near wild heaven

This is now, this is here, this is me, this is what I wanted you to see.

Forgive the single letter, I believe an "h," that was my last post. For some reason I cannot see my home page from the control panel, even as I can see it perfectly when I simply type in the address on my browser. So I was testing things. I'm trying hard to rig this computer up to work until I can scrap the unfortunately-conceived hunk of metal--story to follow--and pony up to buy a Dell.

This computer was built by a former friend of mine, during a peak in our friendship, when hopes were high. I had just moved to Ames to begin my graduate career (a career which has ended only last week) and my former friend and his long-term girlfriend and I were living together, roommates. My former friend I have known since the second grade, and we found ourselves in precisely the same line of work--writing fiction, mainly short stories. After a year out in the cold, feeling as far from anything that mattered as I ever had, I welcomed this new phase in our friendship. I welcomed the prospect of taking classes together, becoming closer as friends, learning from each other. This former friend of mine is as smart as they come, both in terms of raw intelligence and in the ability to apply his smarts into actual learning. That's a crucial step, and he had been taking it since high school. In Ames, I hoped only to begin taking such strides, to remake myself in graduate school into a serious student of what I valued most. I was eager for the chance to do that, and to take a place alongside my former friend as a man who knew how to learn.

I did learn a lot during that year we three lived together. My former friend offered to help me build a computer, this computer, convincing me that a self-built computer was much better than a factory-produced one. He's probably right, if you know as much about what goes on inside a computer tower as does my former friend. He's a detail man, but I never knew how that quality, admirable in so many, manifested itself in him as narrow and fussy. As a quality that renders judgements on a person due to incomplete information that happens to fall within whatever perspective he is able to assume. I get ahead of the story: he built this computer, put it together from a foreign-looking assortment of sensitive computer hardware, and we were off.

The computer was beset by problems almost immediately, and some version of them persist to this day. At first, my former friend was eager to help. Gradually he became less willing and by the end of the year I was taking my computer to specialists in town,one of whom sold me a video card when I actually needed a different part. Which goes to show you that your fellow man will shit on your face at least as often as he won't. Not that I import this worldview onto every person--but in certain contexts I find it useful. Like in graduate school, which was for me equally friendly and scathing. And this is a lesson I learned from my former friend, and it is the last thing he ever taught me, and unfortunately, it is the only thing I can remember about him now.

That October, I took weekend possession of my former friend's coffee maker without first securing his permission. I took it with me to Iowa City, and that Sunday I received a call from him. Bear in mind that he didn't really know where I was staying in Iowa City, but with his smarts it was no sweat tracking me down to express, in tones both solemn and condescending, just how wrong I was to have taken his belonging, and to reject my apology as insincere. What followed in the days after my return was bizarre. My former friend spoke to me only long enough to ban me from ever using his coffee maker again, and he did not speak to me for nearly a week.

But why linger on such a piddling matter? I hear you asking. I feel the same way, but the situation forced contemplation. Situations like this were contemplated still more, by me, as I learned of the word on the street about me and my ways, word that had been disseminated even before I arrived in Ames, word that had come from the mouth and the fingertips of my former friend. That I was, let's say, fickle, a womanizer, flighty, perhaps even unreliable. He was feeding this information, among other people, to the woman who would eventually become my girlfriend, and who is still my girlfriend despite my former friend's objections, which were many and varied. Of these acts, however, my former friend felt himself above reproach, he must have, right, for he could carry on ignoring me over a modest error in judgement even as he had already booby-trapped my arrival in Ames, where he had been for a year already. The full breadth of this duplicity revealed itself over the entire year, in small, painful revelations and whispers from colleagues who had turned their backs on my former friend. All the while, my former friend and his silent girlfriend liked to complain in blogs on this very internet that I had not refilled the ice tray before a week-long absence. Their eye for detail was truly striking.

I was no angel. Once our friendship began its winding tailspin, lengthened to nearly unbearable extents due to our living situation, I took to having sex with my girlfriend on my futon in the middle of the evening, sending vibrations raining down on my roommates as they dined on homemade falaffel or prepared martinis to sip in front of their monstrous computers. I take satisfaction to this day imagining them hunched over books, or turning up the television volume, as I crescendoed to another squeaky orgasm in the bedroom directly above them.

Why am I writing about this? Why haven't I forgotten all about this by now? These are events from three years ago, after all, and my life has been enriched by this disappointment. It's true. I know now who to call my friends, and why. Jeanette Winterson writes in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, regarding intimacy and relationships: "One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that's quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It's not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on someone else's" (171). What I learned was that my former friend was not on my side, not really. Perhaps he didn't have much respect for me, for reasons only he can know. But I do know that his actions were disrespectful of a friendship. If I do something wrong, tell me about it. And don't use it to shame me. Be straight with me. Seek to work things out. Damn, these seem so basic, and yet I can count on two hands strangers I have met, who have become my friends, with whom I share the mutual respect and history of a long friendship.

