How To Elevate Your Writing to Literature: Close Reading of Kirpal Gordon's "New York At Twilight."
To be trained in writing is to learn language, grammar rules, form, rhythm, content organization, economy of words, and research. But there are two qualities you cannot learn in school. After thirty years of studying songwriting, poetry, and creative writing and earning an MFA, I believe two elements elevate writing to literature: Resonance and wisdom. In this Substack, titled "You Make the Culture," I'll illustrate how these elements create literary magic by providing my notes to Kirpal Gordon's book, New York At Twilight.
As the daughter of artists in New York's Greenwich Village, I absorbed early that "Art" depends on the resonance between artist and audience. The artist chooses a compelling visual, musical, or language line as an expressive gesture. Resonance, or re-sounding, involves recognition. To achieve that connective spark, writers are encouraged to "Know our audience."
But there's a flaw in that strategy. In this review, for example, I realize that my close reading notes reflect my perspective, and I would be arrogant to think they are the same as others. The delight in reading Kirpal's sixteen loosely woven short stories is that he challenges you with the psychic space to make these connections from your own experience.
But how do you make these connections if you have not taken the time to know yourself? We are constantly creating our "self." How we thrive depends on our ability to challenge our early beliefs and increase our awareness of our current environment and capabilities. Part of this process is letting go of what we believe is our "self." Getting unstuck and being more fluid: This is how we acquire wisdom. In this regard, Kirpal's book has much to offer.
The Magus of the Blue Hour
"I sense a cold coming on and free Mai Tais will help me weather that approaching storm while I contemplate my last essay in a ten-part series which asks: If civilization is annihilating the wilderness, what happens to the wilderness within us?" (3)
[Thematic statement, so effortlessly introduced. Such a rich metaphor, because society tries to tame our childhood wildness. Though a night out with friends sometimes reminds us. The wilderness is also about overcoming challenges. Perhaps we could be more productively creative if we learned how to accept, channel, or harness our wildness, instead of suppressing it?]
"And because she shows me love's power to create and destroy in the same image, I'm thinking Love is the first clue for the wilderness-within-us article." (4)
[Uses italics for thinking out loud. Ekphrastic inspiration, I like the seamlessness]
"Lady X, this is Mr. Y, a photographer."(4)
[Subtle cross gender intro to "author." Also possible reference to Singer Sargent's Madame X?
The subject of X and Y, referring to chromosomes is particularly relevant to current gender discussions. Even as it emerges that gender is scientifically more complex, even more fluid than simple differentiation between men and women, we wonder has it always been that way, and we are just now able to perceive it? Or is it possible that environmental toxins, such as plastics, are affecting us on a genetic level, and we are just now developing a language for it?]
"Photographer? Please, he's an actor playing a Y chromosome" (4)
[Funniest line I've read in a long time]
"–so I keep returning to your conclusions that our consciousness is not separate from other species and the sounds we make in the sexual abandon of la petit mort are the death knells of the species we've made extinct by our compulsive reproduction and abuse of natural resources.
He loves my work. He actually quotes me verbatim, huzzah!" (5)
[The photographer as amplifier who quotes Kirpal's writing and theme. Nice device. Leads to an expanding appreciation of Y - mental movement = growth.]
"He high-beams me the promise of sexual healing, not about to let my restaurant choice foil him. He says, "You see the whole mess we're in, Lady X: While the Lake poets revered nature, walked the woods and wrote the Romantic movement into being, the English nave carved up Asia and Africa whose reverence for nature was considered backwards and legitimated their conquest. Our treatment of women and lack of reverence for nature go hand in hand making it only more unfortunate that the only remaining path to reverence our culture takes seriously is the passion of erotic ecstasy as you point out."
Mr Y is reading me like a psychic and I'm thinking Such relentless chutzpah––using my own writing to seduce me. (8)
[Skillful theme recapitulation and expansion. Skillful literary and historical references. With the notion of "reverence lost to erotic ecstasy." Lack of conventional punctuation gives the writing a Kerouac momentum.Then using the descriptive phrase 'relentless chutzpah' - how New York!]
"I'm seeing I'm-a-better-future-for-your-children written all over him" (8)
[Very funny! Like a TV commercial.]
"I don't want to lose my appetite or my reputation but I must get a grip, at least find out his first name." (9)
[love the juxtaposition humor details between existential threats and the pragmatic name!]
"I'm thinking Y's journey....leads to his atonement with nature..."
[nice explanation tied into theme. Not one excess word! Poetic, in other words.]
