Happy Birthday, Bernarr

Today is the birthday of the central figure of my book: Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of True Story magazine and prime mover in the "undressing of America." He'd have been 140 years old if his natural health ideas had worked as well as he said they would. I think I'll toast him by starting work on the next draft, the first "submittable draft" of Chapter 1. He was never a guy who shied away from reckless action, after all. And certainly never a guy who wasted time thinking....

The Writer Whisperer

I just found my new words to live by—in PetCo. I had to buy a Ph test kit for my kid's aquarium (for months the water's running acidic, and then I give it a little NaHCO3 goose and it jumps to pure-blue alkilinity—I figured I should buy a new test in case the old one was going whacky, but no) and while I was standing in line I started reading a poster advertising a new book by this guy who calls himself the Dog Whisperer. Three big words, his guiding principles, across the bottom:



EXERCISE. DISCIPLINE. AFFECTION.



And I thought, "That's what I need." I roll out of bed and go straight to my computer—until after Labor Day, when I'll roll out of bed, wake my kid up, drive him to school, and then go straight to my computer—check my email to make sure I still exist and didn't fade away during the night, mess with my Facebook page (which of course I only use to "promote my work"), check Google News ("Oh my God McCain's closing the gap again!"), and go to my blog pages and Red Room to see if anyone's commented. Somewhere in there I'll drink coffee, maybe eat something, and walk the dog. Then maybe I'll blog about how I'm not getting enough work done. For some reason.


      But these are things that I know from experience make me feel better and lead to more productivity: Running. (Lately I've been using the old "I'm too busy" excuse. Except that I secretly know that when I was running every other day months ago, 30-70 minutes per run, I was getting more work done than now.) Having to do work now because I have a deadline. (Best thing I've ever written was the Men of Tomorrow screenplay, up against the wall of the Guild strike.) And community. (In person, not electronically mediated. Sharing pages with writers. Meetings of this spiritual group I'm in. Talking to my family without a computer on my lap and one eye on the screen.) 



      Exercise, discipline, and affection make me happy, relaxed, productive, and well-behaved. But by some perversion of personality or old habit I pull toward indolence, chaos, and isolation. I need somebody to show up with a leash, that's all.

Out of Sheer Masochism

Some of my friends are jumping on me as I talk about my procrastination: "Snap out of it! Quit complaining and write!" What they don't understand is what a strange pleasure it is to be caught in that suspense: haunted by the book, putting notes and words down, throwing them away, never quite able to pull that trigger, say "This is it." It's an electric place. Tremendously alive. Full of possibilities that can't be grasped, ghosts in the corners. Agonizing—but sweet.

     It's not the high of pouring out good material, but a lot more fun than just doing work. And things come out of it too. All those insights I had in Ojai, about Bernarr and Mary Macfadden acting out the 20th Century drama of the Self, which shifted the orientation of the book and keep opening to new ideas—those came because I was fretting about the book but wasn't in a flow working on the book as it was. As much as I grind my teeth and say, "I should be months into the actual writing of a draft," the truth is that the draft I would have started months ago may not have been nearly as good as the book I'm still building up to.

      My favorite book about writing is Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. Which is actually a book about not writing. Dyer told himself that he was going to write either a critical biography or a novel about his literary hero, D. H. Lawrence. What he actually did was squander years of his life, and a significant amount of his publisher's money, "researching" the book and frantically, angrily, insanely procrastinating. The title comes from a quote of Lawrence's, who went through similar agonies trying to write about his own hero, Thomas Hardy, before finally writing it "out of sheer rage." But Dyer's rage—although it builds relentlessly and poisons every last experience—never even drives him to write the Lawrence book. It only drives him to write a book about not writing the Lawrence book. And it's funny as hell. In a nauseating sort of way.
     

      This is the single most-recommended book about writing among the writers I know. But never quite out loud: it's never assigned at a writing workshop or listed on the website of any writer trying to sell his services as a coach or teacher. It's whispered about at intimate parties and passed from hand to hand in communal workspaces, like The Gulag Archipelago in the USSR. Because it tells a terrible truth about the writerly personality: we don't just have terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. We love having terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. The pain just feels so good.

      But of course that doesn't make our suffering seem noble, or even like just a minor neurosis to be banished by "shut up and do it" homilies. It makes us look like a bunch of freaky masochists. So please...don't tell anyone!

