I think when I am finally able to start writing again, I am going to keep this little saying or aphorism by T.S. Eliot in my wallet, laminated, and look at it every so often to remind myself that I am now part of “last year’s words.” I think this might be freeing, in a way. One of the things I’ve had to come to understand — as an imperative really — is that I was not very good and my writing was unrealistic and actually a little bizarre. It was almost too much of a series of non-sequiturs that have no real meaning and, worse, no place even as non-sequiturs.
There was a character I once wrote who cut himself. I named him Greg because I was loosely basing him on a friend of mine whose name was Greg, but who basically dropped me without even the slightest concern once he had a boyfriend. He was weird in so many ways. New York is full of jaywalkers because it’s just the way people are and they step into the street in order to cross as soon as the car goes by. Well Greg thought that they were all trying to kill themselves by stepping in front of his car and he slammed on the brakes and screamed, “Oh my Godl They’re trying to kill themselves.”
He was constantly saying and doing things like that. He was insatiable when it came to sex and men and would have sex with any man that he could if the opportunity existed. Once, out on Fire Island, for example, we were at a house and he saw an outdoor shower that one of the guys in the house decided to use. So he went down to the back yard and sat on a bench until the guy was done showering and opened the door and saw Patrick just sitting there staring at him. Patrick got up and walked into the shower and the guy let him and they sucked and jerked each other off. Patrick thought absolutely nothing of it. He wasn’t even doing it to boast to the others. He would go to sex clubs and call me later and told me that he came six times in one night.
Then I learned he had been gay bashed outside a bar in Staten Island, where he was from. He didn’t remember the incident, but all the windows in his car were smashed out and his head was bashed in with a baseball bat. He was in the hospital for weeks. He was never the same after that and he spoke, almost entirely, in non sequiturs. We used to make a motion of “changing the chanel” every time he spoke up and said something that was completely unrelated to whatever the people were talking about. Gene Stanley would always roll his eyes. But I liked Patrick and so when it came time to write Greg as a character, I created a strange guy who came out with odd jokes told at completely inappropriate times, but had enough sense to know that he was odd. He cut himself, relentlessly, and his chest and upper arms were covered with scars from all the cutting. He did this cutting, supposedly, to release the emotional strain of loving people who could not accept love.
But when I looked at it again, I realized it was utterly ridiculous. It was absurd. And I think my work has always had that quality of being absolutely unbelievable and maybe stupid.
But that was, in fact, my voice. It was who I was. The entire quote (of course it’s from “Four Quartets” but I don’t know if it’s Little Gidding or another one, is:
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.”
When I resume my writing, which I must do soon, and I think before Ellie passes away, I must remember that one of the reasons — perhaps the main reason I stopped writing in the first place — was that I realized I was working in a language that was no longer contemporary. What I was writing had no more relevance, even to me. I still want to finish those books, and the Cigar Tree is now cemented enough in my brain that I don’t think there’s anything more that I need to do to that one.
I have to find a second voice. Another voice.