Speaking creatively, seems to me, the idea of being a great writer, a writer "better" than another, is a fallacy.  First of all, such a judgment can only be subjective, a matter of taste.  More importantly, a writer can only write by being honest with himself.

Does the morning start reasonably?  How did the making of the dragon well green tea go?  Did you put in a spoonful of ground flax seed?  Did you brew at the same time hot water with muddled citrus, turmeric fresh and turmeric ground, a touch of astragalus, a tiny pinch of salt?  Has your mother called already, when you were awake but the body was unwilling to get up, when you wanted to first wake up some, and even get the first few lines of thoughts down on paper?  What are the days appointments?

The bar job waits for later, somewhat ominously, but you deal with the awkward waiting.  A therapist session at 3 pm.  Do you really want to pick up tomorrow night's shift from the kid who wants you to cover it?  You'll see him tonight at work, after your break of eight days.  In a way you feel too old for it.  It's not like you're sitting behind the bar reading the newspaper;  you're moving constantly, from start to finish.  All too easy not to eat enough, to get dehydrated, to bonk as they do if they are not careful in a long bike race...

How will I get my body downtown to 19th St. NW and L Street.  Showers are possible.  Will I have an inclination to do a few yoga stretches before I eat a bit of breakfast.


The things of the writer are the things of journalism.  That is what they/we do.  As a college boy I came up with a wish to explore seeing Ernest Hemingway in this light, a kind of abandonment to the textural textual truths and realities of life that he enables the presence of a narrative, of a new form of connecting the odds and ends and the happenings of life.  Of course no one paid any attention to it at the institution, and nor did I care much about that academic slight.

The writer must go deeper into reality then it is normally perceived, as we piece through the information that might be presented to us as being important.  And to do this, I suppose, we must go through phases.  Say for a period we take one tack upon it, soaking up all we can, putting this into particular terms.  Sometimes, metaphorically, it is through Christianity.  But other times it might be through Buddhism, or Zen, or a Hindu tradition.  Sometimes it is through Milan Kundera, Kurt Vonnegut, Yeats, Eliot.

But you are there at the feeding.  The feeding point of the mind, even as you go through the things of the laundry and the dishes, the unpacking from trips, the assessments of the bookshelves and the piles on the desk, with NPR and ETWN on in the background.

Hemingway was an artist, always working on his cubist viewpoint of summoning reality through a Cezanne-like painting, like a sketch, the old house in the dusty scrubland distance of Provence, creating prose with a similar effect, less is more, the light is right, you can sense the weather and the landscape.  Included in his cubism, of course, the things he ate and drank, the conversations of artists at the cafés.  Did he know the effect?  Did he plan it, or rather did he learn a way to convey much through a seemingly sparse little sketch.  Bringing to us the boys in the apple orchard up north, then them talking by the fire, pretending they are drinkers, considering Chesterton's works, gives us things we get intuitively;  and the light captured in one little story (of the In Our Time collection, his early prose) will reflect off that of another.

In our journals, and even to honor the thoughts therein, we must accept we go through phases, as if waving different flags, say, metaphorically, that of the Civil War, or that of the Polish Underground of the Second World War, of the Irish rebel.  We have to honor the skipping around as itself a form of the mind's natural cubist perspective-gatherer.  We have to honor when we lose the trail, or no longer find the inspiration, or look back on pieces we've wrote, long ones we were once quite dedicated to even, with embarrassment.  We must sweep the old aside sometimes, to look at the new.


Of course, a writer can be recognized for dogged determination, for accomplishments of an energetic sort, for endurance, for preserving through political conditions and life's circumstances, for taking forward, like Conrad, like Dostoevsky, like Chekhov, like Melville, like Kerouac, the nobility of the human spirit and mind in the face of difficulties and hardship, as in all who believe in literature and in literature as a common property, available to all.  And the tale of a survivor, who truly is abandoned to the circumstances of life, might be simple, very simple, almost rudimentary, even almost childish.  The focus on the task, viewed as a personal history, remarkable...  The transformative power of writing, of working on a piece...

How could there be literature without such things, as struggles, etc.  It would take, there would have to be, some form of enormous stupidity, almost, a great misreading, or some vestige of an old national character, Polish stubbornness, Irish contrarian spirit....  some form of not really being able to belong so much to the computerized world, to Homo Sovieticos, the productive robot, the person shaped by the labors of the Industrial Age and the politics of big oil.


How will time work out?  How possibly will things work out?  Will I have time to do yoga and then make scrambled eggs before I must go march down there, having left my bike back in the basement of the restaurant....  How will I escape my being a loser of a certain age, having passed on all the opportunities to do "things."

Writing attests to the condition that it is up to you, that sometimes only you will see the things inside yourself, the good things, the positive things, the potential.  And for some of us, the only way to find that is through writing, writing more than the other things.

Sometimes you write;  sometimes you pray.  And sometimes they become the same.

I actually said this long ago.  Writing is praying, treating the later works of Hemingway.  It seemed too mystical at the time, therefore unscholarly, or not what DeMott wanted, even.