In dreams you are fighting the current.  Or, at least, you are in the current.  The current is pulling at you, and you have to go along with it, perhaps without judging whether this situation of being in such a current is a good thing or a bad thing.  The current is vague in the dreams, but ever present.  The situation of being in the current prompts dreams to appear.  The dreams are the best we have as a means of understanding the current that pulls on us.  Strange.  Thoughts we hold to us are stripped off in the circumstances of the river.  We had them, and then they are floating away.

Later we pull ourselves up on the bank, still wet with sleep.  Thinking awhile we remember little bits of those thoughts, of how the mind within the brain within the skull became like an atomic structure, with the electrons swirling around, sometimes lazily in rings as in the classic diagram of the atom, sometimes firing about unpredictably as in the model of the uncertain principle, sometimes outlining cat-scan type slice-throughs.  In building our little models of understanding reality we only have ourselves as a mirror, as a frame of reference, and each scientific theory holds within a poem about our own nature.  As we fell toward sleep, warmth, relaxation, the self-observations that allow the distance that then allows sleep to happen as it wells up from the warm body.


Kundera writes of his father dying.  (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, is it?)  His old man, who speaks no more, who was a musical conductor, is sweating every night, under an effort, the effort of riding on horseback, having to go far far away.  Every night he will make this journey, in his sleep, on his way toward dying.

Who knows where writing comes from.


Then the business became serious and far-reaching.  It became interesting.  It began to, sort of, hold together, to connect all things.

When you are young you feel you have time, and so you write things which aren't so serious, with only flashes of seriousness here and there.  But then, slowly, surely, you get older, and then more and more you reach the point of understanding of having less time, less time to work with, to play with.  And then you start becoming more serious.  You could turn down then the other uses of time...  You have to remain focussed and vigilant at all necessary times, and for this purpose you can seek entertainment on your own, as it comes to you in your atelier, your laboratory, your study, your conservatory, your recording studio, your news room.  Rich is life around you, a garden for thought.

Even in the most serious, there is humor, room for fun.  For sorts of things like song and dance.  Because you are at work, and the things of work consist of getting the job done, from start to finish.  Later, at night, toward the end, you bring out your own guitar, and the musician picks it up and marvels at it for being a good guitar.  He plays it some, a Buck Owens song, A 11, and then you get to play it a bit, and he likes your ringing style.  Cool.  Sacred.  Fun.  And you earned it, too.


To become a writer is to enter into one's own self-appointed monastery.  There is always work to do, always cause for silence and reflection, for music, prayer.  Even wine, and the daily bread, is work too, for the soul, to understand.  Joy is work, as well, as much as the hardness of confused toil of limited fruitfulness.

It is one's own choice, how productive he shall be, a matter of realizing the power of devotion.

By the time you get it, you're almost an old man.  Your father has passed away.  Your mum is old.  You are going through your final growth spurt, out of some dignified joke from the pineal gland.  Finally filling out.  And it was a tiring growth spurt, full of sleep, and hormones, profound hunger, and life always leaving you a bit short, such that it was hard to feel you were on your feet.

And why did you not take up a career in music, so long ago, when you were fresh and young, and able to play with jazz men and rock and all kinds of music...  What got you down?  Who told you you shouldn't put that music first...  that way you expressed yourself...  And why now, should a man middle aged look back so...