Writers, it seems to me--well, we could say many things about them--are bookish types with a fair amount going on in their heads. They are observers. I think some of them find it, in a way, difficult to be around people all the time. They are sensitive people, vulnerable, and maybe sometimes they have a hard time standing up for themselves, uncertain of what to stand up for, because, well, everything is an experience. But you'd like to whisper over their shoulder sometime, "Jack, say 'no.' Say 'no,' to Neil. I know he's fun and everything, but you have your Buddhism to read up on, meditations to do. Don't get in that car." (Well, on the other hand, if he had listened, we wouldn't have On The Road, such as it is.) Hemingway couldn't say no to wanting to experience things, so he was bold and adventurous. It was his nature to run toward danger and a battle rather than retreat. But all that didn't change the mind-ways of a man essentially shy, at least in some way, who needed to retreat for the first half of the day to his writing chamber.
It's as if people are too much sometime. Each one is a study, after all.
If writers have a tendency toward drinking, toward the social lubricant, perhaps it allows a state of pleasure in their minds that makes it a bit easier to put on the mask required of them.
Writers are people on the way toward Buddhist-type enlightenment. They maintain secret wishes to sit under a tree and meditate as the world goes about its business.
They love being around people, they know how horrible they themselves are... The list goes on and on.
Oh,crap,I didn't say anything new.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Pani K.
My friend, my neighbor, a guest of hers has died in a plane crash far away. I got the news when it happened, thinking I heard something, as if though a wall. I got a call from her tonight. I left a note for her, on my way to work a night or two ago, but what can you say, except a great official mourning for another November 22nd. For the Polish nation, of which many of us are ancestors, no, you don't really want to go into what happened at Catyn Woods. No, you don't want to realize that who knows how many were shot one by one, execution style, in a grim prison, one by one by one. It wasn't all mass mow down, no. But they ended up there, like they say, a lot with a bullet in the base of the neck. You can imagine.
This is the Polish President who came up the street one day, and dropped by to visit. She liked exactly what he stood for. Why be so secular in this day and age--maybe something we need to appreciate about human nature, that gift, troublesome as it seems. Someone who seemed to remember the importance of defying Homo Sovieticos. Defying the cold life-is-meaningless spirit.
I sit and have tea with her. She alludes, but she doesn't go into it. Women stripped naked, whipped about the scalp and further tortured by NKVD, Soviet gestapo.
He was pro-Catholic. He was a veteran of Solidarity movement, as were others on that plane. He thought, along with his brother, that it was worth bringing out the abuses of the old Soviet leaning regime. He seems to have spoken for a truth that goes unsaid, or that people are frightened to speak out about, for reasons of being bullied in bad ways. The old apparatchiks. The old thugs. The old grease the wheels, but in cynical ways and corruption. All the things that this old generous wise neighbor takes a real exception to on every level of her being and moral fiber.
If there is anyone you would trust to calibrate or leave Polish sensibility and art and history to, you would pick her, or her husband, who is gone now, but lives on in dignified spirit. The departed Polish President, wife and family, were friends, and she a friend of theirs. Connected to each, to many, and loving all, even me enough to call in the midst of all this, she is someone, someone alive. God bless her, and the Polish nation.
The notion strikes me today that I must qualify the above and apologize for its sentimentality. One meant to say there are lovely people in the world, like my neighbor, and that things come along in life that effect them deeply. One wants to share, to say to random strangers and friends, the things that make them sad, so that events don't just slip away down the hole of what was yesterday without being acknowledged. I think going by one of my old haunts, Bourbon, in Glover Park, my appearance provoking a shot or two clinked over the bar after my shift last night, had something to do with it. Maybe it is a reference to James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an homage paid, that invites one to qualify and re-qualify, as in the habit of modern master David Foster Wallace too.
There is an epic poem for the Poles, Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz. The Polish lady next door gave me once a rare English translation of this, and I must confess I haven't been able to get very far with it. The poem rises to present a vision of Poland as a Christ amongst nations, and indeed Poland and her people have suffered, and kept true to their faith.
