Letter XXXIV   A Letter FROM Vilhelmina

Swanky Hotel Room, D------- Hotel London, England, Earth, Milky-Way Galaxy, the Universe June, the 16th, 2006 A.D. My Dear Zachary, Or: (as I'm sure you would prefer, thanks to the ridiculous disconnect you've made between speaking and writing -- between who you are when your guard is down, and who you project when you're aware of anything, like print, that might eventually assume some sort of posterity -- Oh No!) My Dear Z. Hello from London! I've been here a week, doing a shoot for M------- magazine the first two days, and laying out near the Thames River, exactly as if I were lounging on some tropical beach, for the rest. This, I'm happy to tell you, is in spite of the indisputable fact that it's been raining nearly straight through, sunrise to sunset, since shooting ended and my extra time allotted for vacationing began. And although I know you would probably love the dismal weather here yourself, as I assure you I am doing, the difference between you and I (you and me? English is a dirty bitch of a language) -- is that I suspect you would relish the rain here in the mopey way that you decide to relish life as a whole: imaginably by walking around in it with a perpetual scowl on your face and a wet cigarette lodged permanently between your drawn lips. Oh, the image you maintain! Occasionally you would duck into coffee shops, no doubt to write bitching emails to your loved ones about how lousy everything is; because, after all, there is a small, lively little bunch of people, my dear boy -- almost saintly in their patience -- who care about you endlessly; and if my suspicions are correct, this is one prevailing fact which has not entirely missed your attention, and which you've not forgotten to take advantage of, now and again, for your own satisfaction and gain -- or, at least, for your own particular brand of satisfaction, which I must say is often very exhausting on others and which, more curiously, hasn't even proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to provide you with any substantial, lasting joy, or even really any gain. This is an odd and curious condition of yours, my stupid friend, and the reason I'm writing you today is to say a few, I think necessary, things about it. You'll forgive me, I hope, for jumping into the subject matter of this letter so quickly and maybe even artlessly -- I know how you like to dance skillfully around any real issue at hand, indefinitely postponing the concrete resolution of what you consider to be the much more romantic and interesting tango leading up to it. And you might even be right in this -- perhaps a little something is lost by getting too quickly to the point, and maybe we could all do with a little more procrastination. I don't know, but I am at least sure that even if you were wrong, dear Zachary, in wanting to speak in circles whenever anything important was being discussed, you could make some long, convincing, esoteric justification for why you were right, doubtlessly unable to resist bringing God and the Devil and probably Rilke into it as well -- But as for myself, my dear boy, I'm afraid I've been thinking about this all day, since first receiving your last letter, and I've been literally chomping at the bit these past two hours to get back to my cozy hotel room and write it down for you, whether you want it or not! (And, God, before you stop reading this and dismiss me out of hand for having just misused the word "literally," please settle your enraged self down and give a little thought to what I'm actually going to say -- and I mean the content, buddy, not the way in which I say it. I have reason to believe that many a good point has been lost on you, Zachary, because whoever had the bravery to say it to you made some grammatical stumble along the way.) (And so I'll just admit right now that you're the cleverer of the two of us -- I'll admit it only too happily if it will give me the little, much needed elbow-room required for anyone to say anything to you that doesn't automatically sound positive and glowing. A little criticism from someone outside of your family will not, I repeat, will not kill you, so DO NOT BE DISMAYED!) (Yes, yes, I know I've just done three parenthetical statements in a row. So what? Fuck you.) So, Zachary-the-drummer, what is it exactly that I'm going on and on and on about (and so defensively, as you'll please note that I've noted, and taken into due account -- Oh, how I can anticipate your attacks)? It is, Zachary, your grieving insistence that you should be allowed to enjoy this world in your own way: namely, by thinking it's a terrible, miserable, no-good rotten nasty place. Now, before you throw your hands up in defense (or abruptly laugh with glee, as you might be more prone to do at such a suggestion), let me say that I know you do this (get a real kick in the pants by hating the world) with a certain smirking, ironical suggestiveness that's meant to imply: 1.) That you actually do love the world, and 2.) That your bad attitude towards life is a big joke on anyone who isn't clever enough to understand implication 1.) Which roughly leads to: 3.) I'm a big baby, and fuck everyone who thinks I mean it when I'm always grumbling about everything. But, Jesus Christ Almighty, that's just it, Zachary -- don't you see that that's positively it? Your entire outlook on life is a big joke on those who you consider inferior and simple. Besides being judgmental and presumptuous (which I'll go into later, if I have the strength to go into it at all), this position, or non-position, essentially gives you a sturdy wall against ever having to really be sturdy in anything that you do in your life. You, my dear child, have somehow developed a way to have your cake, and eat it too, and although I think this does make you deeply sad in a way, you must admit to taking a perverse sort of pleasure in exploding the old adage as well; even, perhaps especially, if maintaining its suspended collapse is slowly killing you. The adage of not being able to have your cake and eat it too is not impervious to being exploded, Zachary -- not if someone has the mind and sheer dedication to do it, which is easy enough to conceive of with you ghastly adage-resenting Johnsons -- but it is there, it is an adage, for a reason. Everything, as Paul says, is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. And I know -- I'm