The voice of William Faulkner is the inscrutable voice of God the Artist, and as such it is never heard.

Not directly. If at all.

It is omniscient and omnipresent in space and time. It has chosen to follow the classical modernist advice to write what one knows, and it knows one county in Mississippi with perfect intimacy. Within that known county, it sees everything and imparts what it sees to the reader without apparent intermediary. Which is the Devil’s own trick, except the voice is not the Devil’s voice. Like I said, it’s God’s.

***

The voice of Scaachi Koul says:

“Hey. I’m really imperfect. I am edgy, difficult, cool, and completely normal. Just like you-
-and thus, I am relatable; let’s relate.”

I was only ever in her audience once, and it was today. She read a piece on This American Life. I happened to be out doing some “last-minute Christmas shopping”, which was nothing at all how it sounds. I bought meat. Drink. A facial cleanser from the clearance rack randomly. Every bit of it was for myself.

The piece she read is called “Single Bells” and you can listen to it here. (As the title suggests, it’s about her first divorced Christmas).

It’s good. I don’t know how old she is, but she’s a better writer than I was at her age. See also her website, where the titles of her essays speak volumes about her concerns, approach, and voice. Likewise for what she calls her ‘debut collection of essays’, which she named “One Day We’ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter“, except on the cover some of the words are crossed out and the alternative reading is ‘one day this will matter”. Alright, okay …

***

One time I heard another writer say something along these lines.

‘They tell you that this is America and you can grow up to be anything you want to be. But that’s bullshit. No matter how hard I worked or how much gumption and resolve I had, I had absolutely no chance of becoming a linebacker for the Rams’.

I forget if this writer was physically slight, or a woman, or what, but there was some reason that made that assertion perfectly logical. And, as a bonus, true.

But it goes a little deeper than that.

Another time, I heard another writer say something like:

‘If you grow up with the advantages of being raised by a loving, average family of modest means, in let’s say Wyoming, or Texas, you can grow up to become a lot of things. Maybe a developer, or a financial services manager, or a chef or a teacher or a shortstop. But even so, there is one thing you will never, ever stand a chance of being, and that is the drama critic for the New York Times’.

Maybe that’s exactly true and maybe not, but the gist of it certainly is. The future d.c. for the NYT is not only going to be a person who takes The Theater very seriously, but a person whose parents do too. Those same parents are going to have to have a lot of leisure time and disposable income, and probably live not far from Broadway, and very likely Manhattan itself. Not Manhattan, Kansas, see?

Any high-level cultural employment is going to be the same. The daughters of diplomats become diplomats at a much higher rate than the daughters of plumbers. The sons of senators will go into politics much more often than the sons of bus drivers.

This was once *less* true in America. Edward R. Murrow could grow up out in Idaho, go to Boise State, and end up as the most important and revered Correspondent of his generation. Eartha Kitt could be a literal post-plantation slave, catch one break, and make the most of it to become an actress, a singer, an important civil rights activist, and the best Catwoman if we’re being honest.

Of course, for every Eartha there’s ten Betty Sue Loudermilks whose names you don’t recognize at all.

And, nowadays, the gates of culture and society are ever more fine-meshed and stratified in any number of ways.

If you want to go to New York and make it big in show biz, and you don’t have any money, you may very well have to live in a bus shelter for a good long while before you make it, or don’t, because renting the smallest closet is just too expensive. Bob Dylan and Patti Smith never had it easy. But they did have a fighting chance, in that America.

If your tastes are more about climbing the ladder in some corporation, or non-profit, or government agency, it may be essential to serve a long unpaid internship, and if the folks back in Kentucky can’t afford to float you in the big city for six months, or if the folks don’t give a shit, or they’re meth heads, or dead–good luck, kid. It’s not that you have No Chance, in the fabled land of opportunity. But you’re trying to thread a camel through the eye of a needle. You’ll need a hell of a lot of talent or luck or both.

One more.

One of the founding fathers, John Adams I think, said that his generation were revolutionaries, so that their sons could be merchants, and their grandsons could be artists.

And that pretty much ties it up in a bow.

***

All idealizations aside, my voice is not in any way the Faulknerian god-voice. I was never going to be that good.

My voice is a lot closer to the sound of the Scaachi-Koul, with many significant differences, like F and M, Canadian and American, young and old, woke and still dreaming. Maybe I’d transcribe my own sound … like this.

“Hey. I’m really imperfect.

I used to be totally convinced I was edgy and cool, but either I’m not, or I’ve stopped giving a shit about whether I am or not, because I’ve got bigger problems.

Difficult? Oh yeah, that’s … fair. In an understated way.

Normal? I’m sure it looks that way, to most people most of the time, but only because I used to also be real good at hiding my suppurating abnormalities, my diseases of the brain and soul, my native crudeness and predisposition to as many kinds of failure as there are. I hid them because I was afraid they’d evict me, fire me, and the very first time I gave them a chance to, by staying in one place more than two years, that’s exactly what they did anyway, when my lying disguise failed and the anarchic misanthrope beneath was exposed to the view of my tasteful betters.

Relating!? Oh sweet Jesus in a bag of dicks.

Unless you are family, or a lover, there is a good 98.6% chance that I’d cross the street, drive a mile, ford a creek, or live in a literal van down by the river to avoid relating to you even briefly and politely.

This extreme and maladaptive conversophobia has had major and sometimes catastrophic consequences for both my life and my art.

In life, I don’t initiate. So the people who get close to me have to come at me and after me, again and again, and that’s generally a symptom of the ways they too are broken. In the seventh house, the one for relationships, my Sun, my Self, conjuncts Pluto, a small and dark and radioactive body that represents tremendously unstable power, a toxicity that sometimes wobbles its way unsteadily into a nuclear fusion of joy but much more often explodes without warning and with all hands lost.

I mean if, you know, you believe in that astrological crap.

In art, well, I gave that Theater an honest shot long ago and I knew right away it was not to be. For all the reasons discussed already, I am incapable of collaboration.

When I practice Belletrism like I am right now, I do it from behind the microphone and the fifty thousand watt signal drifting up the Columbia River Gorge, from behind the Panasonic G7 camera, from behind the endless blank digitally wordpressed page, so that you can hear me (or Hollywood Evansaint Macavity, or Alejandro Vairtere), but with no backtalk. You choose to listen, or much more often not to listen, but the option to respond is mitigated, or it was never, by design, there at all.

I set the sounds and images adrift in the stream not for an editor, or a hungry audience, or a recognized publisher who gladly forks over a fat advance, or an A&R man waving a contract. I launch the fragile poetic paper boats in a whisper for reasons even I don’t understand, and I send them off with a prayer that they be a cause for wonder or joy or a simple shocked moment for anyone who lives closer to the ocean than to the spring and the seep and the cienega I dwell among in these remote uplifted mountains.

Doing the work is all that matters.

I murmur a fragment of a song in your ear and the voice sounds like: ‘and so this is Christmas’ and so it is.