Impulse

The writer has to write. The junkie has to use junk. The addiction is the same.

The writers that I most enjoy have all been drug addicts. Every single one of the words I have read from them have been influenced by narcotics. Reality works against the writer’s mind; there is no joy in simple description. Dictionaries do not read well.

We stretch our language to involve. What was it? Writing is at least 50 years behind painting? Something like that. Painters long ago developed pallets well outside of description; one look at a work of modern art will show you the difference between description and art. Writers strive to remove the real, but fail to elevate the language. Taking drugs helped. Consensus reality becomes just another shade, just another texture. What is The Interzone?

But setting surreal scenes is not enough. Using the accepted language is not enough. The writer has to push beyond whatever “rules” and redefine the art. Poets started that journey, but stopped short somewhere; symbology is nonsensical, words too fraught with meaning, lyrics wound too tightly around rhythm. Our poetry has become lazy, useless.

Writers have the ability to break authority, to create abstracts that push the edges. But they cannot do this and remain in the public eye. Picasso is accepted, celebrated, collected. Writers on the edge of their art are reviled; they “make no sense,” they just “jumble meaninglessness into nothing.”

Because language requires clarity moreso than vision, apparently. Because we humans have no time for the experiment of words as art. So we use the rules. Rules I have broken many times, in just this one paragraph.

The writer writes from a compulsive place, the words sometimes cannot be paused for things like structure or grammar or placement or “sense.” When Trocchi first submitted the manuscript for Cain’s Book, the text was unrecognizable. When Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, it hit the floor as a single roll of paper 235 feet long, a week’s worth of hashish-tinged typography, a madness of verbiage. Burroughs’ original take on Naked Lunch followed no set order, had no set reality, wanted nothing to do with authority, did not begin or end.

Authors should be able to define the authority of their words. The world is no mistake as written; it has sense and order and a creator. Each scene’s stage is set, each object and character placed. There are no accidents. Language may be impulsive, a natural extension of the properties of the world. We accept mathematics as pure, inherent….can words be far behind? But writers may be the last great believers in faith.

The writer writes, and creates, but creates well within the “rules,” brings order to chaos through limited labels. Think of a child’s chemistry set: how much can you really do? The reader will only allow so much, will only take so much. Music and visual arts allow much more freedom, much looser authority; there’s a reason that lyrics have become the new poetry. The world exists in a framework defined by the writer, but the writer is not free to exist without reason, without sense or logic or the consensus of what reality is or could be. We require fact, or some simile for it.

Writing is a tough addiction. There’s only so much the writer can involve, and only so much the reader will allow. Most addictions, they get pushed to the limit of what the user can endure (or even beyond what the user can handle). Most addictions can kill.

The damage from the writing addiction comes from the limitations of acceptance that the reader puts in place; the author is no authority. The reader is the ultimate God of the written world.