You Are Among Friends

Eve, Anna Lea MerrittThis is the third act of the This American Life episode "Starting From Scratch," which re-aired this week. It is also just one of twelve pieces in Jonathan's book Ladies & Gentlemen, The Bible!

In the Beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass. He picked his ear until it bled, tried to fit his fist in his mouth, and yanked out tufts of his own hair. At one point he tried to pinch his own eyes out, in order to examine them, and God had to step in.

Looking down at Adam, God must have felt a bit weird about the whole thing. It must have been something like eating at a cafeteria table all by yourself when a stranger suddenly sits down opposite you. But it's a stranger who you have created. And he is eating a macaroni salad that you have also created. And you have been sitting at the table all by yourself for over a hundred billion years. And yet still, you have nothing to talk about. It was pitiful the way Adam looked up into the sky and squinted. Before He created Adam, God must have been lonely. Now he was still lonely, and so was Adam.

Then came Eve. Since the Garden of Eden was the very first village and since every village needs a mayor as well as a village idiot, it broke down in this way. Eve: mayor. Adam: village idiot. And that is the way it was from the very beginning. Sometimes when Adam would start to speak, Eve would get all hopeful that he was about to impart something important and smart, but he would only say stuff like, "Little things are really great, because you can put them in your hand as well as in your mouth."

Eve would ponder how one minute she was not there, or anywhere, and now she was. Adam would ponder nothing. In her dreams, Eve danced in the tops of trees. Her beautiful thoughts flew out of her ears and lit up the sky like fireflies, and there were all kinds of people to talk to and hug. And then she would hear snoring. She would wake up, and there would be Adam, his yokel face pressed right against hers, his dog-food breath blowing right up her nostrils. Eve stared up at the sky. Adam draped his arm across her chest and brought his knee up onto her stomach. God, watching in Heaven, feared for Adam's broken heart as though the whole universe depended on it.

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There is something about seeing your words on a screen before you that makes you send the word with a better bite, sighted in closer to the target. I know a computer can't make a writer but I think it makes a writer better. Simplicity in writing and simplicity in getting it down, hot and real. When this computer is in the shop and I go back to the electric, it's like trying to break rock with a hammer. Of course, the essence of writing is there but you have to wait on it, it doesn't leap from the gut as quickly, you begin to trail your thoughts -- your thoughts are ahead of your fingers which are trying to catch up. It causes a block of sorts indeed.

--Charles Bukowski (world's most oft-forgiven misogynist), on using his first computer at age 70

Except for my very earliest attempts at writing--I wrote the first half of a really terrible novel in a journal around age 10, and got my first rejection letter at age 11 concerning a really terrible short story I wrote in a wide-lined notebook--I have always written on a computer. This is mostly because of my generation, I know, and also because of the fact that we always had computers around. My mom is a court reporter, and worked as a freelancer while my brother and I were growing up, so she was always tapping away on a keyboard, always an incredibly fast typist. So I came of age on an IBM, running DOS with that electric blue screen.

In college, for the first hour of my first real writing course, we had to write a manifesto on our writing habits, if we had any at all. Part of this involved analyzing the reasons why we worked (or didn't work) the way we did (or didn't). It was the first time I had ever considered why I write the way I do. Among other things, I remember putting down that I loved writing on a computer because it made the aesthetics of my writing nondescript and therefore put all the emphasis on the words themselves, the ways they balanced and ballasted each other. I liked the way all the letters were uniform, little shapes all in a line, making sense, non-distracting.

Writing longhand is what works for other people. (Do people still use typewriters, outside of  taking twee pictures for the internet?) I know Lynda Barry teaches it in her classes and workshops. And generally, I am a huge fan of the old-fashioned, of getting back to the roots of things, the essence. But on this topic, I have to agree with Bukowski: being able to type and keep up with your own thoughts as they happen is a great asset. And if it works against you instead of for you, you might need a better editor.