Who Do You Think You Are?

Just finished reading Malcolm Lowry's incredible Under the Volcano, and kind of shaken up a little. The last chapter details in vibrant, precise, scattered, delirious, and devastating language the demise of a self-hating but somehow life-loving man who has destroyed his life so distinctly there's no other place to go but the abyss. Geoffrey Firmin is the guy, an alcoholic British consul in the Mexico on the Day of the Dead in November 1938. It takes its name from the volcano Popocatépetl, which overshadows the terrain and characters. It was Lowry's second novel, and the last one he completed. The novel charts the tragic love story between Geoffrey and Yvonne, his wife who returns to him in Mexico after a year of exile. Add into the mix Hugh, Geoffrey's step-brother who is also visiting him and who is also an ex-lover of Yvonne, and you have yourself a classic triangle. 

Those are plot points of course, and this thing is perfectly and adroitly plotted, a one-day excursion through Mexican towns and forests and cantinas given to you in a context of expositional highs and lows and circumstances. But it's the language, the way Lowry writes, that allows you to break out of the pleasure of reading a good plot and break into the feelings you've really never been able to name before. Through delivering Geoffrey's last day on earth as a sort of stream-of-consciousness poetic eruption, you have access to a world beyond worlds: you feel the weighty weirdness of not knowing where you are in time and space, that drunken terrible swirl and swerve of a devout alcoholic finding bliss in his own degradation and debauchery. 

But that's just the beginning of what Lowry's writing does: he also is able to define and describe how that same once respected diplomat but now big-time lowlife is able to understand what he is doing even as he undoes everything that means anything to him. That's tragedy on a huge but horribly intimate scale. The Biblical/Shakespearean/Tennessee-Williams-tinted universe of the Lost Cause done up in such high and beautiful and relentless style all you can do is weep a little not just from sadness but also this odd appreciation of what writing can do and be when it's untethered and yet completely controlled. 

As you probably can tell I'm still a little shook up. I try to find inspiration for what I try to do when I write from every source possible: the world, my own dumb memories, TV, books, conversations, just sitting around staring at windows. But Under the Volcano is one of those books that somehow transcends inspiration and pushes you toward realizing what real writing might be able to when you get down to it, when you use it in ways you can't explain just show. When I wrote my novel that came out eons ago, The Life I Lead, I truly was trying to get where Lowry got without even knowing there was a book called Under the Volcano. I just knew I wanted language to go places it's not supposed to go. I wanted to try to use language to fully capture situations that get at the central enigma of my main character, a sad messed-up guy with a huge amount of issues. I tried with language to go to the dark places your head goes when nobody is looking or caring or even knowing who you are. Words and images and phrases and sentences and paragraphs that cut through chaos while also conveying the chaos ferociously enough for you to leap beyond language into feeling, and almost into experience. Somebody else's consciousness becomes yours, and judgement falls away and there we are: complicitous in and somehow understanding a downfall. 

In the case of Under the Volcano, that transference goes something like this: I am that big-mouth pretentious drunk bastard Geoffrey Firmin, and guess what? He is me. And there's no way out of that relationship now that I've gotten access to his gorgeously constructed soul except through grace. mercy, and a firm analysis of my own bull-shit.

That to me is literature. 

That transfer from solipsism to transcendental modesty doesn't happen every time I pick up a book or sit down to try to write story, but Lord have mercy when it does occur it truly is a gift from god or whoever. That feeling of not being alone but also not being great: humility and connection both at the same time, fueled by the urge to move beyond platitudes and politeness into strangeness, into epiphany. Good old Flannery O'Connor called it "mystery and manners."  Flannery's gorgeous and disciplined writing uses the formula and language and irony of manners to provide us with a brief and horrible whiff of the mystery ahead of us, many times inside of us, ready to be painfully released. Her style is almost the exact opposite of Lowry's, and yet they get to that same place, that same moment when we are all just there with each other in our misery and enlightenment. I kept thinking of her story "Revelation" in her last collection Everything that Rises Must Converge, as I went through Under the Volcano's last chapter. That sense of coming home and yet also simultaneously finding yourself exiled from it. Flannery's Mrs. Turpin and Lowry's Mr. Firmin are of course worlds apart, their situations completely different, and yet there's a sense of all their excuses and hurts and desires being burned away at the end, as they find themselves outside of themselves, as they find the mystery engulfing them, even releasing them.

I retired at the beginning of this year from a job I loved just so I can focus in on this incredible process of finding and surviving all that truth through beautiful, intense maybe even sometimes sacred language. I fill my days with reading and then trying to write, and it's an existence that I didn't know how much I depended on until actually doing it. Each draft of a story or a poem is a way out of judgement and into a connection, into a universe where words actually matter more than anything else, where words can help you find who you are beyond who you think you are. 

I keep trying.