"Zee's photos are the coda to the last article on the existing wilderness: humans need to honor other species'territories: mother nature has spoken." (11)
[Wow! what a strong statement, using mortality as the mallet.]
"He's changed from a Y chromosome into the word Why" (11)
[Nice character transformation metaphor]
"I open Door Number One...the shape of a white Bengal tiger ...clicks of a big-speed camera."
[Brilliant ending! It made me gasp at the cycle of hunter/hunted implications, with perception/images/self-knowledge. Major talent, skill, knowledge, that makes literature look effortless.]
Orpheus in Heavy Metal
"His music gave love another chance. He like to remind his audience to walk and not look back. His name became Kid Orpheus." (13)
[Lovely literary reference to Orpheus and Eurydice. Rich sensory description of modern day hell with love as the transcending path.]
Navigating...He understood dismemberment." (13)
[The whole paragraph - What an extraordinary set of details of hell!]
"Kid O , no stranger to the rotten, found his begetter's severed head face down atop a mound of sludge. He fished out the rest of his pater's remains as they floated around an island of condoms that resembled odd-shaped jellyfish buoyed on the surface of the scum tide." (15)
[Those of us reared by parents who lived their own demons, can feel the power of this paragraph. Yet Orpheus pays his respects dutifully. But questions whether without resolution, is he merely an enabler?"]
"Kid O failed to see the maenads in the gallery. Agitated by his music they tore out their hair and began to run toward him. And in search of his love, despite every warning he had given and been given, Orpheus looked back. He watched tearful Eurydice fade into the ether as the maenads ripped off his clothes and screamed a wild unearthly sound.
Then they were upon him." (15)
[Quite the condemnation of the star-fucker mentality that seduces – then destroys – the artist.]
[In the language of letting go, a fantasmic re-telling of of Orpheus and his lost love Eurydice, and how music is a universal connector, even as we are disenfranchised by conventional culture.]
Lustrum at the RKO
[Hypocrisy takes center stage, as Gordon recounts a sweet tale of an adolescent and the eternal struggle of knowledge, love, and original sin - with which the church tries to poison, and stunt our lives in our formative stages.]
""I am this labyrinth, this catacomb, this amphitheater, she told herself, I am the womb that births Christ. But Mother of God, it's the fate of Lucifer bearing light I must accept. Heaven is just a projection booth, a room in my head no one can enter, and I long to break open in a shared bond of warm love. If this be hell or hubris, shame or misery, I'll suffer the price." 25
[I appreciate this declaration of embodied wisdom from the young woman protagonist. In it, I hear a more ancient cadence. I experienced this energy when I visited the Scottish Isle of Iona, most famous for St. Columba's monastery, after he escaped his troubled past in Ireland. But I was much more interested in the Women's Abbey on Iona that had an ancient fertility symbol, Sheela-Na-Gigs (A spread-eagled woman with enlarged genitals) from 11th and 12th century, and likely from feminine Celtic practices) when Hildegard Von Bingen of Germany had accolytes who spread her words throughout Europe and the isles.]
Television Jones
"It was March 1991"
[When a writer cites a specific time frame, one can understand it as shorthand for an important part of the setting against the explicit scene of a "Chinatown loft window" view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Since Jean-Claude, the protagonist of this story is a "light skinned" black man, I look up black history, to be reminded that March of 1991 marks the brutal beating murder of Rodney King by three Los Angeles policemen. What follows is a deeply insightful recognition of the resonance such brutality causes. In this case, the triggered reaction is a descent into patterns of behavior that have proved unhealthy in the past. In this instance, however, the character reaches out to a "team" of allies who might have a chance to help him recenter.
I found it a touching, achingly human portrait, that starts with his mother's homily about forgiveness and healing is better than blame and festering, and ends with his allies meting out some tough love as mirrors.
There are enough nuances and details to remind us of the lessons gleaned from Spike Lee's 1996 movie about the 1995 Million Man March to Washington DC. The point being that we do a great disservice to paint any identity with a generic brush. We are truly all as different as our fingerprints, and violence against any of us, based on prejudice and hate is the gravest injustice. Yet Gordon's paints his character Jean-Claude with an intimacy that signals we are merely imperfect humans doing the best we can, and any one of us might struggle with addictive behaviors.]
[Our current culture makes writers sensitive to cultural appropriation. As a result, Gordon shows distinct courage to choose that trope. Gordon, again uses paradox artfully. Jean Baptiste has experienced "privilege," so it is even more potent that he also experiences the deep rage and hopelessness that renders the notion of good behavior meaningless. Gordon's courage ties back to Ginsberg's Howl. But the rendering is flavored with compassion inescapable from Gordon's Buddhist-based Naropa education, further informed by ancient wisdom embedded in Sanskrit holy writings.