With Brush in Hand

As I got to work today, all the repellent implications of Caroline Paul's "sometimes you have to approach writing like cleaning the toilet" became clear to me. If writing is like kneeling on the floor with a round-headed brush, then what exactly are the words in my first draft? Nothing I didn't already know they were, I guess... But here's the good thing I've discovered: if you approach writing as cleaning, then the bad stuff, the feculence that must be effaced, is at least part of a job. For the first time I can welcome lousy sentences. That ridiculously self-conscious opening paragraph that strains to create a mood of urgency but says nothing concrete...it doesn't mean I failed! It means another piece of glittering porcelain to be revealed! Which means that I don't have to be afraid of...of...producing bad writing. I owe it to myself! (I was going to say I don't have to be afraid of putting out crap. But every metaphor has to know when to stop.)

It Has to Get Done

At the SF Writers Grotto about twelve of us are in this mutual goal-setting group. We meet every other Wednesday, tell whether we met our writing goals for the previous fortnight (you get a star on a white board if you did, you have to kick in five bucks to a group kitty if you didn't), spend most of an hour sharing thoughts on why we did or didn't and how to improve our work habits, then set new goals for next time. We call ourselves the Borstians, because it's a spin-off of a workshop we did with a great coach and consultant named Martha Borst. Our basic operating principle is that if we're having trouble getting work done, it's not going to help to keep beating ourselves up about it, worrying about it in solitude, or thinking endlessly about "what's wrong with me." The way to get something done is to decide what we're going to get done by when, tell other people about it who we trust not to let us off the hook, and do it. And if we don't do it, take responsibility for that and move to the next set of goals.

      It's pretty basic stuff—but it's infernally hard. For some of us, at least. Yesterday's meeting was full of wisdom, a lot of which boiled down to "Stop thinking about your book and just sit down and write it," and everything anyone said shot through me with an "Of course!" I talked about how I was feeling a bit overwhelmed or intimidated by new insights into the theme of my book, and Ethan Watters said how the only really effective thinking for him occurs in an interaction between his thoughts and the words on the page. You can bring head-stuff to the work, but nothing really happens until you try this, discard it, try something else, discover it works, keep going from there.

      Then Caroline Paul said, "Sometimes you just have to approach writing as a thing that has to get done. Like cleaning the toilet."

      We all jumped instantly on that one. So humbling, so quotidian, so elegantly inelegant; no false glamor or self-aggrandizing agony could survive it. A way better than Sisyphus—no French novelist ever wrote an existentialist essay about cleaning toilets, as far as I know. We all reminded each other of the importance of just taking action and not chewing over why we weren't taking action, and when we adjourned I felt lighter and ready to work.

      But then a feeling of familiarity stole over me. How many times had I said and heard phrases like that? Never as elegantly apt as Caroline's toilet, but still—the words are all around us. Advertising says it: "Just do it." Recovery programs say it: "Act as if." "Do the next right thing." Entertainment says it: "Don't think. Throw." (My friend Karen Green reminded me of that line from Bull Durham the last time I was fretting about my inaction.) We say these things to each other all the time, not just writers, everybody. And why? Because we can't fucking get it, that's why. Because the excitement of realizing yet again that action is the answer is such a big mental thrill that it alone can take the place of action for hours. And by the time the thrill wears off, we're back in the thinking again. Why am I unable to apply that epiphany about the toilet bowl again...?

      It is true, though, I know that. And when I wake up and start work again, it's Caroline's analogy I'll reach for first. I have to confess, though, when Caroline said that about the toilet bowl, my first thought was to wonder if I can get my cleaning lady to write my first draft.

The Haunting

This is the phase of every book that I call the Haunting. Actually, I've never called it that, I just all of a sudden thought of it. But it fits. It's when everywhere I go, everything I see, reminds me of the book. Even when I'm not writing it, even when I'm strenuously avoiding it, I find myself trying to connect every experience to it. I would say that's a good omen for actually getting it written except I'm afraid of jinxing it.

     What the book's haunting now is Ojai. My son and his mom flew to San Diego to meet me for half of the comic book convention and we spent a few days driving back to SF together. My first visit to Ojai, which Jennie's been wanting me to see for years. It's my kind of place, all right: hill-nestled oak valley, hot dry summer, white stucco, Spanish revival buildings, Arts and Crafts furniture, a main street colonnade, working fountains, outdoor dining, orange groves, ancient pepper trees, old Hollywood connections. My personal heaven, right this moment, would be Ojai with a gift certificate at Hacienda Antiques. But what put me in mind of the book was the role Ojai played in the history of 20th Century spirituality.