As Buddha tells us, violence only begets violence. Therefore, politics will only beget more politics. One diatribe will only raise another from someone with another point of view. So must I apologize for my outburst of nationalistic sentiment, and only hope that there is some sentiment somewhere... Ahh, yes, Buddha tells us the self is an illusion. What one thinks one day, well, the next day it could be quite different. Still, there are beautiful old neighbors in the world, ones with good karma, who share suffering in the spirit of ... well... love, I suppose.
Did the New Yorker do anything about this?
This is the Polish President who came up the street one day, and dropped by to visit. She liked exactly what he stood for. Why be so secular in this day and age--maybe something we need to appreciate about human nature, that gift, troublesome as it seems. Someone who seemed to remember the importance of defying Homo Sovieticos. Defying the cold life-is-meaningless spirit.
I sit and have tea with her. She alludes, but she doesn't go into it. Women stripped naked, whipped about the scalp and further tortured by NKVD, Soviet gestapo.
He was pro-Catholic. He was a veteran of Solidarity movement, as were others on that plane. He thought, along with his brother, that it was worth bringing out the abuses of the old Soviet leaning regime. He seems to have spoken for a truth that goes unsaid, or that people are frightened to speak out about, for reasons of being bullied in bad ways. The old apparatchiks. The old thugs. The old grease the wheels, but in cynical ways and corruption. All the things that this old generous wise neighbor takes a real exception to on every level of her being and moral fiber.
If there is anyone you would trust to calibrate or leave Polish sensibility and art and history to, you would pick her, or her husband, who is gone now, but lives on in dignified spirit. The departed Polish President, wife and family, were friends, and she a friend of theirs. Connected to each, to many, and loving all, even me enough to call in the midst of all this, she is someone, someone alive. God bless her, and the Polish nation.
The notion strikes me today that I must qualify the above and apologize for its sentimentality. One meant to say there are lovely people in the world, like my neighbor, and that things come along in life that effect them deeply. One wants to share, to say to random strangers and friends, the things that make them sad, so that events don't just slip away down the hole of what was yesterday without being acknowledged. I think going by one of my old haunts, Bourbon, in Glover Park, my appearance provoking a shot or two clinked over the bar after my shift last night, had something to do with it. Maybe it is a reference to James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an homage paid, that invites one to qualify and re-qualify, as in the habit of modern master David Foster Wallace too.
There is an epic poem for the Poles, Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz. The Polish lady next door gave me once a rare English translation of this, and I must confess I haven't been able to get very far with it. The poem rises to present a vision of Poland as a Christ amongst nations, and indeed Poland and her people have suffered, and kept true to their faith.
As Buddha tells us, violence only begets violence. Therefore, politics will only beget more politics. One diatribe will only raise another from someone with another point of view. So must I apologize for my outburst of nationalistic sentiment, and only hope that there is some sentiment somewhere... Ahh, yes, Buddha tells us the self is an illusion. What one thinks one day, well, the next day it could be quite different. Still, there are beautiful old neighbors in the world, ones with good karma, who share suffering in the spirit of ... well... love, I suppose.
Did the New Yorker do anything about this?
Thursday, April 1, 2010
More on Kerouac
It was an act of sheer brilliance, generously sustained, written beautifully. Kerouac had the single-handed genius to find an art form to critique the Post-Enlightenment mid-century attitudes of America, to expose the complacent lack of spirituality in every day thought and discourse. His work stands as a way of taking seriously what the nation, in its mood of success, was ignoring.
After his early experimentation, constant writing and correspondence, Kerouac found the form of the 'true life novel.' Any account of life's moments and consciousness is a creation of the mind, a fiction laden with spiritual leanings and beliefs. Kerouac scrubbed and rescrubbed the surface of thoughts recreating moments of life. He tried a thousand voices, a million ways of looking at things, meditating on the nature of thought.
He comes up with a vehicle. He is telling us that life itself, just as it is, is enough by which to achieve enlightenment. His prose suggests that life's moments of day to day reality have great significance, that they may be explored in such a way as to suggest a fictional hand of some divine sort comes up with what is appropriate to our us, our lives, our inner life, our character. From his work it is not a far leap to the real lasting ideas of Buddhism, the facts of karma from previous lives, that weight of the past meeting a reality which offers constant enlightenment and the chance to live properly. Both sides of this equation have their poetry, Kerouac's prose on the one hand, all his artistic ideas, the spirituality of Buddhist law on the other.
