by Craig Reynolds
from Basta! v1n3 (Winter/Spring 1998)
Speculation abounds as to why Buffalo nurtures so many successful writers––some have suggested that the snow–prison, cold wind heart–attack & long dark days of black spring leave even the most uncreative among us with no other choice but to dream––but I, for one, disagree; our success has little to do with environmental destiny: Buffalo nurtures the verbal spirit because Buffalo itself is a word. Elsewhere, you find yourself slammed (to dance) by the thunderous rumble of syncopated streetlife [, insert catalog of concrete urban experiences here], but in Western New York, you are crippled always by the idea of Buffalo, a central reality as pithy and omnipresent as Mardi Gras beads in New Orleans, cooked shrimp on the bayou, morning mist across the Rockies or dirt–lined fingernails in New York City. What chariots your stay in Western New York is the myth of Buffalo––the grandiose legend of absolute absence that consumes us all (an intricate methodology evoked, like stellar sinkholes, to sketch an unsketchable black hole in the American mind). A definition/ Buffalo: an inverted history of nothing, an elaborately constructed memory founded on a theorem of lack, of interruption (before even beginning), of ah, it's not worth it . . .––and the words linger onward but who savors the absence? Buffalo exists only in theory––as an abstract possibility (like infinitude, or absolute zero), a concrete manifestation of an unspeakable reality (we live this reality, in mind and body). Nobody actually visits Buffalo; you're there before you arrive, gone before you came––I'm not convinced Buffalo even exists . . . except as hearsay, legend, memory . . . perhaps as literature. But as Proust's Marcel demonstrated in A Remembrance of Things Past, transcendence is only a memory away, and dreams don't exist but in the words we use to describe them afterward (words forever outlast experience, and once they do, inaugurate a new, wholly distinct reality liberated from the physical lie through immaterial abstraction). In Buffalo, relegated as we are to the plane of fiction, of myth, of theory (by America's unwavering willingness to facilitate our descent into memory), the words in which we exist provide a loophole for transcendence, an escape clause in the American dream. To deny our essence now––that is, sentences constructed from memory––in the service of a hard–and–fast reality every decaying thing about Buffalo conspires to prove does not actually exist would be to forfit our lives to the clichés that enslave us, a horrible possibility whose slippery likelihood demands a renaissance of the fractured word––if not merely a healthy airing of pure and total nonsense, the meaningless verbal cacophony that is Buffalo's most endearing contribution to the American diction.
2
For decades, Buffalo has spewed forth a new avant-garde vernacular concieved in defiant opposition to the grand American diction that fails to concede its destructive implausibility. From the tangled slang of Mark Twain (whose manuscript to Huck Finn is housed in the downtown library) to the mythic verbiage of the great Irish Modernist James Joyce (whose letters, notebooks and first drafts for 20th century masterpieces Finnegans Wake and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are housed in the UB Rare Book and Poetry collection) to the postmodern malestorms of Federman, Barth, Olson, Bernstein, Howe, et al., Buffalo's verbal foundation is one of visual explosions, satirical fireworks, all life is a pun, poetic infidelities in the name of love, I'll trade my poem for one good shot at the right side of his jaw, literary suicides but what literature isn't?, mythic journeys into the unknown, gutteral nonsense (concieved in the belly, vomitted forth ecstatically), crippling irony, cliché is lovely, flagrant homosexuality, insults are an art form, immorality for the sake of it, my wife is loving, beautiful and talented, bar-talk/ fuck you speak, theory my god why so much theory?, regarding the American collage what matters now is the rips and cracks, murder the word (––murder, the word), complain about everything, shout into an empty bottle, only write in echo, found a new literature on the dull end of a sharp pin, fall on your best friend at the Rendevouz, the end of end, disease a new literature, destruction a hapless literary purgatory toward nothing, devaulation the rule, de-centering essential or else sink with the ship, reconfiguration the only birth, evacuation internalized––to run is to die, revolt, revolt, revolt or forever hold your tongue.
*
Buffalo is a word that means nothing, expresses nothing, communicates nothing, demands nothing. Its ephemerality is its essence. Its unwillingness to cling to any one meaning is testament to its democracy. Its inability to represent anything at all is its crowing glory––if nothing else, it's (always) never wrong. Buffalo is that one piece of street slang that will fester in the American consciousness like a dead rat in the walls of a billionaire's mansion, silently contaminating further that which was clearly contaminated to begin with.
*
An unofficial sequel to v1n2––which featured a "Real Fictitious Interview with Ray Federman"––the following issue of Basta! (or Too Much) We Will Always Know Ourselves represents an awkward first attempt to consciously appropriate the word–Buffalo, to cut it from the American dictionary that sews us all into somebody else's meaning––and to sketch the entropy that is our most magnificent success, most embarassing folly and ultimately, most encouraging advancement.