Total Noise

I write much better than I speak. In her book What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness Candia McWilliams describes this attribute as “What comes down my arm and not out of my mouth.” I’m not sure how it does this—comes down my arm—but I’m very thankful it does, because otherwise I’d appear a blithering idiot.

I always marveled at writers who would say their books just “wrote themselves,” which I never believed, but it does seem there is a connection between your arm and your creativity that sometimes eludes your consciousness. Somehow, the act of writing distills a jumble of information that lacks any coherent structure and comes out valuable.

David Foster Wallace, in his introduction to The Best American Essays, 2007, calls this jumble “Total Noise: the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value.” He goes on to say that the essays he’s chosen for this anthology respond to the “tsunami of available, fact, context, and perspective that constitutes Total Noise by serving as models and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways—ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the over all roar.”

I’m not putting myself in that category, the “illuminating truth” one, and besides, it sounds like way too much work. What comes down my arm is more serendipitous and at the same time more rote: all those words and their arrangements in all those novels, essays, biographies, treatises, magazines, and newspapers I’ve read over the years have provided a pattern for my own. I’m also trying to find a way, like Wallace, through the “tsunami,” but how successful I am is where the serendipity comes into play.

Every few months someone writes in The New York Times or some magazine that you can’t really teach someone how to write. You can help them make outlines, critique their word choice, or laud their imagination, but you can’t identify, much less offer, that secret ingredient—intelligence, creativity, sheer fortitude?—that creates value.

Christopher Hitchens said that if you can talk you can write. Although I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, Max and I listened to Christopher (he hated being called Chris, so I keep referring to him as “Christopher” in the voice Adrianna used when speaking to Christopher Moltisanti in the Sopranos) read his memoir on CD on our long car trip to Chicago to deposit Max at grad school. Christopher, or “Hitch” as he became with the literati, certainly could talk and proved he could write as well.

Max tells me that I write like people talk, which is a twist on what Christopher says. I guess that means I use the pen/computer to have a conversation, which although one-sided, has at least the time on my part to be prepared, edited, rewritten, and finally flung out into the world. It may leave me somewhat removed, but at least it doesn’t leave me blithering.