Flying in Tight Fast Circles

At about 10:45 this morning my blog voice came back to me. That might sound strange given that this is year five of this blog, but I don't joke. The blog voice is not always the interior voice. The blog voice speaks to actual people (to you really), while the interior voice, the voice of the stories I've been writing, speak to--what? It is hard to name that what without sounding pretentious, at least in this context. So while the blog voice is still talking, I thought I'd say some words about Dana Spiotta, whose novels I've been reading over the break. I know I'm late to the game; more than a few of you know that Dana Spiotta's first novel, Lightning Field, came out in 2001, and I'm sure she published stories or excerpts long before that. What can I say about the work that won't be obvious from the passage I'm posting below? I can't think of anyone else who writes with her mixture of charisma, braininess, warmth, coolness, poetry, music, compassion. It's a bit Don DeLillo, a bit Jennifer Egan, a bit Mary Gaitskill--and completely itself. It's already ended up in my category of favorites, by which I mean work that sits alongside the people I've mentioned above, and a handful of others. I'm already rereading.

from the novel Stone Arabia
by Dana Spiotta

By now I should have been used to his--what should I call it? Need? Requirement? Accomodation, maybe? He wouldn't call it an addiction. He would call it his consolation. As far back as I can remember, Nik always used--the consoling part came later--whatever was at hand whenever he could. He just wanted and needed to get off his face, out of his head, expand, shut down, alter, spin, fly, sleep, wake up, float. When we were small kids, we would grab each other's arms and swing in circles faster and faster until out brains' equilibrium was nauseatingly off. We would wake in staggers and feel the earth come up to meet us in giant waves as we collapsed in breathless laughter. This odd feeling was a pleasure, and enjoying it is common, right? Nik also loved to wind the chains of a swing in creaking twists, pushing his leg off the support poles until the chains would twist to their very top, then he would push himself in the opposite direction, flying in tight fast circles as the chains unwound, throwing his head back to augment the spin. I read somewhere that the brain needs disorientation to properly develop. That childhood desire to feel dizzy has something to do with increasing the vestibular and cerebellar interaction in the young brain. Proprioception is the activity where the brain orients the inside world with the outside world. Spinning throws off your proprioception and the brain works and develops as it tries to get it back. The desire to spin around is healthy, I guess, because it teaches the brain how to get a stable fix on the world under any circumstances. But Nik got stuck there, somehow, and had to do these activities over and over. Getting dizzy-high was just the beginning. Swing sets were his gateway drug. Nik had an intense appetite, a special extra need, and as he grew older he grew more hungry for any and all alterations. I watched it; it was impossible to miss his difference, how he craved anything that undid his equilibrium.

He began drinking coffee in third grade. He would make it with instant coffee crystals and lots of sugar. He would mix it cold with tap water. He often stayed up all night (which is another childish and cheap way to get high--stay up all night and the fatigue alone will make you giddy). He drank OTC medicine, all kinds: decongestant to get speeded up, cough syrup to sleep. I swear he always smoked cigarettes, but of course that can't be true, he started at maybe twelve. By junior high he was taking any drugs he could get his hands on, and he could get his hands on so many.

Like the most serious druggies, he lived by the PDR, the Physician's Desk Reference, the well-thumbed paperback book that made his drug experimentations seem so rational and considered. He would root through his girlfriends' mothers' medicine cabinets. He would take a few of these, a few of those. The PDR would tell him what the drug would do, what the pill looked like, and it would tell him what it would interact with. He knew what he could mix or not mix. Nik became the guy yu asked, How many should I take? Nik was the guy who helped the kid who turned blue or the girl throwing up in the bathroom at the party. And his gleeful hunger to alter his brain never abated and was never apologized for. In his youth he extolled theories of the need and even the obligation to get high. He quoted the usual hallucinogenic pantheon of Huxley and so on. He didn't miss any rationales for his enthusiasms: Huichol Indian peyote, Freud's cocaine, Leary's LSD, Richard Harris's scotch.

As others of us (me, for instance) grew bored with taking drugs, of "experimenting," he never stopped. He wasn't experimenting. But as he lived longer and longer into his aging, creaking habits, he stopped trying to extol them to everyone, or at least to me. If it came up at all between us, it was usually because I decided I wanted him to change his habits out of simple health or plain decency, or even economy (the cigarettes I never mentioned were now five dollars a pack). He would simply tell me that this was his consolation. And what could a sister say to answer that?

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Here, a podcast. Brad Listi interviews Dana Spiotta. Be sure to keep with it. Interesting things said about studying with Gordon Lish, working at The Quarterly.