Gary Lutz: I Looked Alive

Part of me wants to call Lutz a satirist. But another, more honest way would be to call him a sadist.

In another time this book would have been labeled QUEER – a word Lutz uses adjectively at best, “the queered quiet of our night,” covered in leather – concealed in the Gay/Lesbian section of the library to serve as a footnote for other works to trod upon like a red carpet announcing “oh hello there gay man and/or woman, you look like a gay man and/or woman, and I want to tell you that we have these rows of books over here if you will just walk this way you will be able to relate to these books on a level at which you comprehend reality because we’re really quite progressive around here at the library and recognize that you are different from us.” Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly has, for instance, too long been relegated to those stacks. The opening lines: “I have been heavy and had much selecting. I saw a star which was low. It was so low it twinkled. Breath was in it. Little pieces are stupid.”

So it says a lot that this is not the case for Lutz, that this book is not put there in that place. Those stacks serve to segregate some of the most interesting books in the library. Stupid. No work of high literature deserves to serve one purpose alone, nor ought to be thought of as one thing entire; as in the case of Stein’s idem, it is the language of feminine lovemaking apparently seen as the right way of reading the text by editor Rebecca Mark. I say Remove All Gay/Lesbian Sections. Leave the pink stickers in place, secure them lovingly beneath your thumb. A matter of opinion perhaps, but I see little truth to constructions like “gay” or “straight” or “bi.” All those things mean other things. My Facebook page for instance says nothing of it. Why. In fact, I Looked Alive as one sort of thing does not concern itself with that thing the gay thing, though much of its content is, of course, justly askew.

Beauty is not a construction. It is a fact. It is symmetry. It is proportion. It is something we can at least at times agree upon. The truth is something that is how do you say what it is. Lutz seems more interested in beauty than some lame approximation of truth – it’s not what is being said, but How and why is it that, with a little w – something that makes Lutz decidedly old-fashioned, despite or in spite of the avant-garde railings he picked out for this his odd assortment of staircases weaving through the narrative, rather than along side it, as most are wont to do, as in a moving sidewalk.

At times encoded so heavily so as to jar you overboard the great big boat of what one could roundly call our common experience – the sort of experience Kieslowkski was after: the little moments we “all” think about but cannot seem to express – into the more turbulent sea of Lutz’s bottle-bound schooner, the density of these stories alone lends them a digestible size and shape for today’s distractible reader, if not the eternally distracted person in a sea of verbal carnage. There seems little doubt in my mind these stories will stand the test of time. Painting is what this kind of writing is, painting on a small canvas, so as not to take all the space, all the paper – greedy painters are fine but they are still greedy. The sexual metaphors, the message in the bottle wrenches at the point of making human connections that simply cannot be gained through words alone.

Sentences melting into objects, objects melting into skin, hair, teeth, pieces of feeling gone dead but not lost – there’s a deep sadness in his description of fallen acts – something more akin to sculpture than collage, operating somewhere along the lines of open-heart surgery for the crippled mind’s body of America, the beautiful babe, honest Abe holding up her dress, peaking at the spectacle they’re creating in the mirror of what is supposed to be our literature, Lady Justice scrutinizes her mangled legs in the trifecta of funhouse reflectors searching everywhere for spider veins, finding none but rather or not finding the deep, encrusted, once tempestuous rivers long since given way to rash, dried up, paved into non-existence below layers of paperwork sliced thick as potato wedges like the brown-orange mud leaves of autumn. Domesticity, ennui, and the like, dressed up as urban foliage for the eyes. The concrete crap we are created out of for ourselves to pretend we play with, a playground of adult folly pronounced firmly long a as in a is for “assholes.” The string holds this tension together. Lutz threads the sounds of the words he uses, and as he pulls them tightly together I stand beside myself and think it’s just masterful.

Lutz’s righteous sentences shoot flares into the night sky of haha, his emotional paragraphs begging to be fondled with your eyes caressed with your tongue jutting out at another going what the hell is this guy smoking. He’s on life, high as hell. Perhaps the real weight of this petite beast, this big little book, lies in the weird interaction with a sense of being American in America. I’m just kidding. No really though. People say that much too much but it’s true! It’s even maybe quite possibly a little more know-how than I know now because I am young after all pretty young. Anywho there’s a lot here beyond orgies and love triangles and rest-stop fuckery with the tikes in the car that is to say there are those there too, too much to talk about besides taboos going excuse me sir/ma’am but this is a taboo the way balloons announce themselves as balloons by shape and location in relation to string, and would be more polite if they were icebergs probably. It’s not a huge loss. But there they are anyway. They sexy it up a little.