July 6th & 13th, 2020 - A Transparent Woman
Dear TNY,
The world is more vibrant, heartbreaking, wonderful, depressing, clear and clean, painful, heavy, sparkling, and visceral than anything presented in this story. This story should have been a novel full of scenes; but it was, instead, stuffed into 8800 words that cannot produce empathy. Therefore, the world that likely contained events like this for real, beautiful, struggling human people (the actual world we meatbots live in, as described above; not this bullshit, cardboard sham created in this story) cannot be touched or felt or smelled or experienced by the reader (which means you failed at your agenda MO, a bad MO to begin with). This fictional world also cannot be accessed (which means you failed at literature). So we don’t get to connect. We don’t connect with the characters. We don’t connect to the Collective Unconscious. All of this summary means no empathy. Which means this world we live in is not made better with beauty. You have immersed us into nothing. You have only made negative. Worse than nothing and negative, you are an open void, inhaling life instead of providing spark within it.
Life.
Isn’t that what literature is supposed to be? Life? Isn’t it supposed to be a replica of life, so complete the consumer feels, without words or language or labels, but feels that other life within them? Around them? The same way they feel their own consciousness, whatever that may be? Literature so rich the consumer is able to touch the Collective Unconscious? To render the seams of this life visible? To tug at the fabric? To pull back the curtain, even for a moment? To bear the unbearable lightness of being? To witness the blue crackling of genuine wonder? That in the face of all of this horror and pain and grief, there is nothing but gratitude? Gratitude to be part of something so breathtaking? So fucking magical it pulls you down to the ground, on your back, laying in the grass, looking up at the clouds and crying your fucking eyes out? To bathe in the overwhelming warmth of love, for all of this, for every fucking second? Isn’t that what you should be fucking publishing?
For all of that NY clout, the closed-circuit, self-congratulatory adoration, those expensive educations in literature, all those staff members so dutifully carrying out the mission of the magazine, all that confidence, all those subscribers and all that reputation, you don’t know fuck-all about telling a story.
So now I’ll go back to the real world that, for me, has its own heartbreak. Its own depression. Its own joy. Its own wonder and beauty. Its own soaring fucking struggle and tender, fingerprints-on-skin moments. Its own inside jokes and embarrassing mistakes. Its own false pride and imposter syndrome. Its own flesh and blood, my blood, my flesh, my two sons running around this fucking house and farting and fighting and laughing and dancing like little idiots, so fucking beautiful I can’t hold it most days, and both still insisting, even though they are 10 and 13, on holding my hand when we walk down the sidewalk, awash in the heat of the nuclear explosion at the center of our planetary system and the heat at the sweaty intersections of our palms, not much difference between the two from this guy’s perspective. And like every other disillusioned motherfucker out here, I’ll be desperate for a real, authentic connection, be it literature or otherwise. I’ll spend my life doing this. Curating a story, my story, so fucking rich and wonderful that I won’t be able to deny that, at its very end, I fucking enjoyed it. That I enjoyed the gift of this fucking life, painful as it was, is, and will be. That I, a nod to Ray here, felt myself beloved upon this earth. That I was, against all odds, beautiful.
Now publish a story that makes me feel like that, you dumb motherfuckers.
See you next Monday, big guy.
Nick