And so Kerouac wrote of his home town, of his father and his print shop, of his brother Gerard, of his mother, etc., and all of it true to life, but also developed as far as the poetry native to each subject, as if he could, more or less accurately, bring us something of the cosmic significance of each.
The literary world is still irritated by his form and any follower of it. "What the hell is this? Is it fiction? Is it memoir?" Lawyers from publishing houses, forget about it, those times litigious, maybe not so much as ours. Kerouac changed all the names, had people sign forms so On The Road could finally see the light of day. He wrote about people who might find themselves recognizable, say in a Frisco jazz bar, real people, but few seemed to have taken offense. Maybe those aren't the kind of people to object to being memorialized in a small way in a great American book.
Still, though, Neal Cassidy wouldn't speak to his old buddy Kerouac for two years after On The Road came out. In many ways, Cassidy suffered from the identification and the portrayal. One could guess people were quick to stereotype, 'oh, you're the guy...' Cassidy, aka Dean Moriarty, points this out in a City Lights reading with Ginsburg. "Oh, they expected I was high on marijuana, so I acted it."
No, you can't blame people for wanting their privacy in a country full of so many people, some of them nuts. (The media has greedily taken over telling people's true-life stories as they really are, with all the nitty gritty, as opposed to the official press release version.) But Kerouac had a higher value, one of being on a spiritual pilgrimage, life being full of spiritual lessons, lessons by which to achieve humility and good stuff like that. Kerouac wished to expose his own life in this way, in real honest warts and all detail, as he wanted to achieve spiritual insight and peace. And, he wanted to offer himself as a kind of teacher, teaching by example, but also through administering lessons to those who might be curious. "I treat my own life as a spiritual occurrence, worthy of note through the simple fact that I exist, have a mind and higher consciousness and a memory and beautiful people around me and an understanding of emotion," he seems to have held. And maybe he saw the same in other people, whether or not they were willing to openly admit or not.
Maybe that's some of the beauty of Dean Moriarty, as he is not afraid to be just as he is, as happens, as he his inclinations present themselves. An individual, but not so private that he might not see some higher involvement which made his portrayal by Kerouac--the two were into writing, wrote side by side, influencing in each other in no small amount, at least in their honeymoon--okay.
No, spirituality is something you share, not to keep private. And as an aside, one might note that in regard to the Catholic Church officially covering up quite a lot, to say the least. If spirituality and the lessons that come of studying real life with an eye toward something transcendent, it would come to pass quickly that we would not only listen and bring forward the experiences of the molested, but also of the perpetrating members of the clergy. Let the great lesson about the life of the great spirit come out through the truth. But no, that's not how the church of Christ's steadfast friend Saint Peter wanted to treat the fabric of real actual life and experience both within the church setting and without it.
Again, a sign of the times. The fear of lawsuits, the official silence, the repression behind doors.
But that's not what Kerouac stood for.
Kerouac stood up for an ideal, one of openness, one we can but crudely describe compared to the achievements of his prose. His metaphors and tales stand beside the natural ingredients of parable.
As an afterthought, but one that slips quickly into the stream, we could say that many issues today bear a similarity to the ones Kerouac stood up against. The secrecy which corporations shroud their operations in, the inability for the institutions of Congress, at least part of it, to admit that people get sick and need to be taken care of without being bankrupted, to admit that people benefit from stable secure housing without taking advantage of this need by providing a temporary high that gets further and further away, to admit that people need financial security, no secret rate increases, no hidden charges, no usury, no need for certain medical procedures that people are going to do anyway after having done the math of whether they can afford certain consequences and responsibilities that aren't small... it all boils down to something about hiding, about not taking life as a lesson to learn from and acquire generosity and mutual respect. Physicists collide the atom now in order to learn its secrets. Kerouac was up to the same thing, and rather than a bomb, his work stands as a great positive humane thing.
