Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck"
March 01, 2002
That afternoon I went downtown to the monthly editorial meeting for Silverdrop Quarterly, which was a small press literary zine run by my friend Larry. Larry was on disability -- he'd been in a car wreck a few years ago and was paralyzed from the waist down. His larynx was crushed in the accident so he had a Stephen Hawking voicebox. Whenever he got bored he reprogrammed his voice; when I'd talked to him last he sounded like Stephen Hawking impersonating Teddy Kennedy. Voiceboxes just aren't that good yet.
I took the bus downtown an hour early, so I could go to the National Gallery first -- a long and towering pile of concrete blocks and diamond glass climbing out toward the Ottawa River. I checked my coat and saw my favorite paintings. I wandered through the Alex Colville exhibition, up the ramps and around the pools and under the skylights and pulled the push doors and pushed the pull doors. I threw pennies in the fountain and bought a postcard of Pierre Trudeau's quilt. Then I reclaimed my coat and crossed the street to the Earl of Sussex pub.
Larry had wedged his scooter into the topmost windowed corner of the pub and was staring absently at the street while the two other major contributors, Tom and Charva, bickered and tore up sugar packets. "At least you're working with quasi-reality," Tom snapped. He'd chewed his nails down to his blunt fingertips again and now he was plucking brown hairs from his nape one at a time. "I have to make everything uh-uppp!"
"Bullshit, I have to deal with more fantasy than you do, Tom. There's no reality, not even a plot."
"Oh come on. It's theoretical but it's not fantastical. Fiction is purely contextual and subject to whim, there are no rules, whereas your stuff is all about rules, it's about discovery!"
"Discovery?"
"Discovery!"
"I don't know what you're talking about!"
"If fiction has any rules, they're sufficiently abtruse as to be irrelevant, whereas theoretical mathematics are all about definition of reality. I make my own reality constantly, you only try to uncover yours!"
"Oh, shut up! Math is about inventing rules, it's not real."
"If it's not real, what's the point? Don't your discoveries have to conform to an ever growing body of precedents established by your peers -- like a justice system of reality?"
"Math is consistently inconsistent -- and beyond that the rules are subject to flex. Math is not about literal rules. Your rules may be more impressionistic, but they're not any easier."
"I'm talking about fiction as exploration of concepts which can have concrete executions but which don't have to conform to anything."
"Sure it does, it has to conform to comprehensible behavior patterns or it's meaningless."
"Strictly consensual behavior patterns which are open to modification at any time! Whereas math attempts to deduce rules from what is!"
"Apparently math needs more laymen telling it what it is," Larry said.
"Some people do math because they consider it innately beautiful. Math has nothing to say about reality, though it does provide tools that are essential within the construct of science. It is naturally an art, it is the purest art, it is the most incorruptible art!"
"STATISTICS!"
"Statistical manipulation is an abuse of mathematical principles! You abuse them, it is wrong, and it is no longer mathematics!"
"You might as well say The Great Gatsby is not literature because it was written for money!"
Charva swung round in her tubby wooden chair. "Larry, if I write an editorial on how math is the purest art, will you print it?"
"As someone who explicitly chose art over science I resent science's attempts to romance itself into the be-all-end-all, Larry."
"My basic outline will be about how math is arguably more purer art than common art, but because of this nature, it is generally less accessible."
"Math is theoretical performance art!"
"Oh? So explain Lewis Fry Richardson, whose mathematical talents led him to patent an early sonar device, pioneer meteorology, and then codify a formula predicting the probable rise of conflict in a human situation -- the very kind of situation that you say is so malleable that fiction flops around like tits out of a wringer!"
"Picasso got laid more!"
I told Larry I would call him later and that I had to go.
"Take me with you," he said desperately, clutching at my skirt.
Tom jerked upright and slapped his palm on the table. "Don't you care?" he snapped, jabbing his finger at me. "Don't you have an opinion?"
"Should I?" I said faintly, detaching Larry's hand.
"You're part of the editorial staff, don't you have any editorial comment?"
"Larry doesn't either!"
"Larry!?"
"Will you two grow up?" Larry grumbled, and ordered a Strongbow cider.
"Don't you think it's perverse to--"
I said, "I think people who write as a secondary, or make art as a secondary, are the ones who worry most about what art is. It's like getting hung up in the chemical composition of a person -- like a parent obsessed with exercise and nutrition but not love. Analysis is important but it's not everything, there has to be a point where one acts spontaneously and fearlessly."
Charva and Tom looked at each other.
"If you're not going to take it seriously," Charva said pettishly, "you might as well go then."
Posted by gtaylor at March 01, 2002 02:42 PM