A Final Draft

by K Hank Jost

I very much like the story of King Wen. Reemerging from solitary confinement free and sovereign, with the whole of the universe set in total order, seems the obvious best-case outcome of one’s incarceration. I doubt I would have used the time so wisely.
      It is tempting to say that were the world as simple as it must have been to the ancient King, I too, we too, any of us now at all, could have done the same. It would be dishonest to say that King Wen’s world was simpler than ours, or even to say that the world has become more complicated since. Mystery never shrinks.
        I fear that I am afraid of the declarative mode. In my classes I tell my students to let their questions guide them, not to write their fictions toward an expression of a belief they know they hold. Though I teach this, it does not feel worth writing down. The students that take the advice go on to write interesting work, but in print it begs explanation, the citation of sources, quotes from someone else. I do not annotate my books. I do not know who said half of what I believe about the world. I have been convinced by very many things that are inherently contradictory. These facts do not bother me because I am a writer of fiction; I do not Essay and I do not write about myself, at least not directly. This piece of writing is a rare exception, and I hope it remains so.
        That is another thing I think I tell the students: to stop writing about yourself, at least directly. To say that is not to say that you are not interesting, but to try and say that I doubt you know enough about yourself to be certain of anything you are saying.
        I doubt King Wen was very interesting. Knowing what little I think I might of Confucianism broadly speaking, Daoism in general, and the things that predated either of these systems, King Wen being principal here, none of it seems very interesting. The insights are true enough. I am convinced by many of them, as I am of many other things. But I do not know that they are interesting. Nothing true is interesting. I am convinced of it.
        There is in Keats that thing about truth and beauty being the same, and that feels right, but that does not mean either of them are interesting. Nor does it mean that all three cannot be at the same time, just that they are not the same thing about each other. It is also a cool thing to say—what Keats said, that is. Cool and beautiful. I do not know if anything in this piece of writing so far is beautiful. It would be cool if there were something that was by the end.
        The last draft of this Essay opened with the line: That the way of the universe is in some respect circular is a proposition so commonly revealed in the aggregate wisdom of the world that it may as well be considered a Spiritual Fact. And I really liked that line, and meant it when I wrote it, and hoped it would be the seed for an Essay titled Artist and Oracle, wherein I would examine not only the philosophy of art as presented by the ancient Chinese divination text the I Ching, but also and moreover my personal relationship to the text and how it has been an influence on my own practice of art making, particularly the writing of fiction. I even quoted the last and first chunk of Finnegans Wake, stitched together like they’re supposed to be, as proof that James Joyce came to conclusions similar to those I believe I have found in my reading of the text of the Changes.
        It is important to make it feel like you have the same thoughts as those you hold in high regard. It is very difficult to take yourself seriously otherwise…
        I like to call the I Ching the Changes because I do not feel the need to italicize it, like the same as I would not were I to refer to the story of Christ as the Gospels or the Good News.
       I like the Good News quite a bit, but it makes you sound crazy if you say it that way. Writing it down like that might make to mean something about yourself you do not mean to mean. Calling it the Good News could put you in the same camp as people you fundamentally disagree with, especially if the mode of your written address were such that the words on the page were being purported to find their source in your soul and not merely your craft.
        I want everything I write to be purported to find its source merely in my craft.
       I wrote about Moby-Dick as well, and was planning on going through a whole system of consultations with the Changes to make my point, but I got tired of referencing and trying to find graceful ways to quote from the text and realized that the first 3,000 words of the thing had just been an explanation of the Changes, the text and system and trying to convince you it was something worth reading someone write about. I got sick of writing about it like I knew what I was talking about, because I do not know if I do and I do not know if it matters that I do not. I write fiction. I like writing fiction.
        Stories are interesting. And can be beautiful and true and good also.
        King Wen is the guy they say put the Changes together the way they are, by the way. He did so while he was in prison.
       I did not like that I had to assume you did not know what I was talking about to talk about the thing I thought I wanted to talk about. I do not like to think that we do not know the same things, or that we cannot know the same things without me telling you what I know. I also did not like very much that you might have a different opinion of the Changes than I do, that there would be facts to check or an argument to be had. I do not like knowing that a case must be made, and I do not like that we could not speak about it face to face.