As Saroyan said, and I've quoted it here before I think, the man wrote of a long series of tender nervous breakdowns, and that at the bottom, you'd be hard-pressed to find within his work an unkind word about anyone.
After his early experimentation, constant writing and correspondence, Kerouac found the form of the 'true life novel.' Any account of life's moments and consciousness is a creation of the mind, a fiction laden with spiritual leanings and beliefs. Kerouac scrubbed and rescrubbed the surface of thoughts recreating moments of life. He tried a thousand voices, a million ways of looking at things, meditating on the nature of thought.
He comes up with a vehicle. He is telling us that life itself, just as it is, is enough by which to achieve enlightenment. His prose suggests that life's moments of day to day reality have great significance, that they may be explored in such a way as to suggest a fictional hand of some divine sort comes up with what is appropriate to our us, our lives, our inner life, our character. From his work it is not a far leap to the real lasting ideas of Buddhism, the facts of karma from previous lives, that weight of the past meeting a reality which offers constant enlightenment and the chance to live properly. Both sides of this equation have their poetry, Kerouac's prose on the one hand, all his artistic ideas, the spirituality of Buddhist law on the other.
And so Kerouac wrote of his home town, of his father and his print shop, of his brother Gerard, of his mother, etc., and all of it true to life, but also developed as far as the poetry native to each subject, as if he could, more or less accurately, bring us something of the cosmic significance of each.
The literary world is still irritated by his form and any follower of it. "What the hell is this? Is it fiction? Is it memoir?" Lawyers from publishing houses, forget about it, those times litigious, maybe not so much as ours. Kerouac changed all the names, had people sign forms so On The Road could finally see the light of day. He wrote about people who might find themselves recognizable, say in a Frisco jazz bar, real people, but few seemed to have taken offense. Maybe those aren't the kind of people to object to being memorialized in a small way in a great American book.
Still, though, Neal Cassidy wouldn't speak to his old buddy Kerouac for two years after On The Road came out. In many ways, Cassidy suffered from the identification and the portrayal. One could guess people were quick to stereotype, 'oh, you're the guy...' Cassidy, aka Dean Moriarty, points this out in a City Lights reading with Ginsburg. "Oh, they expected I was high on marijuana, so I acted it."
No, you can't blame people for wanting their privacy in a country full of so many people, some of them nuts. (The media has greedily taken over telling people's true-life stories as they really are, with all the nitty gritty, as opposed to the official press release version.) But Kerouac had a higher value, one of being on a spiritual pilgrimage, life being full of spiritual lessons, lessons by which to achieve humility and good stuff like that. Kerouac wished to expose his own life in this way, in real honest warts and all detail, as he wanted to achieve spiritual insight and peace. And, he wanted to offer himself as a kind of teacher, teaching by example, but also through administering lessons to those who might be curious. "I treat my own life as a spiritual occurrence, worthy of note through the simple fact that I exist, have a mind and higher consciousness and a memory and beautiful people around me and an understanding of emotion," he seems to have held. And maybe he saw the same in other people, whether or not they were willing to openly admit or not.
Maybe that's some of the beauty of Dean Moriarty, as he is not afraid to be just as he is, as happens, as he his inclinations present themselves. An individual, but not so private that he might not see some higher involvement which made his portrayal by Kerouac--the two were into writing, wrote side by side, influencing in each other in no small amount, at least in their honeymoon--okay.
No, spirituality is something you share, not to keep private. And as an aside, one might note that in regard to the Catholic Church officially covering up quite a lot, to say the least. If spirituality and the lessons that come of studying real life with an eye toward something transcendent, it would come to pass quickly that we would not only listen and bring forward the experiences of the molested, but also of the perpetrating members of the clergy. Let the great lesson about the life of the great spirit come out through the truth. But no, that's not how the church of Christ's steadfast friend Saint Peter wanted to treat the fabric of real actual life and experience both within the church setting and without it.
Again, a sign of the times. The fear of lawsuits, the official silence, the repression behind doors.
But that's not what Kerouac stood for.
Kerouac stood up for an ideal, one of openness, one we can but crudely describe compared to the achievements of his prose. His metaphors and tales stand beside the natural ingredients of parable.
