The thought reminds me of Twain.  He didn't say it, out loud, not that I know of.  "If you could blame what you wrote, instantly and directly, on other people, there would be a lot more good writing out there."  Currently, as the set up goes, what you wrote, well, you're kind of stuck with it, like, for the rest of your life.  This, plainly, discourages creativity.  Hemingway, by the way, would add, to the part of who to blame, or when, or how long, "lastingly."  That sounds like a word he would have wrote, as least as far as my thoughts go.  And he was a brave guy, because he wrote stuff and had to stand by it, and people could have easily said, reacting to it, "oh, that's weird, really not...  no, I, can only see that as vulgar... and disturbing," even though people, lighted up by Freud and other developments, instantly saw that writing was a lot like psychotherapy, a way of getting things out, through symbol, the kinds of things you think about that haunt you that you know you need to somehow get down, put down on paper, get out of the bag...  Which made reading instantly attractive, as if the cathartic process of whatever art the human being had ever come up with from cave painting to tempera, from saga, bard, playwright sonnet maker was able to evolve and develop to meet what ever the times threw at the forms of art and the basic drive behind art.  And the times threw a lot in the face of humanity in, say, an event like WWI, the coming home of the ghosts of colonialism (and thoughtless industrialism) on mass scale at the door step of Europe, such that it would never forget.

Perhaps it is a sign of 'manhood,' adulthood, when the being becomes more attuned, focussed, aligned with whatever he finds sayable and worth mentioning.  You can indeed work long and hard finding something worthy of putting down on paper.  (You can work long and hard, and then find what you have to say ill mannered, unintelligent.)  And you can indeed find things that you really think are vital observations, and these happen in very personal spaces, leaving you to conclude that this was why you started messing about in the first place.

All those sorts of 'fictional thoughts,' thoughts taken from the imagination as little or steady voices, allow one to find a way to think what he/she really thinks.  The form those thoughts take is interesting to mark.  Some paint.  Some make films.  Some take up music.  Some write in certain ways.

And it might be said, that the deepest, or truest, of thoughts are something one has to think about, as they come out as puzzles in a way.  Or as something seen by a very deep and daring mind who is able to move symbols in incredible and mythological ways.  Celebratory, not pessimistic.

"The world is full of ghosts, and such is exactly what each individual represents," the thought might go.  And so then we get on that thin ground that might break beneath our feet, yet knowing in an instinctive way that such is true, true on all levels, symbolically, religiously, poetically, figuratively, literally, metaphysically, as true as we know a push-up works the chest and shoulder muscles.

Of course, such thoughts come into play when we encounter certain minds, effected by the poetry of such minds.  In Emily Dickinson land, we get her nature odes.  In MacGowan land, we get a line of ancient Irish schooling and ghosts.  In each, our own sensitivities pick up what antennae tell us.  And so, we deserve our fascination with Abraham Lincoln, a channel, if you will.

Characters, ghosts, Lears, poems, book depository sixth floor cardboard boxes (as if to predict how cardboard box delivery--and airplanes with metal caskets--would come to rule our present lives), famine haunted dunes of the sands of beaches in County Mayo, Buddha ghosts, candles, reverberations of the thoughts of Twain and Faulkner, Joyce claptrap, Kerouac, the whale mouth sieve technique of writing, the haunted Carolina rocking chair of Kennedy, well-read Kennedy who knew history, the puzzles of old Maupassant's short story taken internationally, around the world, into the depths of deep China, Hamlet too stiff for us, too unyielding, too impersonal (as princes are), but perhaps the best modern speaker of the final truth of the Universe blown into being.  Joyce had gift of language, poor working stiff does not have, but smelleth the same ghosts on shingle beaches though far away.  Worn out by conversations, just as he is enlivened and enlightened by them, an inner eye seeing the friendly ghosts behind everyone's life, like that weird film of the fallen angel in Berlin hanging about, Wim Wenders style.  Yes, Berlin is somewhere I would show up, if I were a ghost.  "Definitely," as people say.

Dedication, to work, what is it?  We must first abide by our ghosts, by the sweet ghosts of the creativity of all our thousand human ancestors (7000 years ago, like taking to Facebook, the kids made cheese in pots now fragmented.)

Daniel Inouye is honored, lies in state in the Capitol rotunda, veteran of Monte Casino.

Writing... you'd rather blame it on someone else.  Not my fault.  Just a tradition.  Somehow good for us, good for our health.

And we should know, despite the show, that everyone and things related is a ghost of something, and in that act, becoming something real and present.

It's always a matter of ghosts versus empire.

All this...  I cannot blame on anyone else.



Just a little sensitivity,
not too much,
not too much time alone
wondering about things.
Laying the sweet memory
of your father down
like a hugged child at night,
to bed and come back
with wakened day.
My old man.
Pop.
Sweet gentle dad.