There is the humanitarian quality in it.
Nick Adams, Ernest Hemingway's true self, his alter-ego, his stand-in, is up in Michigan, his realities crystalized into the moments of short story. "The End of Something" leaves with Nick lying down on his stomach on the shore of the lake he's just been night-trawling with his gal, his brow or cheek resting on the hands and wrists of crossed folded arms, a make-shift pillow. He's just broken up with her, out of some irritation (off camera), and now, the act done, irrevocably, he reconsiders it. This is no fun, no fun at all, we can read him. He wants to be left alone.
And the story mirrors the strange ending of the first story of the In Our Time cycle, the suicide of the Native American husband as Nick's father delivers 'the squaw's' baby through a C-section. (She bites the doctor.) The aftermath leaves Nick, as a boy still, trailing his hand in the water as he canoes back across the lake with his father, who is explaining a bit about the world. The boy's (innocent) reaction is that he is quite sure he will never die. Quite sure.
Life is no fun sometimes, maybe quite often, and writing is one way of assuaging.
What a small town boy I've become. I went back home, landscaped, summers, even after graduation, didn't do much except go the college library and read, dinner with the old man, then walking down to Don's Rok for a beer. The time for adventure, for new experiences, new places, cities, and I retreated. Finally joining the flow reluctantly, a carpet bagger.
Friday, April 10, 2015
There I was, surrounded by them, as my co-worker, looking forward from the beginning of the shift to going home early to watch a soccer match, looked on. My regular lady explaining what a piece of ... the guy who was just sitting next to her. Do you know what he does? I dunno, defense contracting? That's not what he does, she says. That's not what he does. Implying that, oh yes, she has dealt with him, maybe even professionally, before.
He visits infrequently, and because he makes a point of coming in, and has been coming a long time, I, poor judge of character, I take care of him. Initially, just by recognizing him. (He gets our braised veal cheeks.) Thus opening the door... sigh. He is bad karma, not a nice person, and was eyeing every woman in the house, she tells me after he leaves. Yeah, figures. I shrug. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you, but he is not a good person. And there is something, 'yeah, yeah, yeah, I know' dismissive about him, I guess.
The band is setting up and we are getting busy. Wanna-go-home-early/I-don't-give-a-blank has gotten snooty, telling her I'm being aggressive when I am trying to meet the tastes of a table, express some of my frustration of her not being very helpful to the customer. (The female of the couple wants a half glass of Beaujolais. Is told that it's happy hour, get a full glass. This is when I bring her over a taste, to make sure she likes it, as I have to go over their anyway to have him taste our chardonnay, a Burgundy, from the Macon. She ends up preferring the Chinon.) The lady--I missed it--suggests to the server who's not paying perfect attention to her table that maybe they need a glass of wine. Which further invites server to drag her heels, shooting a look at lady, and then telling me about it later. Lady speaks to her in Spanish a little later on, and server says loud enough, en Anglais!
The band, after warming up, the drummer getting set, launches into the first set, very loud. "Tell them to turn it down." "You're closer." "Yes, but they are your friends." My friends... They are always my friends, in her world view.
Before leaving the guy tells me about being a body builder back in college days, and now, he's a cyclist, was out riding in 45 degree rain for an hour and a half. He speaks abruptly, like an athlete, one who's translated that combative precise eye into a good living in the consulting business. Sharp, pointed, self-confident, not one for bullshit, and to him, seeing me is about getting jolly. He's read my book, read it in two days, sounds impressed with it. "Your character went through a lot," he says, respectful of the relationship between author and character. There is a bit of the mensch in everyone. In the eyes of God, wine is wine; there may be old and new, but it's all still wine, made in the vineyard, brought by human toil to the feast.
As he came in and sat down, telling me he's bringing his family by soon, I mention, knowing that lady, seated on his left is well-travelled beyond that term, I bring up our friend's recent birthday celebration in the Black Forest town with starred Michelan restaurants.
Wine, like alcohol, a drug of the male-dominated world, a tranquilizer for the masses, and I have fallen into it, not standing up for myself, for poetry, for a lot of things back when I was a dope college student with some self-esteem issues or some relevant mental disorder.
The impression dawns on me, the aggression. Or is a kind of vertigo, too many competing energy centers. A perceived ability to communicate, but with something in the way of it. The original Tower of Babel.
It's like you want to say, guess what, you are all crazy and under the influence, all falling into the world of aggressive dominance, sucked down a vortex. Not a sane one in the house. Loud voices, grotesque laughter, inhibitions out the window. My natural reaction, I came to see, was please, don't let anyone see me doing such a shameful task, pandering to the needs, like a court jester.
Better to return to the world of passivity, of peace, of calm.
And I, of course, am the one who put myself into such a position, surrounded by drinkers. I went along with the world of male domination's brute drug, alcohol, having conceived of it as a social lubricant for party mixers, then as an Old World healthy everyday pleasure. The only problem was how it left me feeling the next day, a bit poisoned, heart pounding, dehydrated, depressed, not getting anywhere professionally, barely even trying to get anywhere but for the fact of going to a therapist for the last eight months.
