Last Things First

 

R. F. Laird near the end

I’m preparing this now, securing a domain and all that, which I never do, because there are things I want to put in one place for those who are interested to use as a starting point when they start to investigate or appraise me. My operating assumption, my premise for yet another work of fiction, is that I am dead when you discover this. Fame in life was never my objective as a writer after I knew for sure what I was. Fame in death isn’t really an objective either. But I do want my work to survive, enough of it at least, to enable those who are looking for a way forward in the future to have ways of understanding what I was doing in my work and my life.

If certain things happen in a certain way, I will come to be known as the greatest writer of my era, which spans quite a lot of years. I can say that here because I am dead and don’t need to puzzle over how that will sound to any reader. I don’t care about any reader. I care about the generation(s)  who will have to rebuild what the 20th Century destroyed and the 21st Century was systematically deprived of the ability to rebuild. I’m pretty sure the rebuilders aren’t alive yet to take offense, or are young enough still to be swaddled in their Pampers and car seats.

Why was I so great? (You have no idea how freeing this being dead thing is, this ability to say what I could never say plainly when I was alive…) I was the first one who saw the additional creative dimensions available to the most technologically advanced age in recorded history, the reconfiguration of what constitutes writing and how to provide it with the other dimensions so many in the 20th Century glimpsed conceptually but could not define in reality. They were handicapped by so many constraints they failed to see the possibility that the mission of creative writers in particular was not to nail down human experience in words and sentences and stanzas but to expand the whole realm of human consciousness as it could be experienced in life. To make the life of the mind better rather than darker and grimmer.

I truly admire all the valiant tryers who came before me. James Joyce and his stream of consciousness. Hemingway and his one true sentence. Gertrude Stein and her transformation of words into her own cubist artwork. Proust and his ineffable attunement to the way the smallest moments contain everything important. T. S. Eliot and his twisting interconnections between the mundane and the monstrous in skeins of meaning.

But I also know that they failed at renewing literature and have become monuments to the dead body of modern fiction and poetry. Not their fault, but there it is. People who can no longer read them revere their memory and memorize enough lines to seem knowing about the finer things. 

I have admired so many writers and steeped myself in their works to such an extent that I cannot hope to list them all. My claim to greatness does not consist of any belief that I am their superior or even their equal in the smithing of words. My claim is based on the scale and scope of my mind, which lives in a much larger universe than a hundred-plus years of my predecessors. Why I can say with confidence that there is no one presently alive who can take my full measure as a creative writer.

William Faulkner, whose writings were like Spanish moss strangling the old family trees of the South. As one of the pardoned planters of his day, he traded beauty for money and drank himself to death.