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OmensNovember 16, 2007 Over the last few months the speakeasy phase of The Squatters' Speakeasy had been getting vague and vaguer in my mind, with one result (I finally caught on) being that work on the pre-speakeasy phases was getting sludgier and sludgier. Usually sludgy progress (not unrelated to procrastination) boils down to not just "I don't know where I'm going" but "I'm afraid where I'm going doesn't exist." Since writers create where they're going by writing toward it, this is a problem and if not dealt with PDQ it turns into backup, overflow, and writer's block. The muses whispered that maybe it would be a good idea to start working on the speakeasy phase and work my way back in time, with the vision of the speakeasy being a subliminal vision for the characters who are improvising their way toward it -- and for the writer, without whose cooperation a linkup in the middle won't happen. So I prepared some pens, trusty dark-green mosaic writing in green ink and blue writing in amethyst purple, and sat down with the fresh notebook I bought for this purpose a couple of months ago (I think; most of my good ideas I've had several times before). LisaB's memorial grappa bottle candleholder was to my right, dramatically swathed in red wax (result of keeping a candle burning within range of an open window) and burning a blue-gray candle. And what should come on the radio but Stan Rogers's "Mary Ellen Carter," which is one of the two songs that have been utterly crucial to keeping me keeping on over the years (Pete Morton's "Another Train" is the other). That was obviously an omen, or a smile from the muses, as is my inability to send e-mail -- I got home last night from a 24-hour horse-sit and discovered that I could receive e-mail and access the Web, but I couldn't send anything. Composing e-mail is my big time sink and procrastination technique, so glitches in the outflow are like blinders on a horse: a way to encourage focus on the task ahead, and forget about right, left, and behind. As I puttered around making tea, I was thinking that art is dangerous, and should be dangerous, and not in the mere sense of "naughty" -- which tends to get substituted for "dangerous" among the affluent patrons of art. They're no dummies: they'd rather be titillated than threatened, and for the affluenza anything that rattles the foundations of their affluence is bound to be at least subliminally threatening. This is sort of what Squatters is getting at but in recent months art hasn't felt especially dangerous to me -- it's felt more like a drag and a burden and a chimera I've wasted my life chasing a glimpse of, and that I'd love to give up on but then what would I do? So "Mary Ellen Carter" comes on and Stan Rogers is telling me to "like the Mary Ellen Carter rise again." Stan Rogers died in 1983, which reminds me why art is important: Stan won't rise again, but his songs keep coming back and the Mary Ellen Carter keeps sinking and getting her chance to rise again. Like what else can I do but keep those pens moving across the page? I've been thinking in nonfiction for the last few months -- it's past time to get back into fiction mode, total immersion, no more mugwumpery. Trust the process and the process will trust you.
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