I do not want to be betrayed. I may expect it from people who are not my friends, and I will take all measures to redress such betrayals. From friends, I want people who are on my side, who pull for me, and who desire that sort of goodwill from me. Because I want to rip open my chest and hand over my heart. I will do anything for a friend. I learned all about this from my former friend, in my meditations on him after he had moved away from Ames. He wasn't my friend. I was betrayed by him in fundamental ways, secretly assailing my good character even as he ignored me over a purloined coffeemaker.

When I was phoned by Geoffrey Wolff two years ago, and told that I had earned one of the six annual spots in this fiction program, I called all my friends. They were thrilled for me. My parents were thrilled. My girlfriend was happy for me. Getting into the program here was and is an unbelievable opportunity to grow and learn as a writer and person; it is a supremely good thing. I cannot now imagine doing without it.

Which brings us to the final word. My former friend gradually got wind of my acceptance to the MFA program that had rejected him the year before--and here I should note that this very program also rejected me once, in 1999--and what I learned from his response is as follows. He had that week received a negative review of a story in his own workshop, and that coupled with my good news sent him into a funk that nearly landed him as a graduate school dropout. When he heard my good news, it meant bad news for him. I don't think he was ever on my side. I don't think he was ever pulling for me, or wanting good things to happen for me.

That is something I learned in graduate school.

posted by: zithereen at June 24, 2004 00:26 | link | comments (3) |

h

posted by: zithereen at June 23, 2004 23:00 | link | comments (1) |

I suppose it hasn't all been daisies around here. Mark, the guy who led workshop last quarter, read my thesis and offered his frank assessment of the situation with my writing in a meeting at his Palos Verdes office last Wednesday. (Insert here a long pause while Stony Z searches frantically for a lighter than had been in his hands only moments before, and which he still cannot find now, settling instead for the brief opportunities of matches.) He's hopeful for me--he likes my work ethic--but he has his concerns, which seem to, say, get all up in my kitchen. As in they seize directly the middle of my very soul, it seems, calling into question whether what I have "done" as a student of writing is in any way adequate. Or, to lessen the drama, whether or not I need to take myself more seriously in my next incarnation, to pursue and fight for my education when nobody is assigning books to read or imposing deadlines on my writing. Mark made very clear the relationship between studying literature and learning to write it well. And the shortcomings in my storytelling, the failure to recognize what is calling to me to a story, what really matters in this story--that kind of focus is wrought through reading the history of your kind of work. It's work that I've begun, particularly over these past four years--I have read a lot, and I have thought of myself as a writer learning from historians of the genre. These I should recognize, I must recognize, if only to encourage myself in the greater task Mark implied so clearly in our frank discussion. He is uneasy with compliment; he seems to distrust it, as if the popularly held "good" that can come from praise is a myth--that any praise at all is almost too much already. He wants to keep my nose down, keep it in the books and on the page, to the tangibles, the things I share with nobody else. How can I not love this man?  He wants that for me, and that is no small thing to wish for somebody. In a few days, everybody will stop watching; the eyes of my teachers and peers will fall away, and it will be between me and nobody else. What will I do then? That's almost what Mark seemed to be asking. This is where I think you're at, it's not where it can be, here are three books to read, what now? I'm taking that to heart. I've been hungering lately to close the gap between me and my work, and Mark's challenge coincides almost too perfectly--a coincidence, perhaps, that also asserts itself as a challenge? I should be reading constantly, almost without pause, pursuing all the work that is out there, and which is added to daily. I should be scribbling more notes, learning how to focus on the core of something, to find in it what resonates most. This is what I have in front of me; I can feel its weight bearing down, awaiting me on the other side of handshakes and congratulatory goodwill, it's been fun and all that. Then everything will change again. What do you think I'll do then?

posted by: zithereen at June 14, 2004 00:16 | link | comments (1) |

It's been awhile, sorry. I haven't even been that busy, indulging instead (and primarily) in a gradual coast out of California. My girlfriend has been here for a month, and most times I'd rather do something with her than attend too closely to my studies, much less begin anything new. I've enjoyed some companionship, the carefree breeze in the air all the sudden, admired the flawless skies and perfect temperatures, the palm trees and jade plant, my friends in this place. Tonight we had our year-end party, in Los Angeles' Chinatown, and it was so nice to see all my favorite California people collected together in one room. My whole thesis committee was there (sounds exciting, I know), my MFA peers (friends or otherwise), spouses and significant others. Free whiskey sours, beer, wine, soda, a three-course meal, mingling, a red-lit bar afterwards, a retro jukebox, an effortless freeway ride home. Tomorrow another sunny day stretches out in front of me, and manuscripts call on me to read the. And I will, and carefully. And I will write critiques, as I am given to doing. But I'm ready to keep sliding away. It's tasty; it's a sugary feeling. I'm feeling ready to see what happens next.  

posted by: zithereen at June 13, 2004 01:48 | link | comments |