It's endearing that Gordon chose the anachronistic television as the metaphorical addiction. It was, perhaps, the first cyber implant that brought the full paroxysm of racial violence into our intimate spaces. The sexual spaces. The space where the amygdala hormonal energy engine gives us flight, fight, freeze or fuck. The pulses assail and feed our addictions, from the civil rights marches to Rodney King, to the sickening eight seconds for George Floyd. Such psychological association fuels self-hatred. But we start to understand that this injustice happens every single day in some way. Our iPhones only hasten our awareness. Only the brave escape, as Jean Claude hurls a brick at the old fashioned cathode ray screen. Even then, he muses: "Maybe it was time for a new model and a bigger screen." ]
Shanghai in the East Village
"You're like a sub-atomic particle..."
[Love the citation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Such a rich metaphor for existence. For example, I recognize that where Pomo Derm on the specific avenue from Houston Street to the movie theatre on Second and Eighth to be one of the densest historically yiddish for both theatre, yeshivas, and temples in the new-old world. With even a smallest exposure, you will know that literature and the absurd live in the most intimate and even squalid conditions. Yet manage to keep kosher, just as I.B. Singer would have described. Yet in Gordon's story something not-quite kosher is played out.]
[Coming across a character named "Pomo Dern," in a story, I wondered immediately about the author's choice. I think perhaps it's an anagram, but despite my most adept attempts, I'm not able to puzzle it out. But by the end of the story I discern the word-play implications. I don't want to be the spoiler, but if you follow philosophy, you may recognize the apparent dissection of reality as it falls apart so that the reader, as well as the characters, must lose their grip a bit in order to understand how the mind cop must stop. In order to step over the threshold of post modernism and it's possibilities, yet we are way beyond Emily Dickinson land.
Nice device to disclose the deeper thinking of the ex-detective, in reference to to "dick"
Clever that the hostess is labeled the "X Factor" alluding to her sexual ID and mystery.
The german accent is the teaser that ultimately leads to the recognition that power, sex, and death are entwined unavoidably.]
The Zeitgeist of Peace and Love: Philosophy
"Stephanos Stavros could not figure out why there was evil in the world." (43)
[In this story about Zeitgeist which means "the spirit of the times," I admire the way the characters manifest the intersection between classical Greek philosophy and the psychological encounter with Helga's Nietzschian behaviors, and with Eastern contemplative concepts.]
"As for men lying about their feelings, look at my boss at the Village café. I get my little sister a job there and the minute I'm not around, the bastards slips her a Mickey Finn thinking he can now have his way with her. How open a heart is that?
"Love for some is a contest."
"Then call it sex or power, but don't call it love." (53)
[critical discernment of the Neitzschian concept.]
You’re Blooming Everywhere
[In a letter to deceased author J.D. Salinger, Kirpal does his nostalgia proud.]
"As brass and timpani burst the budding season's first green, I know what it means to be born, to open a book and be transformed from printed page into flesh of life."(60)
[A 'master stroke' to link Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, with it's haunting, seductive melodies and explosive dissonance, to J.D. Salinger's now classic american piece of literature, without saying the name of the book. Which he mentions, (and that only a catholic school education can amplify,) is now subject to library bans. Given the apparent sad history of church hyposcrisy, one might wonder what reaction the censor experienced upon review.]
"No American author has gained more by saying less about himself and his famous prrotagonist." (60)
[Salinger was famous for his monumental disinterest in talking about his work and himself, which only added to the impression that the work was not just biographically real, it was surreal. A romp into a noteworthy intersection between sex, food, and first bursts, with only the slightest slant. But the reticent author was apparently fond of the more nubile flavors, which makes it a little sad to realize that the bloom may be a version of stuckness that at least one generation is stuck with. But Kirpal segues an elegant turn into this dark tunnel in the very next story.]
Portal To The Lost City
"But in the language spoken here, what I have been searching for has been searching for me." ...
"A private investigator with no one to find and nowhere to go, I headed out in camouflage face and clothing." (63)
[The trope of Private Investigator is a potent thread in this book. An insightful cue for our own personal investigation, with the inevitable camouflage, while noting the caveat from psychological risk from peering into the darkness.]