As an afterthought, but one that slips quickly into the stream, we could say that many issues today bear a similarity to the ones Kerouac stood up against. The secrecy which corporations shroud their operations in, the inability for the institutions of Congress, at least part of it, to admit that people get sick and need to be taken care of without being bankrupted, to admit that people benefit from stable secure housing without taking advantage of this need by providing a temporary high that gets further and further away, to admit that people need financial security, no secret rate increases, no hidden charges, no usury, no need for certain medical procedures that people are going to do anyway after having done the math of whether they can afford certain consequences and responsibilities that aren't small... it all boils down to something about hiding, about not taking life as a lesson to learn from and acquire generosity and mutual respect. Physicists collide the atom now in order to learn its secrets. Kerouac was up to the same thing, and rather than a bomb, his work stands as a great positive humane thing.
As Saroyan said, and I've quoted it here before I think, the man wrote of a long series of tender nervous breakdowns, and that at the bottom, you'd be hard-pressed to find within his work an unkind word about anyone.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
I am reminded, on a number of fronts, of how writing operates as meditation. I am more and more convinced that time spent writing is as good a preparation as any to gain access to Buddhist understanding. A story can be clever and well-written. It might have some moral value. But unless one is engaged in some understanding of consciousness as being prone to being hi-jacked by false selves and the strife they involve in, the story is not getting at the full picture of the Universe.
Is there place for such a lazy activity as Buddhism in the modern world of science, technology, medicine, global economy? Well, perhaps to encourage a perspective upon the strife, the contentiousness, the selfishness of a world divided into factions and separate identities.
So, finding myself really incapable of making up fiction, like Kerouac I explore true to life stuff. I write out an account of, say, a meaningful time in life, and in doing so I allow myself to meditate on how I was at fault, how I was occupied by distracting voices and false ego things like attachment and pride and feelings of the kind that are easily hurt, how I fell into patterns of reaction over the sweetest and most innocent and beautiful of things, quite as if I had been completely blinded by inner turmoils.
Then again, there is always that part within us that knows the wisdom of the Buddha, capable of listening and understanding, a very gentle and very generous self that never has a problem with anybody or anything, that lives in contented silence, only wishing to share. Buddhism gives strength to this deeper part of whatever it is we are, or are a part of. Buddhism helps identify that deeper part of great peace.
Maybe our own turmoils are unconscious exercises in finding that inner light in the darkness, within the overwhelming sound and action of any given day. Those turmoils, maybe we are never released from them, nowhere close to attaining the perfection that secretly is ours, but maybe we can hope to be better at remaining calm and unmoved as they sway their winds upon us. Woe unto the world because of offenses, Lincoln quoted the good book. We're left to that activity of making ourselves better Buddhists because of them, more focussed, more concentrated. Writing is a way to help all that along, and that may well be its main purpose, personally, for us.
Is there place for such a lazy activity as Buddhism in the modern world of science, technology, medicine, global economy? Well, perhaps to encourage a perspective upon the strife, the contentiousness, the selfishness of a world divided into factions and separate identities.
So, finding myself really incapable of making up fiction, like Kerouac I explore true to life stuff. I write out an account of, say, a meaningful time in life, and in doing so I allow myself to meditate on how I was at fault, how I was occupied by distracting voices and false ego things like attachment and pride and feelings of the kind that are easily hurt, how I fell into patterns of reaction over the sweetest and most innocent and beautiful of things, quite as if I had been completely blinded by inner turmoils.
Then again, there is always that part within us that knows the wisdom of the Buddha, capable of listening and understanding, a very gentle and very generous self that never has a problem with anybody or anything, that lives in contented silence, only wishing to share. Buddhism gives strength to this deeper part of whatever it is we are, or are a part of. Buddhism helps identify that deeper part of great peace.
