Finding a Scene among the Corporate and the Damned

“D.C. is full of people, believe it or not, who dream of beauty.”

Untitled, Kit Knuppel

William Diana is a 23-year-old writer currently living in Washington D.C. He graduated from the University of Virginia, where he studied Sociolinguistic Anthropology. He writes The Hermit Speaks.

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Sometime in early November, one of the editors of The New Critic suggested I seek out and write about a youth literary scene for their publication. All my life, I’ve almost only written fiction, but I read enough Hunter S. Thompson as a teenager to give me lasting brain damage, a condition that scientists will probably later understand to be a kind of CTE purely caused by the works of Hunter S. Thompson (might I suggest, CTE-HST). Because of this unfortunate and chronic condition, I decided to write a gonzo piece. I thought about it: Youth literary scene? Where? Who? Why? Living in D.C., I had a couple ideas for scenes to write about, but I liked the people involved enough to not want to satirize them, and, above all, I wanted to satirize someone. People like blood. The writer’s closest analogue would, upon some consideration, be the gladiator. I asked around with my friends and my contacts in the local writing scene. Someone suggested infiltrating the young Republican crowds and writing an exposé. Imagine the title: ARLINGTON VIRGINIA IS DECADENT AND DEPRAVED, or NAVY YARD DELENDA EST, or something like that. That sounded fun, but after digging deeper, I couldn’t find any events happening soon enough for publication. Thanksgiving was coming, and apparently that meant even evil must rest. But, more importantly, I realized I basically only liked writing about myself. So, what to do?

On a dreary November evening, I happened to get drinks with another young writer at an Adams Morgan bar. After the third or fourth beer, I brought up an idea that I’d always joked about but never followed through with: what if you and I started a cabal? What if we assembled a squad of our creative young friends and created our own scene? I didn’t really expect to follow through with it. It was the sort of thing I liked to joke about. In college, if you fed me enough beer and talked to me about any kind of literature, I would inevitably suggest some form of secret society through which to engage in all kinds of literary misadventures. It made for fun conversation, but nothing more than that.

So I was joking about a literary cabal with my writer friend in an Adams Morgan bar. After we got past the initial joke, we started to discuss how we didn’t have that many young writer friends between the two of us — not enough to start a conspiracy with; not enough to build any kind of scene with. The doubt crept in. It’s Washington D.C.! The people here don’t read. They’re hardly even literate. The average person you meet thinks that The Dark Knight Rises is the pinnacle of cinema and that Brandon Sanderson is the greatest living writer. Talking to a Washingtonian, you realize their eyes don’t shine at all: there’s not even a glimmer of inspiration in those hard orbs, only the feral throbbing of indifferent rage and indifferent greed, dull eyes uncaring about anything but food and sex. You realize finally that you are looking into the eyes of a boar about to charge if you don’t stop yapping. Yes, you say, let’s talk about the best happy hour spots and pickleball courts, who even heard of Proust anyway?

The writer and I chatted about the literary cabal, taking it seriously enough that I gave it real consideration for once, and after the fifth beer we parted ways. Walking back, it started to rain hard. While I try to maintain a kind of zen detachment from the weather, I am a Virginian at heart and absolutely hate the cold and the rain. Give me those humid D.C. summers over frost in the air. Shivering already, I ducked into a nearby jazz bar — where I typically hide when out with my friends to annoy them by disappearing for thirty minutes or so. As luck would have it, one of my friends, having unfortunately discovered my hideout, was just leaving as I was entering, and we got a drink together. While we were talking, it occurred to me that she too has a creative soul. She left soon after, and I stood smoking in the doorway, listening to the jazz behind me, watching people run through the rain with their jackets over their heads. I started to think.

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The idea was beginning to annoy me. It had energy waiting to be unleashed. Although I slept through most of high school physics, I believe this is what’s known as static energy (in those grainy worksheet diagrams, it was represented by something absurd that you would never see in the real world, like a boulder dangling at the top of a hill sans Sisyphe).

Maybe nothing would have come from the idea. But the small burst of kinetic energy needed to push the boulder came when another one of my young writer friends texted me a picture of absinthe bottles for sale in Friendship Heights. If you’re a writer and you’ve talked to me enough, I have probably yapped to you not just about having a literary cabal but also about drinking absinthe during our meetings. (Again, I read too much Hemingway and Rimbaud when I was younger, a terminal condition even worse than CTE-HST. If epidemiologists really cared about the wellbeing of society and wanted to curb the spread of dangerous diseases, they would either have to quarantine me or put me down like a sick cow on account of how badly my mind has been infected by the Hemingway-Rimbaud Mind Virus. The HRMV renders its victim totally incapable of contributing to the economy or holding a stable job in any way as the infected subject in question becomes more and more delusional about adventures in foreign cities, getting drunk in weird places, and doomed quests through the wilderness. Visions play constantly in the victim’s head of drinking absinthe in a smoke-darkened opium den somewhere in the desert. Hair wild, mouth bitter, eyes bloodshot, in these visions they wander the streets of the city only after dusk, the respectable citizens staying far away from these poètes maudits. If you were to look at a scan of my brain, for example, it would probably be full of empty spaces where these HRMV fantasies have eaten away at my prefrontal cortex. Those empty spaces in my brain practically beg to be filled with absinthe). Absinthe! Until writer friend #2 (and creative type #3) texted me about this, I didn’t even know you could buy it. Absinthe, of all things, was the spark I needed. That evening I crafted a letter and sent it to a small group of friends who met several criteria:

1. be below 25 (never trust anyone over 25).

