Miscellany, 5

Intermezzo, cont.: or, Writer’s Block

For Bill Hansen, maestro di color che sanno

One more category in my library, this time in the mental library I carry around, is that of the books I have planned to write but have not written, something like Pierre Menard‘s invisible oeuvre. Let me list them here. If you believe in the motto “Be All You Can Be” (which is either the mantra of the US Army or of the Nike Corporation, I can’t remember) then you will see how abysmally short I have fallen of my potential. On the other hand, just think how much time I have saved you and countless other readers by failing to write these works. But let’s go on to the list.

1.     Mirem-nos (‘Let’s Look at Ourselves’) was to put an end once and forever to people’s confusion about their own nature. The book would have chapters resolving such fundamental questions as whether we are big or small (we are tiny, given the inordinate size of the universe); whether we are good or bad (we are good, mostly); smart or stupid (stupid); hardworking or lazy (sloth is the rarest of the capital sins, there wouldn’t be any wars or mega-corporations if we weren’t predominantly industrious); and so on. I have a list somewhere with all the questions, including the topics of love, sex, money, and other weighty matters. As its title indicates, Mirem-nos was to be written in Catalan so as to make Catalonia the most enlightened country in the world. The book would also have illustrations by my friend Bill Hansen. A book with such a delusional grand outlook would either make me famous or get me institutionalized. Sink or swim, Sobrer, I told myself in the flush of the excitement I always feel when I have an idea for a book.

2.     Barcelona 1961; or Essays Against Modernity. The book argues that modernity is but a shibboleth and a lifesaver thrown to uninspired literary critics and historians. Isn’t every Tuesday but a modernized Monday? Doesn’t modernity begin when it suits the historian to say it begins? Feeling that it was about time someone decried this cancerous fallacy, I decided to devote a book to the year 1961. That year was chosen because the figure is a biaxial palindrome: if you turn it upside down and backwards it still reads 1961. The figure itself is thus a statement against the myth of modernity. I have actually written a couple of chapters of this book, but have abandoned it because I felt I should make a tacit statement in defense of indolence. One of the chapters had to do with a novel published that year in which the protagonist embodied the Sartrean en-soi and the antagonist the Sartrean pour-soi; very timely, for sure, but a sorry way to draw character, resulting in the reader’s unwillingness to keep reading. Another chapter was about Josep Maria de Sagarra, a writer who shunned modernity in favor of rhymed decasyllables and verse plays set in the eighteen thirties. Well, forfeiting my usual lassitude, I ended up writing an actual book, albeit short, on Sagarra; the 1961 compendium, however, is yet unborn.

3.     Aprengui anglès sense proposar-s’ho (‘How to learn English without really Trying’) was to be a vademecum to teach my fellow Catalans the dominant language they so insidiously fail to master. The idea is that the prevailing methods to learn foreign languages have an inherent flaw: they are methods. Methodic learning, as I am sure you’ll agree, will pall on, wear out, stultify, bore you to tears and put you in a bad mood after just three sessions. Methodicity insures failure. My un-method, is based on love; its guiding principle is “follow your bliss.” Or, in other words: poetry. By memorizing poems (plenty of examples provided, with commentary), reciting them out loud (with my fail-proof pronunciation guide), musing on each word as one would enjoy each sip of an excellent vintage, investigating (with my help) their etymology, pausing on the idiosyncrasies of the language, and letting the poem be in your body as much as in your mind, the task of absorbing English would become pleasurable rather than painful, enlightening rather than frustrating. The blurbs on the back cover would recommend the book for bathroom consumption, for surely elimination elicits illumination, as Luther and Freud knew.

4.     Ars amandi, or letter to my teenage son about love. This will be written in English, as my son has decided to study Japanese rather than Latin and I do not know how to say “ars amandi” in Japanese. This will be a step-by-step manual to guide my child as he enters the world of dating and its corollaries of petting, landing on baseball bases, committing, promising, and engaging, while trying to forestall procreating and precipitate marriage. The letter will report on all the mistakes (some, I avow, quite racy) I have committed in that area until I regained sanity in my late forties (my late youth was my “muddle” age). My confessions should certainly inspire my son to commit his own mistakes only and not also mine. After this first part, my letter-book would turn proactive and tell the boy how to choose a companion and how far to go with each step. A juicy section of the work would go into the details of physical lovemaking, and this part will be the real seller. For it goes without saying that at least until he turns thirty-five my son wouldn’t be caught dead reading anything I have written and the Ars amandi, truth to tell, is thinly disguised porn for a readership of pruriently curious folks—most of us are insecure voyeurs—hoping to figure out just how randy a writer may attempt to be and still be published by a reputable house. I really ought to write this one; it might sell.

5.     The Masters and Margarita, a play about a woman in her forties, her ex husband (who lives in the apartment next door and whose laundry she still does), her young hot lover, and the “man of her life,” next to whom she plans to be buried but who is in a steady relationship with another man. Based on a true story!

The list could go on; I have practiced not-writing books all my life, but the older planned books, Cheshire-catlike, have left only their titles, or just about: Correspondencia (an opera libretto in Spanish about Simón Bolívar’s sister’s love affair); Dysaphorisms (pithy!); Return-tickets (a travel book mixing my first-sight impressions—kept in some hand-written notebook, and thus easier to find than if I had consigned them to the computer—with second visits to spots in Italy, Greece, Mexico, Egypt, and India); and surely others, as I have been a most prolific non-writer.

The fact that I considered all of the above seriously can only be summarized in one word: pathetic. But think how much easier it has been for you to read the summaries rather than the books themselves, had I written them. And how grateful other writers ought to be whose books you wouldn’t have been able to afford had you instead purchased one of mine. All I can say is de nada!