       You can read my stories and novels alone, that is fine. If I never get to hear what you thought of them, that is fine also. I would prefer it, honestly. Just hoping it was something for someone else is enough to put the next one together.
        For the Essay to work I would have had to have made an assumption that is much easier to make when I am working on a piece of fiction—the assumption that both of us, all of us, know that thing in front of us in an object of artifice, something that was made, something bound up only by itself.
      What I like about a piece of fiction is that the only thing it necessarily contains is the form of itself. Even if it refers to things beyond its scope, it is still an artificial reference. It is the seeming quality of a reference. If I were to write something set in the distant past, or in a ‘real’ place, or even about ‘real’ people like myself and others, it would not be fair or honest to assume that you knew anything beyond what I decided should go in the text. It would not be fair of me either to criticize your reading of the text based on your not knowing what I was referring to. It is my job as the writer of a piece of fiction to make it so that there is enough in the text for you to understand what needs to be understood to understand the text as a whole, as an object. Your incomprehension is my failure.
        I know that all you have is what you have been given.
      That is another thing I repeat to my students, I think, that they should keep in mind that they are making something. That they should stop trying to say stuff. Use whatever you have to, but know that the thing in the end is a thing even if on the surface it looks something that is being said.
        I cannot remember if it was an invasion or an insurrection that put King Wen behind bars. I also cannot remember how long he was locked away. But it was long enough to get some things straight enough to round out.
       There were some very silly things in the initial draft of this Essay. I am afraid that some of this here is silly now. I had it figured that convincement and inspiration were sister states of mind, I called them sororal to each other. It might be true, it might be interesting, it might be beautiful. It was written that inspiration is when something in your mind needs to be made material and real in the world outside of it. It was written that convincement is when something material and real in the world outside of yourself is made one with your mind. I think I wanted to say the hope of the object produced following inspiration is to convince those who come to witness it. I like that thought still, but I do not know that I believe in inspiration.
        If this was a story, a piece of fiction, I would not worry that any of it was silly. If it was silly I would be content to know that I made a silly thing. I would only hope you would laugh at it.
        Please do not laugh at any of this.
       I tell my students to give up on inspiration. I tell them to figure out how to make the thing, no matter what it takes, but never to wait around for the thing to need to be made.
       King Wen probably was not inspired when he was imprisoned for however long he was imprisoned for. He was probably bored, scared. He probably just wanted to witness something other than the walls of his incarceration.
        I tell the students all the time that self-expression is a lark and a sham, that it is a silly reason to make art. You should make art because you are supposed to. At my most extreme, I think I believe it is the only cool and good and beautiful and true and interesting thing we do. It is a moral obligation. Though, I am not going to make that argument. There are more important things than art, but it is the only thing there is I think to work out all that other important stuff for the sake of.
        The first draft of this Essay was very bad and silly and big in itself, and I am trying to make it less of all those things.

        I asked the Changes what the spirit of art was, or what the spirit of the artist is, because that is what you do with them, you ask them things, and it told me that the spirit of art, or the spirit of the artist, was Progress. I think that is about right. The image of Progress in the Changes is that of the sun directly above the earth, of clinging, fiery illumination over total, open receptivity. I think that is about right, too.
        Richard Wilhelm, who translated the Changes into the German that the most popular English translation is translated from, makes a much more learned case that it is the hexagram Grace that is the spirit of art according to the Changes. His argument makes sense, but when I asked the book that is not what it told me.
        In the dust on the floor of his cell, King Wen sketched out the 64 hexagrams of the Changes and put them in order and that was the universe he said. He put them in an ordinal sequence that circumscribes a cycle whereby an individual grows to something like enlightenment and then passes into society and existence at large, from the primordial eternality of the beginning always starting anew to the unending finality and impossibility of completion. Consultation of the text never takes us along that path, though. We always jump around, sometimes leaping the entire diameter in a single bounding moment, sometimes lazing a little ray from Youthful Folly to Stagnation. It is a wonderful design.
