by David Faden
June 24, 2002
I sip my coffee. I hate coffee, but the old man ordered coffee for the both of us, and it would be impolite not to drink. I try not to gag.
"I brought you here to tell you to stop sending me that dreck."
"You mean my writing?" I say.
"Yes. What else would I be talking to you about?"
I stop pretending to like the coffee and set my cup down.
"You brought me all the way here just to tell me my writing stinks? Why didn't you just send me an e-mail?"
"I don't go in for that e-mail crap. I don't want you to have an hour to edit your response. I want to see how you actually feel about what I have to say. And I want you to see how I feel. I'll admit that I sometimes polish away the rough edges, too, hide my true feelings."
"OK. I'm pissed off. I'm unpleasantly surprised. I knew I wasn't writing great stuff but I sort of hoped that since you were going to the bother of meeting me, that you were going to tell me you thought you saw some potential for greatness."
"Potential? Hell, there's potential wherever there are words. The compiler of a dictionary is a potential Shakespeare. No, Shakespeare plus every other writer whose words are recorded there."
"You know what I mean. I've never taken criticism well. But if it's got some content to it, at least I have some chance of getting benefit from stewing over it. 'Dreck'? What am I supposed to learn from that?"
"I don't speak for your benefit. I speak for my own. But I get some small pleasure from the idea of helping you advance. You're tempting me just to leave it at 'dreck' so I can imagine you squirming, tearing yourself to pieces trying to figure out what I didn't like."
"I won't be tearing myself to pieces trying to think what I could do to win your approval."
"Didn't you come here excited because you thought you were about to receive an affirmation of my approval? Anyway, you said you were writing about aimless people. Well, I can't really tell that from what you've sent me. But I would call the writing aimless. Not that I don't sometimes catch you taking aim and so finding myself bored when you do hit the target."
"What about Sartre's 'Nausea' or Dostoyevsky's 'Notes on the Underground'? Aren't those aimless writings? Aren't they great?"
"According to some people they are great. I'll agree with them. But I definitely won't agree with you that they're aimless. Nor would I even call their main characters aimless."
"All right. I suppose my stories do meander a bit, in storyline, purpose, and style. But that's just a result of my style of writing. I choose a couple of characters and a simple premise and see where they take me."
"That way of writing is nothing new, my friend. I don't really care how you write. I care about the finished product. I think that's part of what's wrong with modern art. Too much focus on the process of creation. In a thousand years, do you think anyone but the coprologists will care that a painting was painted by ass and enema rather than squirt gun? I'll go further. I don't care what the artist meant for the painting to mean. I care what I see. If somehow the artist's intended meaning reaches me through socialization, fine, but, otherwise, forget it."
"I think you're going too far there. I think you're cutting yourself off from a whole level of meaning -- that of the creator. And I don't see anything wrong with being curious about the history of a piece. Perhaps by trying to understand an artist we may ourselves become more like the artist?"
"Bah. And create like the artist? Aside from the purely technical aspects, more likely, you'll just pick up the artist's incidental and likely disgusting traits, traits created simply for spectacle, for extra sales."
"Anyway, I understand what you mean when you say it is the end product that matters. I was just trying to give you more information so you might offer some more cogent criticism and be more secure in securing your some small pleasure in helping me advance."
"OK. First let's make one thing clear. I am you, you are me. The coffee was imaginary. I don't understand why you didn't make it taste wonderful. I don't know where you get the idea that I'm old. Really, if I'm not to be the same age as you, you should've made me younger than you since you seem to have been a better writer and artist when you were younger."
"I practiced more then. And I'm not sure I was better then. Think of yourself as a somewhat idealized future version of me. Sure, I'm fond of the stories I wrote when I was younger. But that may be just because with them I'm familiar. Familiarity does not breed contempt. It breeds love. What we know for long we come to depend on and what we depend on we must love, for otherwise we strike at what nourishes us. Stand in one place for long and you're feet will grow roots. Read the same book for long and to its ideas your mind will be bound. Stay around the same woman for long and you'll end up married."
"Oh, don't lay that simplistic, 'romantic' crap on me. Not only literature, but the real world is full of examples of people stuck in the same place for years, only to escape without regret. Can you honestly say a prisoner loves the prison or the guards?"
"Without regret? I can't think of a single example that fits. Both in literature and the real world, we even have the strange spectacle of prisoners refusing to be freed or committing crimes on their release so as to be jailed once more."
"All right. But to deny that one is without regret is not the same as saying that one is in love. Anyway, this is a terribly minor point. We're missing the main one for it, aren't we? At the beginning of this conversation we were pretending that I summoned you, when it was really you who summoned me, and yourself."
"Well, I'd say that's close enough to correct. Here as myself I'm not quite me. I have a feeling that next you were going to say our main point was to see about improving my writing or at least just trying to analyze what's wrong with it."
"Yeah, something like that. My tone's softened since we began. That's unfortunate, especially given what we're trying to accomplish. Here, I'll try to get back into character."
"Thanks. I could use an attack from myself on my self-esteem."
"I'm not trying to lower your self-esteem, you insipid fool. I'm trying to help you improve yourself. I don't aim to offer false props, though today those are what you've made me offer. I aim to knock them down. Better me than someone else, better now than at some other time, out of your control."
"I'm tired. I'm sorry, but I should've made that coffee real. Now, I have to go to sleep. I have a feeling that I won't learn if I'm too tired."
"You shouldn't say "you have a feeling." We both know you've read a couple of articles that state emphatically that sleep deprivation weakens the mind's ability to turn short term memories into long. It's really too bad for you that we can't continue now, but OK."
"Yeah, OK. Talk to you later."
"Yeah, sure thing. I'll be waiting."
"I look forward to meeting you again."
"You shouldn't and you should."
"What do you mean by that contradiction?"
"If we're honest with one another, we'll hurt ourself in the short term but in the long term, and that is what matters, we'll be better off. Now go to sleep."
"Good night. I hope not to see you in my dreams."