I wasn't always like that. I wasn't always a depressive, a sad sack. I was a good student, and an avid reader, into poetry and the tickings of literature. And then I suppose, part image, part peer pressure, part self-medication, part feeling different from the rest, I drank, to be cool, I suppose, but a little bit too much, even though Ive always taking my breaks from it, tried to moderate it, strove for balance. Was it the mythic writer's rhythm, of focus by day, and then relaxation and a social life at night of the sort Hemingway writes about, letting the well replenish itself, the mind having consciously turned off directly thinking about subject matter.
Talk with my therapist earlier in the week. The threshold glass. Usually it's glass number three that puts a person of normal tolerance over the edge. Harder to tell when you're at the bar, cleaning up, and over time, and with food, you have a few tastes, and then maybe it's when you get home, when you open a bottle at the end of the week, find yourself staying up 'til six in the morning...
A depressant, she explains to me, slows things down in the brain. Oh, that explains its effect. But, the next day, that is turned into anxiety. And anxiety can become a pattern. And indeed, I know, what you put into the system the night before has its effect the next day, the opposite of reassurance that things are good and going well.
How sensitive we are, the creature, its chemistry.
The day-off comes. I get up, make some reservations on Expedia for upcoming trips, which takes effort and study, drink my hot water and lemon, a little green tea, scramble some eggs. My co-worker, back from his trek from Brazil World Cup onward into South America, with more vigor than I, proposed going down for a baseball game, but that was way too early, it's unseasonably cold, and I knew eventually such a trip would involve beer. I avoid the phone and light some incense, thinking of Ekhardt Tolle in A New Earth opening windows, 'away ego and ego devils' and all the hot sticky putrid money-before-God air. I want to go for a walk, but I'm tired, and need to write down this rough draft of things, having at last a chance to put fingers to the old keyboard.
There are a few stray thoughts, necessary to gather up in the house in need, trying again to find the foundations that keep it together. I do some vacuuming, and prepare, mentally, at least, the recycling. There are cob webs in the front by the desk and the salvaged book shelf where two of my father's professorial leather attache cases have sat gathering dust over the winter next to the bureau with his personal items, fragrant with sandalwood and his homemade fragrances.
One of those thoughts was an impression late night of Russia House, gathered as I sat on a Saturday, having run out of wine in my house, almost intentionally, but then no fun at all, having necessitated the walk down the street and up a block and up the steps and in through the foreboding doors for a decent glass of Cahors. I sit politely by myself and unobtrusively observe the comings and goings of the very pretty barmaid and server. To my fanciful mind as I watch I am seeing the physical continuation of some very very old habits. Our friendliness, our sense of community, I have the feeling, anthropologically, goes way way way back, in this case, perhaps to the Denisovans, whoever they were, the earliest tribes, who would have nodded to each other with just the same deference almost self-deprecating but immediately rich with generosity. Here we are. We are together. We are a tribe. No more need be said, because it's all there on the surface, not in need of words, but which of course makes words easy and fun, communication a breeze. And true, the bartender, truly a beauty who sets off an ache within as I look at her face and her hair, is wearing a wedding band, and no more need be said as that fact, nice ring at that, speaks volumes. And I sit too poor to buy such a thing as a diamond wedding band, so I sit, read my blog on my iPhone, have an extra glass, tip well, leave when I'm told out into the night, unrecognized with my beard and leather jacket, to walk home, and then wake up, on Easter, to go back to work.
But anyway. I manage to stay out of the wine, though the thirst grows as the night deepens into its darkness after midnight with the trash out and the laundry gathered from the dryer in the basement as a misty drizzle falls underneath the street lamps. I manage to avoid going out, to avoid all the various disappointments and disillusionments the act brings, along with the ultimately unsatisfying aspect that all things material, except guitars, women, good friends, bring or have, particularly the consumer products. And chicks with dicks, the Spring Happy Hour the French guys at the bar told me about, down on 17th Street, I'm sure they would be, in the end, a disappointment anyway, another sad illusion, pleasurable as they might seem initially to the lonely unaided eye. I've shaved off the facial hair growth, after mowing it down to a trimmed beard, neither look pleasing me, tired of the itch of wiry hairs. I want to experiment, how the days go if I don't drink, but if it were not for another mild experiment, which turns out pleasantly a bust, I would have had a glass, not to mix.
I don't feel much better about things in the morning, but with green tea I'm able to brighten a bit and move, a little tunafish and some quinoa for breakfast, a glass of V8. I still feel heartsick over all the miscommunications I have caused and deepened in my fall into the male dominated economic world I don't seem to be able to quite get, into the 7000 year-old custom of fermented juice of grape and grain which must be deeply tied to the settling down into the agrarian of a nomadic creature. The tiniest blip on the human time-line, but admit it, these days we need a little something to calm ourselves at the end of a day, the blank creative period when minds wander into sensory pleasure.
Writing, not beset by the usual anxiety, but still enough to worry about, I feel better, the jumbled up-in-the-air pieces in my brain having been dusted off and put back into some form of alignment and rest.
