It doesn’t seem possible when I feel still quite young that I could be thinking about how I will approach the latter part of my life. Or time, if those are the same thing. Personally, I think gravity and time are the same thing and life is just an accident of time and matter, but, here we are — thinking.
But I think one thing that might make me happy and give me a sense of fulfillment in spite of not having had much success is to go over all that I have written and either rewrite it or pull it into a unifying oneness. I’ve been thinking about this because I am trying to write a story about someone I knew who killed himself by self-immolation. And although you can’t actually come up with a satisfying answer — there’s a kind of Joan of Arc question behind the whole act — one thing I realized is that if you look at David’s career, much of it was dedicated to responsibility and holding people accountable when they refuse to act responsibly. He applied this belief — which you could almost say was a belief in adults — to sheriffs, lawmakers, lawyers, judges, corporate profiteers, and plain old average citizens. He believed, in all his work, that adults had to be responsible. So he, during the time I knew him, worked tirelessly on behalf of youth and was the Youth Director for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, (now known as simply Lambda Legal.) His focus wasn’t really on youth, in a sense. His focus was on the adults who are supposed to protect, nuture, defend, and teach the youth.
When he switched from gay civil rights to environmentalism, that focus on responsibility did not change at all. He still worked with young people, but in this case, his focus on creating and living in a healthy environment was ultimately directed at the people who create an unhealthy environment. And when Trump and his minions started to destroy environmental regulations as soon as they got into office the first time around, that’s when David took his own life. That’s when he sacrificed himself, and tried, somewhat hopelessly and naively, to make his death a symbolic act.
Anyway, that is, so far, what I’ve managed to glean from my reading, my attempts to retrace his steps, and so on. For me, since I’ve spent most of my life pursuing the craft and art of writing, I think it would help me to feel that I’ve fully explained myself — for much of my work is, looking at it from the advantage of many years, incomprehensible. Most of my plays are utterly ridiculous — sometimes privileged and almost always offensive in one way or another. The very most offensive play I wrote was a one act which I threw out with the bathwater, as they say. But it was extremely funny. No one could read it without being offended and I think I probably had the worst feedback with that play.
But we will see. It’s an awful lot of work to write five novels and not rewrite them at the time. And I always wanted to make it to six, like Aldo Busi once wrote (that he wanted to write six novels and then stop).
Ultimately, I was interested in David because I am interested, right now, in trying to understand people who live incomprehensible lives, or do incomprehensible things. And this is for the purely selfish reason that I’d like people to understand me and not… I guess “wonder” about what I spent my life doing.
Regarding Busi: He is a hard reader to find in English. I’ve only managed to find two books in English: Sodomies in Eleven Point and The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman. The rest are in Italian and I think he made most of his career in translation, so there is also his translation of The Decameron. I don’t know if he ever wrote the six novels he talked about. (It turns out, from his Wikipedia page, that he wrote seven, and I think none of them are translated into English except the Pantyhose Salesman novel.) The Sodomies book he doesn’t consider a novel but it had one of the most beautiful and sudden endings I’ve ever read. The book is full of sex, drugs, male violence including rape, and language so dense you sometimes need a dictionary to read a sentence. But when I got to the end, I totally understood it and I almost broke into tears.
On its own, the ending sounds almost meaningless. But after the long and torturous journey he took us on, it was extraordinarily simple and beautiful.
“Look at the moon,” he says to his mother. He was staring at the full moon from her kitchen window while she cooked him some supper. She looks out the window and says, simply, “But what if it isn’t there?”