"They cried out each other's name––Holden and Ava––over and over as their excitement built."(65)
[I love it when a book inspires me to research more deeply. In this case, I recognize the allusions to Salinger's Holden Caulfield, but I didn't recognize the name Ava, since Holden's love interest was named Jane. Thanks to the miracle of the internet however, when I search for "Holden and Ava," I discover a 2014 New York Times review of Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaria. The Times author, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, delves into the emotional trauma of a sibling death. Like Holden's brother's death is thematic, Dellaria's book is a story about a classroom assignment to write a love letter to a dead person, "There are some things that I can't tell anyone except the people who aren't here anymore." And finally the review delves into the darkest of dark, through the double whammy of abuse and family death. This silent space of trauma is the heart of the matter. Every matter. I can imagine that Kirpal, in his university classes, might have given such an assignment, because if we can't teach this, we teach nothing. For me, this is the apex insight, eloquently couched, as the Times reviewer suggests, "in fiction."]
Venus Rising Over Brooklyn Bridge Rising
"However pedestrian and lacking in pathos, every solitude's walk means to confront loss" (73)
[A wise refrain in a masterful prose poem, with rhyming lines that dance in the mind, begging for the form of song. This piece deserves to be read aloud, so the word sounds form in your head and surrounding space. In this way, one hears the internal rhymes and repeating consonants, and recognizes the necessary melancholy in twilight's magical mood. It's great to be reminded that every person has a story.]
A Ghost In His Own Skin
[In a surreal setting, the protagonist says he lives under the floorboards of the "Archer of Death's" house. Upon research, this appears to be an allusion to the concept of archer in the bible. The location is given as "Punim County," which might be a slant version of Putnam County, a locale that might be familiar based on Kirpal's bio. But on a deeper etymological level, the word signals a version of "punishment" for this "lost soul." As the story unfolds, it reflects how this protagonist lives in such close quarters, with occasional scraps of nourishment from allies, who might even have some residue of saintly recognition. What can we take from this tale? Perhaps even as we try to reassure ourselves with spiritual beliefs, the closer we are to being imprisoned by our proximity to death.]
Petals of Pushpema
[Title, which appears to refer to the feminine Vedic Boddhisatva, could be a road sign to a site such as https://www.trippingly.net/lsd-studies/2018/10/13/the-psychedelic-experience-a-manual-based-on-the-tibetain-book-of-the-dead, for an explanation of the means of expanding consciousness. The internet site provides a map to the mycelium of history, fluid knowledge, and philosophy, metaphorically brought forth as a display of blossoms.]
[Love the choice of names Eroica Zelignaut and Mark Tense. (Heroine of her time and NB the time frames?)]
[Nod to Ezra Pound's iconic poem! and a Whitmanesque walk through lower Manhattan, including our more modern iconic capitalist bull.]
"She realized she was the passenger on this inner outing" (83)
[Clever observation, for a lifelong journey towards enlightenment.]
"Mark Tense confirmed her woeful tale of lures and snares...rippling along the East River...1863 Draft Riots....Vietnam...memorial to the fallout from the nearby Twin Towers" (85)
[The density of the cinematic dissolves portrays the errors of our human ways through recent history.]
""Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull, his girlfriend said. "You're living that line from Rushdie's Satanic Verses.""
[This insert follows the thread from the previous story about how a poet lives in close proximity, beneath the floorboards of death, when he reads and writes with full force of authentic knowledge and freedom.]
"Whitman says...be not discouraged...I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell." (87)
[Here we see Kirpal's capability to embrace paradox, as Jung suggested, and as Eli Siegel, poet/founder of Aesthetic Realism proposes. Whitman's optimistic essence, after witnessing the worst of humanities effects during the civil war, becomes the foundational pavement upon which New Yorkers walk every day.]
"Joining her in song, "Die to be born, John Barleycorn," (89}
[I love the reference to this song which is one of my favorite ancient international folk songs, whose lineage includes a version by Scottish poet Robert Burns, so beautifully rendered by Traffic. Because of the guitar stylings and lyrics, I chose this as part of my own ASCAP performance repertoire.
Say the Word
"Walt Rusk was once again losing the letter t and k in his name." (91)
[Very funny opening to those familiar with Beatles lyrics, which follows nicely from the recognizable title. The essay riffs on a number of Beatles songs especially the album Rubber Soul, which signaled a turn in their writing as Kirpal says, "from bubblegum music to mysticism." (92) It could be asked did the album inspire a tectonic cultural shift, or did it reflect it? The most populous American generation was reaching adolescence and the "times were a-changing," to psychedelic fueled peace and love––or, maybe just tusk lust?']
Hers At Last
"I pass beyond the boundaries established for the residents here."