He visits infrequently, and because he makes a point of coming in, and has been coming a long time, I, poor judge of character, I take care of him. Initially, just by recognizing him. (He gets our braised veal cheeks.) Thus opening the door... sigh. He is bad karma, not a nice person, and was eyeing every woman in the house, she tells me after he leaves. Yeah, figures. I shrug. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you, but he is not a good person. And there is something, 'yeah, yeah, yeah, I know' dismissive about him, I guess.
The band is setting up and we are getting busy. Wanna-go-home-early/I-don't-give-a-blank has gotten snooty, telling her I'm being aggressive when I am trying to meet the tastes of a table, express some of my frustration of her not being very helpful to the customer. (The female of the couple wants a half glass of Beaujolais. Is told that it's happy hour, get a full glass. This is when I bring her over a taste, to make sure she likes it, as I have to go over their anyway to have him taste our chardonnay, a Burgundy, from the Macon. She ends up preferring the Chinon.) The lady--I missed it--suggests to the server who's not paying perfect attention to her table that maybe they need a glass of wine. Which further invites server to drag her heels, shooting a look at lady, and then telling me about it later. Lady speaks to her in Spanish a little later on, and server says loud enough, en Anglais!
The band, after warming up, the drummer getting set, launches into the first set, very loud. "Tell them to turn it down." "You're closer." "Yes, but they are your friends." My friends... They are always my friends, in her world view.
Before leaving the guy tells me about being a body builder back in college days, and now, he's a cyclist, was out riding in 45 degree rain for an hour and a half. He speaks abruptly, like an athlete, one who's translated that combative precise eye into a good living in the consulting business. Sharp, pointed, self-confident, not one for bullshit, and to him, seeing me is about getting jolly. He's read my book, read it in two days, sounds impressed with it. "Your character went through a lot," he says, respectful of the relationship between author and character. There is a bit of the mensch in everyone. In the eyes of God, wine is wine; there may be old and new, but it's all still wine, made in the vineyard, brought by human toil to the feast.
As he came in and sat down, telling me he's bringing his family by soon, I mention, knowing that lady, seated on his left is well-travelled beyond that term, I bring up our friend's recent birthday celebration in the Black Forest town with starred Michelan restaurants.
Wine, like alcohol, a drug of the male-dominated world, a tranquilizer for the masses, and I have fallen into it, not standing up for myself, for poetry, for a lot of things back when I was a dope college student with some self-esteem issues or some relevant mental disorder.
The impression dawns on me, the aggression. Or is a kind of vertigo, too many competing energy centers. A perceived ability to communicate, but with something in the way of it. The original Tower of Babel.
It's like you want to say, guess what, you are all crazy and under the influence, all falling into the world of aggressive dominance, sucked down a vortex. Not a sane one in the house. Loud voices, grotesque laughter, inhibitions out the window. My natural reaction, I came to see, was please, don't let anyone see me doing such a shameful task, pandering to the needs, like a court jester.
Better to return to the world of passivity, of peace, of calm.
And I, of course, am the one who put myself into such a position, surrounded by drinkers. I went along with the world of male domination's brute drug, alcohol, having conceived of it as a social lubricant for party mixers, then as an Old World healthy everyday pleasure. The only problem was how it left me feeling the next day, a bit poisoned, heart pounding, dehydrated, depressed, not getting anywhere professionally, barely even trying to get anywhere but for the fact of going to a therapist for the last eight months.
I wasn't always like that. I wasn't always a depressive, a sad sack. I was a good student, and an avid reader, into poetry and the tickings of literature. And then I suppose, part image, part peer pressure, part self-medication, part feeling different from the rest, I drank, to be cool, I suppose, but a little bit too much, even though Ive always taking my breaks from it, tried to moderate it, strove for balance. Was it the mythic writer's rhythm, of focus by day, and then relaxation and a social life at night of the sort Hemingway writes about, letting the well replenish itself, the mind having consciously turned off directly thinking about subject matter.
Talk with my therapist earlier in the week. The threshold glass. Usually it's glass number three that puts a person of normal tolerance over the edge. Harder to tell when you're at the bar, cleaning up, and over time, and with food, you have a few tastes, and then maybe it's when you get home, when you open a bottle at the end of the week, find yourself staying up 'til six in the morning...
A depressant, she explains to me, slows things down in the brain. Oh, that explains its effect. But, the next day, that is turned into anxiety. And anxiety can become a pattern. And indeed, I know, what you put into the system the night before has its effect the next day, the opposite of reassurance that things are good and going well.
How sensitive we are, the creature, its chemistry.
The day-off comes. I get up, make some reservations on Expedia for upcoming trips, which takes effort and study, drink my hot water and lemon, a little green tea, scramble some eggs. My co-worker, back from his trek from Brazil World Cup onward into South America, with more vigor than I, proposed going down for a baseball game, but that was way too early, it's unseasonably cold, and I knew eventually such a trip would involve beer. I avoid the phone and light some incense, thinking of Ekhardt Tolle in A New Earth opening windows, 'away ego and ego devils' and all the hot sticky putrid money-before-God air. I want to go for a walk, but I'm tired, and need to write down this rough draft of things, having at last a chance to put fingers to the old keyboard.