Maybe our own turmoils are unconscious exercises in finding that inner light in the darkness, within the overwhelming sound and action of any given day. Those turmoils, maybe we are never released from them, nowhere close to attaining the perfection that secretly is ours, but maybe we can hope to be better at remaining calm and unmoved as they sway their winds upon us. Woe unto the world because of offenses, Lincoln quoted the good book. We're left to that activity of making ourselves better Buddhists because of them, more focussed, more concentrated. Writing is a way to help all that along, and that may well be its main purpose, personally, for us.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Kerouac
"Spontaneous bop prosody," he called it. One doesn't have to look too hard through his mature works to find an example. It's when he gets emotional about something as he describes it. Words run on like the saxophonist's riff, full of sound and flow and energy. He could be describing the Mississippi, or Times Square, the river in his own town, his father, brother, childhood. It's when his prose gets poetic, rich, stopping for a moment to let out something. (He's really not far away from Twain, nor Whitman, nor others of the American or any other tradition.)
Ol' Kerouac. I guess we could fairly say he was of an empathetic type. He didn't have a career to put that into, and so he wrote, as he'd always wanted to. In the blood, that sort of thing. He liked to read up on Buddhism. You Tube him on the Steve Allen Show and you can hear him read with all his inflection and sensitivity.
To write on that level, with that consistency, as Kerouac did, one wonders. With so much rich inflection, poetry, sheer verbage about things and moments big and small, he was a sensitive guy, caring, like we say, empathetic. Maybe even sort of selfless as a being obliged to record life as he saw it. He didn't ask for much, just that he could continue writing, some wine, some food, some shelter, some friends, and why not some interesting travels as required by testosterone and curiosity. (His favorite shirt, found in a junk yard.)
It takes a high-mindedness to write as Kerouac did. It also takes the classic combination of feistiness and sensitivity, but really empathy and all that Corinthian stuff. Which left him to be, in his great empathy, passive and a bit vulnerable. He was a nice guy. And so, we can feel it when he complains, in Big Sur, of all the freaks coming out to his mother's house in Long Island and knocking on the window as he tried to sit down and write in the basement, "Hey, we want to party with King of the Beatniks..." We wished he could have said no.
He was, on the one hand, a wise man, an avatar, a reader of dreams, with some useful Eastern takes on things. It would have seemed somewhat natural to allow such interlopers in for a moment, maybe to cure them and send them away, but it was always more troubling than that for him. They wanted to drink with him. And so the poor guy, wishing just to write peacefully and quietly, was drawn away, time and time again, by his fame, by people.
His great empathy led him to adopt a kind of passivity, as Buddha preaches passivity, as Jesus does, both realizing one is part of the other. Something we have a hard time with. How can passivity be manliness? That's not what TV and magazine commercials preach to us. By common logic, passivity is a trap.
He wanted to escape, and Big Sur is a story of one attempt of his. The book is a notebook, a journal, of trying to find a balance once having fallen into that strange trap of being a popular celebrity. We don't come away from reading this particular account sensing he found the perfect escape. (Though he does, through alcoholic nightmare find The Cross, and we can't blame him for his French Canadian Catholic sensibilities at the bottom of his soul's decorative tastes. A good story, anyway.) And we know his end, as his drinking, rather than decreasing, increased, or at least, stayed the same as when fame goaded him into it.
Yet, we read him, and we find a beautiful balance, an outward empathy, an outward passivity, an inward peace, a discovery of truth and beauty and eternal things.
Ol' Kerouac. I guess we could fairly say he was of an empathetic type. He didn't have a career to put that into, and so he wrote, as he'd always wanted to. In the blood, that sort of thing. He liked to read up on Buddhism. You Tube him on the Steve Allen Show and you can hear him read with all his inflection and sensitivity.
To write on that level, with that consistency, as Kerouac did, one wonders. With so much rich inflection, poetry, sheer verbage about things and moments big and small, he was a sensitive guy, caring, like we say, empathetic. Maybe even sort of selfless as a being obliged to record life as he saw it. He didn't ask for much, just that he could continue writing, some wine, some food, some shelter, some friends, and why not some interesting travels as required by testosterone and curiosity. (His favorite shirt, found in a junk yard.)
