Nothing to Say, Ma

As a result of recent conversations, my life-long closest friend Diego wrote the following. If you’re lucky as we are, you have such a friend whose interests and thoughts match yours so closely that it seems that you were separated at birth in a dream. We both felt from the days of our youth when chance brought us together that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, it was not he, she, them, or it that we belonged to, or that we would ever gargle in the rat race choir for those who make the rules to terrorize humanity.

By Diego Sandoval

“Does anybody ever say anything?”

“Not really. Everybody talks all his life, and many write for many years, but nobody really says anything. It’s all right, though.”
– William Saroyan, Not Dying: A Memoir

Because I have nothing to say, I am writing this. It’s all right. I have nothing to say because I am disgusted by all the words I have written for deaf ears and by the news that just repeats itself like an endless Greek tragedy to the chorus of commentators of all persuasions echoing each other as if their words made a difference in the butcher’s bench world of ruthless actors with their motto: acta non verba. I’m just sighing, Ma, like another man of many words, Bob Dylan:

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

Life? Yes, Dylan is right: “If you’re not busy being born you’re busy dying.”

But what difference can words make? I don’t know. Quién sabe?

William Saroyan was a witty man, a Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winner, very famous in his day, and he didn’t know either. He claimed he wrote to ward off death and said he expected an exception to death would be made in his case. He was a man hiding in a house of words, always ready to bolt when death came knocking. But he never grasped the contradictory meanings of bolting, a common neurosis and a necrophiliac’s dilemma. He wanted to escape death’s clutches but wasn’t sure whether to run or hide. To bolt or bolt, that is the question he couldn’t answer unequivocally. He decided to obsessively accumulate stuff to barricade the entrance to his soul while writing the opposite. His monitory words insinuated the ineluctable nature of his rat packing.

I have spent my life shedding possessions – call it rat unpacking – having seen too many people possessed by them, and the nothingness of death that they represent. I always sensed that nothing is more real than nothing. Having grown up in Mexico – the country that Octavio Paz referred to as the land of the labyrinth of solitude, the country where death lays heavy on every heart, faithful or doubting, I became a poet, writer, and singer to somehow create a language that would lead me into the realm of silence where true language lives and death is exorcised. I took the stage name Mr. Z  to honor my heroes, Zapata and Zarathustra. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. Few who come to hear me perform know my name’s origins and I never explain. Explain to whom? Why?

I was drawn to William Saroyan’s writing at an early age, probably because of his early efforts to write musically and exorcise the death-themed experiences of his childhood with Armenian immigrant parents, his father being a preacher who died when William was three years-old and he was sent to an orphanage along with his sister and brother. When I was about seventeen years-old I read his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and was mesmerized, especially by his story, “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8” – its free form musicality with its gaps of silence that tore out my heart. I identified with the story’s protagonist, who was lonely Saroyan at 19 years of age, and how a few chords in a piece of music, even bad music, transported him into ecstatic reveries, even during moments of silence when he wasn’t listening to the record. I memorized this sentence: “He stood over his phonograph, thinking of its silence, and his own silence, the fear in himself to make a noise, to declare his existence.” And then a string of few words came to me – “the music of forgetting” – which have haunted me ever since.

I too hear some secret music and don’t know why I am writing this.  I’m only sighing as I move to the music of forgetting.

For his part, Saroyan, in his abodes of death, eventually wrote many millions of words in maybe seventy-five published and unpublished books, saying nothing about something for someone. It was all right, though, I guess he too was only sighing. A kind of sighing that was a haunting.

Aren’t we all sighing? Isn’t the world news enough to haunt anyone with a heart?

Then he died in 1982 at the age of seventy-two. No exception was made for Billy Boy. He either was or wasn’t surprised, depending on what happens when one dies. He said that in everyone’s secret religion “the idea is to keep death at a distance by means of junk of all kinds, and this junk makes a shambles.” Money, possessions in general, the more junk one can surround oneself with the safer one feels, so that death will have a tough time getting through the clutter to reach you, and in a writer’s case, his most treasured junk – his writing – may be useful in buying death off. This Saroyan said.

When he died, he left two houses in Fresno, California stuffed with shambles. Possessions so junky that they rattle the mind: envelopes of his old mustache clippings, pebbles, rocks, used typewriter ribbons, broken clocks, boxes of junk mail, every piece of ephemera that passed through his grasping hands. He let go of nothing while writing words warning of its futility despite its seeming necessity. He created a foundation in his own name, devoted to the study of himself, to which he left all his junk and to which he bequeathed all future earnings, despite having two children. He thought he was immortalizing himself under the illusion that his shambling rambling words and ratty belongings would free him from the labyrinth of solitude he was leaving. It was not a fit ending for a man who was once the daring young man on the flying trapeze.

Without faith, daring ends in desperate measures. I think Saroyan lost faith in the living.

He forgot his own wise words in the preface to the first edition of his first book:

If you will remember that living people are as good as dead, you will be able to perceive much that is very funny in their conduct that you perhaps might never have thought of perceiving if you did not believe that they were as good as dead.

Isn’t it funny that he left a shambles at home?

Madre, I’m running out of words. Please take my sighs and make them prayers of resistance to the ruthless actors who make this earth our home a bloody shambles.

 

Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His new book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press)