Writing Outside The Box

Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the very sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy’s hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.

That afternoon the sheep crossed the creek in front of my hook. They were so close that their shadows fell across my bait. I practically caught trout up their assholes. —Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America, 1967, Houghton Mifflin Company (by permission)

If you asked me to define edgy writing, I wouldn’t hesitate a second to answer. “Richard Brautigan”, I’d say. His work should grace the library of every edgy writer. Every morning, one should wake up and pour him/herself a Brautigan tonic as a bracer, slugging it down to shock a lethargic, post-somnambulistic system like astigmatism making itself at home behind your optic nerve or sprinklers going off in a park where John Dillinger’s body lies in repose.

Feel the burn… understand the hunger, own the desire to move the elephant into the living room. Smelled of sheep… do you remember how Grandma smelled when she leaned down and forced you to allow her to kiss you, smiling and cooing, cool fleshy flaps of skin suddenly smearing spit all over your cheek as every atom in your body struggled to bolt? You can’t capture the odor except in the context of the universality of common experience. Brautigan’s brilliance created similes that gave anthropomorphic qualities to plants, rivers, the sun… he related human experiences in the context of the natural world, at a level that requires supernatural realization. He creates a world of ‘could have been’ or ‘might possibly be’ or ‘if x then why not y, even though y doesn’t exist on a plane that some humans accept as real’. He bounds, undaunted, into a twilight world of what the word-snobs call ‘quasi-reality’, the ‘almost real’. And by doing so, he slips the fetters binding other writers with cold, hard reality. He expands the possibilities, linking the grace and poetic beauty of the great masters with the stark, in-your-face slap of everyday living. His elixir alerts you to the burn that makes you edgy. Enjoy it with gusto; wallow in its sensitivity and immerse your mind in his pool, suspend your disbelief.

Reality. What is it exactly? Most people accept a more-or-less universal concept of it, but no one has license over it. The five senses don’t adequately explain reality in total. My reality may not exist for you at all, and that’s okay. Reality’s domain is different for every creature, every plant, every breeze that blows. Some kids grow up thinking that if they don’t get knocked around at least once a day, daddy doesn’t love them. A large number of humans have never seen a skunk or a double-bladed timber axe or a coffee cup, yet they still have a concept of their use if their other senses get involved in the process. Helen Keller could not see, hear nor speak; yet she created a world of beauty for herself, within herself—then she shared it with us. Helen Keller was one edgy lady; her reality existed on a different, higher plane.

I’ve heard good writing described as ‘capturing life on the page’. For the most part, I’d be inclined to agree with this assessment, especially when uttered by creative writing professors or others qualified to make such assertions. Further, I’ve been taught that the singular quality that links all good writing is its ability to make the words ‘jump off the page’. Obviously, there would seem to be a contradiction at work here.

Given the inability of any act to accomplish two different events simultaneously due to the Einsteinian subscription to the limits placed on the natural world, one must assume that if something can jump off the page, it cannot, by definition, be captured. So, given my perceptional difficulties with the concepts, I choose to ignore the contradiction and commit myself to capture life on the page and jump on it, no matter whether or not it offends your sense of reality and/or fair play. Yes, the elephant can come inside my house, so long as he promises not to drink my beer or harass the toilet/tiger.