But in writing a man must first distract himself, and then focus on that distraction.
By doing so, then allowing himself a moment of creative flow.
One must ride the distraction, or else the whole thing might sink.
This is another reason why it is good to branch out into many talents, skills, languages, hobbies... The help keep something at bay. The shell of having many distractions, work of a benevolent non-irritating sort, by engaging one part of the brain, letting the wheels spin.
I find the Seven Samurai works for me.
Or feeding the cat. Or the dreariness of doing the dishes, keeping the drain free when first rinsing off the cat's dishes before putting them into the tub of hot soapy along with the glasses, the silverware, the dinner plate, the pot and pan.
You have to get in the right spot. And thus I understand how Hemingway worked, doing the absolute best he could to distract himself, with violent hunting, fishing, war, bullfighting. And of course, drinking, and of course, cafes, bars, dining places. Such thick and horrible and gut wrenching distractions that he was then, in a sense, allowed, free, ready to create. It couldn't happen before that. He was wired that way, I guess, though I don't know, and of course this is all a guess, as everything a writer writes is a guess.
Shimada Kambei, the head ronin here, played by Takashi Shimura, finds each of the samurai, and some have particular kinds of sins, strengths, flaws, weaknesses...There's the drunk one, we all know that, Mifune, playing "Lord" Kikuchiyo, and I find it just enough, unless I have to deal with the emotional issues with mom here. The sets are beautiful. Wood, the old fashioned way, incorporated into stables and strange large shacks. Streams. Nature’s soothing.
Regular life doesn't do it, apparently. Not for a writer, folks. Thus the extremes. The apparent extremes. Thomas Merton being one of them. Maybe Vonnegut, even, having been given the Battle of the Bulge.
Kerouac liked jazz and a certain kind of crowd. They distracted him enough so that he could come back and write clearly without another single thought in his head, nothing, just the flow of the words before him, typing, as it should be. The drinking, small or large.
I have things to worry about which are quite difficult to distract myself from, as I try to keep that which is within me on-going.
If you can't distract yourself well enough, forget it, forget ever trying to be an artist.
I don't have it in me, and nor do you.
The poor writer must be, almost by definition, irresponsible to the things of the world.
Spiritual distractions can work to. Vonnegut is full of them. Even if it is softly vague laughable pornographic science fiction from the hack writer living far away from reality.
Seven Samurai moments:
Minute 22:23, an early part of the film--shot in black and white--in which the principal samurai has his head shaved and takes the monk's ragged robes on to save a child from a bandit kidnapper, look at that stream that flows along by the village walls.
Just after that, a departing scene, the road, at minute 25:16, the initiate samurai walking to the sky and the great mountain in the distance like clouds, following the now shaven head samurai, ronin number one.
"I'm at a loss... There's nothing special about me... I may have seen my share of battle, but always on the losing side... That about sums me up.... Better not to follow such an unlucky man." And then he plainly tells the kid, “I don't have the means to travel with an attendant."
Minute 50. "We let a good fish get away. An excellent swordsman... A man obsessed only with testing the limits of his skill. I doubt he'll join us."
Minute 51:44. The samurai have gathered, a discussion that turns whether to bring the bright youth along for the battle. The head one in profile. "I was once your age, you know. Hone your skills, then go to war and do great things. Then become lord of your castle and domain. But as you dream your dreams, before you know it, your hair will turn as gray as mine. By that time you've lost your parents and you're all alone." The swordsman arrives out of the darkness.
And even to ride that thin line of distraction. As I sit in the kitchen of mom's apartment with the light over the oven and the one over the sink on, the rest of the lights dark.
Thus do great art works lead on, to feed, in the stream, the next great art, quite beyond you or me.
And must it not come out of desperate and unbearable circumstances that of course one is somehow able to bear, thanks to this gulp, this whale's rising breath of fresh air from the top of the head down in, then back down into the waves again, the ocean itself.
