Reality Lasagna
There’s a good case for arguing that any narrative account is a form of fiction. The moment you start to arrange the world in words, you alter its nature. The words themselves begin to suggest patterns and connections that seemed at the time to be absent from the events the words describe.
What the lyric essay gives you—what fiction doesn’t, usually—is the freedom to emphasize its aboutness, its metaphysical meaningfulness. There’s plenty of drama, but it’s subservient to the larger drama of mind.
— David Shields
If you’ve been following Hyperjabber since its birth a couple of months ago, you’ll have realized by now that the posts can be, well, strange. You may have had an experience similar to my son’s when he asked, “What exactly am I reading here?” It’s a good question. I often find myself wondering, “What exactly am I writing here?” If pressed, I would guess “lyric essay” is not a bad description, but between you, me, and my son, I prefer to think of my writing as “reality lasagna.” First of all, lasagna is delicious—baked layers of pasta, meat, cheese and sauce. Yum. Second, my approach to writing is built around layers—layers of fact, memory, fiction, and dream. Third, lasagna has always been there, even at the beginning when I was first finding my way.
When I was 19, maybe 20, I decided to have a solo dinner at a local Italian place called Ambrosia. I ordered a plate of lasagna with garlic bread and a soda, and while I waited, I paged through a copy of my latest obsession, The Garden of Forking Paths, a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. The book bristled with bookmarks and the pages were packed with notes crammed into the margins. My dinner arrived and I continued reading, but when I finished and went to pay the check, I realized to my horror that I had forgotten my wallet.
Mortified, I explained the situation to the staff. After some discussion, the manager decided that I could leave to retrieve my wallet so long as I promised to return promptly. I also had to leave my treasured book as collateral. Red-faced and sure that the entire restaurant was staring at me, I agreed with only the slightest trepidation. I did as promised and, after paying the bill, I retook possession of my treasure and hurried back home. The ordeal over, I sprawled on my futon to read and relax only to suddenly find the book strange and unfamiliar.
At first I thought the restaurant staff had altered it, maybe rearranging my carefully placed bookmarks, but then I noticed that even the marginalia seemed alien. I wasn’t sure the handwriting was actually mine, and the notes were not exactly what I remembered. In fact, looking more closely, I realized that maybe the notes were not comments on the stories at all, but rather ideas for new stories.
With this vague intuition, I devoted myself to fiction. I read books, took classes, joined writing groups. I pursued the short story and the novel the way my friends pursued love and success. I carefully studied stories by Borges (of course), and others such as Ballard, Ellison, and Cortázar. I spent days deciphering novels by DeLillo, Pynchon, Gibson, and Wolfe. I wrote thousands and thousands of words, but I was still skimming the surface, emulating my idols. I had not yet found my way.
Several years after the incident at Ambrosia, I attended a writing workshop held at G. Willicker’s, a local hangout that’s since been torn down. A dozen of us were crammed into the back room, the tables arranged in an uneven square, food and manuscripts strewn across the tops. For lunch, I had ordered lasagna. While not nearly as good as Ambrosia’s, I was now old enough to enjoy it with a beer. The instructor, a well-known writer, editor, and anthologist, sprawled along one edge of the square and had thick, wiry eyebrows that seemed to move on their own when he talked.
I remember nothing of the other stories we reviewed, and barely remember anything of mine other than it was a fantasy that featured stormy weather, monks, a tower, and a book with pages made of mirrors. The instructor did not like it. His eyebrows squirmed demonically as he held forth that philosophy needs to stay out of fiction. A story must focus on a character’s struggle against physical, social, or personal problems. He waved my story in the air, the pages fluttering like a chicken being strangled, “No one cares about this crap!” I just stared at my lasagna.
That instructor wasn’t entirely wrong. The workshop was, after all, aimed at aspiring writers of commercial speculative fiction, a label which, at the time, I thought described me. So for decades I tried to write like that, focused on characters dealing with problems. Decades of frustration—both mine and my poor readers’—before I finally realized what those comments in the margins really meant back in Ambrosia, the lesson I was supposed to learn from Borges.
I struggle when writing traditional fiction because when I’m writing I’m not interested in sweeping character arcs or the detailed minutia of relationships. I’m fascinated by the world we experience, the ideas that shape it, and the people that breathe it. I don’t want to lose that fascination behind a distracting horde of characters dealing with their own problems. I want fiction to reveal, expand, and deepen the nonfiction experiences I’m writing about. No more and no less. It took me a while to figure this out, but eventually I realized that my way was not the way of commercial speculative fiction.
It all came together for me one Christmas several years ago. We had just finished our family’s traditional Christmas dinner of lasagna, and the kids were playing with their new toys. Dishes done, I sprawled out on the couch to read my latest obsession, Reality Hunger, but, with a stomach full of lasagna, I quickly fell asleep, and once asleep I fell into a dream.
Proust and I are standing on a dune in a sun-blasted desert, and I’m so thirsty. Proust takes a copy of In Search of Lost Time and wrings it like a towel until words spill from the pages. When they hit the sand they form a pool of water, and I drop to my knees to drink. I see a tiny speedboat powering across the surface, but when I reach for it I lose my balance and tumble head first into the pool. It’s surprisingly deep, and as I sink, I pass Salvador Dali crammed into a diving suit. He waves at me, but I just keep sinking. Finally, I land on the seabed, stirring up a cloud of sediment. Looking closely, I see that the sediment is made of words from all of the books I’ve ever read. The cloud of words gets thicker and thicker and starts to suffocate me. I inhale them and they flood my lungs, my body, my mind. Gasping, I try to scream, and that’s when I wake up.
Today, I mostly write essays laced with fiction or fiction disguised as essays. I do this because fiction allows me to use language more freely, more poetically, more passionately, and essays let me write more directly about the experiences and ideas that actually interest me. This mode of writing lends itself naturally to a layered approach: a lasagna of reality and imagination, narration and exposition, action and contemplation. It’s an obscure way to go about things, but it suits me perfectly. The lessons of Borges and the dream of Proust let me let go, and with Hyperjabber, I’ve finally—maybe—found my way.