only too well aware -- that you've got your bag of problems with that most famous and misquoted of apostles, but you have got to admit he's got a point there, Zachary. I mean, you're being a really testy shit if you don't admit that. And meanwhile, you're not even playing fair. You want to be Ivan Karamazov, only you don't really want to have to put up with late-night visits from the crummy old Devil. You want to be Cool Hand Luke, only you don't really want to get shot after sarcastically delivering your line about "a failure to communicate." I know the difficult position this puts you in, and maybe even understand some of why you want to continue in its agonizing limbo, but could somebody for once just tell me what's so horrible about wanting to be Alyosha Karamazov? Dostoyevsky himself considered him the goddam hero of the novel, for Chrissake, but instead of wanting the strength to emulate someone like him, you'd rather just have someone like him in your life who you could lovingly adore while you, in the meantime, go happily to shit. And don't tell me I"m wrong, buddy, because, for Christ's sake, your whole list of literary heroes come with their own bona-fide stamp of heartrending tragedy. There's your treasured Ivans, your Cool Hand Lukes, your Steppenwolfs, your Holden Caulfields, your One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nests (I forgot his name), and your Strangers. And don't go on to claim someone like Seymour in your defense -- he is the most generous and spiritually minded of all the Glass family, I know, I know -- but you know damn well that Seymour committed suicide. I mean, if we're being entirely honest here, the only reason Christ Himself doesn't make it onto your list of literary heroes is that he had the audacity to rise from the dead after he was crucified! And so, Mr. smarty-pants who is so depressed in Boston, I want to know just what it is that makes you think it's so horrible, so unforgivable, to be someone who makes a concerted effort at being happy, and who maybe -- God have mercy on them -- even succeeds? Just how is it, Mr. "Woe-is-me, I'm-a-fucking-artist," that you would lose all credibility, within a snap of a finger, if you just so happened to accidentally put on a clean shirt once in awhile? Why, really, can't you enjoy a few hours of watching Sex in the City some afternoon without having to make some elaborate, ironic lecture about the "State of Humanity These Days" afterwards? Most pointedly, why is it that you are being such a big, goddamned bore? So you're touring with The Cinematic Underground, doing what you love, and yet here again you've found another way to be unhappy. Now listen, I know you're dismayed by yourself in this -- I know you truly are -- but God knows the Band is equally confused and dismayed; and they do have to suffer the consequences as much as you do, which I know you resent the hell out of, but how could they not? When you're in a foul mood, everybody in a ten-mile radius is punishable by death and dismemberment. I mean, you're a goddam maniac when you get going. And, look, I know you could probably say all of this better than I am doing here -- that you could analyze it to death, and spin long theories as to why it is, all the while carefully avoiding anything that looks too much like cheap psychology -- and you probably already have; But have you really given it the thought, the hard clear thought, that it deserves? Do you have any real aim at all of fixing it? Or, buddy, are you just content to complain about it -- happy to claim it as your own individual stamp of tragedy, turning a real dilemna into another of your three-ring circus acts of Despair and Triumph and Loss, heartrendingly imagined and featuring a cast of devastating tightrope-walkers, damned for their beauty, high-minded elephants reduced to walking around in circles, with you yourself in the middle ring, the very picture of the modern existential man at war with himself, torn between Spirit and Body, Heaven and Hell? Come on. Everybody knows that shit's old! I'm sorry, but I have to go on, with as much loving reproach as I can muster, because you've been writing to me, Zach, despairing in your own half-humorous, half-depressing way for months and months. And it hurts me, believe it or not. You've been complaining about the band, the pressures of being an artist, God's desertion of the world, and just about everything else you can hit by swinging your arms grandly -- and just because you usually remember to fit in a few cynical jokes along the way isn't going to stop me from putting this down. I'm goddam saying it because somebody has to. You want the recognition of being a talented, promising Actor, and yet you don't want the responsibility of fulfilling your potential, of actually entering the big pool of other promising, talented Actors. You're happy to stay safely out of the messy fray (and don't even get me started on The Fray), so long as you've convinced some people along the way that, really, you could be successful if you really wanted to -- I mean, if you weren't so charmingly lazy and everything. Buddy, you really are a fuck. I go on. Yes, you've become a great musician, but you don't want to work any harder at becoming a better musician -- certainly no exertion that would ensure any success, because success would be so god damned demanding on your soul and everything. So you want to make your living by being an artist -- you'd be quite happy to be "discovered" and rolling in money -- but you absolutely refuse to take any practical (you would say pedestrian) steps towards making it your career. And why? Because you think career is a banal-sounding word. That's it. That's actually why. You're just aesthetically against it, and you claim this as if it's some great religious revelation that you've discovered through living a long, hard life of toil and devastation and searching. You're TWENTY YEARS OLD, you pretentious fuck! Look, I'm sorry -- I'm half-kidding -- but it's almost as if you've taken this stance that the only pure art is art untouched by success or ambition -- that the greatest performances were never recorded; the greatest songs sung in the privacy of a living room. And this in itself might be alright, if a little romanticized -- I don't know, and I don't claim to know -- but with you it comes with such a bitterness, such a resentment, that you effectively kill