writing around death

As with every time a script hits the Finished pile, the ritual resets.

Mornings begin with the commute.  I'm on day four of a twelve-day stretch at work, so an essential element in the morning ritual is recharging.  Find a space to Be In, a place to walk, pace, think, sit, stretch, do yoga, listen and focus.  Focus is precious.  There's not much else one can do at my job BUT focus on the immediate.  So I need a recharge space.  There are several--  what I refer to as --'woods offices' along the way to my gig.  The current preferred favourite is beneath a major bridge, where cliff swallows nest.

Yesterday, sheltering there from the rain, as I observed heron and river otters and, yes, beaver, I went through the scripts, from most recent (THE KILL HOUSE) to secondmost recently completed (AZURE PANTRY / DENIZEN) and that put me in mind of the first to be completed in the pile (PAINLESS).  Looking for...  not similarities, so much as resonances?  Because I wanted to reassure myself that they aren't all The Same Book.

And they aren't.  But they aren't unrelated, either.  It's occurred to me that four of the seven major projects on my desk are about Dying.  At least in part.  It never occurred to me before that I'd turn into the kind of writer who writes the same book, essentially, time after time.  First off, I'm Not A Writer.  Secondly, I didn't think not-dying had been that big of a knock.  But, faced with the facts?  It's obvious that I'm trying to work through something.

Because all these books are about one's relation to mortality.  One's proximity, if nothing else.

A couple years ago, one morning in a burst of basic arithmetic, I tallied up the number of times death buzzed my ass.  It came to three, officially.  Surviving the murder attempt.  Surviving the suicide attempt.  And surviving the accident.  I'm sure there were other close calls, or at the very least WAKE UP calls, but of the times death was close enough for hugs:  three.

I have not done therapy for that.  Unless one counts four scripts.  Do these count as therapy?  Clearly I wrote them for that purpose.  Technically they were written because the OCD demanded their invention.  I don't write because I want to, I write because crazybrain commands.  Anyway, they're all plainly of a piece.  They're very different (or at least arguably different) approaches to the High Seriousness of that practical jester, mortality.

Maybe that's why the next book is just about sex.

Tracing Gould - oo7

I'm in my head because of death.  I'm into Gould, because of death.  I'm a morbid person.  I'm into grotesquery, vivid depictions of the severed nerves, the whole shebang.  Not ALL death.  But the Good Shit, the Artful Shit.  True heads know what I mean.  It's all down to the way it's delivered.  Do I have to justify shit?  A lot of people are into horror movies because they're taboo, or weird, or stupid, or funny, or "gross"; a lot of people are into horror shit because they're perverts.  Then there's that percentage that find it cathartic.  You know, the ones who identified with Laura Palmer.  Hi.  My mom collected horror comics, married a violent mad scientist, and moved into the deep woods with him to raise a child.  Nothing happened.

Just some near misses.  Run-ins.  Bad accidents.  Stitches.  Broken bits.  Nights I wake up screaming.  I mean, hey, it's not unique.  These things happen to literally everyone.

"Literally."

I don't use that word casually.

So that's the other thing we haven't been talking about, when talking about Gould:  the amount of just full-on, fuck you, death.  And how literary he was with it.  The punishments were swift, abrupt, sometimes cavalier, but rarely comedic.  Death is a solemn moment.  Sometimes a richly deserved finale got strung out a while--  Flat-Top slipped Tracy The Reaper once, but rare's the hood to ditch 'im twice.  Sometimes death was as abrupt as a bullet's passage thru a forehead; sometimes the round had to pass through a forearm or head to get there; but happy was the villain to simply bite a bullet with Tracy on his heels, because Death dogs Tracy.  If a ne'er-do-well gets away from his guns they're just as liable to be beheaded or slowly impaled by falling shards of glass or drown in the fog with a bag of money around their neck, as they are to escape to crime, crime again.

And I mean look.

Look!  Gould makes death look good.  It's awful stuff.  Absolutely horrid.  Gould lays death out with all the tact & decorum of a coroner.  He doesn't gild the lily about dying.  Gould makes the moral of his criminal capers clear:  dying is the least fun a body can have.

I'm just putting these thoughts down here, on this subject, at this moment, because that's how I'm treating the Gould fixation generally.  As a lens through which to view the preoccupations of the day.

Sometimes the obsessions are sonic.  Sometimes they're contextual.  Frequently it's whatever I'm reading.  And other times...

Sometimes I hear an ex from 30 years ago passed away.  My second boyfriend.  First sweetheart I had after running away.  I loved him.  We read a lot of comix together.  Sunshine had ALL the Sienkiewicz New Mutants...  And I was a bitch to to him.  And I don't know why we broke up.  But we did.

That's all I'm fucking writing today.  Selah.