        King Wen was a great artist.
        So was Herman Melville.
        It is probably safe to say that we are about a third of the way through this thing. I have been trying to find a shape for it, a design, and I think now we have got one.
        I do not write fiction this way.
        The rest of this Essay will likely go on in a manner much the same as the above sections. It will continue to pivot between the paragraphs, but the pivots will likely still be between the zones already described. Those zones, if you have not yet begun to notice, concern things I think I teach my students, fallow remarks as to my practice of writing fictions and my idea of what a piece of fiction is, meekly told slivers of the mythohistoric King Wen’s ordering of the Changes, and, if an intrusion further up is any indication, increasingly regular references to Herman Melville, perhaps even to the point of supplanting the rather threadbare account of King Wen given. It has got to stop at some point.
        I do not write Essays because I do not know how to shape them. I would like to say I am envious of those who can string together an argument, of those who can think toward a conclusion, of those who can write like they are speaking. But I like writing fiction well enough that I do not know if I will ever figure out how to write an Essay the way the Essays I have read are rendered. ‘Rendered’ to avoid saying made. I think you make fiction. You probably channel poetry, when it is very good, but you can make it too. I have made poetry. Bad poetry. But I would like to claim that you render an Essay. I do not know if that is true, but it sounds right enough. I am not going to argue as to why.
      What I know I do envy is the feeling I imagine the author of an Essay to have while writing one, especially personal Essays or one of those ones that is really about something. I bet it feels like it came out of them. I have never written anything that felt like it came out of me. Even this.
      I do not write like this.
     I am trying to pretend that none of these paragraphs have anything to do with one another. I have learned from writing fiction that if you string events together the reader is perfectly capable of making them make sense.
        I want this thing to be 5,000 words long.
        The first draft was supposed to be 10,000 words long.
        I stopped writing the first draft when it got to be about 5,000 words long.
       I was tired of listening to myself. I wish it could have all been said at once. I wish I could have told you why I like the Changes over a cup of coffee and then given you a book or story of mine to read on your own time. I would be happy to explain it that way. Over a coffee I think I would even be happy to argue about it.
        Maybe you could have sent me home with something of yours to read as well. And the next time we got coffee we could talk about literally anything else.
        These 5,000 words are to serve toward a redemption of the effort put forth by that initial very bad draft.
      My fiancé has interrupted to show me a song that was in their head when they woke up. It is a bad song. They interrupted saying that they did not want to interrupt because they think that I am writing. They said to say it like that, that that is what they said. But this is not writing.
        I inserted the above paragraph into this piece right after it happened. I thought it would be an interesting textural shift while also making it seem like all of this has been off the cuff, improvised, or honest. This paragraph was inserted after I wrote the following 700 words, ending with the sentence ‘All of these books are interesting.’ I am now doing a trick that I think I learned from reading Gerald Murnane. This is the only reference to Gerald Murnane that will be contained in this Essay. James Joyce will only be referenced once more in this Essay.
        This does not feel like writing.
      Writing, when I like to do it, feels like making decisions about the fact of an object’s being. It is active and interrogative. When I write fiction I make a lot of decisions. Character names. What happens. The words that are used and why they are used in the way they are used. The sound of the sentences. The dimensions of the object. I decide the shape of the thing until the thing starts to tell me what shape it wants to have, then I let it have that shape. That feeling is very interesting.
        All of this is very uninteresting to explain.
        A piece of fiction is true because it is an object.
        A piece of fiction is beautiful because it is an object that was made.
        From that it follows that if you do not believe in a Creator you cannot believe the world is beautiful, only that it is true.
      I try to make fiction that is interesting. The only way I can think to do that is to make it out of things I think are interesting. I do not know about true and beautiful. Authenticity has more to do with one thinks is interesting than it does with what one thinks is true or beautiful.
