Finally signed a writer. I've agreed to pay (i.e. have F+V pay) Alejandro Amoretti (q.v. manuscript submission, sub) an advance of $5,920 for two 500+ page novels in three years. 4% royalties on first printing; further printings @ 6%, negotiable. Do we have any money to pay this guy? I'll be back from Argentina on 3 January. Dinner and let-bygones-be-bygones sex at my place?
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To: F + V Publications
From: Alejandro Amoretti via waitress at Gran Café Tortoni
Title: Crayons and Ontological Crises
On the first day of First Grade, my composition teacher told me1: “You are what you write.” Several factors lead me toward taking this statement very seriously: (1) It was stated by my teacher who must eo ipso have been trying to teach me something (and (1.1) I really wanted to learn something); (2) being unfamiliar with the phrase, “you are what you eat,” I was unaware that “you are what you write”’s semantic precision (i.e. meaningfulness) was compromised by its rhetorically-driven phrasal subservience to its epigrammatic progenitor3; and (3) it seemed like a rule to a game—(3.1) games being to the young, first-grade mind very serious matters. Staring Michelangelesquely at the blank piece of handwriting paper set upon my desk before me, I envisioned what I would write. My little first-grade heart began to flutter a bit as I moved the oversized tip of my fat handwriting pencil toward the first, street-like line on the page. Something wasn’t right. The pencil tip hovered just above the page, shaking as though possessed by a slavish excitement to participate in the consummation of its master’s existence. The color wasn’t right. I didn’t want to be lead-grey. My stealthy little first-grade hand snuck into my desk and groped around for the crayon box. I fished out four crayons: Atomic Tangerine, Forest Green, Radical Red and Goldenrod. I wanted to be Radical Red. Laboring to maintain steady crayon pressure I slowly wrote my name:
I was Daniel. I contented myself with being Radical Red Daniel for several minutes. And then I wanted a snack:
I was eating snack. At first it was an apple but then it became a Mars bar and then it became a chunk of moon-rock and then it became a Forest-Green scribble and then finally it became Atomic Tangerine nothing right before I finished eating it. I snuck out of the classroom while my composition teacher was writing on the blackboard and grew into a Goldenrod giant. I ate a giant-sized Mars bar and then ran around the earth three times in nine strides and then leapt into outer space and swung from planet to planet through the solar system. Letting go of Pluto I fell through the stars which scattered like dandelion petals. I fell until I decided to start flying and then I flew to the edge of the Universe where there was a door that I walked through which led into my basement. I ran upstairs into the kitchen and ate an endless bowl of frosted Alpha-Bits and then turned my mom into an Orchid rose and then felt sad because she looked sad as a rose and turned her back into a mom. I made my dad appear in the kitchen with his briefcase full of Ninja Turtles for me and Orchid roses for my mom. I made it summer, I made it the future, I made there be classical music playing to make my dad happy. I made everything make me feel like Valery from Kindergarten used to make me feel before she moved. I made everyone feel like that. Then I crossed out everything since it had become summer in Sepia and made my dad into Michelangelo, my favorite Ninja Turtle. I made my dad fly through the ceiling, swing from planet to planet across the solar system and become a little speck in outer-space. And then, in Midnight Blue, I became my dad:
I wasn’t sure what to write next. This business of persistent becoming was becoming wearisome. I was overcome by a melancholy feeling of meaninglessness; what did it mean to be who I was if I hadn’t always been who I was, if I wouldn’t always be who I was? If I kept changing who I was whenever I wanted then I wouldn’t really be anyone.4 I would just be words. I poured myself a glass of Diet Pepsi and went upstairs into the study/guestroom. Exams and fragments of poorly-composed theses were stacked neatly on one side of my desk; files from half-finished genealogy projects were strewn haphazardly across the other side. The house was quiet. I had a box of my son’s crayons in my hand. Putting the crayons aside I decided to review the précis to one of my students’ theses. In a series of pretentious, imprecise monstrosities of Academic English the précis proposed to explore the pretentious imprecision of the “Post-Modern Narrator,” focusing mainly on the “obfuscated first-person personæ” of Franzen and DeLillo and arguing that “meta-irony, the pointed épée of the Post-Modernist,” suffers a degradation of its rhetorical capacity to affect trans-textual ontological crises when conveyed through a “personless” first person. Some Diet Pepsi went down the wrong pipe and I choked/coughed for several seconds. I pulled out a red pen and prepared to cross out the majority of what I had just read. But as the nib of my ball-point pen neared the page, my weary, professorial heart began to falter a bit. Nothing was right. And there didn’t seem to be much sense in crossing out everything. My eyes strayed from the précis in my hand and cursorily scanned the next essay on the stack. I noticed an italicized quotation: You are what you love. I sensed a rush of endorphic activity in my brain as it processed the sensation of meaningful coincidence. A footnote indicated that the quotation was from Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I quickly checked my excitement, being all too familiar with the abysmal anhedonic aftermath of placing trust in meaning—one can only take Tennyson’s advice5 so many times in life before being endicronously forced to kill oneself.
