CREATION STORIES: A SHOPPING CART FULL OF BOOKS

The author, long ago.

CREATION MYTH I: A Shopping Cart Full of Books

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I struggle with the writing, with the calling, all the time.  Doesn’t matter that I’ve written books or gotten literary acclaim — when I go six, nine, twelve months, without writing a word worth reading, much less worth sharing, when every first chapter is more laughable than the one that comes before, I fall into the kind of despair that has me seriously considering quitting writing — forever.

Some of it is the depression I've battled all my life.  Some of it are childhood cuts so savage that I would need keloids the size of mountains to cover them.  Some of it is the universal fact that writing is hard (and just because the rare few find it in their power to publish as reliably as a metronome should not obscure the truth of the challenges). 

These last two months have been exceptionally egregious in their fail-ness and once again I’m over here wondering why I bother, why not choose another path? 

To which a small invincible part of me says, Never.  

The invincible part of me – the young boy in me who refuses to die¹ — is what I try to listen to. But it ain’t always easy to heed our invincible selves when one is depressed or demoralized.  What I’ve learned after nearly 30 years of this bullshit is that there are only a few surefires that help me survive these awful desolations, that keep me in when all I want to do is be out. 

The first of these is the most obvious: return to the love that brought me to the art in the first place.  

Which for me was my love of reading. 

No accident that I’m linking love and reading.  Because in dire moments not just any reading will do — what I find most salvific are the very books in which my love of reading first took root, first bloomed.  These are the Books of Love and all readers have them.  The books we return to again and again in order to find words for what we already know; in order to recall the invincible hearts that allowed us to survive childhood.

My Books of Love saved me when I was growing up, and they saved me as an adult, and they have saved my writing.  As Silko reminds us in Ceremony (one of my Books of Love) nothing was ever lost as long as the love remained. 

True for Tayo, true for this scrambled writer. 

As long as the love for reading, for books, remains -- the writing will never be lost.

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Here’s what else I’ve learned after nearly 30 years of this bullshit —

— to break these grim devouring spells, I can’t just read the Books of Love, I have write my own —

— I have to tell myself over and over the origin stories of my writing -- how I, a poor Dominican immigrant kid of African descent, rebelled against all commandments, inner and outer, against all odds, to become a writer. 

If you’re tormented by the anti-art demogorgons, the best way to exorcise them is to tell the Creation Myths of your creativity, the Origin Stories of how you gained your artistic superpowers.

This is the Incantation of Creativity, the Chant of Making, the stories all us writers-in-struggle should tell ourselves, what Thomas King calls “saving stories,” stories that will save our lives, and our art.    

Silko again:

I will tell you something about stories

They aren't just entertainment

Don't be fooled

They are all we have, you see

All we have to fight off

Illness and death.

You don't have anything

If you don't have the stories.

And sometimes our Creation Stories are all we have to fight off despair. 

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Here’s one of my Creation Stories.  There are others, perhaps better, which I might share in the future, but let’s begin here:

When I was eleven years old and the paperboy for our neighborhood, I delivered all three newspapers.  Two routes in the morning.  One route in the afternoon.  A paperboy who read every inch of the newspaper, because in those days I was hungry for words and, perhaps more to the point, for any sign of the world.  I even read the classified ads.  Shit, I loved reading the classifieds.  I read them all, slowly, carefully, diligently.  Like an exegetist bent over a scroll. 

What was I looking for in the classified?  Not entirely sure, even now.  Not like I could buy anything, too fucking broke.  Curiosity might have been part of it.  The classifieds were glimpses of an America I still had trouble grasping.  Reading the classifieds was like riding your bike against traffic.  The way the cars shot past, the flashes you got of the people within.  Other lives, other worlds.  I guess I was starving for any world other than my own.  For escape.  

One summer day I hit a classified that stopped me dead.  It read, simply: Free Books! 

Followed by a phone number. 

At that time no one in my neighborhood, in the entire Middlesex County, loved books as much as I did.  That was the only identity I had besides poor and Dominican and immigrant: reader. 

Free books to a kid like me was like free money to a miser, or dumb-asses to a dictator.

I couldn’t believe it.  Figured it had to be a joke or a trap of some kind.  But my desire was stronger than my misgivings and I called, and the American lady on the other side of the line told me they were her grandson’s books and he was out of the country (military) and wanted her to give them away and all I had to do was come to Madison Park to fetch them. 

Was I the only person who had called?

I was.

How many books?

Two hundred or so.  She had counted.  You’ll need a car if you want them all. 

I checked her address on the map my father had left when he ran off.  Her house was two miles away.  My father had left the map but not the car, and there wasn’t an adult around who could drive me.  

Maybe for someone else that would have been that.  But I, book-lover-supreme, wanted those books.  I owned maybe six books in all, and the thought of gaining two hundred had me on some Frodo-and-his-Ring-type shit.   

This was Parlin, NJ — no bus or train anywhere — but there was a Pathmark up the road.  And the Pathmark had shopping carts.  So I ran right up to the Pathmark, grabbed a shopping cart, pushed it out two miles to the lady’s house and when that old white woman saw what I was about she just laughed.  Showed me the books.  Not in boxes.  Didn’t matter.  She was too old and frail to help.  Didn’t matter.  I filled my shopping cart and pushed it home.  Trying not to flip through the books.  Wasn’t any time for that.  Maybe I was tired.  Maybe I wasn’t.  Who the fuck knew?  Dumped the books at the apartment.  My mom was like, what in carajo.  No time to explain.  I pushed the cart right back to Madison Park.  Loaded it up, thanked the old white lady, wish I remembered her name.  Pushed the over-loaded cart through college-named streets, through traffic, over Route 9, down Ernston Road, and then it was done.

Luckiest day of my life — even after all the blessed things that have happened to me (and all the cursed evil things, too) — luckiest day of my whole damn life.  

That grandson in the military, wish I’d gotten his name, wish he’d put his name in some of the books.  I would look him up, because dude was a nerd like me.  In those two hundred books I found Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ben Bova, Harry Harrison, Diane Duane, and oneauthor who would forever change my life, who would give me more Books of Love than almost anybody: Octavia E. Butler. 

Like I said: luckiest day of my life. 

I’ll never forget that boy I was, the boy who pushed a shopping cart full of books, I'll never forget him as long as live.

I’ll never forget that one summer afternoon, evening and night, when I was eleven years old.

I’ll never forget organizing the books on my basement ledge in alphabetical order, feeling light-headed, not understanding but sensing sensing sensing that something important had begun.  

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Anyway, that’s the short version of the story I tell myself when I doubt the work, when I doubt myself.   

A story of how I, as a writer, begin.  

With a shopping cart full of books. 

You don't have anything

If you don't have the stories.

When the writing is impossible, when night falls all around me, when I’m ready to throw everything away, I tell myself: push the cart, just push the cart and we’ll get there, eventually. 

1. A variation on Tove Ditlevsen’s oft-quoted line “There's a young girl in me who refuses to die.”