        My students are never encouraged to find their voice. I tell them they already have a voice and that there’s nothing they can do about their voice but to live completely different lives than the lives they have already lived. There is a dual fact here: that to change one’s life drastically is very difficult to do, that the risk is more than most folks can take; and, secondly, that one’s life is already going to change drastically in time to come, and has already changed drastically in time gone by, that the life anyone is living in the present moment of their living it is likely not to be the majority of how their life has been. I tell my students to stop looking for a voice. I tell them to think about style, to learn all the different decisions one can make with regards to making an object of fiction. Then I tell them to find the ones they think are interesting, and to try to use those the best they can until they make something good.
        The style that this Essay is in is one in which I have never written.
        I think Herman Melville struggled with something similar as to what I have said in this Essay that I have struggled with during the composition of this Essay. I think Melville too did not take his ideas very seriously. I think he took having ideas very seriously.
        I take having ideas very seriously.
        I do not care what a Melville scholar would say about any of this.
        I’m reading Mardi right now. There is truth in Mardi, there is truth in Moby-Dick. There is also beauty. But, mainly they are interesting objects.
        After I finish Mardi, I will read Moby-Dick again. I consult the Changes nearly every day, and am always reading through the Bible.
        I read Moby-Dick every November and am glad not to have annotated my copy so that I do not remember most of the book. I have read it cover to cover maybe four or five times, and it has never once been the Moby-Dick I read last.
        After I read Moby-Dick I think I would like to read Clarel and Paradise Lost at the same time. Finnegans Wake is for before bed. The Changes are nearly every day and the Bible is always.
        All of these books are interesting.
        The Bible is the most interesting book, I think.

       I should let it be known also that I tell my students to actively defy me. I try to make it very clear that all I know about writing is all that I have come to figure with regards to getting writing done. The only method I can explain is the one I use, and it is a true method insofar as it has led to the completion of work. I tell them that none of what I say matters if it does not help them finish work, and that none of what they think about what I say, or what they believe, matters if it does not help them finish work.
       This is probably the denouement. Even though this is an Essay that is full of truths stated unbeautifully and perhaps even uninterestingly, I must here be a craftsperson and find a way to make this thing an object, not an utterance. The method I will employ throughout the following paragraphs is to find reasons to say again or differently things that have already been said, to bring shapes from the beginning closer to the end of the piece so as to make the thing feel like it is repeating itself, because if you repeat yourself it means you meant for the thing to be there initially to begin with. This is a good technique for finishing work.
      This piece has been heavily edited.
      Trust me.
    After I have made the Essay repeat itself, I will likely break it with a formal gesture that in context will seem rather radical. There is a word for doing this, I think, but I cannot remember what it is, and the previous sentence probably is not exact enough to count as a definition in the word’s stead.
     The second paragraph of this Essay goes: ‘It is tempting to say that were the world as simple as it must have been to the ancient King, I too, we too, any of us now at all, could have done the same. It would be dishonest to say that King Wen’s world was simpler than ours, or even to say that the world has become more complicated since.  Mystery never shrinks.’ I do not like this paragraph, but I have left in unedited so that it may be repeated exactly as it was initially written above below.
       This paragraph would likely have to be cut from the final draft if I were not to bring it back here toward the end. I do not know that it has much to do with what the rest of the Essay is trying to say.
       Mystery never shrinks. This is good and true, a platitude and a lame profundity.
       I think I wanted to make the point that King Wen is like a writer of fiction in some manner. That was the intention. I have above called him a great artist. And I believe it, truly, that something a writer of fiction does is take what they know of the world and make some sort of order out of it, like Wen did with the hexagrams of the oracle.
      There is another story attached to the Changes and the greater corpus of Classical Chinese literature that I like quite a lot, as much as I do the story of King Wen. It is the story of how the language itself came to be. It goes something like some primordial sage sat and contemplated the world around him for long enough that the shapes and sounds of everything became apparent. He drew then all the shapes that there were and gave them the sounds he heard them have, and then compounding the shapes on top of each other such that they would come into meaningful complexity that became the language. It is something like that. I like it for the same reason as I like the King Wen story in that it is about how form is in some way emergent from the world, that world wherein the mystery is the surface. It is interesting.
       I like the writers that say the only thing there is in any of this is the surface of the language and the form of the text. Meaning is inevitable, and for that fact is none of my business.