But then at a certain point it is more and more difficult to achieve any real kind of distraction. Even you yourself see through them. And you wish you had not taken life so seriously earlier, that you had every sense of humor but that of looking out for yourself. That's the death knell. If you could no longer achieve distraction.
If you were not captivated by distractions you would have to look at yourself honestly. You would then see the continual dishonesty that is a crucial part of alcohol disorder.
So where to begin, on a cold rainy day...
The glaring lack of intimacy the old barman has gotten stuck in? Some sort of past social trauma, if so from where and when? A great lack of life’s natural painkillers, a woman’s hand...
And now, here I am. Caught. Trapped. The repetitive pattern of waking hungover, tired, in pain, then to be constantly reminded of the desperate situation I find myself in... the opinionated headstrong senile mother on top of that, she being terrifying enough on her own to rattle me, if not by act than by habit and experience, the nightly sundown misery of talking her down off the ledge of confusions, "but my home is over there, you're not listening to me... a little kindness now would help..."
I get up late again, feeling like hell. Sharon has come to drop off part of a cake. I hear her speaking with mom in gentle tones from my spot upstairs. There's a rent check to write, taxes to do, we spent thirteen hundred plus on the old Toyota, but she needed it, and now she rides like a gem above her rusty fenders and rolling wheels and now purring motor, a misfiring cylinder, new spark plugs and a related wire, a ball bearing for the back breaks, new brakes in front, so now the emergency brake will hold solid now.
It's pouring out. But we have the car back, and that is a huge relief, a small victory after days of considerable pain, six days full. I take mom for a ride, we'll go get the newspaper, and a few odds & ends at the Big M.
I'm struggling. The box wine from Portugal again I've been treating as medicine for all this. There is a black Labrador dog on the box. It leaves me feeling worse than I might otherwise need to be. But after driving down by the water, the lake disappearing into the mist and even the great smokestacks of the power plant swallowed whole by the gods of the mist & fog of the grey lake and the low sky's coming in, after the supermarket, mom already with her newspaper from the Stewart Shop, there is the wine shop liquor store, and I'm thinking I need a wine of better quality, maybe even organic, and they have a Les Hauts de Lagarde 2019 Bordeaux, which sets one back about $15, but there is a lot to be said for a wine that doesn't kill you with tricks and artificially added yeasts after the natural ones already there are killed off by sulfites.
After the car stress and getting mom down, this is before, I went out for a six of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, but something didn't sit well as I watched the Kurosawa. He went through a depressive state too, at some point, hit a pretty low place.
But now mom has come, and thankfully gone after a Pepsi, here in the present night, as the rain continues to fall for the twelfth hour, it will be very windy tomorrow, and buying the six pack of Pepsi was a whole saga too, down to the Kinney's drug store, with her coming in out of the car as I was about to check out, mom, where's your mask, and the young women at the counter were kind enough to chuckle, though I could barely face them now in my beaten down shame... She pulls a wrinkled blue mask out of a pocket as she stands at the end of the foyer's automatic doors now, somehow manages to put it on after I tell her to go back to the car, which I left running, which of course she won't do... I take her by the lake for the talk she wants, and she wonders what happened to Ted, the most kind-hearted person she ever know, and I say, well... We park beyond Rudy's, and stare out at the lake, deep in the belly of the sky to the west, some form of passing clearing light, but a passing one, like a torch going past you in the darkness.
Torture of a different sort is an odd chance for opportunity, just that God has amped the pains up now considerably, all the old ones, flourishing now across your face, bloated, sweaty, a feeling of residual puke from something there in the background but a stomach quelled.
I've heated up the beef stew for dinner, adding some mushrooms and a touch of yogurt, it will do. Mom as her wine, she's calmed down some, but has been foggy today, not a good one for either of us. She'll tell me it's fine if I go up and take a nap after the errands in the rain, or that she's going up to bed now around 6 in the evening, but then ten minutes later is coming down the stairs and telling me she had a big problem... How are we going to get all my stuff back home, and there's the cat too... Mom, we are home. And then the shouting will come.
