In Washington...

A writer who lives in Washington has an interesting life. He will not get very much respect, unless he is a Woodward. The creative writer finds himself out of the loop. By the habits of the town, everything he writes will have a twinge of the rude, the inappropriate, to it. An admission, or a creative consideration of a personal situation, a telling of how something might feel, will be, by the rules of the herd, be taken as evidence damaging to a career, something frowned upon, even if it is the juice that feeds the wagging tongues. A writer must try voices on, more or less publicly if he is to be acknowledged as a professional, and so he runs the risk of sounding like a punk, a distasteful guest. Good writing is often initially embarrassing, as Washington concentrates on what is happening at the moment, before being spun by time into an offering of common sense and wisdom that the public is not the worse for, the easy natural spin of a relaxed, accepting, healthy society.

The unfortunate thing for the Washington resident is that he cannot say anything readable or wise until he has been shepherded along the ways and routes of the fallen, the poor, the meek, the mistaken. It is not popular to be meek here. To the politician, to be so is an act of suicide.

And yet, when he has stumbled upon such ways, had too many cheap thrills that were immediately swallowed by a sense of loss and sadness, he will fall finally into a state of beatitude. He brings forth, from his sins, by his steadfast pondering and writerly habit, fruit. Filled with light, he blooms, a previously unknown kindness shining forth, as a ray of sun touching upon a leaf, extended all the way from its source.

Being a writer is a marvelous occupation. You can take it anywhere. If you live in Washington, you will have dreams of pulling your pants down in public. But you must live there, and it is your duty to say the things as you have found them to be true, if you do.

Admissions of the human nature and the erring of ways accounts for the broadness of Chekhov. As Chekhov knew such failures and transgressions with such an intimacy, admitting them as it were, there is to him an uprightness and an obvious dignity we would expect from a doctor, a good one at that.

This writer gets to bartend. It could be much worse. I get to live in a possibility of further transgressions.

Find me a good writer who hasn't made a lot of mistakes, who hasn't at one point screwed everything up.

Gaining the beatific state, I think it possible that his own human energies become aligned with the great body of electromagnetic energy, the light, which moves at speed, that is the flow we all tap into, a part of, to do our thing. Matter, remember, is conserved by the system; what is sin in one state is virtue in the next. This to me is the hidden meaning, the basic sense we find in a good story, that gaining of sympathetic light energy, so that we are not going against the flow, but with it. Maybe it takes reaching a state considered idiotic by societal functions. From it comes the fruit, for all to take joy in.