Go Into The Story: David Milch: "The Writer's Voice" (Part 5)

Go Into The Story concludes Milch week with this discussion of St. Paul. For Milch, Paul was a writer who struggled with alienation and guilt and suffering. He became a great religious figure only because he first became a poet. Which is to say, that they are the same thing. Born from the desire to connect with the world around you:

Let me hasten to say I’m not comparing myself to St. Paul. But I know what it is to do what you never dreamed of doing, what you never thought you’d be capable of doing. The utter mystification that you experience. “How did I get here? How did this happen?” Let me read from Paul’s Epistles. He doesn’t seem like a murderer: “We know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal. Sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want. But I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want but the evil I don’t want is what I do.”

Let’s think a little bit just for a second about writing, when for any reason you don’t do it, and if you do do it, you don’t do the writing you want to do, and if you do the writing you thought you wanted to do it turns out that you didn’t do it the way you wanted to do it, or you gave it to the wrong person, or the person you gave it to didn’t handle it the way you wanted . . . It’s a mystery. It’s all a mystery to us.

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But consider what that was like for him to have his works rejected like that. And when he went out, he said, “All right, so you want me in Rome. You want me working in Rome?” And they said, “Yeah, work in Rome.” And he did. That’s where he died. So all of us can tell our war stories of isolation and humiliation and vacillation in commitment to the faith, which for us is, in this very secular context, the enterprise of fellowship. What I would have you understand is that if you keep coming—you know, Franz Kafka was every bit as crazy as Paul, but he kept coming—and if you sink your roots deep and if you keep coming, you can find an accommodation for anything.

You think you’ve got problems with self-esteem? One day Gregor Samsa woke and discovered he was a bug. So you got problems with self-esteem, now let’s see if you can write. And, ah, that story, The Metamorphosis, is the most beautiful domestic comedy. It’s not about being a bug; it’s about how a family lives with a bug. To paraphrase Yeats, the ladder starts in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. And that ladder, if you keep climbing, will take you out. Here’s the last that Paul wrote:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faiths so as to move mountains, but have not love, I’m nothing. If I give away all I have but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful. It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice of wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As per prophecy, it will pass away. As per tongues, they will cease. As per knowledge, it will pass away, for our knowledge is imperfect, and our prophecy is imperfect. But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see as in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall understand fully, even as I had been fully understood. So faith, hope, and love abide. But the greatest of these is love.”

Now that came to Paul because he kept showing up. After he wrote that, he made a lot of mistakes. And he failed to be fully human a lot of times. But the words abide. And that the words abide perfectly is the little bit of God that we touch, in the same way that when we see our children, you will live outside yourself. As you experience the voices—whether they’re punitive, whether they’re meek, whether they’re shrill, whether they’re placid—understand that love accepts them all. Love redeems them all.

Text Patterns: jest the third

Milch argues that "content tests and verifies the implicit assumptions of form." In other words, a book about a megalomaniac hunting a white whale will be written with the same fervor and obsessiveness in order to address and eliminate alternative arguments. A novel that seeks to recreate Dublin on June 16, 1904 will build the city brick by brick through the free play and history of language and literature. These strategies are not intended to frustrate readers, but stand as proof of the the initial premise.

In contrast, Alan Jacobs writes that David Foster Wallace fails to achieve this in Infinite Jest because his obsessive writing style - the endless sprawl of sentences, the doubling-back, and mining for deeper and deeper meanings - is an end in itself; it does not speak to the content of the story or the world of the characters, but to its own formation. Perhaps what people like about IJ is not the novel itself, but the force of Wallace's intelligence and the tragedy of his condition. His books are not novels, but a hedge against depression and the possibility that words are not enough.

The Idea of the Writer: December 13, 2007 WGA Theater

Defining Imagination:

In the Biographia Literaria, which I commend to your attention --

He was a junky, Coleridge, and that was before they had Metamucil. He was afflicted with horrible constipation and the measures that he had to take were not pretty.

-- Coleridge made an effort to distinguish between "fancy" and "imagination" as a principle of association. Now, this is very, very important because if you give up the Outline, which is logic. If you take a step back and think of what we're doing here, you are watching me associate as a principle of organization in our communion with each other. I'm associating one experience with another experience. I'm reacting to you. 

An imaginative association, Coleridge would suggest, is what we are doing now which is that available to us on the basis of this shared experience is an understanding of the substance of the experience. That is, how the artist gains access to the imagination of his audience through the vision of, and the vitalizing of, the bringing to life of experiences to which the viewer can relate on the basis of the operations of the imagination of the storyteller. Not because there's a prior expectation that, "OK, at the end of the first act: judges chambers! dnn-dnn dnn-dnn!" But as a vital exchange of energy. That's the way the universe works. OK?

