Twenty-six years ago, I opened a book, skimmed the first page, turned the second, read a few words, then felt it: I’d put my finger into an electrical socket. I went back and read every word I’d skimmed, and felt a personality of a kind I’d never felt, as it rose up from the page before me, confronting me with its unrepeatable pure electric light. I knew very soon thereafter that I had to bring her back.

Tonight, you go out and premiere your possession of that same woman – and your possession by her.

In those twenty-six years, Mary MacLane has never been very far from me. As when I wrote She and I, I would often pretend to do other things – I would even sit about and talk like other people, visit with them, sip coffee. I even wrote the said book, pretending to be there. But really, there was always the Presence, on my shoulder, in my gut or will or what-have-you, wanting doing. Wanting – needing – calling – insisting. Patient, and yet demanding the moment.

Such Presences, in short, want everything. And, as with other relationships, it can be the making of one’s life to give them all.

And now my book is coming out, the book that returns M.M.’s writing to the world, for the first time the vast majority of it gathered together along with introductions that sketch out her life. It’s a long distance, from that afternoon in 1985, to now, and yet no time at all. And the Presence is still with me.

I ended my note thus:

Give her a toast for me, tonight, after. There’s no one I’d rather see doing this than you.

And now the reviews begin to come in – of the play, not the book yet, though a limited set is for sale at the theatre – and the Herald-Sun reviewer says: “She is in vogue again a century later.” For a quarter-century, she’s been my shoulder-friend – and is by no means gone yet.

More soon.

REVISED:

Night-window at my back,
The train unseen, but O!
That whistle moving across the fields!

Order #: 24147
Order Date: 10/12/2011
Order Status: Done
Book Title: Human Days

More, soon.

From my somewhat-spoilery answer, lightly edited:

The style of She and I was the greatest surprise of all the writing I ever did. I edited the book for two years, and as I went on I looked at the regular prose I’d used on the web and I could not bear having it so lengthy. Something emerged in me that wanted it more telegraphic, sharp, brief, elliptical. So I went with it, and found it opened up expressive possibilities I had not glimpsed.

One of the big challenge in She and I was what I called the challenge of normalization: for the story to mean anything, the reader had to feel that there was something meaningful between Mira and the narrator. But most of it played out in the chats early on – where Mira is quite a bit more exuberant than she would be in person. (The issue of self-representation and talking-oneself-into arises. Cult of self-woowoo.) So there had to be some way of normalizing the diverse modes the relationship played out in – in chats, emails, phone calls early on, then in person, then afterward back to chats/emails/phone calls. Also I did not want it to date too much, so that’s why Mira and I always send “notes” – not ICQs, AIMs, or even emails – until the end. I wanted something more timeless.

The system of contractions emerged from the desire to shorten and sharpen. “I would have” is a lot longer than “I’d've” – and the latter is more striking. I wanted to make every word in the book some art-gesture, lest it turn out to be a set of trivialities. After all, as you know, it ends with no explosive passion or even epiphany. It’s the story of “coming to be and passing away” – the part V title is nod/tribute to Aristotle’s essay on generation and corruption, as well as the American euphemism for death. I liked the contractions as a bridge between formal and informal – another timely thing, as the old formalities were falling (see the discussion of Chasing Amy when it comes). Lastly, it lends a telegraphic quality at times, and that’s a sort of premonitor of brief Facebook entries and Twitter tweets – the compression of communication still ongoing.

What I liked best about the contractions was that in times of lyrical emotion I could stop using them entirely. That opened up another stylistic register than one usually has access to. I probably open up that register most fully in my descriptions of the dreams – the one of Beth in the lodge/Vegas is something I take special pleasure in – and in the sex scene with Mira, the meeting Catherine, and the final three days. I use quite a bit fewer contractions in the beginning, deliberately, so the effect is entering and exiting a state of mind/perceiving.

The editing took two years, probably to an obsessive degree, but that was what made the finer-grained things come. I did a lot of the later editing using my typesetting program, because by the end – once the text was largely set and even the style – I was looking for a specific appearance on the page. There was a click when it happened, and I see and feel it now. So there’s a bridging of prose and poetry too. The book occupies a very strange, sui generis space.

I wanted at the beginning to tell the complete story of a relationship down to its roots back in time and deep down in origin, including the origin of every turn.

I pick the book up sometimes, look at it, and think “I did it.”

That is all I sought.

So it was in a mood of concern that I clicked upon a rawstory.com story about safety stupidity at a nuclear plant site in Virginia. All of the site’s seismographs, the article wrote, had been removed in the mid-1990s – a decade and a half ago – due to budget cuts. Outrageous!

Wanting to learn how such a thing could have been during the Clinton era (and could have lasted more than 130 weeks into the Obama era), I clicked on the link to a virginia.gov site provided in the article, clickable in the very sentence revealing the outrageous seismograph removal. Once there, I was perplexed to find a general page about Virginia’s seismic profile, specifically its earthquakes. A string search for “budget” – to find about the dangerous economy measure – returned only one sentence.

