The City Our Writing Teacher: Success as Disintegration
Enrique Martinez Celaya, Quiet Night (Recollection) II, 1999
by Mary Rakow
We see disintegration in the city all the time. New objects become trash. Dumpsters fill up and are emptied. Streets are torn up, sewer lines replaced. Cars fall apart, are repaired.
But we shy away from disintegration because it’s scary. We can’t control it. We don’t know where it’s going. And as writers, with our work, it’s doubly troubling because when we write we’re doing the opposite. We’re building a world. Then we work hard to put our story into the larger world. We’re builders. Builders of meaning.
Enrique Martinez Celaya graciously gave permission for this large painting to grace the cover of the original hardback edition of The Memory Room. He’d never allowed his work to be used on a book jacket before. But he’d read my manuscript and agreed. I’ve mentioned him before. I’m very fond of his work and his thinking and we’re now friends. I was invited to write a book on his working methods as a visual artist, Enrique Martínez Celaya Working Methods. He teaches me many things. And was the first person to teach me about disintegration.
Counterpoint Press thought this painting would be great too. And they were hospitable when I asked if I could approve the layout of the first page. I wanted just the one line of text. Because the silence and emptiness of the blank page are very important to me and the relationship of the ink to the white, Jack Shoemaker, the publisher, allowed me to approve not only the first, but every single page of that 511 page book. Both Enrique and Jack were very good to me!
But when the book arrived and I was flipping through, I was shocked because petals from the painting were scattered across the pages inside the book, by the graphic artist. I contacted Enrique, really scared. But with great calmness he said he liked his work disintegrating over mine. That really surprised me. And made me think. This is what I have figured out:
We do not live alone, we live in a culture. We live in a community. Even I do, as an urban hermit. And if we make something that is really good, it will disintegrate. It will become part of the very culture that holds it and holds us.
Our relationship to the work will change, will dissolve over time. And we need to not be afraid of this. It is inevitable. We know the music of Mozart, few know Mozart as a person, much less his relationship to his work.
In the end it is the work that will enter the world, not us, the maker.
Take the young man who designed the first Apple logo. None of us know his name. If we care about design, like I do, we may know Jony Ive, Dieter Rams and of course, Jobs himself. But we don’t know this other person. That relationship is totally lost. His idea got streamlined again and again with every new leap to success of Apple’s growing presence in the world.
Things dropped away because the brand became ever more recognizable. Here’s an example of the logo from about the halfway point in its distillation. Do we need the rainbow now? No. Do we need the company name? No. The work itself is fully digested by our global culture. All the extra stuff has dropped away.
I had my own super small version of this experience.
A friend told me that quotes from The Memory Room were appearing on mugs and T-shirts sold online. Not my name, not the book’s title. And of course not an entire page of the book, much less the book itself. Just the single sentence. The whole book reduced to one line. And put on mugs. These were the favorites:
Time, on its own, heals nothing.
Maybe Cubism started this way. Memory re-arranging a face.
Some people underestimate how erotic it is to be understood.
This last one also appeared on websites she sent me. Some sites were sort of soft-porn. The line just floated, or prompted a blog post. The visuals on the sites cracked me up as I’m a fairly prim person. It was a very unforeseen juxtaposition for me to see. But I was excited. And found it touching. Partly because I still think it’s true. It is very erotic to be understood by another person. It’s a deep and accountable pleasure. So I liked all of these occurrences which were even more weird to me, as I’m online so little. But it was super wonderful because the book was interacting with the world in a way that was alive.
Here’s another example:
When Counterpoint purchased my second book, This Is Why I Came, the launch party was set for December. I’d read and do a Q&A, etc., in a small art gallery I frequented here in SF. Very exciting.
But two months earlier, in October, on my birthday, I woke up with a surprising and intense desire to have my work in the world, now! Like then I would feel complete and nothing else would matter. I just really wanted to have it physically in the city. I just wanted the pages to touch the city.
I didn’t have the manuscript, but I had the file. I got up, printed it out and took it outside. It was a beautiful, clear fall day. I set the first page on a bench in the park by the Transamerica building. I left a page in a dressing room at Neiman Marcus. I walked further, set a page in a dressing room at Ross. High end clothes and low. In the produce section of Safeway, on top of some pears, a page at a bus stop.
Each page would have its own destiny. Blown away, peed on by a dog, swept up by the janitorial staff, glanced at, set down. It felt so, so good!