2. be in D.C.

3. if not a writer, have a creative soul from which to coax a writerly spirit.

D.C. may not be a creative city, but it’s full of people who yearn for something better than the vainglorious life of the soul-crushing office, people whose dreams are darkened by the absence of something they don’t know they need, people who yearn for something divine with which to make their life less unbearable. D.C. is full of people, believe it or not, who dream of beauty.

The letter, copied below, had only one requirement. You had to write something and present it. Without this, the invitee could not attend.

Friend, Poet,

Something is wrong. You can feel it deep in your bones if you only pay attention. Is it the stars, which look slightly different from the stars you knew as a child, as if the constellations have come slightly, just slightly, undone? Is it the earth’s own rotation, which feels to you sometimes jagged, unwieldy, off-balance, especially on a Wednesday morning or a Sunday afternoon? Is it inside of you? A feeling that you just can’t shake, as if you’ve been walking for some time in a fever dream that you just can’t wake out of?

You check the news. It is one hundred years in the future. An entity known as The Regime has taken full power over the globe, and The Regime has BANNED FUN. All forms of debauchery and whimsy have been outlawed, punishable by death. At the beginning, the sound of rifle fire resounded in the streets at dawn as the last Fun Enjoyers were rounded up by Agents of The Regime and shot for their crimes. Now, things are quiet, and the days are dreadful. Entertainment delivered to you in prepackaged, carefully curated servings: the TV shows, the Instagram reels, the happy hours, the short vacations. But none of it transcends the power of The Regime. Your fun is controlled, and therefore dead. The Regime is killing your soul.

You cannot keep living like this. You decide to do something. You decide, for once, to have real fun, to seek something transcendent. This is the exact moment when you, the reader, receive this letter. You have completed the first step. We have been waiting for you this whole time. You read the letter with growing anticipation, finally realizing revolution growing within you.

iN ViNO VERiTAS, SEZ THE GREAT PHiLOSOPHER COPERNiCUS: iN WiNE THERE’S TRUTH. We the Dylanites hold that truth to be self-evident. This cabal founds its charter on an ancient Greek mystery cult from the city of Delphi active from 800 BCE to its strange and sudden dissolution on July 16, 1945, oddly coincident with the day of the Trinity atom bomb test. They were followers of Dionysus, the god not just of wine but also of human creativity, who was indeed in some views a Promethean figure bringing the “spark” of intelligence to man, making man suzerain over all beasts and lord of the creative. For his crimes aiding humanity to rival the gods, Dionysus was dismembered, and his body was scattered among the spring harvest.

Every year, the followers of Dionysus recreated this dismemberment in a staged, masked ritual that would eventually evolve into the first forms of theater as we know it today. It was a rite of supreme importance: the drunken revelry enabled humanity to achieve a higher form of being, to come closer to the god.

Following this tradition, we will perform readings of poetry and prose in a state of drunken fever in order to attain, through fun and wine, a transcendence over present conditions. A humble and reasonable charter.

IN ORDER TO ATTEND, PLZ WRITE EITHER 1 (ONE) OF:

• A SONNET

• 3 HAIKU

• A FLASH FICTION SHORT STORY THAT CAN BE RECITED IN 7 MINUTES OR LESS

• & BE READY TO GIVE A RECITATION OF SAID PIECE.

• & PLZ, SEZ WiLL DiANA, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS BEAUTIFUL AND DEBAUCHEROUS, PLZ BE READY TO DRINK SOME ABSINTHE.

[Addresses, postgames, and required reading are not reproduced here. A literary cabal, even one which publishes its highly secret letter of invitation online, must maintain some mystery.]

Written to you with a little bit of that good old fashioned Peace n Love,

Will “Dylanite” Diana

Delirious letter delivered. Now, the doubt. Why “start” a “literary scene”? What would it serve anyone? In college, I’d been a member of a literary and debate society for a couple of years. I learned how to present poetry in front of a large crowd, and I learned how to get awfully drunk and still carry on a conversation about Toni Morrison. But in the end I got annoyed with the whole scene and quit, fleeing off into the less literary recesses of the university, where beer and basketball and girls were more important than Borges and Dickinson. Writers write alone, they read alone, they die alone; they are lonely creatures, I once told myself. Why huddle together except out of cowardice?

