[Jim Moonan]

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Excerpts from Obscurity

“Always be a poet, even in prose.” —Baudelaire

Sometimes I take something I’ve written and, just for the fun of it, reduce the font size down to impossibly small print. It looks different. Strangely beautiful. Then I imagine all the world’s writings — every single syllable of everything that has ever been written down in books, journals, diaries, letters, napkins, wrappers, scratched on ancient walls; everything worth saving that has ever been written by human beings — and reducing them to fit on a single page. It looks like dust.

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This morning I came across a collection of thirty-nine quotes by famous writers on writing; nearly all of them dead. I am sure I've run across all of them individually before, but never as a collection. The effect of reading them together felt like what I imagine a spa treatment must feel like for someone who is looking to be physically pampered and rejuvenated by touch and smell and sound. It is a fleeting interlude of time. Rilke, with whom I identify most closely, was there. So was Kafka, who I’m always surprised to discover is a kindred spirit. I had the thought that I was walking through a graveyard reading headstones. Every one of the buried had been successful and everyone of them knew what it took to accomplish good writing. There were no gravestone quotes from writers like me who had gone nowhere with their writing and yet I could say unequivocally that each quote I read spoke of my own experience as an unknown, obscure writer. It was surreally spa-like to be reminded that we share the same insistent, burning need to write. We legion of writers, great and obscure. I like a good massage from time to time, but it never lasts long enough nor happens frequently enough to be anything more than a blip in time of pleasure that costs more than I can afford. It’s like splurging on an expensive restaurant just to experience fine dining and then being forced by my wallet to get the cheapest thing on the menu. In Thailand massages were cheap and good. You can get a foot massage for next to nothing. There are opportunities for every kind of massage on every street in Bangkok. I am, of course talking of legitimate massages. They also have a sumptuous flower market where big bunches of flowers are sold for pennies. But I digress. Each quote pierced me. I had the sensation of being pricked alive and salved in the oils of my own identity and ever so briefly realizing I am all of what they say a writer is and more. And more. It will wear off, I’m sure. It was just a massage.

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I don’t believe I’m a mediocre writer — even though there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. I believe I’m a great writer living in the wrong brain. I preside over a kind of uneasy alliance between the writer in me and the brain in me. I’ve made the best of it. It will have to do until I get a new one. (Brain, that is. My imagination is perfect.) Under the present circumstances the most I can hope for is to smuggle something out without my brain recognizing it. The greatness within me seeps out from time to time. I have evidence of it, though I’ve misplaced it or lost it or it has receded back into my imagination. If I were able to look back at my life frame by frame, evidence of my greatness would be there. I'm sure of it. It is an unforgettable sensation. Like sparks that flared but failed to ignite a larger fire due to the smothering blanket of my brain.

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If you were reading my words between the covers of a book would they be different? Would they be if you discovered them in a letter tucked inside a used book you bought, say, on the embankment shops along the Seine in Paris? I don't know if Frost read Dante. I have tried to read Dante. If he did I don't see it in his writing. Perhaps I haven't read enough Frost. All I see is an earth-bound man who found a way to climb birch trees and ride its branches down to the ground. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Dante did, too. Back in Gutenberg's time, upon hearing the good news that the printing press had been invented, how many writers clamored to be published? How many stayed up nights dreaming of sharing their imaginations with the world?

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