A fanciful association, and this is the danger, the burden of inauthenticity that those of us who work without Outlines must bear, in the achievement of the act of imagination and that is fancy.

Now I kinda tried to plant, just the way I did with the "urine" when we were talking about "principles of association" and this gentleman said, "Oh, I was thinking of Coleridge and you said,'Coleridge'." And I suggest that that is not an accident but that the substance of what I was suggesting was bringing to mind an imaginative association from this gentleman's past where had he encountered those ideas before. So that's not an accident, nor is it a fanciful connection. It is an imaginative connection. That's what art does. We are creating art together here. The audience is always a participant with the artist in the creation of the art by apprehending it in faith. Which is why I urge you not to watch Law and Order, which is an exercise in logic.

A fanciful association is a private association.

(Around the 15 minute mark of the linked video).

Melville and Madness

In the fourth of his lectures, Milch starts off with more Kierkegaard, but having made his point, goes off on a tangent about Herman Melville that turns into a graduate seminar:

• Melville the simple travel writer who gives us simple tales of the Pacific, whaling, and pretty island girls.
  
• Melville who in his early career is a big success.
  
• Melville whose greatest work, Moby Dick, is a hopelessly boring novel, cataloging in excruciatingly dull detail every aspect of the whaling business, its tools, rituals, and practices.
  
• The average reader hates it. But feels guilty for hating it. And just wants to finish it so they can read something else!
  
• And why? In order to get to the good stuff, Melville must ground you in that world. He must demonstrate without a doubt that the madness of Ahab and the great White Whale spring only from the unknowable heart of the captain of and the uncontrollable violence of the oceans and the sea. The book is nearly impossible to read because Melville must convince you that Ahab's obsession is his own, and that it goes beyond the rational.
• With the closing chapters, that's what you get. An epic, biblical battle of man and beast.
  
• But, with Moby Dick, Melville himself seems to lose his ability to see the relationship between ideas and things. He abandons logic and his every sentence destroys itself with contradiction and irrationality. He has become alienated from those impulses that made for safe, popular fiction.
• Until, that is, late in life he rediscovers the ability of imaginative association and writes Billy Budd.
  

It's a fascinating reading of the work, and as I am still reading Moby Dick (having for years shared that same guilt over never having finished it) I found it encouraging and look forward to the Chase, First Day when Ahab and the Whale take center stage.

Kierkegaard Quote

Here's the bit from Kierkegaard that Milch likes to quote (and as difficult as it is to read Kierkegaard, this does not seem like the best translation):

Such a derived, constituted, relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another. Hence it is that there can be two forms of despair properly so called. If the human self had constituted itself, there could be a question only of one form, that of not willing to be one’s own self, of willing to get rid of oneself, but there would be no question of despairingly willing to be oneself. This formula [i.e. that the self is constituted by another] is the expression for the total dependence of the relation (the self namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation. Indeed, so far is it from being true that this second form of despair (despair at willing to be one’s own self) denotes only a particular kind of despair, that on the contrary all despair can in the last analysis be reduced to this. If a man in despair is as he thinks conscious of his despair, does not talk about it meaninglessly as of something which befell him (pretty much as when a man who suffers from vertigo talks with nervous self-deception about a weight upon his head or about its being like something falling upon him, etc., this weight and this pressure being in fact not something external but an inverse reflection from an inward experience), and if by himself and by himself only he would abolish the despair, then by all the labor he expends he is only laboring himself deeper into a deeper despair. The disrelationship of despair is not a simple disrelationship but a disrelationship in a relation which relates itself to its own self and is constituted by another, so that the disrelationship in that self-relation reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power which constituted it.

This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it.

Talk Amongst Yourselves, Part 3

Milch wants us to move from the fanciful associations we have to the imaginative associations we can share with others.

From "Tell Me A Story" by Robert Penn Warren:

Tell me a story.


In this century, and moment, of mania,

Tell me a story.


Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.


The name of the story will be Time,

But you must not pronounce its name.


Tell me a story of deep delight.

Later, we learn that writing is the process of accumulating images so that the fanciful associations of the dead past are transformed into imaginative associations in the future tense of joy.

We must rest transparently in the spirit that gives us rise and reject despair. If we cannot rest transparently, and force upon it a form and logic, then we are in despair. Resting transparently requires faith.

(This notion of despair comes from Kierkegaard).

Anything you think about writing when not writing is wrong. The outline is an expression of despair.

Talk Amongst Yourselves, Part 2

More from Milch. On Paul as a writer:

That sense of being on a roll allows us to infer that the excellence of the message is based on the principles of association of its components.

