NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND BY ROBSTOYEVSKI

Defying all that is good and healthful in life I have decided to focus on the negative. I will let myself sink into the worst possible interpretations of my life and all its doubtful enterprise. I have decided not to try to talk myself out of misery, but to dwell in it and see what it might have to tell me.

I have in the past talked myself into exactly the opposite position, and said I should do everything possible to stay out of darkness, do everything possible to find the bright side, be positive, be grateful, pay attention to the successes rather than the defeats.

But I find myself now with abilities grossly diminished, possibly from a murmurous heart, possibly from other maladies that have benighted my days, possibly from being old. Wherever it came from, I have embraced the determination that my energy is too low to work hard, too low to follow the dreams I once had.

I tire after walking across a room. I tire from remaining upright longer than a minute. My physical life has been ruinously curtailed, and likewise my mental life. I read good writing as always to give me pleasure and to learn, but my mind, too, lacks the energy for such efforts. I do not leap to the blank sheet as I once did. I have determined to live in this world for the time being, in hopes of, if not in the effort to, get out of it. But who’s to say it’s something to be gotten out of?

I look at others who do good work of the sort that I would like to do and remind myself to be resigned to being less than excellent. I look at others climbing mountains or pedaling across the country and remind myself to be resigned to sitting still at home and trying to find some satisfaction that way. I could possibly go and find work writing for someone but I don’t have the energy for that kind of work.

My life is girt round by darkness. I conceive a disdain for anything coming into my sphere. A turned-on television in the next room drives me nuts. TV advertising makes me sick. I can’t stand watching football or being with people who watch football. Australian accents annoy me. Christmas, New Years, Easter—they all take too much energy. Novels by women make me angry. I could fill pages with things that leave me cold. Just about everything leaves me cold.

I dream of a physical challenge that will call me out of myself at long last, and keep me out long enough to feel that the continuous rubbing of time along the soul may sometimes pass valuably. But I have no feeling for value. In my calculation, everything I see is valueless. Plus I lack the energy, though I once had it. The signs and billboards that purport to influence my fellow beings along the highway only make me laugh. The goods which fill other people’s houses are frippery, and not to be countenanced. I would never fill a house with tchotchkes, either because I revile them or am too tired. I am also tired of being angry. But I will never be too tired to refuse a needless product.

Yet every morning I awake to optimism! Every morning I will follow the plans I have secretly laid for good work and transcendence! I will commence the day and continue with gladness in my heart, and the satisfaction that knows good work is being done! Yes, gentlemen, the evening before, I look upon the coming day with hope and high feelings—as if each morning of the last several hundred had not brought with it doubt and derangement, and the knowledge that however much I yearned for it, that happiness would never be mine. How could I be so easily and incessantly fooled?

What is this good work, you ask? What did I crave so furiously to be mine? But what does it matter? I am an artist, put it that way. My own particular search for aesthetic value is conducted in poetry, but again, what does that matter? I might as well be a painter, or a dancer, or an architect, or any of those professions that produce materials designed for contemplation and the aesthetic experience—that is to say, any object intended to be appreciated in a way that is delightfully improving to the observer. I need not, I trust, enter into a discussion of aesthetics. Let me talk only about my experience as the producer of the aesthetic objects. The erstwhile producer of aesthetic objects.

Yes, I have always been a poet. When I was young—but how many complaints start with those words! When I was young I couldn’t wait to set words to paper. These were the days when paper was still used! I thought anything connected to writing was magical. I got a job as an editor of a literary journal. Long hours I could work there, and be held to the task simply by knowledge I was writing lines that could last beyond me, that could be published! And when I found publication at last, what delight! And when I continued to publish, what fulfillment!

Those were the days when I could work for ten straight hours writing a few hundred words, happy in my own little warrior cockpit, wrestling the words into position, hammering the sentences into shape, denouncing whole paragraphs and fashioning new ones, inserting here and there the words that would impart an ironic tone, or a skeptical tone, or an appreciative one, unperceptive of the clock, wanting only to forge the tightest possible lines with the bravest possible meanings, eager to advance myself over the rout of scribblers who lacked my vision and intelligence.

Yes, I was a snob, and happy to be a snob, happy to be engaged in an activity that so readily drew upon my strengths. Dare I even say I was happy? From this distance what does it matter: I was happy 40 years ago, at least it looks so from here. The people around me made my family, the only family that really mattered, a community brought together by important work. How young I was, younger even than my years.

And what few satisfactions I missed at work I found outdoors in the bracing air, hiking through woods, walking through cities, riding through counties. I had always that to solace me: that whatever other activity in my life broke down and ceased its sustaining function, I could always walk free in the woods and be restored. This idea buoyed not only me but, if you want my opinion, the world at large. Everyone, I reasoned, had some backup solace they could embrace should the primary exertions of their professional lives go awry.

Time went on and at long last I ceased to be published, never mind the reasons, but some nefarious doings were involved. The journal folded. No matter: I ceased to see my name on paper, ceased to have any chance of it. Well wasn’t this a top-notch disaster! What a crisis for positive expectation!