It takes a high-mindedness to write as Kerouac did. It also takes the classic combination of feistiness and sensitivity, but really empathy and all that Corinthian stuff. Which left him to be, in his great empathy, passive and a bit vulnerable. He was a nice guy. And so, we can feel it when he complains, in Big Sur, of all the freaks coming out to his mother's house in Long Island and knocking on the window as he tried to sit down and write in the basement, "Hey, we want to party with King of the Beatniks..." We wished he could have said no.
He was, on the one hand, a wise man, an avatar, a reader of dreams, with some useful Eastern takes on things. It would have seemed somewhat natural to allow such interlopers in for a moment, maybe to cure them and send them away, but it was always more troubling than that for him. They wanted to drink with him. And so the poor guy, wishing just to write peacefully and quietly, was drawn away, time and time again, by his fame, by people.
His great empathy led him to adopt a kind of passivity, as Buddha preaches passivity, as Jesus does, both realizing one is part of the other. Something we have a hard time with. How can passivity be manliness? That's not what TV and magazine commercials preach to us. By common logic, passivity is a trap.
He wanted to escape, and Big Sur is a story of one attempt of his. The book is a notebook, a journal, of trying to find a balance once having fallen into that strange trap of being a popular celebrity. We don't come away from reading this particular account sensing he found the perfect escape. (Though he does, through alcoholic nightmare find The Cross, and we can't blame him for his French Canadian Catholic sensibilities at the bottom of his soul's decorative tastes. A good story, anyway.) And we know his end, as his drinking, rather than decreasing, increased, or at least, stayed the same as when fame goaded him into it.
Yet, we read him, and we find a beautiful balance, an outward empathy, an outward passivity, an inward peace, a discovery of truth and beauty and eternal things.
Friday, March 5, 2010
From Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:
“As I mentioned before, competing against other people, whether in daily life or in my field of work, is just not the sort of lifestyle I’m after. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own values to live by, and the same holds true with me. These differences give rise to disagreements, and the combination of these disagreements can give rise to even greater misunderstandings. As a result, sometimes people are unfairly criticized. This goes without saying. It’s not much fun to be misunderstood or criticized, but rather a painful experience that hurts people deeply.
“As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves. Take me as an example. It’s precisely my ability to detect some aspects of a scene that other people can’t, to feel differently than others and choose words that differ from theirs, that’s allowed me to write stories that are mine alone. And because of this we have the extraordinary situation in which quite a few people read what I’ve written. So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.” (pages 18-19, paperback edition.)
“I don’t think most people would like my personality. There might be a few—very few, I would imagine—who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn’t compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away alone in a closet? But is it ever possible for a professional writer to be liked by people? I have no idea. Maybe somewhere in the world it is. It’s hard to generalize. For me, at least, as I’ve written novels over many years, I just can’t picture someone liking me on a personal level. Being disliked by someone, hated and despised, somehow seems more natural. Not that I’m relieved when it happens. Even I’m not happy when someone dislikes me.” (pages 20-21.)
Somehow it takes a load off, what this Zen cat is saying about those of us who would write. We’re not natural, we’re not unnatural, we just are as we are.
Maybe it’s having tended bar the last six nights, and maybe it’s having slept all day, but I have little real desire to go out this Friday night, even if friends were handy. It’s a little odd to admit, but solitude and what would appear as doing very little is in order. Even the intrusion of having to order delivery Chinese was a stretch, brought on by real hunger. Who knows how late I’ll be up, or when I’ll be up tomorrow. (If the phone rings and it’s work calling, I’m not picking it up this time. The last seven weekend surprises have been enough.)
Muramaki talks, page 36, about the time he and his wife closed his jazz bar business, after some initial success as a novelist: “It was a major directional change—from the kind of open life we’d led for seven years, to a more closed life. I think having this sort of open existence for a period of years was a good thing. I learned a lot of important lessons during that time. It was my real schooling. But you can’t keep up that kind of life forever. Just as with school, you enter it, learn something, and then it’s time to leave.”
One tends to be brave. One wants to be brave. One wishes to be kind to the people who come by, the early ones, the late ones, but ultimately, you get your fill, if you really are to be a novelist. There comes a time to admit that your energies have changed, that you’re tired of being Jesus amongst the publicans and sinners. You don’t get so much personally out of it anyway, at least not in the sense that there’s someone to come home to at the end of the day and share your schedule. Or maybe that’s just something about me, my need for isolation.
