“James, being an aspiring writer I do follow your work with an eye on increasing my own output. I read your writing journals with curiosity. Over the past years I have read many entries about eye seizures, which seem to have been brought under control, notes on vertigo and a ringing in your ears. It is useful for my purposes and apparently for you, to post rather intimate accounts of your waxing and waning health, boxing, drinking too much and physical activity. Your prolific level is so far above the rest of us that you bear study by other writers.
“That said, and knowing it improbably that a person who renders characters in fiction with such empathy is not sensitive to his own condition, shouldn’t you seek medical attention?”
-Allen, Via Multiple texts to Flop the Zero Phone, 8/12/2022
…
Dear Allen, good luck with your writing. I am superstitious, increasingly so as I dotter on into decrepitude. I do omit much of my physical condition. I have not been noting when I see shadows of darkness during the day or in well lit spaces at night out of the corner of my eye. I have omitted the fact that my inner ears ring loudly almost every day for two years now, and sometimes combines with vertigo. It did note in June that I had “hallucinations while awake.” My sleeping life is a field of nightmare and self-doubting insecurities about the decisions of yesterday and tomorrow.
As I sit here this morning in Bob and Deb’s basement guestroom, my inner mind rings like a cross between a waterfall, the echo of the tides in a sea shell and the power outage alarm in commercial buildings. I used this condition in a novel, Writ Hate, while the condition was intense. I have used my eye problems in Night Song of the Nords/Eye of the Dictor, Ranger? And Uprising.
This summer my online computer and both of my phones failed, cutting me out of much of my habitual communications, such as this. In fact, I am recalling your texts from memory as the phone you sent them to died. I messaged by skype to my editor that I take these collectively as signs from God that I should isolate and write something deeper and better than I have. I have been bucking against the slave-driving muse monkey on my back, trying to get lost in history and simply write the easiest novel outlines, having balked in fear of failure over writing Of Ichor and War, which I outlined over a year ago.
My chief concern is writing, the reason I have consented to remain among the living. That concern became my only driving factor on December 11 2017. I had previously been writing a lot and better and was still staying close to family if in poverty so that I could be there for my sons who were well on their own and my sister and mother and two girlfriends and little Emma and my grandchildren. Of some hundred LaFonds, Kerns, Baringers and Quades I was the last of our kind to remain in our ancestral city. That night two pair of muggers set their sights on me. I nearly went to prison over the first two and then, the second two, giant Bantu twins, decided at the last moment that I was not worth burning a calorie, that I was the fish to foul to eat.
Shaken, with a torn hip rotator, getting fat, suffering from two small hernias and having both knees within 6 months of fully torn meniscus according to Doc Dread, I hobbled to work and quit. Then, I found glory at the desk, writing and writing for three days straight as I alternately drank coffee and whiskey.
I lost four hours in what doctors said was a sleep seizure. My nose in 7 pieces and on the wrong side of my face, while awaiting reconstructive surgery I came back to the room I rented and looked at the scene, the dried blood, all over, the numerous signs that I passed out cold face down in my blood and then rose again and smashed my face and clawed my way towards a mattress on the floor which I never attained. It looked like a demon had attacked me. But, only my hand prints were visible.
I think it was an attack from Beyond a punishment for my hubris and my writing. I have since sought to maintain only enough physical health to continue writing and also sparring with my fighters. I see myself as an undead creature writing a parting journal to the unborn. My sense of autonomy and agency were crushed by my failure to maintain residency in my home town due to lack of vigor and combat ability and was compounded by the attack two or three nights later. I try to maintain my health mostly to prevent opening that demonic door within.
But I listen attentively to the echoes and chitterings from beyond, the ringing in my head, the streaking shadows that never stand for a direct view, the waking hallucinations. I ma blessed to write about such things authentically from experience even as I am cursed to diminish in those very facets that attained a fractional autonomy in the face of the soul-devouring world that hates, not just me, but you, hates us forever and anew for the words that we try to honestly work into deeper meaning.
I had some very close conversations about writing with the excellent novelist Andrew Edwards, Andrew practices a higher version of the novelist’s art than I do, who am largely content with pulpish adventures. You see where I am, concerning the physical health, its subservient and not a priority in and of itself. However, knowing that readers care about the plight of this writer, I will spend a second passage on my recent health history and why I have turned away from medicine in favor of cryptotheology, in:
‘Cryptotheology’
Engaging the World from the Mechanism of Functional Insanity