       The reason I tell my students to avoid writing about themselves directly, or to avoid writing about things they believe or want to say, is because Freud was right and you are just going to say what you mean and believe anyway, and you should not worry about it other than making sure it is being said in a way that is interesting and beautiful, regardless of whether it is true or not.
          All of the paragraphs of this Essay are of different lengths, and I think that is good enough to call it an interesting object.
          I could probably spare you the next 1,000 words:
          This is the part of the Essay where, having brought back from the beginning something I had forgotten I had written and made to make it seem like it was supposed to be there all along via repetition, I should probably print it out and figure how to end it with a red pen in hand, make sure it is coherent before I find a place to stop, start cutting stuff that does not work or gloss, read it aloud to my fiancé to see where they roll their eyes, count up all the times I have written the word ‘I’ because, being completely honest, I hate it, the word ‘I,’ and I do not know how to express exactly that hatred other than the fact that I do not think I believe in it, ‘I,’ it is a convenience, it serves to put the voice somewhere in space and time and in relation to you, which I do believe in, I greatly believe in you, I have hope even that though I have written above that this last thousand or so words is probably needless, literally here just to hit an arbitrary, if not pridefully, chosen word count, you will still find it worthwhile to read to the end, and not on account of some trick I plan on playing by making the last 1,000 words of this essay all just one long sentence running on and on until I literally hit the mark, maybe I will not even overshoot, maybe this will just cut off like the end of Kafka’s Castle, we are a quarter of the way there already, in fact, maybe I will have to cut it off like the end of Kafka’s Castle just to prove to you that it is not a trick, just to make it seem like the feeling I want this to have in that it should feel improvised because I have made it so central to this roving mess that I do not write Essays because I do not know that I believe any of the things I believe in such a way that they should be declared and put up for debate and that the whole point of this Essay was really to say that I would rather be writing a story where I can make decisions that are purely formal and dramatic, that I hate this, and not even in a way to say that there is something wrong with Essays, but to say that I do not do this, this is not writing, that when I think I about writing and when I am actually writing I am doing something very different than what it might seems like I am doing here, right now while I type this, but also that the frustration here is that I have been writing this, I have been making purely formal decisions, and this sentence is not really even that impressive since it is not really doing that cool and interesting nesting of clauses and multi-layered parenthesizing one would like to see in a sentence of this length, that I would like to see in a sentence of this length, it is just sort of going on and on until it hits its mark, and I still do not know whether or not I will cut it off midway or not, whether I will put the period at the end—what I would have liked to have done is had the forethought to really make the thing a circle of itself like King Wen with the Changes or Joyce with the Wake such that the opening of this Essay could be necessitated by its ending, but the hope for that seems a bit lost now, I bet I could figure it though, I bet that if this were a story I was writing instead of an Essay I would have the gumption to do something that silly and let it be silly and interesting even it did not exactly work, because a story is just a thing that was made and that is all I ever need a story to be, in fact I like stories best when they feel like they were made and not when they pretend like they were not, which is something that really frustrates me about the ‘I,’ is that it seems like it is trying to lie to me about what it is, that it is a layer of artifice too thick unless it is done like how Melville does it where I think he forgets most of the time that there is even an ‘I’ to begin with, he gets so caught up in making the thoughts fit into the box he wants them to fit into, whether or not they can or do—and this is honestly a lazy trick, I just finished a whole novel that works like this, and the long sentences therein are much better than this long sentence here, and I wrote those long sentences to prove something to myself and to whatever readers the novel might have at some point hopefully if I am lucky, and it stopped being fun to write them about halfway through, but they needed to be there because that was the rule of the book, that was the deal I had made with the object, that is what it told me it needed and I said okay, and I promised myself that for my next project I would really try and have fun writing whatever it was I would write, that I would approach it with a joyous countenance, grinning, that I wanted to write whatever I wrote next grinning and even laughing, but the first thing I wrote after I finished the novel was this and the only thing I can hope for it honestly is that it makes enough sense and is at least a little bit interesting because I do not know that any of it is true, not that I have lied at all, but just that I did not exactly say anything beautiful I do not think, but this is not how I like to write really anyway, none of this has felt like writing…