There are a few stray thoughts, necessary to gather up in the house in need, trying again to find the foundations that keep it together. I do some vacuuming, and prepare, mentally, at least, the recycling. There are cob webs in the front by the desk and the salvaged book shelf where two of my father's professorial leather attache cases have sat gathering dust over the winter next to the bureau with his personal items, fragrant with sandalwood and his homemade fragrances.
One of those thoughts was an impression late night of Russia House, gathered as I sat on a Saturday, having run out of wine in my house, almost intentionally, but then no fun at all, having necessitated the walk down the street and up a block and up the steps and in through the foreboding doors for a decent glass of Cahors. I sit politely by myself and unobtrusively observe the comings and goings of the very pretty barmaid and server. To my fanciful mind as I watch I am seeing the physical continuation of some very very old habits. Our friendliness, our sense of community, I have the feeling, anthropologically, goes way way way back, in this case, perhaps to the Denisovans, whoever they were, the earliest tribes, who would have nodded to each other with just the same deference almost self-deprecating but immediately rich with generosity. Here we are. We are together. We are a tribe. No more need be said, because it's all there on the surface, not in need of words, but which of course makes words easy and fun, communication a breeze. And true, the bartender, truly a beauty who sets off an ache within as I look at her face and her hair, is wearing a wedding band, and no more need be said as that fact, nice ring at that, speaks volumes. And I sit too poor to buy such a thing as a diamond wedding band, so I sit, read my blog on my iPhone, have an extra glass, tip well, leave when I'm told out into the night, unrecognized with my beard and leather jacket, to walk home, and then wake up, on Easter, to go back to work.
But anyway. I manage to stay out of the wine, though the thirst grows as the night deepens into its darkness after midnight with the trash out and the laundry gathered from the dryer in the basement as a misty drizzle falls underneath the street lamps. I manage to avoid going out, to avoid all the various disappointments and disillusionments the act brings, along with the ultimately unsatisfying aspect that all things material, except guitars, women, good friends, bring or have, particularly the consumer products. And chicks with dicks, the Spring Happy Hour the French guys at the bar told me about, down on 17th Street, I'm sure they would be, in the end, a disappointment anyway, another sad illusion, pleasurable as they might seem initially to the lonely unaided eye. I've shaved off the facial hair growth, after mowing it down to a trimmed beard, neither look pleasing me, tired of the itch of wiry hairs. I want to experiment, how the days go if I don't drink, but if it were not for another mild experiment, which turns out pleasantly a bust, I would have had a glass, not to mix.
I don't feel much better about things in the morning, but with green tea I'm able to brighten a bit and move, a little tunafish and some quinoa for breakfast, a glass of V8. I still feel heartsick over all the miscommunications I have caused and deepened in my fall into the male dominated economic world I don't seem to be able to quite get, into the 7000 year-old custom of fermented juice of grape and grain which must be deeply tied to the settling down into the agrarian of a nomadic creature. The tiniest blip on the human time-line, but admit it, these days we need a little something to calm ourselves at the end of a day, the blank creative period when minds wander into sensory pleasure.
Writing, not beset by the usual anxiety, but still enough to worry about, I feel better, the jumbled up-in-the-air pieces in my brain having been dusted off and put back into some form of alignment and rest.
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Kerouac
What gives him his sensibility and his talent is is what makes him susceptible, a wanderer, a follower of exotic outsiders, an alcoholic. The prose digests, but the creature is vulnerable, his intelligence encompassing. There is the need for words, later on, after things have happened, after the going-along with the ride, after the vulnerability. There is shyness, but at the bottom of it all, an incredibly sane man, and one who knows craziness, who makes a pattern of overcoming it.
(That he had phlebitis might suggest he had Type O blood.)
You can't blame a writer for wanting to eat. A restaurant offers a home-cooked meal. But with the job came adrenaline, and people, and with all that the need for calm. The drink is social, a part of conversation. And once you've had the first sip, then you're along for the ride.
And so the writer needs calm, the time alone to write down what he's been through out in society. Working at the bar was a way of finding a niche in society, a way of belonging, a source of decent company and friends. But you need a retreat, away from the invites, away from the dealings. Exercise, a jog, a walk, a bike ride. And of course, writing.
An elderly couple--they've long been coming to the restaurant; he's not able to climb the stairs anymore for the usual Sunday night 8 PM reservation--invite me over for dinner. Of course there's going to be drinking. The relationship is built on a mutual enjoyment of French wine, in particular, the Pinot Noir of Burgundy. A bottle of sparkling California Mumm, and then, a very rare wine open on the table, which turns out to be a Clos de Vougeot Grand Cru, Nicolas Potel, 2005.
Good conversation, talk of dark matter and the Big Bang. Talk of visiting with the Chevalier du Tastevin in 1965 while working with a French company sub-contracting a a cyclotron. A talk of colleagues from her work at NIH, and cancer. After desert, a fruit tart from a good patisserie, a ride home.