I took a good rest after dinner too, leaving the dishes to do, but fell into sad displaced dreams, a wandering life, trying to join younger people at night playing guitars and music outdoors in the summer, but then, looking in my hand, the neck of my good Martin d28 is severed, and then there is another part of the dream trying to catch a Trailways bus like the one I was one when I was coming back from a college reunion and met a nice girl from Utica. She didn't drink. She was lovely, and we sat together, and exchanged letters and wrote each other for a while, but I was back to my miserable life in DC...
Dreams.
But I get up, knowing I won't be able to jump back into the robes of sleep anytime soon, miles to go, churning horses of anxieties over all the pragmatic and practical things and everything that once was good now haunting me, and I'm only fifty six. Which also means unemployable, which also means, perhaps, an incredibly lonely person who has been so cowed in life that there is for him the wine to ease the pain, dishes to do, the whole wet process, so that the wheels might spin. And quiet at least.
I'm not fussy about wine, to tell you the truth. This wine I drink tonight, Les Hauts De Lagarde 2019 "Vin de Bordeaux," Agriculture Biologique, Non GMO, has dark berry fruits, cedar, hot rocks and pine pitch and petrol, other medicinal things, eucalyptus, scuffed shoe leather, a hint of distant damp soot, a Cherry Orchard for the circumstances here, a feverish vision of a swirling black robed monk coming from a distance but walking ten feet above the ground in one's own mind's madness, the stem of a blue red berry patch briar's breath, chocolate, cough syrup drop, stable hooves, straw, damp clean dew from nature's moving winds and natural waters and estuary, an apple with its skin, and all dry over the tongue, right down the middle path, and then ten seconds later arriving at the sides of the back of the tongue as the voices of salivary rise clean, a hint of last autumn's fallen leaves, the mud of a springtime orchard with the blossoms of white just passing into tiny leaves, a whiff of sustaining planet miracle in the middle of an airless elemental chemical universe of physics, the atmospheres that protect us all from naked harm, a dirt path for foot or hoof or tractor wheel puttering, a gravel road, the open excitement, good or bad, of the open paved roads of life and commerce, the protective darkness of the shipping container across the sea, the great sensitivity of the wine to reach all that has touched it, but also its indifference. Bark, with lichens, morel mushroom, the wood of a fallen tree slowly decaying as grass rises, as small creatures gentle it into softerness by stages, open spaces now within for larger but still tiny life to crawl, the ability of teeny tiny things being able to see and sense, a deeper pebble somewhere down in the old gravel river bed earth upon with the roots of an old vine happily deep against the extremities of season rests upon in embrace, yeasts taking up homes upon the surfaces of animals and people and old barns, apple skin travels in the wind, sunlight daylight, the tannic self protecting medications that rise in all such plant life to ward off the intruder, so that God's work in the vineyard will stand til the ripened robust.
How did it all do that. And the pores upon the papillary tastebuds of the coral reef tongue that goeth back to monsters deep finding a new darkness to entertain, a licorice catching off guard, how did that get there too... Let it pour over your tongue like a cool mountain stream trickling down now, wait, what's that... now the bottle's been open six hours or so, more, savored savory, the agreeable bitters quality of all God's roots and medicines are there on a tea spoon fed to you when you were a child and your mom kindly watched over you with love so deep. Another offering, as if from a muck, a marshland of watr'y birds, fowl, the things good for webbed foot and bill below a green edge algal surface just so, like blossoms fallen down upon, above the roots of cattails and twiggy things a turtle might sun upon just so, or a quick frog's leap.
A touch of an old Ancient Greek godly domain wind. Smoke from open fires and stone rings, campaign, wagon wheels. The tree bitterness of virgin olive oil. Grapes eaten orgy style dangled by damsels as you robed recline, tanned, muscular, garland, clad in white with a touch of the blue of the sky.