The house was very quiet. I sensed that I was trying to repress the presence of the question of what to write (i.e. what to become); I tried to repress that sensation. I tried to repress knowing that I was trying to repress. I tried to repress everything—but it was too quiet to hide from my thoughts.
I pulled out my grandfather’s Remington (typewriter, not gun) and fed it a fresh piece of old parchment paper. (All other ontological propositions aside, I always subscribed firmly to the belief that the essence of something written depends largely on what it is written upon.) I was ready to write. I knew that if I thought about what to write I would never write it. I needed simply to write something. I began: On the first day of First Grade… and proceeded to write a story about myself as a young boy with the ability to change his existence through words. Eventually, I reached the end of the story and realized that I hadn’t solved any of my ontological crises by pretending to be something I am not. I was not what I had written—I was not simply “I”—and yet something of me was contained in “I.” I wanted to believe that I could find my self in words. I considered revising the bit about my character’s student’s précis to address the aphoristic potential of, “You write what you are,” but it felt too contrived. But it felt. I felt something. Perhaps I am not what I think, not what I write, not what I eat or love or think about eating or loving, but only what I feel. I felt the cold metal keys of my grandfather’s Remington, my fingertips resting in their shallow cradles. I felt like I should retype the second page of my story and use her name—Émilie—instead of Valery. I felt like I shouldn’t be writing prose. I am a poet—I should be writing her a poem. Refusing to philosophically rationalize not taking comfort in a final, cathartic dive into semantically imprecise resolution, I typed out the last sentence: I am in here.6
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1 “Me” being the pre-pubescent student’s unconsciously solipsistic synecdoche for “the class.”2
2 Incidentally, but not entirely impertinently, this semiotic phenomenon suggests a kind of inversion of the biogenic-law formulation as applied to individuation (viz. ontology inversely recapitulates phylogeny w/r/t the development of self-differentiation).
3 N.B. that the ontological claim made by “you are what you eat” is simpler in nature than that of “you are what you write” insofar as the former statement’s subject and object (viz. you and food, respectively) both posses a materiality significant to their essential being whereas the object of the latter statement (viz. “what you write”) is essentially an immaterial thing (i.e. its materiality as ink on paper is insignificant w/r/t its essential being as something expressed—cf. the end of the paragraph from which this footnote is referred & the beginning of the final paragraph of this story). More simply perhaps, comparing apples to apples is simpler than comparing apples to the word “oranges.”
4 While the formulation of this ontological proposition is rather sloppy, the central claim appears to be accurate: If a subject reflexively modifies a sine qua non attribute of its Dasein (e.g. “The colour red changes its colour;” cf. “The man cuts off his arm.”), it (the subject) is no longer itself. While spatio-temporal phenomena can be used in most cases to bridge the noumenal gap created by this ontological crisis (e.g. A child becomes a man; the man is no longer a child (<- noumenal gap); but the man’s Uncle Woody can still recognize that the man and the child are the same thing from having watched the child grow (<- spatio-temporal phenomenon) into the man), the case addressed in the above ontological proposition is unrestricted by spatio-temporal boundaries—that is, the man who is what he writes can write himself into the past or future, into the furthest corners of space, or out of space and time altogether. The set of his potential beings-to-be is the universal set of Existence with a tall E. More simply perhaps, the colour that becomes all colours is not any one colour.
5 “’Tis better to have loved and lost, / Than never to have loved at all.” (In Memoriam, 27:15-16)
6 Infinite Jest, p.1