And I take a nap on the couch afterward, and then I'm awake, and I open up a Kermit Lynch Beaujolais and watch Lincoln, staying up way too late. As if the whole thing had thrown me off. The chain reaction going into the next day, and then the next night needing also to have some wine, to settle that which had been enjoyed before.
It's the vulnerability, the problem of being too kind almost. In a world in which you can't necessarily be like that. Is that where art comes from? The feminine aspect, in your own hands? The problem of being as if blown around by the wind... Embarrassing.
It is indeed like the Conrad short story, that you are a writer mainly because you really do not understand society, that you blindly follow it, really never knowing what to make of it beyond the most basic things of it. And therefore whatever you may choose to write about is happenstance, random details, and it's a great bit of luck if capturing those catches the larger realities beyond them. Kind of like a Fellini movie.
What gives him his sensibility and his talent is is what makes him susceptible, a wanderer, a follower of exotic outsiders, an alcoholic. The prose digests, but the creature is vulnerable, his intelligence encompassing. There is the need for words, later on, after things have happened, after the going-along with the ride, after the vulnerability. There is shyness, but at the bottom of it all, an incredibly sane man, and one who knows craziness, who makes a pattern of overcoming it.
(That he had phlebitis might suggest he had Type O blood.)
You can't blame a writer for wanting to eat. A restaurant offers a home-cooked meal. But with the job came adrenaline, and people, and with all that the need for calm. The drink is social, a part of conversation. And once you've had the first sip, then you're along for the ride.
And so the writer needs calm, the time alone to write down what he's been through out in society. Working at the bar was a way of finding a niche in society, a way of belonging, a source of decent company and friends. But you need a retreat, away from the invites, away from the dealings. Exercise, a jog, a walk, a bike ride. And of course, writing.
An elderly couple--they've long been coming to the restaurant; he's not able to climb the stairs anymore for the usual Sunday night 8 PM reservation--invite me over for dinner. Of course there's going to be drinking. The relationship is built on a mutual enjoyment of French wine, in particular, the Pinot Noir of Burgundy. A bottle of sparkling California Mumm, and then, a very rare wine open on the table, which turns out to be a Clos de Vougeot Grand Cru, Nicolas Potel, 2005.
Good conversation, talk of dark matter and the Big Bang. Talk of visiting with the Chevalier du Tastevin in 1965 while working with a French company sub-contracting a a cyclotron. A talk of colleagues from her work at NIH, and cancer. After desert, a fruit tart from a good patisserie, a ride home.
And I take a nap on the couch afterward, and then I'm awake, and I open up a Kermit Lynch Beaujolais and watch Lincoln, staying up way too late. As if the whole thing had thrown me off. The chain reaction going into the next day, and then the next night needing also to have some wine, to settle that which had been enjoyed before.
It's the vulnerability, the problem of being too kind almost. In a world in which you can't necessarily be like that. Is that where art comes from? The feminine aspect, in your own hands? The problem of being as if blown around by the wind... Embarrassing.
It is indeed like the Conrad short story, that you are a writer mainly because you really do not understand society, that you blindly follow it, really never knowing what to make of it beyond the most basic things of it. And therefore whatever you may choose to write about is happenstance, random details, and it's a great bit of luck if capturing those catches the larger realities beyond them. Kind of like a Fellini movie.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
It could well be true that no one in a situation of material comfort can write well. Conventional contentedness and writing are mutually exclusive. What have I to do with you, Satan, nothing, away.
Viewed from the long lens of future generations, the religions, the writings, the art, the cave paintings will all merge, seen as fruits of the same impulse on different branches of the same tree, equal as human expression.
Well, I guess you can't always be apologizing for yourself. Maybe you dodged a bullet. True of many of the women you've dated with curiosity and attraction. You want to learn something. Affection, certainly.
But it's a larger issue, one of not blaming yourself, I guess. Free yourself up. Life's confusing enough for some of us. Don't be down on you. Guess what, we all make mistakes. Even the best of us. And if we do nothing but dwell on those mistakes, which cometh, these offenses, I'm afraid we don't get anywhere, do we.
I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do back then. I wanted to be a writer. I felt I had to focus on it. I've never known the meaning of that effort, nor do I understand all the self-reflections or whatever it is that I tend to write, embarrassing and as pointless as they may be, but for some vague psychological purpose. I got piles of notebooks, many writings I know not what to do with.
Pull them apart and put them in different categories. Like goes with like, as in house-keeping. You don't put kitchen stuff in the living room. Take what you have, and then sort it out. Throw old stuff away.
Writing for me is a facet of my blood type. The old blood, type O. A way of sorting out the distant DNA memory of life before agriculture and property and ego. Before all the terms were placed on things, specialization. The body doesn't label. Thus its protean sexuality, its friendships.
When all the terms came, all the societal rules, all the uptightness, then the cooperative grew distant.
The modern world is thus profoundly confusing to some of us. Can't we admit this? We don't know what to do about a lot of things but innocently go along for the ride. Wine, for instance, profoundly confusing, good and bad. Like facing a transexual. Huh? What?
