On Writing #156 : LM Rivera

THE RULES OF

THE GAME

LM Rivera

I.

Often, when a writer bears upon writing itself, we (the reader) find ourselves afflicted—unless, in the most unusual of cases, the writer invents a fiction so consummate that a new kind of authorship is born.

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There’s another way to bear upon the writing: write unto significance. Overpraise and bow to the proper name. Homage is an unequivocal way to confine the mistake of bad writing.

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An author should live in Sicily with changed name.

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Read Kafka. Read O’Connor. Read Antonin Artaud in Acireale.

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Writing is agonistic. If there’s no blood, you aren’t doing it right. A smear on every page you send out into the world. Please, hold the pen like a just sharpened dagger.

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A book is made up of screams. If you can talk, you aren’t doing it right. You can’t walk into a library with your eyes open, heart laid bare and bleeding. Platitudes are the kind of things that will get you killed.

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When you send your work out into the wild, expect repudiation. If nothing happens: expect suicidal thoughts. Without a proper theology, you’ll be just another dumb detective.

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I am irregularly Gregor Samsa.

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A good detective will have a depleted and threatened family. How did we end up in this place? From my balcony, I have a palatial sense of minor and major verse.

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And a godlike harmonics…

II.

She failed to write ideologically and, failing to do so, the end came near. Writers avoided her whenever they had the opportunity to.

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She reads French fluently but the French writers she reads have fallen out of fashion.

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She stops writing altogether. Quality of life promptly proliferating.

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She possesses an intrepidity—she had never before been capable of.

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She vanishes, now and then.

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She felt the love a very young poet—a dialogic totality. One fine day, the young poet vanishes. He was not seen nor was he heard from again.

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She tried to track him down, for a short time. But the attempt was half-hearted and incoherent.

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She became, to other writers, an icon of each and every defect existing in the domain of poetry.

III.

He chose to write poetry in the same way we choose to defend our house against an intruder. You left the window slightly open and the masked man slipped inside—hushed and constant. You know the sound of your own house. You know the floors don’t make that noise of their own doing. You reach for the locked box underneath your bed. Your pregnant wife, in the deepest of sleep, next to you. The box is unlocked and, now, you are ready.

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He continued to write, despite the fact that the work was quite bad. He read an immense amount and only what he believed to be the best of it.

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He knew only other writers and wanted only to know them and them alone: exchanging poems, exchanging gossip, arguing many nights away, and ecstatically discussing literary futures and forthcoming subversions.

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He wanted children but a poet can’t have a child, with the strange acquaintances coming and going—with trips to Rome, falling in the street, and people disappearing. Every now and then he thought of suicide as a romancing of the edge: to be hanged, by your own hand, by the neck till dead.

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He grew older and grayer, at that very moment, a child appeared. He looked into the face of himself and was reborn—having, himself, done very little.

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He writes a novel when the child sleeps—another contented insolvency.

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Banality isn’t evil—banality’s a vulgar sleep.

IV.

I should like to attack another writer but this is simply not done anymore.

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A famous writer insulted me at an academic soiree. My plans for revenge were thorough, meticulous, mendacious. I later came to find out that the famous writer was paid for the act—no surprise in the unearthing. The famous writer has an enormous readership. Financial goals are always met for a man of letters.

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Two writers meet at the crossroads—neither believe in the validity of the other. At the corners of the four angles: a marble block, un-carved; a floating red sphere; an antique music box, golden; a rain thrashed wooden chair.

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In Unamuno’s A Tragic Sense of Life, the writer dies with his pants on. If that isn’t blatant sentimentalism, I don’t know what is. Unamuno is the kind of great writer who might, given the right moment, poison your tea.

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In our current climate, a writer’s meant to know where they are but seldom is this true. I opened the book and was disallowed from future party meetings. I was, after all, only there by happenstance. I’ve been incapable of moralism from a young age—as a young girl with a shaved head pontificates to a room full of aging painters.

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Later, I called the famous writer at his home. The maid answered the phone. I told her what the writer had done. She took my name and number and said she’d like to speak to me again sometime alone.

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I know that I am obsessed with writers, that I will continue to be, and its done me no good. A lunatic’s dreams restate themselves and no one knows why.

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A book with no violence and a writer who doesn’t succumb to melodrama:  uninterestedness itself.

V.

When you use the word love, use also the word suffering. You’re disfigured from devotion, a being scrubbed of pleasurable particulates.

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You get on a train. You sleep on a train.

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In the desert of small pain, you cover yourself in melting ice—that does not last but for a moment. Wet clothes slows movement. But the slow comfort was preferred to that which soon materializes. The desert interminably arrives with a solid beam of burning light. The burns become signatures of the sun.

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You love someone seemingly forever, then no longer there forever. One day, in the company of someone else, you’ll love them again forever. A demon rests in the relative concept.

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You write a crazed murder ballad.

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…The night collected their revolting dreams / Knives, glass, animals, and steam…

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When you’re questioned by detectives, you realize you’re the prime suspect.

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You start to resemble the desert when the frenzy takes hold. Memories collide with one another and roll themselves into dunes. Creatures, once tame, are now rabid, armored, drooling, and attack anything that moves.

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The only cure for the desert is drinking. And you drink—drink till you vomit and back into the desert you go.

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The detectives find a frenzied one with most of the incriminating evidence. It confesses to the crime.

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You are left alone, innocently writing.

LM Rivera lives in Santa Fe, NM. He co-edits Called Back Books with his partner Sharon Zetter. His work has appeared in Alien Mouth, FUZZ, Mannequin Haus, DUM DUM Zine, and elsewhere. His chapbook THE LITTLE LEGACIES is available from Glo Worm Press and his first full-length book, The Drunkards, is available from Omnidawn.