and white of pen on paper. More conducive...
The next morning would find him looking into his office, struck by the interplay of light and shadow on the tile floor. He was planning to meet John here at 10, he looked at the clock's dusty face and saw that he was a little late, rummaged through the papers lying on the desk. John would be here soon, would be talking his ear off about the latest project, he wondered idly if he had enough time to go downstairs and get a cup of coffee -- he would just leave the office door open and John could come in if they crossed paths.
Daniel was half-listening to John's description of the mountain where he and Greg were going to go backpacking. Happy to have the friendship but unable in the moment to really get out of his own head and relate to the friend. He suggested they ought to see about going down to Freight and Salvage, in a few weeks Suburban Tribe were going to be in town. They talked for a little while about the new album as they were walking to lunch; the chill of early autumn shook Daniel a bit, made him nervous about where he was going. He dug his hands into his pockets as they turned onto University, glanced at his reflection in the glass storefront of the campus bookstore. He noticed a flier taped in the window for Clara's reading next week, and scratched his chin.
John was walking home from lunch and thinking about his work prospects when he noticed a mural on the vacant storefront at the corner of Grand Street that he did not remember having seen before. Very well done -- he admired it as he waited for the light to change. He had enough for rent this month and next, he ought to be able to sell a story about roughing it in the Cascades to one of the east bay glossies when he and Greg got back. ...If not, well, Greg had been talking about moving in together...
The mural was unusual, all shades of gray on a whitewashed background, with very precisely bounded shapes and regions. It showed a crouching gargoyle with bat's wings folded behind its back -- the only color in the image was the gargoyle's olive green eyes and the monstrous, scarlet tongue hanging from the black void that was its open mouth. John briefly imagined the descent into that demonic pit, and noticed the light had turned green. As he crossed the street he wondered who the painter was, and about trying to get in touch with him. It shouldn't be difficult -- he would call Doug after dinner, Doug usually knew what was going on around town.
Now picture the gargoyle's mouth as the portal to a bottomless pit, one that swallows and regurgitates without end. Picture John, looking at the picture's grays and seeing its filthy yellowed beak, the blood of generations of victims, sacrificed to its bitter god. You must look behind that picture, behind that mural, must find the ruddy whitewashed brick, the mortar laid there by sons of immigrants. Look for the structure of the city, the process of building it. Find the image's heart. This city was built up over centuries, the rusty miners of two hundred years ago, dead and gone, are as present here and now as the frustrated hipsters who call it home today. John can examine this painting, wonder whose work it is; Angel can paint this gargoyle, can whitewash this brick -- both are playing out roles which are as old as the city itself. Every role that gets played out on these streets, ultimately every interaction, is here prefigured, graven into the land and into the architecture.
Now Doug is riding BART with John, they're headed over to People's Park so Doug can introduce him to Angel Ruiz, this genius hispanic kid who's been turning a lot of heads with his grafitti for the past few months. (Ruiz will not turn out to be there.) John is excited about it, he knows to take Doug's bestowals of "genius" with a grain of salt -- he has heard Doug speaking of him and others in these terms whom he knows not to be possessed of it -- but he saw that gargoyle on Grand and University, and was pretty floored by the the voice behind it. He had been thinking it was a nearly perfect visual representation of some of the stylistic thinking he had been seeing in Serpinsky's films these past few years, was maybe going to ask Doug about writing a review for his magazine. Doug is a lot younger than John and Daniel and most anybody John can think of, but he's really hooked in to the scene, he seems to have more friends and contacts than anyone else John can remember meeting.
Daniel was on the phone, very excited, the flatness of affect was gone -- he wanted to tell John about this instant of reality he has been achieving in his story, how he is identifying fully with his characters. How he understands himself to be Belle, rejecting Jacob; how he understands himself to be Jacob, longing for the release he will never find in Belle's arms. John didn't have much to say on his part -- he was pretty preoccupied with his finances still, and was thinking about the trip. (And indeed the conversation was pretty familiar ground to him already. Daniel was always extremely talkative when his writing was working out.) Daniel almost didn't notice, or didn't mind, his friend's absence; the talking through of the process was in itself helping him to see this process through.