Maybe there's some of that in Conrad's short story about washing up on some shore of completely foreign tongue.
And all through that, you are still you. You still have your basic tastes, you understand the things that agree with you, that don't give you gas. It's not what goes in you that corrupts, it's what comes out of you. It's not a matter of being intentionally clueless. You're just made that way. Gullible, I suppose, until you know better.
Is attraction a sin? Is self-knowledge?
For an O, yes, it's all about cooperation. A kind of automatic pitching in, playing your role. You don't mess with people, you just get fired up, full of adrenaline. That's just how you see things. Maybe to another you're absolutely blind, you don't get it, don't understand the cultural cues... Particularly when you're fed a foreign substance...
Viewed from the long lens of future generations, the religions, the writings, the art, the cave paintings will all merge, seen as fruits of the same impulse on different branches of the same tree, equal as human expression.
Well, I guess you can't always be apologizing for yourself. Maybe you dodged a bullet. True of many of the women you've dated with curiosity and attraction. You want to learn something. Affection, certainly.
But it's a larger issue, one of not blaming yourself, I guess. Free yourself up. Life's confusing enough for some of us. Don't be down on you. Guess what, we all make mistakes. Even the best of us. And if we do nothing but dwell on those mistakes, which cometh, these offenses, I'm afraid we don't get anywhere, do we.
I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do back then. I wanted to be a writer. I felt I had to focus on it. I've never known the meaning of that effort, nor do I understand all the self-reflections or whatever it is that I tend to write, embarrassing and as pointless as they may be, but for some vague psychological purpose. I got piles of notebooks, many writings I know not what to do with.
Pull them apart and put them in different categories. Like goes with like, as in house-keeping. You don't put kitchen stuff in the living room. Take what you have, and then sort it out. Throw old stuff away.
Writing for me is a facet of my blood type. The old blood, type O. A way of sorting out the distant DNA memory of life before agriculture and property and ego. Before all the terms were placed on things, specialization. The body doesn't label. Thus its protean sexuality, its friendships.
When all the terms came, all the societal rules, all the uptightness, then the cooperative grew distant.
The modern world is thus profoundly confusing to some of us. Can't we admit this? We don't know what to do about a lot of things but innocently go along for the ride. Wine, for instance, profoundly confusing, good and bad. Like facing a transexual. Huh? What?
Maybe there's some of that in Conrad's short story about washing up on some shore of completely foreign tongue.
And all through that, you are still you. You still have your basic tastes, you understand the things that agree with you, that don't give you gas. It's not what goes in you that corrupts, it's what comes out of you. It's not a matter of being intentionally clueless. You're just made that way. Gullible, I suppose, until you know better.
Is attraction a sin? Is self-knowledge?
For an O, yes, it's all about cooperation. A kind of automatic pitching in, playing your role. You don't mess with people, you just get fired up, full of adrenaline. That's just how you see things. Maybe to another you're absolutely blind, you don't get it, don't understand the cultural cues... Particularly when you're fed a foreign substance...
But who would want to wake up and want to write, but for something cathartic about it, to come to psychological peaceful terms with the things that gnawed at you in the night. What sort of excuses could you come up with to explain your behavior? Why were you such a jerk to that girl? How, in what terms, could you possible apologize?
There is something rotten in Denmark, which is the stiffness of it, the lifelessness. Hamlet is dimly remembering a distant past of humanity, before possessions and property, before such heavy terms and titles were placed over everything. Yes, the court is quite an organization, but it's all based on show, and if not show, aggression. Puppets. Hamlet is very much a Christian figure. Render unto Caesar that which is appropriate to him, usurper of real humanity.
You write to try to figure something out. Why were you so removed from yourself, from your own interests? Why could you not save yourself and create a relationship with the one you wanted?
Who wants to think of such things, or write about them? Society bores you. Great. So you write a play depicting what you sense and see, after a long career as a playwright. You don't really want to participate in society somehow. You like the players, people on the fringe, taverns, the communal spirit of the theater. The play is the thing, to catch the conscience of the king indeed. Of all the institutions. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A blip of cosmic dust over soon enough, passing on. All the acts, pretending something.
Not the happiest stuff to think about. There is love and friendship. But the fear is of turning into another institution.
But we are all so vulnerable. Men in particular. They can easily fall apart. They can be left turning to art and music, as if their lives depended on it. Unable to find happiness anywhere else, but by drilling into artistic bedrock, chipping away at a block of marble with some vague sense of form.
I want to forget about her. I also want to be forgiven, I suppose, understood. A bit of redemption.
Because I don't know what I'm doing with my life. And she would have been a reason to live and have a life and a job, and a place to come home to, so that then you could know what to do with a day. Without that you really don't know what you're doing. Not the slightest sense in your consciousness of what you're supposed to be doing, but for a flash now and then, a kind of empathetic understanding of the creature, or maybe a wish to be an anthropologist, or move to New York and be a musician with whatever meager talents...
Drilling on through unyielding bedrock, and almost wishing you had a place to go like the bar, or a great hike somewhere.