There are things you don’t want to admit for some perception of the greater good. You want to perform your service sector job well and cleanly and with kindness. But, for some of us anyway, the admission comes, that you need your time away from people. And it makes life a whole lot easier to realize that.
A writer is, to the human world, a natural phenomenon, like a cloud is part of weather's. Yes, unlikable, solipsistic, what can you do. He tries not to do harm, at least. Dostoevsky put it well. "I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."
“As I mentioned before, competing against other people, whether in daily life or in my field of work, is just not the sort of lifestyle I’m after. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own values to live by, and the same holds true with me. These differences give rise to disagreements, and the combination of these disagreements can give rise to even greater misunderstandings. As a result, sometimes people are unfairly criticized. This goes without saying. It’s not much fun to be misunderstood or criticized, but rather a painful experience that hurts people deeply.
“As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves. Take me as an example. It’s precisely my ability to detect some aspects of a scene that other people can’t, to feel differently than others and choose words that differ from theirs, that’s allowed me to write stories that are mine alone. And because of this we have the extraordinary situation in which quite a few people read what I’ve written. So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.” (pages 18-19, paperback edition.)
“I don’t think most people would like my personality. There might be a few—very few, I would imagine—who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn’t compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away alone in a closet? But is it ever possible for a professional writer to be liked by people? I have no idea. Maybe somewhere in the world it is. It’s hard to generalize. For me, at least, as I’ve written novels over many years, I just can’t picture someone liking me on a personal level. Being disliked by someone, hated and despised, somehow seems more natural. Not that I’m relieved when it happens. Even I’m not happy when someone dislikes me.” (pages 20-21.)
Somehow it takes a load off, what this Zen cat is saying about those of us who would write. We’re not natural, we’re not unnatural, we just are as we are.
Maybe it’s having tended bar the last six nights, and maybe it’s having slept all day, but I have little real desire to go out this Friday night, even if friends were handy. It’s a little odd to admit, but solitude and what would appear as doing very little is in order. Even the intrusion of having to order delivery Chinese was a stretch, brought on by real hunger. Who knows how late I’ll be up, or when I’ll be up tomorrow. (If the phone rings and it’s work calling, I’m not picking it up this time. The last seven weekend surprises have been enough.)
Muramaki talks, page 36, about the time he and his wife closed his jazz bar business, after some initial success as a novelist: “It was a major directional change—from the kind of open life we’d led for seven years, to a more closed life. I think having this sort of open existence for a period of years was a good thing. I learned a lot of important lessons during that time. It was my real schooling. But you can’t keep up that kind of life forever. Just as with school, you enter it, learn something, and then it’s time to leave.”
One tends to be brave. One wants to be brave. One wishes to be kind to the people who come by, the early ones, the late ones, but ultimately, you get your fill, if you really are to be a novelist. There comes a time to admit that your energies have changed, that you’re tired of being Jesus amongst the publicans and sinners. You don’t get so much personally out of it anyway, at least not in the sense that there’s someone to come home to at the end of the day and share your schedule. Or maybe that’s just something about me, my need for isolation.
There are things you don’t want to admit for some perception of the greater good. You want to perform your service sector job well and cleanly and with kindness. But, for some of us anyway, the admission comes, that you need your time away from people. And it makes life a whole lot easier to realize that.
A writer is, to the human world, a natural phenomenon, like a cloud is part of weather's. Yes, unlikable, solipsistic, what can you do. He tries not to do harm, at least. Dostoevsky put it well. "I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
No Good Deed...
I must issue a long-overdue apology to any readers here. This entry, in attempt to draw circumspect humor, about life in general, abused terribly some perfectly normal circumstances and some perfectly normal kind decent people. Above and beyond the fact that it is greatly unprofessional of me, and unreflective of my pleasure in finding a good life waiting on good people, the quick whiny picture I drew of a restaurant in a state of pressure was a complete tangent from any reality. Again, I apologize. I hope no one minds that this posting has been, as it should have been immediately, deleted!
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