No other sentence in this piece will be much like most others you've read before, nor like one another. Formal experimentation is my game, but my endgame is to send you careening across your particular room with everything I can throw at you. I want to write something of chaos that keeps you guessing: with its merger of form and content, of style and substance, of the reader's experience and the piece itself: I want computers to tremble their Turing tapes and humans to bite and draw blood on lips and aliens to shudder as the waves hit them. Those aliens by chance have been hit by this piece and are presently on their way to an attack on me but won't get here until I'm dead at that rate. God bless the speed of light and everything at it hitting my eyes and your eyes and thence to our brains, at once blistering fast and setting a limit on all its potential usurpers. Every coherent written thing seems to try to set a limit on everything that comes thereafter. And it gives you some focus. But it's not very fast. Coherence doesn't jerk you out of a slumber.
Still, my ambition to start this piece were unruly; I'm already feeling doubts about the enterprise. Whosoever should tempt that "experimental" label gets lashed at justifiably with all manner of barbs - coherence is a reader's friend and spitting in its face is a great way to spark a spiteful exit from the piece. Add a character or two, give the reader someone to latch on to, and sit back and simply watch the neurological alchemy of written communication brew. Variation within limits, formal coherence, formal structure, and all the rest: It's all driving at one central theme or maxim: Give them a rhythm and don't test their patience. Because they will fail you, even the best, even yourself at a later date. They will all fail you if you test their patience too mightily and don't bother to earn every last word. They will fail you and they will laugh in ways you don't intend or they will stop reading. And that group includes myself in twenty years, my real, unforgiving audience: That's one that has no reason to stifle a laugh or a sympathetic, genuinely worried glance at the formal struggles of the protagonist, even knowing the outcome. I think I know how he'll feel about this piece, and, whatever the case, it feels like I'm back in high school, experimenting wildly with words for the sheer exhilarating sake of experimentation itself. I wonder if in 20 years he'll feel that way or if he'll just see the edges and get embarrassed. I guess he'll have to trust that it was fun to write. And what about the rest of you? Well, you'll just have to trust that I know where I'm going with this (I don't). I don't know where I'm going and this piece itself is testing patience. I'm worried right about now.
But maybe - and this is the point - maybe I can make a new, manic order from the wild and complex urges which produced the germ for this piece. That is to say: difference and chaos and departures from formal order as a sort of order itself, where from sentence to sentence you can follow me and yet will have to bear each sentence as a sort of undivided jab or blow in a barrage in the space of a breath, my footwork hopefully immaculate. And then comes the next sentence, the next blow, which is as different as the last. And now you're having a biological experience, which is promising given that the best writing in me produces such a biological response. I could never hope to explain it except to say it's like closing a door on a loved one and turning to leave for awhile and having hints of tears rise to the surface. I remember one time my mom was moving to San Diego about a year ago and she stopped over at my apartment and said Hi and after awhile she left my apartment for what might have been the last time and I said Good-bye and I hugged her and I waved until she was in her car and couldn't conceivably make eye contact with me even in her periphery, but she was still in sight and I felt sad so I turned towards a glass case of a poster in my dark apartment, eyes away from the glass door, and I saw the muddled impressionist black car going to the right away from me in the reflection of the glass poster and tears came up and I still remember it because I cried for a few minutes before going to the door and closing the shades and composing myself for whatever meaningless crap I'd planned for that morning. Yeah, that's what the end of a good short story is like to me, if a bit more muted; it's a biological feeling and it's unlike just about any other feeling, the feeling that something you love is gone and may never come back.
Maybe that's my end-game, using chaos and formal oddity to express the chaos and uncertainty of my mind right now. Whatever the case, abandoning all pretense of order gives the impression of pure emotions, which is about where I'm at right now, not depressed, not happy, not sad - just a pure, doughy shell of emotional responses and vulnerability. So mission accomplished, I guess. Sometimes, albeit not very often, I do feel like that, and it's not so much painful as it is overwhelming, hyper-aware, engaged. And I think a lot of people feel like that sometimes, but, to their credit, most of them didn't have to wrap it up in experimental, rambling sentences and pretend they were James Joyce.
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