The perplexed perplexing look of an iridescent royal blue insect, or a dragon fly with long tail, a twist of an insect eyed head, studying something quite beyond you, your vibration, your spectrum wavelengths, which the bug does not really give a shit about except you are seen as such, nothing personal, apart from spiders, who know, and see and are oftentimes friendly, enjoying the things our company allows, dinner.
The faint surfaces of rosemary and mint leaves, fresh grass, morning grass, sunny grass, mowed grass chewed by blades into an itchy richness for the skin of passerby.
Asparagus, hot tobacco leaf drying now, along with the tubal core of things gathered by a greater hand into different forms of existence. Carbon, both animate and inanimate. Ancient seabed chalk packed by pressure's hold into limestone, porous, happy in its new existence. Deeper creepy old fog of prehistoric geologic era Paleozoic Pleistocene and Carboniferous forests of giant ferns and early simple pines and the horseshoe crab trilobite... Old currents with things crawl swimming part rock part creature, a shell, a few rudimentary things, mountains rising from their roots on upward. Old Basque tales that remember, that could shake your bones and gray your hair.
Metals, higher elements born in furnaces of deep progressing stellar life far far beyond, on upward up the periodic table, adding another element, another particle. and snowflakes. The soft sensual earth of, again, pine forests, protected with their resin slow oozing skin bark, the youth of tree giving it it's character while the old sits within just happy to be there carrying up water cell by cell, tube by tube, and yet the outer growth, the bark, the skin, looks like ours, old and blemished now, grooved, tougher now, far less ticklish and pinkly fresh and thin, knobbed now with old bumps and sun exposure. The chimney of an old castle upriver. An early spear hidden nearby from long ago in human time. Copper. Dark volcanic periods, vast time of endless waters, and all of this buried within us, just like it is in the wine. An old feathery pillow that has caught the sweat and sleepy drool and tears and the self lubrication of nasal and other passages, alongside a quilty blanket. The soles of bare feet. Rope. Saddle leather. A stony forest caught between the dampness of night earth and birth of honeysuckle leaves coming along and the bright heat of a morning sun overpow'ring the first heavenly blue that brings the bird to chirp for lover home.
Ten percent Cabernet Franc for the fresh graphite pencil lead stroke streak upon a page. The underside of a shoot of green by the river bank for a tiny frog to huddle and hold under. Entre-Deux-Mers, between the two seas. Oysters and Arcachon dunes to the east of the moderating sea, above the druid pines of Landes, Dordogne, Garronne, Cahors up the road a piece. A quarter Cabernet Sauvignon. A noble savage and wise grape, the right amount of red fruits here, plum, below the protective arms of mother Merlot. The waters, cool, coming down from Pyrenees and Massif Central have gravelled the rocks down, pebbley, smooth, white, blue, I shouldn't know.
Violets, of course, and lilac. And cedar box as if pretending to be a Burgundy. Wine's like us; we're all alike, but different, sometimes vastly different, and disagreeable unto each other sometimes, but then again, alike, two legs, two arms, two eyes, kinship the whale, with the little weevil mole a housecat could easily hunt down, but one creature who helped mammalian existence survive the meteor dinosaur apocalypse. Barge engine exhaust smoke ascending, but then coming back down. Lacquer and varnish of old wooden furniture handmade. An old oil paintings patience with the elements.
Look left into this wine, look right, up and down. Aged and distant manure, something made of iron. Spittle of a hairy animal happy to rest in mountain cave far away where mists come, and snow, even in summer. Rose petal. The licked liquid dewed enjambment of a fair and sensual animal. Innards of a well used gearbox, as if of an old English motor car, strewn with the faintest perspirations of raspberry, as it holds its old spoked tires like they don't really make anymore. Bricks of reddish and brown of the kind that turn golden orange in the setting winter sun. Soft pelt of regal wild life upon a hide. The hot itch of a woolen scarf in dry wintry air, bone. Stillness of morning upon a foggy pond. Hint of tiled roof in summer distance.
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