I did, however, feel troubled by two things: first, I was littering. Second, Counterpoint owned the book, even in manuscript form. Those loose pages weren’t mine anymore. S it was a form of theft. But I did it anyway. It felt exactly right.
I didn’t tell Jack right away. But when I did, he was delighted. Thankfully! But he’s a very wonderful and unusual person.
The cause of our suffering, in Buddhist teaching, is attachment. We are attached to things, to ideas, to ourselves, to life itself and this causes suffering because change is constant. Things are born and die. Things are built and destroyed.
When we write we are building a world. One that we can see and feel that is invisible until we put it on the page. But to build something of true value we need to incorporate the universal fact, the ancient fact, the perennial fact of disintegration.
Martinez Celaya makes a painting and parts of it are scattered over a book he did not make. My words go on mugs. The Apple logo is pure white. It’s reached it’s conclusion. Someone comes to my reading and asks a question that has nothing to do with the book as I understand it or intended it, and yet the book becomes even more itself in the process. And I grow from that person. And the feeling is joy! The book needs the world. And the world will change the book.
So we engage in this paradoxical thing of building up the presence of our work in the world, and detaching from it. Letting the world do what it will. It’s a tension, just like the other tensions we’ve explored in this blog. We have to hold Fast and Slow, Minimalism and Extravagance, etc.
But why? Why do we have to hold them? Because as artists, we have to try to be as complex as our own human nature. And we have to let the world be as complex as the world actually is.
To simplify the world so that we feel secure all the time is just nuts. It’s better to keep moving toward being able to tolerate more complexity, more paradoxes, more diversity. I think this task is infinite. To grow and disintegrate and grow more deeply and to disintegrate again. This is what courage demands both for us as persons on the planet and for us as writers. And to find joy in this.
Why do we have to hold this paradox of success as disintegration? Because we can. Of all the created order, we alone can. Human beings alone, can. This is our calling. This is our privilege. This is our joy.
Fun Links:
Short piece on the evolution of the Apple logo, https://www.tailorbrands.com/blog/apple-logo
Website for Martinez Celaya
https://www.martinezcelaya.com/work.html
Exercises:
- Go to a place where you are not known. Where you have no platform except your own existence. How does it feel? Give these feelings to a character in the work you’re now writing. Create a scene around this feeling.
- Print out a page of your current work and put it outside in an unprotected spot. How does that feel? The page will change. You can watch it change or you can put it in a distant location and turn your back. Either way. It will disintegrate. But if someone reads a line of it, they may remember those words for 50 years.
Thank You!
This is the last post for the year. It’s been fun! Great thanks to those who commented and enriched it! And much thanks to those who left Reviews on my new Google Maps Business Page. It really helps other writers find me.
If you or a friend need an editor I’m booking for 2023. I’d love to hear from you.
Good writing! Happy Holidays! Stay brave!
Mary
© Mary Rakow 2022
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A freelance editor living in the Bay Area, Mary Rakow, Ph.D. works with clients who are both local and global. She is both rigorous and encouraging, insightful and kind.
A theologian with graduate degrees from Harvard Divinity School and Boston College, Mary writes with deep feeling and a questioning faith. This Is Why I Came earned outstanding reviews in The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Commonweal, Christian Century, O Magazine, Ploughshares. It appeared on reading lists for courses at both Princeton and Yale.
Graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from UC Riverside, inducted into Alpha Sigma Nu for her doctoral work, Rakow is a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellow. She received two Lannan residencies and two residencies at Whale & Star, in the studio of visual artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, where she wrote the first book-length treatment of his work, Martinez Celaya, Working Methods (2014).
Rakow’s debut novel, The Memory Room, received outstanding reviews and was shortlisted for the Stanford University International Saroyan Prize in Literature, a PEN USA/West Finalist in Fiction and was listed among the Best Books of the West by The Los Angeles Times.
Mary is a beloved editor and writing coach. She is constantly on the lookout for new writers, both those who are just starting out and those with publications and writing accolades.
Maybe following a path into complexity, paradox and diversity is the catalyst to disintegration, which naturally leans toward more simplicity. Discovering the essence (“basic invariable nature or significant individual features”) of people is the path to understanding each other. As writers, we have to be open to the concept that some paths may lead to understanding and other paths may lead us to the story. Taking a risk, going left instead of right, putting pages of your most intimate writing in the open hands of the city, are simple ways to embrace the complexity of ourselves and the city.
Agreed.
Disintegration! A very complex, yet very simple, idea. I’m still processing the article but found it got my thoughts flowing.
Thanks, Mary.