All of us aspire to a life at least as free as our imagination.
-- Enrique Anderson Imbert, The Other Side of the Mirror

Much joy.  Shame.  The tension between the two gives the work its larger meaning and its strength.

I am not the first writer to feel this tension.  I am not the only one now writing who feels that a writing is not reality.  (May be a reality only.)  I am not obliged to be original in my thinking, although I hope to be original in the result of my thinking on my art.

I think of myself as an artist rather than a writer.

I may be committing here a lot of nonsense to paper. 

I am, if I had to describe myself as a writer, a fabulist.  Or an expressionist.  Or a fantasist.  I fashion artifices.  I am more likely to be moved to delight by Klee and Miró, Matisse and Joseph Cornell – his boxes, than by an author, unless the author be Agnon, Buzzati, Borges, Calvino, Cortázar – his Cronopios and Famas especially, Duerrenmatt, Hildesheimer, Ionesco, Anderson Imbert, Kafka, Kharms, Landolfi, Lem, Lettau, Meckel, or Schulz.  The preponderance of influence on my work lies outside the American and British tradition.  Obviously.  Unless the American be Donald Barthelme, or Lish, or Kenneth Koch (a magical presence in my artistic life for 30 years), or the wonderful Edson, and the Britisher be Lewis Carroll, Flann O’Brien, or Wells.  (You say that I have omitted the James Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake?  I have not read it.  I have not had the life so far to dedicate to it.  I’ll dream my own Night Town.)

I have read Tender Buttons and am mystified, as I am sometimes in the presence of one of Cornell’s boxes.  I am amused.  I play Stein’s games.  I like sometimes to be mystified. 

I like fables and fairy tales.  They show the bones of the world or its sickness.  They are often homicidal, are they not?  And dangerous.  I was taught in college to despise them.  I went to college in the 60’s; but that despite lingered for a long time, until 1977 when I discovered Ionesco, Arrabal, and Duerrenmatt, who are also dangerous.

Name-dropping?  To know what a person reads is interesting.  That the reading each of us does may not be the same reading is also interesting.  The difference advances the sum of knowledge for us all.

I dwell on all this because I believe one is the sum of his influences. 

Who does not?

The sum and then some little more hopefully, which is, finally, his own.

The authors I have named are those in permanent residence on the bookcase next to my bed.  I have a thousand other books on other bookcases in my house.  What a man has on his shelves is the surest insight into this character, his mind, his style, his vision.

Why do I and others of my contemporaries studiously avoid “story” to describe what it is they make?  Could it be that we are distancing ourselves from a worn-out literary tradition?  Or are we embarrassed by an inability to plot?  To devise anecdotes?

To me the psychological tradition is played out.  But that is only my opinion.  Others believe otherwise and produce compelling work.  What matters is the result of one’s opinion.

I may believe something entirely different next year.  What matters is what will result from that belief.

A carpenter makes a cabinet.  No one questions the cabinet’s realism or lack of realism.  Fiction ought to enjoy the same prerogative of independent existence: it is, after all, another act of making, of facture, a fabrication.  They are, all of them, cognate.

A cabinet is not obliged to be anything more than it is, a cunningly crafted collection of materials, regardless of to what ultimate use or disuse it is put.  It is under no obligation to signify.  A fictional text can exist independent of the consensus of reality and still serve various ends outside itself.  For me, these ends are pleasure, surprise, delight, and occasionally mystification.  Even deliberate obscurity has its uses, although it can be irritating.

Occasionally the cabinet may even illuminate psychological or social dimensions.  How can it not, being, as it must be, in the world – a world with those dimensions?  So long as it is understood that they are not the sole measure of the world.

My great grandfather’s wire-rims are inside a cabinet that stands in my living room – a bequest.  There are also my grandmother’s opera glasses, old photos, and other things, some whose meaning escapes me, such as a handsome hardwood box filled with orange sticks of a material and use unknown to me.  The photos, too, are mysteries to me, even those in which the subjects are known. 

Life is a mystery to me.  Why should my fiction be less mysterious than life?

The sticks are red, not orange.  Why did I lie to you?  Why did I wait until 
the third draft of this meditation to emend what I knew to be a 
misrepresentation of reality? 

To be a fiction.

Why am I now admitting to a lie?  What can it possibly matter to you whether the sticks are orange or red?

In fact, they are a reddish-orange.

I wish my stories to be museums in which can be found the extraordinary, sometimes forgotten, debris of the world. 

Or, as they were sometimes called in the early nineteenth century:

Cabinets of Wonders.

Dreams.  I do not despise my dreams.  I would practice palmistry, if only I might be vouchsafed a glimpse of my unconscious mind.  I have ransacked encyclopediae, why not pursue the arcane, the discredited, the ridiculous?

I do not despise the ridiculous.  I am often so.

I believe in the magical and tonic power of the unconscious.  And hope to use it.

I am not comfortable writing this essay.  I am not an essayist.  I am probably not much of an original thinker.  I am certainly not a theoretician.  I know little enough about schools of literary criticism beyond those I touched on in teaching literature to prisoners in state and federal institutions.  I did this for ten years.  I did it three or four nights a week, two, sometimes three semesters a year, to make myself useful after a career of uselessness.  I am an advertising copywriter.  My embarrassment at being an advertising copywriter is genuine. 

If this essay embarrasses me, I hope that the editors of Linnaean Street will suppress it.  It may be pretentious twaddle.  I would rather be known for my cabinets – my fictions – my stories than this essay.  What I think or don’t think is not very important.

