Getting My Manifesto On.

Aesthetic Manifesto: Draft 1

James Bezerra

One sure sign that you have ended up in the weeds while attempting to write your aesthetic manifesto is that you freely and under no threat of duress return to the manifesto of Dadaism. Asking Tristan Tzara for help is probably about as good of an idea as asking William S. Burroughs to write the tax code; it will be fascinating, it will likely not be illuminating.

Because we expect our manifestos to be jaunty and bombastic and pamphlet-able, I am breaking this one up into bite-sized chunks, like chicken in soup.

The nighttime work of a writer is writing. The day job work of a writer is the amassing of tools to be placed into a toolbox. These tools can be words or styles or strategies or thoughts or images or people or - as is frequently the case in my own life - whiskey.

I have not yet formulated a Grand Unified Theory of my own writing. Or rather, I have not yet figured out how to write it down. But I have some thoughts:

Tzara did write things like, “knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA”. You gotta admire a guy who writes like that. I think I would have enjoyed being a Dadaist, though I don’t think they would have enjoyed me. I think I would have liked being a Trotskyite too, though I have never been able to decide if my affinity for Trotsky is entirely the fault of David Ives.

My aunt used to own a small box. It was made of light colored wood and half the size of a brick and it didn’t open, exactly. It was a kind of rudimentary Rubik’s Cube she’d picked up in Hong Kong. Slide one side in order to move a peg inside in order to release the top panel to slide away in order to be able to hinge open the other side, etc etc etc.

I write like that.

I try to build magical little clockwork black boxes. All writing should have within it a kind of mystery; that creates the joy of reading. The act of writing then, is the act of building that mystery (shout out here to Sarah McLachlan) and it is one of the most problematic acts of joy and most complicated acts of problem-solving I have ever even heard of. I think about writing the way that chess players think about chess: that it is an insane pleasure which will probably one day crush me and drive me completely batshit out of my mind.

I’ve been writing basically my entire life. I used to use a machine called a ‘word processor’, which was like a box where you kept all of your frustrations and paper jams. Early on as a writer I made a list of things that I did not want to write about. An excerpt:  

• Cops
• Doctors
• Medical examiners
• Criminals out for one last score
• Astronauts (I have no idea why this ended up on the list. I was 12.)
• Heroic G.I. Joe-esque soldiers
• Wise-beyond-their-years children
• Fearless and high-moral investigative journalists
• James Bond ripoffs
• Any type of character that Tom Cruise might one day want to play
• Chosen Ones (Luke Skywalker, Neo, Jesus, Harry Potter, etc.)
• Rockstars
• Serial killers

The list goes on.

Other people will invariably write that shit and god love them for doing it, but the world is far too weird and complicated and confused and mysterious of a place for me to spend my time doing it.

The most recent thing I wrote was about a guy who needed to find 50 mimes real fast.

I find myself returning to Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins about once a year. The way that some people return to Don Quixote or the Bible. For me, Still Life is about as perfect, small, and beautiful of a novel as has ever been written. From the kitchen table where I do all my writing I can see it. I also make sure that I can always see the spines of Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope, Amiee Bender’s Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, One Hundred Years of Solitude by my man Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and at least one Vonnegut novel though I waffle often over which one that should be (Slaughterhouse-Five or Mother Night). These books are my extended, portable, literary family.

For the record: Yes, I just said Still Life is as nearly perfect of a thing as I have read.

That’s not true.

I have actually read the one perfect thing that exists and it is a short story by Carol Shields called “Various Miracles”. I will not defame it by saying any more about it.

I feel like I am still in the weeds.

Our writing must contain joy. Not happiness, but joy.

I like the act of attempting to make the ridiculous not ridiculous.

I love the words: svelte, duck, ephemeral, tart, slick, syllogism, phosphorescent, emitting.

I hate the words: cacophony, webinar, Hegelian, parataxis, jurisprudence, chalk.

Our writing should be charming bordering on snarky, sexy bordering on lurid, clever bordering on obnoxious, honest bordering on profane, and ultimately when the mystery box finally slides open and reveals itself to us, it should be tender. Our writing should always be like writing to a complicated lover, in that it should hold everything we are capable of feeling. It should be the most true thing about us.

Dada.

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