Wednesday, April 9, 2014

What is a writer working on, anyway?  Is it science?  Theory?  Is it Proust…

A poor student makes, in a way, a good scientist.  The worst student of all, of all science, the writer, the writer of that sphere we primitively call "fiction"…  and yet still able to navigate to that understanding we all need:  to live in the present moment.

And this is revolutionary, remarkable, and yet probably very very very very old.  And it is also probably very difficult in a complicated modern world.

And that is why a  moment of fiction is beautiful, because it is a--and nothing else but--living in the moment.  As strange as that sounds….  (as we might think of literature as a quaint long revisitation that is basically inaccurate to the present moment and how we should rise to treat it.)

This speaks of the moments that rise, naturally noticed, out of literature:  when we finally get to the bridge near Austerlitz in War And Peace;  the moments of Levin reaping grain with peasants;  the utterly remarkable entrance into momentary consciousness as Anna nears the station.  This is when things get vital, when even the adolescent male present in the reader becomes as involved, as if over a pictured pirate tale or a children's book, Richard Scarry.

One book's moment.  When one person tells another, 'crazy to bring flowers to a beautiful girl.'  One of those moments, when the participants, basically only two of them, merge in a moment, become present, alive, current.

Carver pays homage to Chekhov the scientist, on some deep instinct.   To catch that moment when Chekhov is dying, his wife, the actress Olga Knipper--they'd met at 40, more or less-by his side, the call to the doctor there.  Chekhov, tubercular, finally wheezing with nothing left, turn him on his side, and his (the great writer's) own recorded comment, spoken in German, "Ich sterbe…"  The moment.  Full of stuff.  That elusive moment behind all his stories, stories of so many moments.  A science, and one that Carver understood, in some way.  A strange kind of science, that in its own way has to do with the Cosmos, in that living and dying are too part of the Cosmos along with Big Bang, Light, Gravity, relativity, Newton's principals…

Perhaps the writing mind appreciates that lesson, of living, happily as one can, in the present, to create and act a good present moment, not creepy, kind, not too passive, involved, alive, aware, not caught in the past's slights, nor the future's heavy anticipations of what adult life might actually entail as far as sweat and blood.  Just to keep a good attitude, a spiritual self-comfort.  The lesson of art unto itself…  the wise person knowing, having a bad attitude going into something, thus not listening, thus withdrawing into complexes, does no good at all.

It is, of course, a complex dance, to live in that, the now, the present.  But still, a nervous person can be calm, and find relief, as if by the tonic of an herbal medicine free and available in the woods or a backyard, remarkably effective, giving even unto the timid the voice of a lion.

Yes, for the nervous human creature to realize the healthy beauty of a given moment, it can only come as a relief, an unburdening from over thinking…  The quality of the shit one takes after tea before the shower, the praise-worthy submarine-minus-conning-tower accredited to flax seed, no gluten, a probiotic tablet;  the discovery of how to more properly do the act of shaving;  the sexy beauty of nature, the witnessed event, the tree budding, the little fish running, the hawk on thermal circuit mimicking the spins of the heavens, the flight of a rabbit.  Even the discovery of how to write itself, as if one lived in a gently surrounding Moveable Feast...

The beauty of Dylan Thomas' Child's Christmas, the cave painting, the physicality of a Hemingway short…  all easily clichéd, but leading us out to experience the movement, the dance of life…

And maybe somewhere, as a writer becomes a scientist of his own fashion, being the son of one, a teacher, as God in Heaven as a teacher, and realizes that indeed, behind everything, there is… yes, love.



Well, he just didn't seem to look much like a scientist, bumbling along at his slow pace, looking off into the trees, studying a squirrel…  What work was he doing?  It didn't seem like much of a science at all…  But for the fact that he was always looking at things, or scribbling, absently, in a notebook.  He had not ingratiated himself with any school of science, it would seem, but for his love of old DeMott, who was strange and iconoclastic and made a big deal out of bringing a Shakespeare scene or a poem to life.  He seemed to believe in impossible things, things that had little to do with…  well, adult business stuff, as if he lived in a bubble, had a completely different sense of time and its operations…  And he was at his best when there was a transition coming immediately, as if that was the only time he could really speak his mind, in his own crude but delicate way,a real primitive.   And so it was probably good, somehow, no?… that he wasn't a successful writer, that sort of thing, but just went on, at it, at his own thing…  in his own time… 

Being male--it must be horrible, horrible as what women physically have to go through, an invert of all the threats a woman has, yet alike, the battle of finding our own way to health and healthy things for us, individually, seemingly, almost, unique.  The sexes will never quite understand each other, but by the present...

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