[The possibility for transcendence is portrayed in this hispanic-based cultural connection to the moon. The lines are blurred as to whether the existence described are of the city or a prison, but, in a sense it is all the same. Kirpal contrasts the gray of existence with the heat and romance of Caribbean/Puerto Rican sensibilities. The protagonist is a woman who rises above the darkest insults against her by connection to the full orb of the moon that shines into her solitary cell. You can't help but think she has tapped into some essence.]
The Twilight Society
"I was making a living and growing a reputation. But the first time my sketch healed anyone...someone else took the credit."
[If Kirpal's book is an exploration of "Love is the first clue for the wilderness...within us", as stated in the first story, then this essay is the love letter. The speaker is a sketch artist, archly named Pablo. We recognize that the process of drawing is one of the most intimate gestures. The visual sense gives us a way to see deeply and with full attentiveness, perhaps the strongest portal to love. But this sentence also reveals the conflict or story tension. At first, the vampire-like implication of the title of twilight appears as the two musical characters who combine their "aural magic" with the sketches to entrance (and heal?) their audience. But that turns out to be just the first stage rocket for the energy and information interest, Maria.
I love the name Maria, a version of Mary. While traveling in Bruges, I visited the famous Beguine, a 12-century community built for women, both abandoned and widowed by the crusades. A small bookstore had virtually no books that talked of sacred feminine, except one by a dutch nun scholar, with a title translated as "A Thousand Marys." It described her research into iconic literature that "cried Mary." Although just hinted at the more ancient connections. But we see it from The Sound of Music to West Side Story and other cultural vehicles, now including Kirpal's.]
"when I put down the pencil and Pam and Sam finished and the applause ended, there was a sweet fragrance of gardenias."(107)
[Addition of the sense of smell signals the "Twilight Society, and presages the connection to Maria. If you have ever experienced this scent, you may remember its startling potency and indelible sultriness.]
"I noticed a brown woman in a white dress materialize into an empty chair at an empty table in the corner....You smell of gardenias, I said, May I ask your name?...What are you, ICE or just the heat? she said and laughed." (107)
[appreciated the scent and the humorous tone, and I love the agency implied by her coming and going without explanation.
"Maria described the the Twilight Society...to pay witness to atrocity and discovery, to heal ills, align worlds and welcome the dead to life..."
[What a delightful way to put this; that the arts are portals into the mysteries that embrace the full spectrum of human behaviors, and ultimately transcend the prosaic. So poignant.]
"correctional facility..."
[This, on the surface, echoes the previous "prison" story. But I imagine that given Kirpal's publishing bio at the end of the book, that he has a sense of this transcendance.]
Erasing The Separation
[A lot going on below the hood on this one. But I appreciate the form of short story to impart the important aspects of energy, the illusion of separate self, and the conundrum about the words for God. After doing some research about the protagonist name, saw that the character is both destroyer and embodiment of goodness. Nice, thought-provoking paradox.]
"Joe drew a large X across the calendar box that tread July 13, 1977..."
[Once again, I search on the date to find that it was one of NYC's most serious blackouts, in the midst of it's darkest financial days. I was long gone, living in Seattle by then. It's funny that it's blamed on the electrical typewriter. I was living in Village View projects in the lower east side during the 1965 blackout. (About the time of Hara Joe's arrival, lol) At twelve, I had to care-take my three siblings, aged 11, 6 and 4, feed them dinner, calm their fears, then walk them down 15 flights of stairs with a candle to reunite with our parents. So this noteworthy experience is visceral for me.]
"Explaining the poet instead of burning their own house down first." (116)
[I appreciate this notion, similar to Marjorie Perloff's great book about "Wittgenstein's Ladder."
"religion and its priests-rules-beliefs-hypocrisies cannot be trusted." (121)
[Potent and truthful, at least to this reader. It seems to me that we might be able to navigate however, given more fluid guides such as Siegel's definition of mind, and perhaps some of the basic buddhist philosophies.]
"My rational mind wore out and took a back seat."
[Great glimmer!]
Leaving You Properly
[Ah yes, I thoroughly connect with Kirpal's sentiment. I, and my siblings were sent to camp 8 weeks every summer, to Greenhouse House and Children's Aid Society. Looking out the bus window, I would cry as we pulled away and then cried again as the Empire State Building re-appeared upon our return. Also related to the more beautiful, younger sister, the Chrysler Building, as our view from our apartment from NYU's Silver Towers, from 1968 which I, too, left it in the rear view. Nice touch of the love of place and your roots. My husband even resonated with this notion, as a child, he thought it was called "The Entire State Building."]