The great unseen almost obscene vulnerability of a human being, male or female, an honest relationship based on a balance, on the improbable meeting of two lonely minds with a sense of trying to do something.
I use my memory of her as a jumping off point, mysterious ground to launch a new understanding of the creature and the society he keeps. I would have nothing without that, probably, though, no, that's not true because of my own family. The more you love someone the more vulnerable you are, and maybe the more vulnerable you are the more you act like you're a tough guy like Bogart's Rick.
Who is real, in the end, but someone like Jesus, who, in a way, has nothing to do, nothing to do as far as a job or a place in society, no home, just the deep wise thoughts that come, a lonely figure, who asks now and then if anyone gets it. As if part of what he was saying was that he didn't want to talk about such things either, just live a normal life; but as a sort of psychologist or psychic medicine person who knows the pain we all go through, he's obliged to prepare the herbs of reality. For which drugs serve only as a natural metaphor, a meme, a word for, a kind of model, not the least for revealing that things are not as they appear to be (nor are they otherwise.) Sex, writing, highs, walks in nature, listening to a friend's music, eating thy daily bread, they are all of the same inner peace. The things we crave, as we ourselves crave being like Jesus and Buddha.
That's where Shakespeare is, at least in Hamlet, with his 'foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.' Or Ahab in Melville, 'strike through the mask.' A glimpse of what else might be, or is that too, madness? Enough to make you want to jump up and run off into the woods. And a thing you must hide, really, when walking down the street.
You do want love, a relationship, but there's not a damn thing conventional about a real one, anymore than mortal minds could have thought up sex and its beautiful instruments but of course through some poetic ideal picture, in which case we do create sexual love whatever it means, a tantric one you would gather... An intuitive understanding that needed no words, a picture of the highest things possible.
Of course you feel lost without your father. Of course you do. Hamlet. Jesus speaking of his own source of wisdom, which does not come from himself, but through him from the father.
I guess you have to ask people to not think of you conventionally, that you, nor really anyone, is cut out for the conventional. How do you explain that?
You would probably need disciples in such a situation, disciples, and wine, to keep you from going mad..
There is something rotten in Denmark, which is the stiffness of it, the lifelessness. Hamlet is dimly remembering a distant past of humanity, before possessions and property, before such heavy terms and titles were placed over everything. Yes, the court is quite an organization, but it's all based on show, and if not show, aggression. Puppets. Hamlet is very much a Christian figure. Render unto Caesar that which is appropriate to him, usurper of real humanity.
You write to try to figure something out. Why were you so removed from yourself, from your own interests? Why could you not save yourself and create a relationship with the one you wanted?
Who wants to think of such things, or write about them? Society bores you. Great. So you write a play depicting what you sense and see, after a long career as a playwright. You don't really want to participate in society somehow. You like the players, people on the fringe, taverns, the communal spirit of the theater. The play is the thing, to catch the conscience of the king indeed. Of all the institutions. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A blip of cosmic dust over soon enough, passing on. All the acts, pretending something.
Not the happiest stuff to think about. There is love and friendship. But the fear is of turning into another institution.
But we are all so vulnerable. Men in particular. They can easily fall apart. They can be left turning to art and music, as if their lives depended on it. Unable to find happiness anywhere else, but by drilling into artistic bedrock, chipping away at a block of marble with some vague sense of form.
I want to forget about her. I also want to be forgiven, I suppose, understood. A bit of redemption.
Because I don't know what I'm doing with my life. And she would have been a reason to live and have a life and a job, and a place to come home to, so that then you could know what to do with a day. Without that you really don't know what you're doing. Not the slightest sense in your consciousness of what you're supposed to be doing, but for a flash now and then, a kind of empathetic understanding of the creature, or maybe a wish to be an anthropologist, or move to New York and be a musician with whatever meager talents...
Drilling on through unyielding bedrock, and almost wishing you had a place to go like the bar, or a great hike somewhere.
The great unseen almost obscene vulnerability of a human being, male or female, an honest relationship based on a balance, on the improbable meeting of two lonely minds with a sense of trying to do something.
I use my memory of her as a jumping off point, mysterious ground to launch a new understanding of the creature and the society he keeps. I would have nothing without that, probably, though, no, that's not true because of my own family. The more you love someone the more vulnerable you are, and maybe the more vulnerable you are the more you act like you're a tough guy like Bogart's Rick.
Who is real, in the end, but someone like Jesus, who, in a way, has nothing to do, nothing to do as far as a job or a place in society, no home, just the deep wise thoughts that come, a lonely figure, who asks now and then if anyone gets it. As if part of what he was saying was that he didn't want to talk about such things either, just live a normal life; but as a sort of psychologist or psychic medicine person who knows the pain we all go through, he's obliged to prepare the herbs of reality. For which drugs serve only as a natural metaphor, a meme, a word for, a kind of model, not the least for revealing that things are not as they appear to be (nor are they otherwise.) Sex, writing, highs, walks in nature, listening to a friend's music, eating thy daily bread, they are all of the same inner peace. The things we crave, as we ourselves crave being like Jesus and Buddha.