We think: "oh it's the content of what he's saying." And because of all our experiences of religion, we think, "yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very good, very good thinking."

But that ain't what's going on.

It's the juxtaposition of things and the way that one begets the next until finally we have a sense of the comprehensiveness of what is being said by its rhythms and juxtapositions.

I will tell you later in this conversation or another one that content tests and verifies the implicit assumptions of form. And Paul's religious vision affirms at the level of content the perfection of the communication which he accomplishes because he has given his soul to God.

And this was a guy that did a murder.

In other words, in order to write, you must have faith in what you're doing. He reads a passage from Paul (1 Corinthians 13) and continues:

If you give your heart to the encounter with those words, you will know how to write. Because Paul had given himself the logic and it led him to murder, but the principle of association ...

Remember yesterday, I was saying, the idea that, any idea that is based on subject/object relationships (I and it, the thinker and the thought) must ultimately generate logic as its organizing principle. And must be wrong.

And logic murders faith.

That's why I don't use an outline. Because an outline is an expression of fear, and I must trust that the spirit will move with me.

I know what it is to murder and to want to be in the temple and I've been blessed to have heard the voice ask me why I persecute it. Every writer does. The trick is to train yourself to listen.

Heavy stuff. Poetic nonsense. Profound. (It's also important to note that he's speaking without notes -- true to form. Putting these ideas together as if they're coming off the top of his head).

Talk Amongst Yourselves

Topics for further study taken from David Milch's first lecture:

• Paul the Apostle
• The Bicameral Mind
• Echolalia is Tourette's, Glossolalia is "speaking in tongues"

Main Ideas:

• Disregard for organizing principles
• Faith through works

No Outlines

A series of lectures given in December by David Milch are now available online. Milch is famous for his work on Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Deadwood, and most recently John From Cincinnati.

These lectures are brilliant, challenging, hugely entertaining, and sometimes maddening. There's no question that Milch is a talented writer, but his real gift is telling stories in the old-fashioned mode of the raconteur. He's the loudest guy in the bar and he can talk all night to anyone willing to listen. And of course it has to be bar because Milch comes from the school of writing for tough guys -- hard drinkers, drug abusers, wife beaters, guys with "boundary issues." If you want to be a writer you better come from alcoholic parents who beat you to sleep every night while they gambled away the family fortune and left you with a child molester for a baby sitter. If you're going to write, you've got to get down and dirty, and bring it, because Milch is the kind of guy who will wrestle you to the ground and beat you with his words until you cry uncle. This is serious stuff here.

There's a lot of psychologizing in Milch's thought process. For him, the writer is a deeply wounded person who through childhood traumas has been made to feel apart from the world. Writing is the process the writer uses to bring himself back into the community by transforming those wounds into art. The goal is to be authentic. To be honest and true and not use your writing to bury those wounds or disguise them. You've got to bring them right out into the harsh light and make what's personal and hurtful to you, universal and profound to the reader.

But Milch is not just lecturing, he's telling stories, and the wilder and more obnoxious he gets the more you realize that he's putting on a demonstration. He's proving a point. Your reactions to him are the Q.E.D. of his method because he wants to provoke you. That's what good writing is supposed to do.

No outlines!

That's the thing that gets you, as you sit there listening, trying to be a good student of the "How To Write" school. He offers up no paradigm, no thoughts on 3 act, 4 act, 5 act structure. No recommendations on how to break a story down into beats. For Milch that's the Ego's way of keeping you from writing. You have to get past all of that and write. Writing is writing. Thinking about writing is NOT writing. You've got to dig down into your Id and let it speak.

It's a nice antidote to Dramatica and the Hero's Journey and all of the Structuralist methods you're likely to encounter out there in the marketplace. On the other hand, I remember a lot of wannabe writers from my student days who shared Milch's personality but none of his talent. They wanted to be Beats, to write from their hearts, experience everything, tap into the wild untapped imagination of the world, and sing, sing, O muse. But their work was sloppy, unedited, and often unreadable. They had no discipline, no willingness to rewrite, to critical eye for murdering darlings. Everything they wrote, they assumed, was good, because it had come in the heat of inspiration. Going back would just kill it.

In the end, they failed Milch's last test which is to take what's meaningful to oneself, and tell it in a way that's meaningful to others. He borrows from Coleridge's distinction between Fanciful associations which are mechanical and personal and Imaginative associations which are organic and communal.

Milch also has interesting things to say about St. Paul, Kirkegaard, Melville and many other poetic theories that I didn't quite catch the first time. Well worth another listen.

[via Jill Golick's Running With My Eyes Closed]