The weather here was warm for a couple of days, into the seventies, the first one sunny.  Today will be in the fifties and raining steadily by the time I get myself ready for work.  Mom is feeling better, taking her antibiotics.  She is sounding better, and has enough energy to consider going out to Bame's to get some wine and to the Big M.  I hope she can find some bone stock, as even the carton-kind seems to help.

Writers are independent kind of people.  They do not like being told what to do.  Lawless peoples, like the Irish, make for good ones, stubborn enough, independent, fixed upon the passion of an idea and the meanings of it.  They understand how their craft, their process works.  Turning on the television, even that, even the Weather Channel, even the seemingly minor is an imposition upon the free mind, blocking the thoughts to gather enough to be rendered out of the inner silence.

I see my mother this way now, her wild spirit, her independence, her impatience, her feistiness, the fact that she does not travel well, is too nervous to be driven on highways, her inabilities to stay focussed in a grocery store for an extended period of time...  all of this, put together, points to a certain kind of spirit that enabled, that pushed her, to be an excellent writer of an excellent book, that which came out of her Ph.D thesis, Reading and Writing Ourselves Into Being.

Writing still, even in this day and age, the modern time, the coming of the Holocene, is an organic process, the inspirations for which cannot be reduced into commercial viability and the profit motive or anything else so logical, so bound to rule.  Even my father, a great scientist, yielded to the fact that that there is no ultimate non-creative explanation of the creature, and considered that there has to be poetry to the human understanding of the world and its phenomena.  Genies, he used to say, you might was well say it is all genies at work when your science entered microbiology and the world of things atomic and conceptual things like DNA.  What did Goethe ask, something like is chemistry physics, or is physics chemistry (I don't have it right.)  Ponder that.  Is biology a matter of physics, or is physics a matter of biology...

By miracles of nature, by miracles of the peculiar circumstances that arise when human personalities and realities get together, my mother, holy, a writer, arose, just so.  And the tale of her experience is an interesting one, a story of the human spirit, of redemption and all such good things like that, the outsider who came out and shined.  Lovely.  And you cannot tell her what to do, and that remains, a healthy thing.

By the same math, the same opposition and rubs of the human character and personality, of offending things and relationships agreeable and sometimes now, so did my form come into some form of wise being.  

The human being lies, wittingly or not, at the center of all the art forms and forms of spiritual life and forms of social life.  It is hard for him or her to naturally distinguish between them, to not view the wide field of human talents for such a myriad of ventures as a totality.  Inspiration is what matters, the good feeling, the feeling of participating in creativity, culinary, visual, musical, worded, athletic, tribal, political, choreographed, cave-painted, rune-ed, conversational, personal, private, public, communal.  This is why it must be nice to live in New York City, but also why it is nice to find a community organically, a collection of specimens as one might come across by a river bank or a stream with its bed, the agreement of nature that allows trees to share and balance in the light, as if dancing in slow form beyond human observation.

And in this comedy of us trying to feed, cloth, and take care of ourselves, where it is the taste of some to take their own work as of greater monetary value to society out of some urge not quite democratic, approving less of those who take it upon themselves to display the natural homegrown down-to-earth generosity of deep spirit, who are willing to create what they will create by, basically, their own rules, does indeed yield beauty worth telling about, and things useful to us.


Such is life that the stakes are always raised.  (The cradle of humanity has escalated into modern-day Syria, etc., etc.)  The rule-makers impose.  And the artist, naturally, will rebel from rules.  There are even some who apply art to rules, seeking justice, equality and words befitting our condition.  The artist has his own sort of science, the acknowledgment of structure, rules, applicability, pattern, natural organism.  No scoff-law he, but one in search of the ultimate peace that brings life together.

After all the crazy years, with the understandings that hydration and electrolytes, proper rest and nutrition, can bring, I saw my job as rather perfect and praiseworthy, and I understood with some appreciations as to my unexpected bravery toward it, how I never shied away from it, but went and took it, knowing somewhere down deep inside, that I was doing the right thing.  And I could only hope for the help and the will, the good health and endurance to keep on at it.

I am not one who will ever pooh-pooh the magic of writing.  I am not one to turn away from the incredible plasticity of the ever-changing mind.  The river of it constantly brings down new things within it, upon its currents, and who are we to turn away...

I find some happiness in all this.  I find within myself a contentment, a happiness I never would have expected, and had not remembered really having since I was a kid.  Those who wanted me to follow their rules, well, I just couldn't do that very well.  And the artist does not like that imposition, much as one might have wished for different outcomes here and there...  Could I have put my stubborn quality aside?  I might have wished to, but particularly when you are a student, learning, exploring, it doesn't seem to work that way.  And so, to be effective, you humbly take up your arts, and you endeavor to in some way put them out on display, even as they make little sense at the time, beyond deep down.


The Robin Said

Is it what we fight against
that defines us just as much,
as the things we like to remember and 
hold dear and think about,
things maybe you would not necessarily
bring yourself to understand.
Your blood is defined by the city, Mongol, cheekboned,
and mine is by the countryside, Irish,
of mistakes you would never bring
yourself to have made.
Constraint is not the country boy's thing.
The excesses of nature are his to taste,
yielding prairie goodness,
the medicinals we knew and used long ago,
before the the forest was cut and paved.
You have your rules, and your own forms of art,
and dreams, and I shall not trespass
nor impose.
This beautiful love for life
and happiness so sweet
can hardly be borne, but that it must,
it is me, who I am.