The play of intellect also needs fostering.  There are, in certain of my fictions, toys for the imagination.  I like to play.  I like to be made to laugh the way reading Dickens when I was a boy made me laugh.

I like the circus toys Calder invented for the amusement of his friends more than I like his mobiles.  I like his mobiles very much.

I like the Surrealists when they are playful.

I like Miró’s ladders, his personages.  I like Klee’s comic little figures.  I like Patchen’s gay and wistful characters.  I like the strange and gruesome world of the wonderful Edson.

Words are a shadow universe in the way an x-ray is a shadow image of inside the body.  The notion frightens me.  Amusement and dread are locked in the same idea of language. 

My work has been called theater.  This is very much to the point of my enterprise.  Text as stage.  The white page “blocked” with notations for the actors of my little stage engines that produce sometimes nothing more important than an ape dressed in yellow gloves and spats dueling with cigars for the love of Mrs. Willoughby.

Sometimes my ideas are significant.  Sometimes my theaters presume to take on the most profound metaphysical questions of the age.  Why should they not?  I am of my age and think the big thoughts that all men think.

I believe that the value of my work lies in its inclusiveness, which cannot be apparent in the reading of only one or two stories.

When I send stories to a journal (such as Linnaean Street), this is what I have to say about them:
 

The 44 linked stories of A History of the Imagination plot the mythic intersection of illustrious personalities from the 20th century's formative years who have come to figure prominently in our consciousness.  In a fictional landscape derived largely from Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 natural history, African Game Trails, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness – a large ensemble of characters enact metaphysical and aesthetic comedies that illuminate present preoccupations.  By defining the outset of our era, I hope to explain – in part – its end.

In A History of the Imagination, I assume that significant ideas are more powerful – and motile – than the persons who conceive them.  Seminal ideas are embodied in fictional characters, loosely based on historical originals, who are brought – by the author – to an Africa of the Imagination.

Themes?  Desire and anxiety, certainly.  And language – words,  always.

But lest the reader be put off by the overly theoretical bent of the author, it must be noted than these are comic stories of absurd circumstance.

I worked on this statement for many weeks.  I believe it is true. 

Human error, then, still operated here: mystery and freedom were still in the realm of possibility.
--Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

I came to write the first stories that would six years later become A History of the Imagination as a game of chance.  I was reading Cage. I liked the possibilities for play in his aleatory games.  I wanted to make a box full of Duchampian readymades.  I wanted to fashion some toys for myself.

I have a book on the shelf, a first edition of African Game Trails, published in 1912 by Theodore Roosevelt.  The book had belonged to my great-grandfather.  My mother had played “library” with it when she was a girl.  My great-aunt had given it to me twenty years before I first “consulted it.”  For reasons unknown to me, I decided one hot July afternoon to write a brief African story.  I wrote it in the manner of Hemingway.  I liked the result.  I decided to write another and remembered the book and, opening it at random, plundered – or, as I called it then “colonized” – descriptive bits on the African flora and fauna for my own. 

I liked the result.  The piece had authenticity.  (T.R. is a damned good naturalist writer!)

I did it again.

And again.  I wanted to see if an entire fictional universe could be built up from randomly seized (appropriated) bits of the Roosevelt.

A world opened.  An Africa of the Imagination.  (Not a real Africa at all.)  And as I played with my texts, I forgot the rules of the game: that only cribbed bits of the original text be used in composition.  I found my own stories.  Roosevelt’s real-life characters (for I had appropriated them as well) became transformed into my own characters.  His Mombasa became my Mombasa.

And then, a year into the writing, the first of the historical figures walked on stage:  Méliès.  He was there, on the edge of the text, looking in at the action, observing.  A decoration.  (A whimsy!)  A small, walk-on role.  I wasn’t even conscious of him, as an actor.  But my subconscious was, had to be – for Méliès changed the course of the book.  It soon became what it is, as I have described it above.  The first dozen stories were discarded, as one might discard cards which are dealt one to no advantage.  I had discovered a narrative possibility, an adventure.  A hand to play out.

The work became, if you will forgive me, profound: about ideas, about existence, about how we know what we know and why it may be mistaken.  It remains, however, a game.

I believe that language is a universe.  That it may be the most important of all universes.  (It is for me.)  I believe that it exists in its own right and on its own terms.  That it is articulated by its own grammar (its physical laws).  That it offers the intrepid writer and reader freedom.  That it also reflects the other universes, that they may be impossible without it, for it names them and its parts.

This is rhetorical.  I am often in danger of rhetoric.

There is an evening in which the moon lies at the full on the Lorian Swamp.  The evening is, the moon is, the swamp is – regardless if there is anyone there to name them.  But to name the parts is to relate them to the whole.  Is to make a landscape.  An idea of order, or disorder.  Is to make a story or a poem.  Is to bring meaning to the bits.  Is to make the universe which, after all, was without form until “Genesis” named them.

Or am I wrong?

Is there not great danger in this delight in fabrication?  Is it not a lie?  Is not my vision anarchic? Fascistic? Irresponsible? 

Or am I wrong?

When there is an error in the genetic code, adaptation may begin and with it evolution.

Or malignancy.

Who can tell in what jeopardy we may be placed by our fiction-making?  By an ape in yellow gloves and spats?  By refusing the laws of gravity?  By willfulness?

Who can tell what rapture?

The ambivalence again.  The old anxiety.

Image: Joseph Cornell, "Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery," 1943, Des Moines Art Center, from WebMuseum Paris. Photograph by Mark Harden.