Writers, you will say. What is the destiny of writers anyway but to go on the slag heap of life? The starry-eyed and unrealistic in this world deserve what they get. If one wants to follow some will-o’-the-wisp and delusion, rather than buckling down and working a job, why, that is the price they pay, to be cast aside in later years and forgotten.

And of course I agree with you. I am nothing if not agreeable—in person. But dreams burn brightly in some, like a star of wonder. And a powerful force exists that urges their pursuit. I will not say this is right or wrong. Only that it is inevitable.

Also I will say that writing is work, of a stubbornness and complexity that few will ever know who have not stained their arms up to the shoulders, and waded hip deep in the gore of it. But who am I to turn the wisdom of ages toward this truth? I am the hidden of the globe.

“This is all very well,” I hear you say. “But where does it go? What is the point of dwelling on the negatives at the expense of higher things and brighter accomplishments?”

That is it exactly, my friends. Up to now there was no point at all. Yet, as I’ve said, “defying all that is good and helpful in life” I will dwell here. I will set up my tent and camp amidst my failures and defeats. I will be one of those people on the slag heap. There may not be a point at this moment, but let us continue.

If I were to make a list of the questions that occupy me now—surely a useful exercise—it would look like this:

--Why have I failed at everything I have done?

--Why do I continue to fail?

--What must I do to achieve more completely?

I continue to wonder.

After the closure of the literary journal, I did a strange thing: I ran away to sea. There seemed to be no other opportunities awaiting me, and the man who hired me for the boat in question did a remarkable thing: He spoke in a friendly way to me. I had no experience with this before while looking for jobs.

People in a position to hire, for reasons I will never understand, almost invariably take a position of imperial dominance over job applicants, as if their hauteur might impart proper meekness to those poor supplicants hoping only not to starve. It is one of my prouder failures that I could never attain the correct level of subservience before a hirer, but maintained always the insupportable arrogance and self-importance that befit my station—which may explain my lack of opportunity!

But the man spoke to me as a friend and, finding this, of course, irresistible, I soon found myself on a large wooden sailboat, where I lived for nearly 15 years with a crew of other misfits. In that time I had many strange adventures and met many strange people, saw many enchanting sights, and came to know a version of myself that I never believed could exist. That, however, is another story. Suffice it to say that that, too, ended in failure, blistering rancor, and an efflorescence of self-doubt, like everything else I have done.

“Surely,” I hear you say, at last reluctantly interested, “surely your life cannot have failed so miserably on so many fronts, with your poem-writing and your sailor adventures and your friends and accomplices.

To which I say, Possibly you are right. Possibly it has not been such a grand exercise in blasted expectations as I like to make out. But then again, others have done so much more, and continue to do so much more.

I have friends—I have always kept a keen watch on them whether they knew it or not—who have soared above the populace of groundlings I knew as a youth and continue to soar. I have known people who, despite their lack of promise in school or maybe because of it, have risen so far above the heads of my immediate comrades that, were I to encounter them now, would fumble whether to address them as Sir, or Your Honor, or plain Ken who I knew in school.

That is the great bugbear of advanced age, you see, measuring your own progress against that of friends, and yes I know that Envy is a cardinal sin. (We should make Nostalgia a cardinal sin.) Most of my company from school settled into ordinary life after college, buying houses, working the job, vacationing in Mexico, managing budgets, getting the kids into rehab, all very straight line.

And I suppose we must all commiserate in the shared fortune of being thrust into life without permission, as it were. We must all take our human breathing and pulse as the signature of absolute equality in the world. Nevertheless, some rockets fly high, and some sputter on the ground. I can never seem to forget this fact. Besides, even these common household goods I have failed to collect.

So I return to failure. Defeat of the grand campaign, crushing of the spirit, that is my home. I have dwelt so long in failure that to me it is welcome. It opens to me its broad-spread arms.

I will bring this saddened screed to a conclusion with a final thought. Turning the question on its head, I am led to ask whether the objectives we seek in art are the best we might pursue in life. Cheerful endings? Guy gets girl? Happily ever after? The hero attains to a famous and lucrative job? Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird!

Is there not a way to cheer for the loser? Have we no pity for losing the girl? Can we not applaud the steadfastness of a life lived in hope and endurance, rather than in triumph and transcendence? Can we not turn our aesthetic values backward and root for the ordinary? These are the questions I now ponder.

Meanwhile, we persist. Whatever the bane, whatever the onslaught, whatever the assault to one’s dignity and one’s ever-injured sense of importance: to face it with strength may be enough. Gentlemen, harken: To face the oppressor with bravery and strength may be enough to defeat any assault.

Ah, but you see how easily I concede to cosmic pronouncements. I am to be taken as seriously here as I have been throughout this harangue. (Admit it, now, you have grown restive.) So goodbye now, before you fall toward me! I am about as sagacious as human beings are allowed to be. Goodbye! You have my permission to take what I say with two or three grains of salt.

Rob Laymon has worked as a musician, reporter, newspaper columnist, travel writer, outdoor educator, tall ship captain, and valet parking jockey, among other things. He has written for many print and online publications and edited many others. He currently lives in the Free and Independent State of South Jersey.