      The Theosophical Society was a Victorian "spiritualist" group, one of those séance-and-medium deals, a lot of clairvoyants with huge beards and black-garbed ladies with scary gleams in their eyes, but one that opened up to an interest in Buddhism and Hinduism before such things were fashionable in America and England. They were a weird bunch, mixing valuable scholarship and social work with a cultish belief in the imminent coming of the World Teacher, the new incarnation of the Christ. Then, in 1909, one of their leaders discovered a beautiful, dreamy, gazelle-eyed, 13-year-old Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti and declared that this was Him for whom they waited. The Theosophists persuaded the boy's father to allow them to adopt both him and his younger brother, and for the next thirteen years Jiddu was raised to become the new Christ.

      Part of the job of the World Teacher turned out to be lecture tours. In 1922, needing rest after an exhausting world circuit, concluding with a long voyage from Sydney to Los Angeles in the close company of his Theosophical handlers, Jiddu was allowed a little R&R in a cottage in a secluded California valley—Ojai—owned by one of his followers. His handlers mostly left him alone, and in the company of his brother and some Ojai neighbors and a few lower-level Theosophists more inclined to honor than indoctrinate him, he began to see things in a new way. He experienced the first of a series of spiritual crises that would eventually lead him to break from the Society and deny that he was any sort of Christ. He was no more, he realized, than a man with the opportunity, the knowledge, and the temperament to bring the philosophical insights of Hinduism and Buddhism to Western awareness in a way that was relevant to the modern world. He rejected organized religion as a whole, even the Hindu guru tradition, and gave his life to teaching an ethical and personalized spirituality that he hoped might lead to individual freedom and universal peace. "Truth is a pathless land," he said. The marriage of Eastern philosophy and Western individualism that underlies so much of modern spirituality and psychology was shaped more by him than any other teacher.

      Krishnamurti lived in Ojai until he died in 1986 at the age of 90, and around him the town grew into an artistic and spiritual center. It's still full of spas, art galleries, lecture facilities, and philosophical foundations, not to mention a lot of shops selling those big pink crystals and the rest of what I think of as the goofier accesories of individualized cosmology. Looking at all this in my current haunted state, I started lining up Krishnamurti's story next to the story of The Undressing of America. While the Theosophists were preparing the world for The Coming, a wave of natural-health gurus were seizing the American imagination, and just as young Jiddu was being drafted for his holy role, Bernarr Macfadden reached the first peak of his fame. Krishnamurti began to rethink his destiny during the same years Macfadden rode True Story and its tabloid children to a new kind of power and influence. And as Macfadden began to behave more weirdly, finally throwing away his own empire, Krishnamurti was coming into his own as a teacher.

      Suddenly some patterns started to emerge, and I had another one of those thrilling "So that's what this story's about!" moments. You have the messianic zeal of the early 20th Century, with all these charismatic eccentrics saying, "I have the Truth! Follow me and be saved!" Then the frightened pause of the War, and afterward a huge turn toward individualized, relativistic, experiential journeys, illuminated but not led by teachers who encouraged people to examine their own stories.

      Macfadden had always told his readers that listening to their own bodies and their own experiences was the best way to health, but in his earlier days he always drowned that out with his louder, "But of course what you will discover are the Laws of Nature, which I have already mastered." But with the publication of True Story, and its subsequent overshadowing of his health crusade, he became an intermediary for people to tell their own stories and learn by reading their peers'. Soon enough the true-story industry, the confessional culture, could roll along just fine without him, in the same way that Krishnamurti's message spread far beyond him until even his death was just a historical footnote.

      Then I started seeing the same wide cultural turn all over the place around the same time. Like how Bill Wilson and his fellow drunks seeking a spiritual solution to alcoholism made their slow, painful break from specifically Christian organizations in the early '30s to create the Twelve Step Program, the "higher power," "God as you understand God," a program that just keeps splitting and spreading and rambling along anarchically in the hands of a bunch of addicts with no leaders. Each story reveals the mechanisms, the rewards, and the costs of the same profound shift in our relationship with self and truth.

      I have a lot of those "So that's what this story's about!" moments, to the point that I could probably list twenty things the book is "about." But what starts to happen in this haunted phase is that those abouts all start to hook up and overlap, turning into one big—still probably too big, but at least comprehensible—story. Which reminds me that there may be a real reason to delay and procrastinate on writing the thing. It may still need something I haven't found yet. Like a trip to Ojai.