Love letter? Writing essay? You decide.

You know, I adore Cary Tennis, the advice columnist on salon.com, with such an open-hearted passion. I would marry him, truly, if I thought he would marry me back. His responses are generally kind and thoughtful and wise, and that makes my heart beat faster because I am a total sucker for kindness and thoughtfulness and wisdom, but there's more to it than that. So much of his advice is unapologetically of the abstract, get-to-know-yourself type. So much speaks directly to me, even if the letter-writer's question has nothing to do with me, because Mr. Tennis manages to enlarge experiences to an almost universal level. He wears a fedora! and I have loved Fedoras ever since I loved a boy who wore one, years ago! And, incidentally, he puts a great deal of himself into his replies, so that at times they seem more like confessional blog entries than advice column answers.

In most writers, this superegocentric voice might annoy me bit. But the kindness! The wisdom! Etc.! It all works together more or less seamlessly, so that what you have when you read his column is Cary Tennis saying, Okay, you want to know this, and I am thinking from the way you worded your letter that you are like this, and in addition to your actual question, I am hearing this sub-question, and I only have one perspective from which to draw from and that is my own, and in my experience here is what I have found to be helpful in dealing with questions like this.

I find this method of response utterly compelling, because goddamn, if I were capable of writing an advice column, which I'm totally not, that is exactly how I would want to write it: you and I working together, putting our heads and our experience together to achieve some understanding of this trouble you are having. It's so satisfyingly personal, isn't it? Mmm.

In today's column, someone writes in to say that as s/he ages, s/he becomes more and more worried, to the point of immobility, that s/he is boring. Cary Tennis, in his answer which more or less amounts to "what's wrong with boring, anyway?" (and this of course only further endears him to me) says this:

I am interested in the details, is the thing. I like the long, somber narration; I like the bare, unadorned facts beneath which seems to hum a vast incomprehensible mystery. So your grandmother knit you that shawl? Therein rests a universe of pale shiny grandmotherly knuckles (Look at those gnarled old knuckles: as though polished ivory by time itself!) in the windowlight of an old family home, knitting needles bought at a store that long ago was paved over for Wal-Mart, hands taught by a woman -- her mother -- who was the first woman ever to cast a vote in her small and unassuming Midwestern town, in the presidential election of 1920, and you know she voted for the socialist Eugene V. Debs, even though he was in prison at the time for advocating noncompliance with the draft in World War I, can you believe that? (This is the moment at which the listener's eyes fasten with great longing on their shoes, unconscious symbols of imminent departure from the boring, over-talkative guest who has collared them in the kitchen and is rambling about the old grandmother in between piercing, revelatory insights into the ingredients of the celery dip -- could it really be canned mushroom soup that gives it that richness? But it's the sour cream that gives it the tangy bite,
without which, don't you find, it's just a teensy weensy bit flat? Like it needs a little bit of salt or something? And maybe not just plain salt but a seasoned salt, a ... there you have it: Celery salt! Oh, you are the clever one. So you know how many votes Eugene V. Debs actually got in the 1920 election between Harding/Coolidge and Cox/Roosevelt? 913,664! And how did I know that? You know there's this really neat site called Wikipedia? On the Web? Have you heard about the Web?)

And I experienced a sort of double-identification. The first with the letter-writer, hung up on his-or-her-oh-god-I-am-tired-of-this-attempt-at-gender-neutrality-thank-goodness-I-am-about-to-switch-to-first-person notions of what makes a good conversationalist, and the second with Cary Tennis, so in love with the details of any given story that to leave any out becomes an unbearable form of censorship, an incautious truncation, and the more you cut out the less rich the story is.

(Of course, this is not true, and I know it. I know writers so adept at setting a scene, hinting at an emotional depth, conveying a physical gesture, in such an astonishingly few words (Raymond Carver, anyone?) that anything more detailed seems almost obscenely overdone. It's just that I have trouble checking this impulse in me, is what I'm saying. I hear the words spilling out of me when I tell a story that if they were on paper would read like a Nicholson Baker novel. When I have a story in mind, I see it in hallucinatory detail, and I feel as though I must tell you everything I see or you will miss the point, which in the end of course gets lost anyway, what with all that extra detail.)

And then after the double-identification I experienced a bit of a revelation about my writing, which is that as the two impulses in me collide--the impulse to words and tangents and the urge to tell the whole story with nothing left out, and the impulse to censor myself from fear of becoming some sort of Funes-the-Memorious-like idiot savant, incapable of seeing the forest for all those fucking trees--I become tongue-tied, incapable of moving past that battle. And that when I do get around it, I seem to do it best by limiting the story to something tiny, a moment, an instant. A story of mine really is like a Nicholson Baker snippet, just one footnote, just one aside of about fifty-seven in a larger story that you won't ever see. Most of my stories could be reduced to a single sentence without losing any of the so-called plot at all.

So ha! Clearly, you are lucky that not only do I write short, but also that I find my writing footing only rarely. And this little excursion serves as a secondary sort of illustration of my point, doesn't it?

*flails*