off any of the innocent purity that ought to go along with such a saintly-fool stance in the first place. Or, at least, you kill it off half the time. The rest of the time you're too busy being tongue-and-cheek about what an unrecognized goddam genius you are. And don't argue with me, buddy. I know you'll feel the need to defend this all (or worse, accept it but make disclaimers), but try resisting it for just a little while, a few minutes even, just to see if you don't actually melt from blocked up, righteously burning indignation. Because I'm not done, not just yet. So you want to be allowed to enjoy your life by grumbling and bitching about it as much as you want. But my question is this: Does any of this really, as you claim it does, give you any enjoyment? Do you feel free to actually love life by doing this, by constructing this semi-autobiographical, semi-serious projection of yourself, or have you not imprisoned yourself, and damned yourself to misunderstood isolation, by making joy out to be such a sacred, precious, and untouchable thing? Is joy really so breakable a condition of mind and body as that? Is it so flimsy, that it must be covered up, shrouded beneath an interestingly conflicted persona, so that nobody surrounding you can ever even imagine it's there enough to touch it? Is that the secret joy you've managed to save up for yourself, protected away from society's ignorance and pettiness? But that's for you to think about. I don't know the answer, and of course none of this is even my business . . . which really does make it all the more fun to say. What I do, however, have to seriously put to you -- and you'll hate it, you'll resent the hell out of me for it, but I'm going to say it anyway, and I want you to listen -- is this: Whether or not living perpetually in this conflicted way is fair or beneficial to you, and whether or not you even really would care if it wasn't, it's certainly not fair to your family and your other loved ones. And you need to consider this. Because since they love you, they have to take your apparent misery a little bit seriously, even if you don't -- you require it of them in the lengths that you go when you're being, or pretending to be, all Vincent Van Gogh. They cannot think it's the hilarious joke that you sometimes do, Z, because they are the people who you call crying when you happen to be in a place which you don't consider to be so very funny yourself. And so you can't treat them like an audience. Not unless you want them to start treating you like an actor. You must be very careful, buddy, about mixing reality with drama, about mistaking what you create with who you are. Be careful about living out the ideas you want to explore in your art. You could very well wind up in a harrowing situation -- you might actually get your tragedy -- and if you get in too deep, there might not even be any redemptive Art to come of it (assuming you're of the mindset that thinks such art born from pain really is so goddam redemptive -- which I know you irritatingly are, and which is a separate issue that we can argue at length about another time, as I'm sure we will). It still stands that at the present you're making things perfectly miserable for yourself, and, I'm sorry, for a good many people around you, people who care about you and believe in you. And I think even you are somewhat weary of the inevitable valley you've recently found yourself in. Redemption is a powerful thing, and it is a theme I know you love, but don't you see that it is a blessing to not be in need of it all of the goddamned time? Trust me: it is. A lot of people's lives are a hell of a lot worse than yours, and it's a wonderful thing to not constantly be in need of redemption. And for you, as blessed as you are, to try to create this need for redemption is insulting to those who have had it thrust upon them. It is a wonderful thing, essentially, to be able to enjoy a rainy week in London for its happiness, and not just for its melancholy beauty, even if you are a goddamned artist. There's certainly nothing wrong with a little melancholy beauty here and there, and I'm not suggesting you dance in the streets like me, but what I am suggesting is that you be a little more careful in the way you're moving through life at the moment, as your melancholy can often take a bitter turn into depression. Look -- and I'm near the end here, so I want you to listen close: It is true that Joy may be put into a sharper relief when accompanied with sorrow, but don't make the common artist's mistake of thinking that Joy by itself, without some overshadowing sorrow, is somehow negated or made meaningless. A positive may be made to appear more dramatic by its negative, but it is the negative that cannot exist without its positive counterpart, and not the other way around. Be careful, then, while you are still so young, about making the fashionable assumption that being a great artist means also being a lousy human being -- that the former is somehow attained only by becoming the latter. This is a disingenuous way to live, not as deep as you think, and I promise you this: being disingenuous, or fashionable, never leads to creating great art; worthy and showy art, perhaps, but only that, and at what cost? You'll have sacrificed your joy for mere trickster art, when if you had taken the pains to search out real Joy -- to develop Love, which is hard, Patience, which is elusive, and Faith, which is damn near impossible -- you might possibly have succeeded in also attaining the generosity and depth of spirit -- the goddamned exuberance! -- needed to create really Great Art! And to sacrifice that, Zach -- that would be a real tragedy. I'll leave you with that, as it seems a suitable ending point -- exactly some little bit beyond where you would have preferred me to stop, I'd imagine, which is perfect. I'll only continue to say that I admire and (sometimes) look up to you, dear Zachary, despite my constant naggings and urgings that would suggest the contrary. As I'm a good seven years your senior, I feel it's only right that I display a little maternal care for you every once in awhile. Anyway, my hand is tired and I should run, so give my regards to the band, and especially to that brother of yours, Nathan. (and stop telling him that I have a crush on him. I do not have a crush on him. I respect him as an artist. Jesus, Zach.) All affections, Vil