Underground Lecture # 1

Are You Ready to Quit?

Ships ahoy, writer! Are you ready to quit? Me, too. There is nothing to write about. There is too much to write about. And yet language keeps happening. We hear voices inside our heads. The only thing I know how to do… is to write it down. Used to be in a notebook. And sometimes it still is. More often than not, I write on my computer & inside my head. The spirit of the notebook is what I want to talk about here. That “unfinished” form that I tried to escape as a young writer… wanting so desperately to see myself as a “published” writer. Now, I have such nostalgia for the notebook… when I felt absolutely free… nothing to lose… and I didn’t know it!

Such is life… is it not? As we get older, we become more like ourselves. That has been very much true for me as a writer. I remember when I made the decision to become an artist. It was the summer of 1989 in an empty apartment on Washington Avenue in the capitol of New York State. A little city called Albany. I was 19. And I began keeping a notebook.

I had kept diaries & journals before this. But this was different. I felt it. More like a monk’s vow. A point of no return. It felt exhilarating & terrifying. My friends would not understand. As for my family: best to tell them I wanted to study the law. Like you know who. That famous law student from Prague.

Kafka’s diaries are brilliant examples of the “formless” form. And yet is there anything more real & palpable? To see Kafka open his heart & Gothic soul in each diary fragment. Bataille is right when he says Kafka’s “guilt” as a writer is apparent… betraying his family… rejecting love… & all for what? The void… the nothingness… the abyss… that every writer must face. Every writer that dares call themself… an artist.

So why do it? There is everything else to do. This question seems especially poignant in the Third Millennium. Why do “human writing”? It is certainly less necessary. The machines are pretty damn good at writing. Not long ago I asked artificial intelligence to write a story in the style of r.g. vašíček… seeing the result I thought: We are in trouble.

We, meaning, the human writers. I still think there is something to be said for human writing. Notebook writing. Journal writing. Diary writing. What that is… is as infinite as the human mind. And I will be the first to admit that human “thinking” is far more machine-like than humans want to believe. And yet I think that human writing is machine + something else… something beyond… a non-space where no machine can go. I could be wrong about this. But I don’t think so.

And if you think so… think again.