Connection and Creation

I recently found a copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s Stranger Than Fiction, a compilation of non-fiction articles and “true stories”.  He frightens me with his

stories; the stark, often disgusting reality of society, people’s lives and capacity for wretchedness depicted time and again.  But ultimately, his writing and perspective is singular and oddly, paradoxically, inspiring and I keep coming back for more.

One story in particular in this book has grabbed me around the throat and hasn’t let go.  You Are Here chronicles a writers’ conference.  It begins depressingly enough; very elderly

people with their life story, tales of trauma, clutched in “… both spotted hands” looking for an editor to validate their words, and in so doing, their life.  The stories, written and received, giving meaning to their suffering.  Then he begins

to spin an analogy of the process; lives being lived just to get the story, stories defining how to live that life – what “sells.”  The interwoven web impossible to tease apart, our life stories and their marketable potential becoming what living is.  “Then, sorry, your seven minutes is up.”  So far, pure Palahniuk.  Stripping convention, the meat from our bones, exposing us once again to the stark essence of our lives.

But wait, what’s this?  Positive possibilities emerge.  He postulates that maybe we’ll lead better lives, become the leading man and woman we aspire to in real

life.  Maybe we’ll begin to pay more attention to the details of living, of life; take better notes.  And maybe, by so doing, we create a fuller, richer existence.

Maybe with a little more effort and reflection, you can live the kind of life story a literary agent would want to read.
Yeah.  Chuck Palahniuk said that. 

He goes further.  Perhaps there is the capacity to rewrite the future.  Enact only what “sells”.  Maybe there are simply too many stories of atrocities and war and

these lose their audience and therefore cease to exist.  And then, then, what if a brand new story emerges?  One that depicts a never before considered way of living?  Here lies hope, possibility, the image and role of a writer as never more important or essential.  Evolution driven by the written word.

This from a writer who has touched the depths of hell in humanity, not

permitting us to look away from that which we are forced to acknowledge resides within us.  But here, he sees the extreme continuum of capacity that exists in each of us.  The potential for utter destruction exists along the same continuum with the absolute capacity to change ourselves, the world – to evolve.

This is what writing is.  Possible futures, salvation, potential destruction; man’s dance along that line.  There is resonance, a connective magic.  That connection, that somebody somewhere gets it, thinks like I do, wakes up dormant parts of our minds.  This person understands, speaks the truth for me that I can’t or that I hadn’t realized, and bravely puts it

to the page for just me to see, for the world to see.  The words shine a light illuminating a secret pathway hidden in plain view.  Options.  Hope.  A way to live, to think, to consider.  A life “other than” this one that can be lived.  Possibility never considered, but now that it has been written and read, can be, must be.

It worms its way in, tunneling through atrophied pathways, pathways not yet opened.  It seeps in, flowing through you, taking hold, taking root.  It becomes yours, fitting in with what’s in there already, germinating

those things, building upon them until brand new creations spark, come to life.  Possibility.  A new entity created, born from those words, on that page.  You’re never the same again, your synaptic pathways forever altered, new pathways forged and tunneled. 

This is physically experienced; a gasp, eyes widening, a quiver of wonderment, anticipation, thrills throughout the body, head to toe.  You want to squirrel it all away privately, you need a moment; you want to shout your discovery from a soapbox in Times Square.  Alone, together again. 

Maybe it all gets stopped up again.  Maybe we’ll be punished for our rouge epiphanies.  They don’t fit in with the well worn accepted pathways and routes

of thinking.  They lead to dangerous lands that others don’t want to visit.  But the words don’t force themselves, they just exist, from one beautiful mind to be picked up or not.  It doesn’t matter to the source.  They were written because the writer had to write them.  They are not meant for you.  But they are available to you.  This is magic – the very definition.

I discover this is what compels me, why I connect with each writer I revere.

This weaving of magic is what Tom Robbins excels at, what Chuck Palahniuk did

with this piece; showing the infinite possibility.
David Mitchell and Frank Herbert riding that magic through the whorls of time, through millennia.
Albert Camus and Hermann Hesse probing the magic of what exists within humanity.
Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka and again Chuck Palahniuk showing what happens when those hidden away dark places are dragged into the light.
Haruki Murakami floating on the precipice between.
Michael Cunningham, Joyce Carol Oates writing the magic and tragedy of our

everyday lives, where we can prevail or not. 
Ray Bradbury dropping hundreds of mines into the meadow of our life, each an explosion of wonder.
Gerald Durrell (yes, Gerald) making us weep in laughter and recognition of the sheer absurdity and delight of the magic of everyday life, and how very full it is.
The sheer fun of Christopher Moore.  Douglas Adams turning the very concept of reality upside down, just daring us to join the fun.
Bill Bryson showing the magic and fullness, the endless variety of the everyday, painted in a

bursting palette of words.
Joan Didion painting the stark reality, the facts we so often don’t want to see, heartbreakingly rendered.
Diane Ackerman painting that reality in ethereal words.
Kurt Vonnegut turning the telling on its head.

We have all of these possibilities. Which leads to and aptly ends here in The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad:

“The mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.”