Carl Boon, in his very first question during the interview that ran here a few weeks back, asked me to position my work towards what he calls “the ‘clash zone,’ the space where technology meets nature,” to which I responded: 

Now for reasons that are much more social than natural, I’m somewhat obsessed with documenting “the invisible” in our lives. If there’s an enduring theme in my work, that’s it. And in urban environment especially, nature is one of those dimensions that recedes. One tends to forget that sparrows are great urban foragers, or how weeds fit into the ecological chain, but they’re there.

This response provoked another question for Carl, as follows:

Why is it so important to document “the invisible in our lives”? Do you have some sense that sparrows and weeds are vanishing in our increasingly urbanized, “parking-lot” landscape?

This goes right back to the motivation for writing in the first place, or at least my motivation. When one is raised, as I was, in a household in which one of the adults has repeated, lengthy & fairly severe psychotic episodes – the apotheosis for me was being chased around a table at knifepoint – and no one in the family is able to speak the words “mental illness,” the question of the invisible comes up front & center.

Not that I would have articulated it as such. From the perspective of me at the age of ten, I had simply found a way – creative writing – that I discovered would cause most of my teachers to let me replace any major homework assignment that I found difficult, boring or otherwise repellant: I would offer to write a story or report on the general subject. Writing also gave me a safe place to be, and an acceptable reason for not interacting with that same adult, my grandmother, if I wanted some space, literally, for myself.

Although I didn’t recognize at the time, writing was also giving me a series of tools that were of exceptional value in terms of organizing the world as I was experiencing it – beginning by dealing with such obvious questions as why my family life seemed so different from that of so many (though not all) of the kids around me. I didn’t deal with those questions directly, at least not as a kid & really in many ways not until I got to the age at which my own father had died – 38.

Somewhere in the process, though, I got the idea that there was an awful lot of the contemporary world that was hidden from many, perhaps most, of the people around me. When I was a kid, I would have articulated that in terms of civil rights, and the individual rights of people – especially artists – struggling in Eastern Europe against the censorship of the state. If Jonathan Mayhew thinks I’m earnest now, he should have seen me at the age of 15 or thereabouts. I’m sure that I was insufferable.*

That equation – that the civil rights marchers had much in common with the Hungarian rebels in 1956 and that Eugene “Bull” Connor had even more in common with the heirs of Stalin – stuck with me & proved essential in not only giving me an orientation toward such basic terms as justice, but also gave me the ability & willingness to be the only member of my high school graduating class to file immediately for conscientious objector’s status, which I did within 48 hours of my 18^th birthday. Whenever I look at the Vietnam memorial wall in Washington & see the names of people I grew up with like Ray Nora and Chris Martinez etched into that marble, it reminds me that writing might very well have saved my life on more than one occasion.

So while I’m less concerned with weeds & sparrows, I am always conscious of how the invisible manifests itself, again & again in life. Certainly any man of my generation will recall just how radically differently the relations between genders were back in the early 1960s. It was exactly the “obviousness” of sexist patterns that seemed invisible to men back then, just as many people today have no clue of all the homophobic systems we have in place throughout our lives, the ways in which “daily life” could seem an active campaign for heterosexuality, especially to anyone who doesn’t share in that common myth. So I would articulate my interest in the invisible in terms of the social, more than the natural – especially since I think “nature” is a cultural category, rather like “God,” something we impose on the universe as we live in it – but I often feel that the commitments I felt when I was ten years old are an awful good test of not only my writing, but my life, & bringing the unseen into the foreground is central to those commitments.

* Memo to self: write a piece someday on the importance of insufferable people. Insufferability is deeply underappreciated, just because it’s déjà toujours so obnoxious.