Some of these instruments were stationed around the North Anna Nuclear Power plant, but in the 1990’s, due to budget cuts, most of the North Anna sensors were taken off line.

Some?

I went back to the rawstory.com story, the one that linked to that very sentence. There it was, the central contention, the (to use our vulgar culture’s money word) money shot.

According to the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy (DMME), the Virginia Tech Seismological Observatory (VTSO) removed all seismographs from around the plant in the 1990s due to budget cuts.

How had some become all?

Something tickled my intuition. I looked at the DMME page again, and noticed that the VTSO was an academic organization completely separate to the nuclear plant site’s management – and that the seismographs that had been removed from the nuclear plant site had only been VTSO’s own. The partial seismograph removal hadn’t even had anything to do with the plant’s seismic safety systems at all.

And then I looked at the rawstory.com comment thread, and the motivation for this entry began. Dozens of comments, one after the other, piling hate: The Rich (capitals original), profit, “industry spokesmen” (quotes original), Reagan, sycophantic regulators, “The Greedy Bastards in Wall Street and the sleazy CEOs [who] will bring this Country down,not AlCraka or AlQaeda,” “Lots of fracking going on in that area and they don’t want any evidence that they might have caused earthquakes. Check out this analysis[:] http://www.dailykos.com/…,” Eric Cantor, “millionaires and billionaires [who] need their money[,] so fuck all safety, environmental, and people concerns.” “Skimping on nuclear effort in favor of the war.” “[T]erribly sad and dangerous!”

An anti-Eric-Cantor commentor summed up a number of frighteningly violent people who said things like he did: “That’s good news, maybe some day the radiation will kill all of congress and we can start over”

And on and on and on.

I became curious, next, at how widely this non-story had spread. A few Googles returned a greater list than I had imagined. The expected conspiracy sites, right and left and beyond, were there. But a few altered terms, and I began to see progressive sites – who pride themselves on empirical facts and critical thinking – and our mainstream were all covering this story – without doing the most elementary fact-checking. I offer the following selected rogues’ gallery to document the penetration of this completely false story in both coverage and uncritical, often raving, comments:

http://thinkprogress.org/green/2011/08/23/302537/earthquake-nuclear-power-plants/ & http://upload.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439×1799848 & http://wonkette.com/451809/space-lizard-gods-didnt-get-eric-cantor-or-his-nuclear-reactor-this-time & http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/08/how-virginias-nuclear-reactors-endured-quake/41634/ & http://abcnews.go.com/US/earthquake/east-coast-quake-nuclear-reactors-offline/story?id=14365268 & http://www.lefthudson.com/2011/08/virginia-nuke-plant-had-earthquake.html & http://www.facebook.com/TheRawStory/posts/103009656471389 & http://techslurry.blogspot.com/2011/08/virginia-nuclear-plant-had-quake.html & http://regator.com/p/252845786/virginia_nuclear_plant_had_quake_sensors_removed_due/ & http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/quake-sensors-removed-around-virginia-nuke-p & http://digg.com/news/politics/quake_sensors_removed_from_around_virginia_nuke_plant_due_to_budget_cuts & http://ericcantor.us/2011/08/space-lizard-gods-didn%E2%80%99t-get-eric-cantor-or-his-nuke-reactor-this-time & http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/3007 & http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/08/23/cantorquake-trembling-at-the-heart-of-gop-claims-we-dont-need-government/

What we have, in sum, is a classic moral panic. The following distortion process took place:

Earthquake -> Anxiety -> Scanning process to detect threat -> Fear of nuclear power + Some of VTSO’s seismographs removed + Budget consideration -> Rich Republicans ignoring humans for profit -> Seismographs removed -> All seismographs removed due to Rich Republicans -> We, the Real People, are again in deadly peril due to selfish actions of a few outcast Others among us.

A perfectly circular system, and perfectly evidence free.

And the hundreds of venomous commenters largely believe it’s the Other Side that Others people and hates them and is scared. We, by contrast (they also believe), the life-loving Human Beings, are concerned with good, with life, and would never pursue the course of darkness and evil that those Others are. They must be rooted out, those Others. Since they do not care for our lives, really, perhaps we …

And so it goes.

Not one person of the hundreds of haters, and bloggers, and in some cases professional journalists, thought critically. Evidence, and thinking that perhaps the opponent was not utterly craven and insane, was the last thing on anyone’s mind. This is why we are where we are, in the tense Mexican stand-off of our era, evidence free, each sides’ fingers on the triggers of the firepower directed against the Evil Others.

This is what comes of seeking the lowest common denominator and going for the instant instinctive hit on the limbic system, rather than being a complete human being – which includes the virtues of self-control, logic, and a presumption of innocence until guilt be - proven.