I have nothing to say about something once I’ve said it. A story told once is told for all time.
I don’t know whose philosophy it might embody, but I believe that a story told is a story told, whether heard by one, by millions, or by no one at all (the story forgotten the instant it was whispered through the creator’s mouth).
Stories told in my mutterings to self, experiences written into a notebook, secrets shared with a random drunkard at a forgotten pub – tales like this are told, and to repeat a story or even an idea is some kind of compromise.
I have felt sickening remorse at telling a story and feeling it was wasted. Stories from raw thickets of my gut, saved at an early age for someone I could trust, stories that make my throat tighten just to think about them – some of these stories have slithered away to people who could not care, the consummation of these stories were grotesque failures.
But those stories can not be told again. A story told is a story told.
I tend to forget there are people on the other side of this screen. Live humans thinking things, doing things, looking at this mental rotgut and squinting.
On an obscure level I imagine that story-telling and the gift of memory exist in a realm of purity where readers do not exist.
I am reading a volume of Bukowski’s poetry these days. He disappoints me when he stops telling a story and addresses his audience. Words like “reader,” “critic,” and “writer” sound laborious and heaving coming from Bukowski.
“gold in your eye” would have made its statement more impressively without the finger-wagging at the “critics / the writers / the readers”.
They are good, though, the Bukowski pages. He and Robert Lax have me writing poetry, something I thought I would never do again. I forgot how much power a blank line can carry, or how simply indenting a word can infuse it with new meaning. I like Lax’s ideas of the poem as an object of contemplation, the words turned into a thing.
Bad poetry, though, slithers onto the page and molders there like an unflushed turd. That, in fact, is how those stories felt after I wasted them.