That's where Shakespeare is, at least in Hamlet, with his 'foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.' Or Ahab in Melville, 'strike through the mask.' A glimpse of what else might be, or is that too, madness? Enough to make you want to jump up and run off into the woods. And a thing you must hide, really, when walking down the street.
You do want love, a relationship, but there's not a damn thing conventional about a real one, anymore than mortal minds could have thought up sex and its beautiful instruments but of course through some poetic ideal picture, in which case we do create sexual love whatever it means, a tantric one you would gather... An intuitive understanding that needed no words, a picture of the highest things possible.
Of course you feel lost without your father. Of course you do. Hamlet. Jesus speaking of his own source of wisdom, which does not come from himself, but through him from the father.
I guess you have to ask people to not think of you conventionally, that you, nor really anyone, is cut out for the conventional. How do you explain that?
You would probably need disciples in such a situation, disciples, and wine, to keep you from going mad..
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
He'd been to visit the weekend before.
I'd worked my week, had a long night at the end of Wednesday shift, staying out with pot smokers, biking home late.
Getting up late on Thursday, had set up a date with a lady of Gautamalan nobility, when I got a call, your father's gone to the hospital.
And I callous, sort of said, as I picked up pho and a bottle of wine, the floors and the paint and the bathroom finally having been done, inviting the lady by, oh, he'll be alright. I walked past the statue of Marek standing tall and nobly, there were buds on the trees.
That morning around eleven we slept together again and then I got serious about calling St. Luke's.
Tonight, busy, the wine tasting night for the guy who's gone away. Talk and talk. I'm busy, the waiter must go, forgetting he was to go out to dinner with his gal, not his fault he works two jobs.
My love of my old man showed to her, that girl in college, the princess, for he was a guy beyond compare, in all ways.
And yet I'd fucked it up when he came to visit, first one weekend I was trying to get my thesis together, professionally, then off to Maine, and then the next, Parent's Weekend. Her parents must have come. She brought me a James Dean poster, because I'd earned it, but I did not put it all together, and so I let everyone down.
I spoke to him around twelve, the nurse put me on. His color had been good before, and the doctor's report from his own was good around 11 the night before. I feel awful, he said, in his own voice. And then he said something like he had to go, and I said bye, as the other line of my cell phone began to beep, after he'd said, bye.
Compassion, yes, that would be a thing I'd write about.
Two nights the fuck-up managed, to stay out of the wine. And then he was reminded, it was, after the shellfish tower, the shared steak, burger and rueben late after the shift at Old Ebbitt, it was the 'french toast' shot the barman offered up at the end, as a gesture, that made one feel like hell. Part of it was forgetting to be leery about trusting going out so late, after a shift, when he should just go home, but for the pathetic social life and the kind offer of an elder always good soulful company and the man in need of company before some serious tests up at Hopkins... Yes, gallant co-worker reminded him of the parting shot, the free one, the one that made him feel like shit, sweating under his blankets as he waited for the alarm clock call at 2 PM...
Sunday night, not so bad, passed. Monday night jazz, almost enough to tweak one back into it, but again, refrained from, the first sip, the first glass, the oh well but you need a glass with your solitary plate of food at the end... And then a hectic Tuesday, a stiff back from pulling out of the headstand in an awkward way, the complexity of free wine tasting and bottle discount night celebrating the return of a good man from his travels in South America... The sip from an opened Vacqueyras with the liver provencal as the last ladies from the continent left. No more than that, but when he got his flesh home on the bicycle, there was an open bottle of Pinot Noir from Friday night ticking its time away in the fridge. He needed to relax. The PBS show about cancer interesting enough. The bathwater poured with epsom salts, a Virgin of Guadalupe candle set on the bathroom radiator, and the wine tasted good.
Two nights the fuck-up managed, to stay out of the wine. And then he was reminded, it was, after the shellfish tower, the shared steak, burger and rueben late after the shift at Old Ebbitt, it was the 'french toast' shot the barman offered up at the end, as a gesture, that made one feel like hell. Part of it was forgetting to be leery about trusting going out so late, after a shift, when he should just go home, but for the pathetic social life and the kind offer of an elder always good soulful company and the man in need of company before some serious tests up at Hopkins... Yes, gallant co-worker reminded him of the parting shot, the free one, the one that made him feel like shit, sweating under his blankets as he waited for the alarm clock call at 2 PM...
Sunday night, not so bad, passed. Monday night jazz, almost enough to tweak one back into it, but again, refrained from, the first sip, the first glass, the oh well but you need a glass with your solitary plate of food at the end... And then a hectic Tuesday, a stiff back from pulling out of the headstand in an awkward way, the complexity of free wine tasting and bottle discount night celebrating the return of a good man from his travels in South America... The sip from an opened Vacqueyras with the liver provencal as the last ladies from the continent left. No more than that, but when he got his flesh home on the bicycle, there was an open bottle of Pinot Noir from Friday night ticking its time away in the fridge. He needed to relax. The PBS show about cancer interesting enough. The bathwater poured with epsom salts, a Virgin of Guadalupe candle set on the bathroom radiator, and the wine tasted good.
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