The responses to my letter came in quickly. D.C. may not be a creative city, but I, a pretentious and annoying flake, got twelve RSVPs to my shoebox apartment for twelve poets to get drunk on absinthe and recite poetry on a Tuesday night, with only a week’s notice. The game was on.

So I made the treacherous journey north to the distant and mysterious land of Friendship Heights, riding the Red line with the same misgiving that Marco Polo must have felt riding his first camel to Xanadu. In the medieval conception of the world, going to Asia was essentially like going north: on a medieval mappa mundi, Asia, the world’s navel, is located above Europe. Therefore, Polo’s journey east is as deeply symbolic as me going north to Friendship Heights. It’s a matter of cosmic orientation. Flip Google Maps counter-clockwise and you’ve almost got a mappa mundi, minus Prester John and cynocephali in the blank spaces, or Jesus sitting atop Asia with a T-O globe in his left hand and a scepter in his right.

True wanderers get nervous going north. East-west travel takes one to old truths or transcendent ideals, southward travel takes one to the reverse of one’s current condition — to the dream state, to the hidden obvious, or to what could have been — but northward journeys are just cold blankness. What is the meaning of going north? Hibernation, death, obliteration. Or worse, it’s symbolic of kneeling to the elite, to the old, to the established. I hate going north. All of my travels have taken me to every other cardinal direction but north; indeed, until recently I’d never even been to New York City, and, when I went, it was only to give a reading before hightailing it back south. I thought about how this was all just a massive waste of time. All of this time and energy I could have used for writing, and instead I was going to some metro stop with a stupid name to buy alcohol for other people to drink. Idiot.

I tried to write a sonnet but mostly got distracted. The doubt crept in. I was assembling a group of consultants. Would they even write something? Would they just drink my absinthe and sheepishly admit they couldn’t think of anything and then leave?

Arriving in Friendship Heights, I stumbled onward to acquire the absinthe. After a little grumbling, bartering, and participating in the exchange of goods and currency, I now had two bottles of the green stuff. To mess with my friends, I created a fake warning from the Surgeon General about the dangerous hallucinogenic powers of absinthe. Of course, despite all the wormwood and gloom, absinthe is an alcohol like any other. They say it hurts your liver, but after years of stumbling hungover through higher education, I’m not so sure.

On my way back, I stood for a moment outside the metro station, looking around. Apparently Friendship Heights is just some fancy shopping mall. I had expected Xanadu. What was I doing here? Why was I doing this? Wouldn’t it be better to spend all this time writing? I’m a writer, not a socialite. Why should I care about making other people be creative? Standing there, I considered taking the metro line all the way north and then getting on the first outbound Greyhound. I wanted more than anything to run away, just to prove a point.

The bacchanal, as I was calling it, would be the next day.

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Two days later, I awoke with a gasp — sweaty, mouth reeking of absinthe and cigarettes, head pounding, body aching, hair unruly and greasy. It was 9 a.m. — I had to be at the office by 8:30. During the night, in whatever brief glances of sleep I had stolen like an irreverent kid looking into the temple of a jealous god, I had a nightmare in which I was trying to stab a strangely Will Diana-like businessman to death at the desk in his office. His suit kept deflecting the knife just enough to avoid a fatal blow. He was powerless to run away, to fight back. He merely squirmed in his office chair and tried to reason with me as I, horrified by my own incapability to stop myself, kept plunging the knife into his flesh. I looked in his trembling eyes as I dismembered him. I looked at those eyes that looked exactly like mine. Then, horribly, I was awake. What did it mean?

Exhausted, I crawled to the metro, drowning in the very material of the air I moved through like a worm after the rain. Fucking bullshit. If the world was just and good, I wouldn’t have to work. I had done nothing wrong. What curse of Cain sentenced me to toil the earth? I thought about the night before.

The metro doors chimed open and I sat down, sunglasses on against the lights. I drank my coffee. The metro car rolled steadily through the earth. Like usual, I started to dream.

Except this time, I didn’t need to dream of faraway lands. Xanadu, Tangier, and Paris all became nothing. Last night, in Washington D.C. of all places, I’d assembled a ragtag team of writers and creatives. I’d filled my tiny apartment with burning incense and candles, I’d turned off the lights so that the whole place really was like some opium den. My friends arrived, all of them seeming to understand perfectly what was expected. And out of this group of young people, which featured those who hadn’t read since high school and those who had spent their whole lives writing, I heard some of the most genuine, earnest, enthusiastic poetry in my life. I’ve been to quite a few readings. None of them were as wonderfully earnest and beautiful as the sonnets this new group wrote on a week’s notice, with no enticement at all but absinthe, whimsy, and a good time.

Why did I want to start a literary scene? Why not just spend the time writing? I’m not sure. However, I found out that even a city full of the corporate and the damned, like D.C., is full of people who love art, who need beauty, if one only dares to ask around. So why even question it? It was a beautiful night, the sonnets were genuine, the absinthe flowed. It was a stupid idea, but after all it was good.