Hypertext of the Unknown

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything—or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well.
—Thomas Pynchon

When you get right down to it, it’s all sublime. That is, indescribable. You don’t stop, though. You keep trying to describe it.

Language games become a form of breathing.

What you don’t know can and will hurt you, but not as much as will what you already know which already has and will continue to bring you pain.

This is also the ultimate cause of joy.

To what extent is the unknown a function of memory, and to what extent fate?

We are frontier-obsessive creatures. From America, could we be otherwise? This is not all the stuff of domination. One would hope. To know what is not known. This is the limit and the expanse and the ultimate undoing of all horizons.

But how can we explore the spaces between understandings of things?

How can we begin to question how we remember, not what we remember?

How can we know the totality of what we do not think?

There is a problem of scale. To discuss U.S. foreign policy is to avoid discussion of the fact that we are sitting at a table.

There is a problem of etiquette. That is, in addition to the Unknown, there is the Undiscussed. And we are sitting at a table. But that fact is not very interesting to us right now.

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Trip

So now it was the three of us driving to Seattle. Our book tour. We had seen an opportunity and we had made it ours. We had built a literature, crammed it into a van, and we were heading for the Rockies. Laptop in lap, writing our third Unknown anthology—our anthology of travel memoirs, written on the tour of the first two books: The Unknown: An Anthology, and Criticism of The Unknown, a book of essays written by us about our first book. Technological advances had cut out the middleman between writer and readers—in effect eliminating the whole publishing industry. We were a celebration of that. And we were in a van looking for a campground. I was in the back asleep dreaming of our fourth Unknown anthology: The Unknown Cookbook.

But there had been a flat tire. I sat up and stared at an American landscape we had not yet named, as the car wobbled to rest beside the road.

Dirk had been driving while Scott typed. I had fallen asleep in the middle of a hallucination and was unsure what was. “Where are we?” I asked. “I don’t know,” said Dirk. “I know,” said Scott, typing. But he wouldn’t tell us. I climbed out of the back of the car and looked around.

I realized that the tire needed to be changed and that the three of us, collectively, being academic professionals (not to mention the Hope of America), working together with the blaze of charisma and virtuosity that had so captivated our reading public, didn’t know how to change a tire.

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Innocent

No one would ever describe our time in the Midwest as insane, or as decadent. That was the beginning, that first road trip, when we were still truly and completely unknown, aside from the hypertext. Weeks later, we would remember that time as one of innocence, as one of hunger. There was fire in our bellies and we were looking for readers. Our budget was shoestring, and our ride was not luxurious. We had to rely on friends, old teachers, people we knew tangentially, for food and places to crash. But we made every appearance, in those early days, just as scheduled, by hook and crook, fixing breakdowns with duct-tape, fixing bored miles of corn with word games and laughter. We didn’t know how we would make it from one day to the next. A bowl of ramen and a six-pack of Bud was a kingly feast back then. We had to be creative with our time, not knowing what would come, relying on words for our sustenance. How I long for those days of disorder, of hunger, of facing down the unknown!

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Illinois

Illinois is a funnily-shaped state. Sort of like Lincoln’s profile. It’s flat and it’s long and it crags along unsteadily on the Mississippi. But there’s a lot going on there. We read at a used book store in Cairo. We ate at a Chinese food joint. It was a slow night, only ten copies of The Unknown sold. Who knew then that months later, we would be honored guests at The University of Illinois. The highlight that first time round, truth be told, was when Perloff picked us up near Carbondale.

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Denver

Bing bang boob baby and smokestacks yeah as we drive down the wide street this cat is blowing this sax there and the music is like zen steeped in boiling fog and me and Scott and Dirk are three dilated eyeballs soaking in the Benzedrine gin, floating in glasses like orange shapes the cigarette sketches out the details of against the night. Scott needs a drink and I feel a poem coming on and a slow train is like the clicking of a piano and in this jazz lounge we run into Frank by accident. This cosmic coincidence has completed the trilogy of reason and hare rama hare hare wow zippety do dah day. Then Frank runs out on the street like Groucho Marx smoking a hooter and batting his eyelashes crazily at passersby of the night. There is a star in the sky that has burned through eternity and a wave of delirium tremens flows over me like a wave of colonial invaders over a peaceful continent, Christianizing my cells and taxing them we go puddling through Mountain driving baby see city lights yeah see gargantuan airports no oh frontierymeweewee pudda ludda bodda buddha bing bang boom.

And the irony of this, it seemed then, against that mountainscape, invited us to drink and to write volumes. So on that deserted road with that sunset and that flat tire, we took turns writing on Scott’s laptop. And we wrote so well that nobody would ever again need Homer.