I guess a book is, as we are, an emanation of mind.  Subject to wave properties.  We come to life, give forth our light, and we can never come if we then do not finally disappear.  Life, death.  Talk, wisdom, kindness, and then silence, stone.  And so a book comes, and it is written, as a kind of tinker hobby, then it is written, and then it pulls with it a great silence behind it, complete obscurity.   It had its own reasons to be, that have nothing to do with a lot of things to do with life, and yet maybe everything.  Its irrelevance, its difficulty is the same as its relevance and its beauty.  It should not have any meaning, at least any conspicuous meaning.  It should not claim the limelight.  If it did, well, throw it on the mighty scrapheap of all things written by egotistical minds, look at me, look at me, I will occupy your mind...  with crap, with mental activity you don't need.

So a book comes, arriving in a quiet grace, basically unnoticed, properly, and then it bows and off it goes into the mists of time and graveyards and forgotten people who once were much alive and had whole stories but now are utterly forgotten.  An author knows this.  He knows that the great affairs of the heart, the loves, the family, will fade, and be lost.  It is proper for the author to carve out a memorial, indeed, to these great loves, and all the essential realities of the heart.  The memorial is a portrait of a universal reality, the deepest stuff we'll ever know.  It speaks of the great mysteries, why...  And this is heavy stuff.  Not for amateurs.  And yet the best know somehow that they must approach such tasks as utter amateurs, but that to do the work of it is somehow natural, similar to walking.

And so when they wake up, still having light in them, its kind of natural that through their gloom they would sit and write, not for any particular reason, but just like the basic urge to eat breakfast or have a  cup of soothing tea and a hot shower.  Like going about the acts of old farmhouses and the old people who live in them.

Then the writing becomes like the fruit on the vine of a growing season.  Every day, it expands a bit, picks up some more juice, some more energy from the sun, a few more minerals from the earth, absorbs a few more compounds from the flora and fauna nearby, the skin expanding and contracting, in rain storm, in sun, in the cold of starry night.

Then, I suppose, the master of the vineyard comes, picks by hand the fruit, puts it together in a big barrel and lets, again, nature take its course, which happens, again, in time, attended patiently.  Then it's bottled and shared and enjoyed over future dinners with conversations imaginable and unimaginable.  The vines themselves, upon whose shoulders the grapes were borne, well, they stay where they are, out on their rocky slopes, doing their thing.



V., V., why?  There we were, we'd gotten through the night, the rookie, myself, even the boss admitting we needed the pro busboy tonight, not the fill-in, the assistant manager calling in sick with swollen gum, the fill-in switched to food runner, thank god.  The clock approached ten, and the six schoolboys were ordering dessert and the table in the back was getting ready to leave.  Then some selfish chubby little guy who used to work with us calls six minutes before the kitchen closes to order appetizers...  And I get this news right at 10:30 when I'm pretty much saying myself, my god, this happens so rarely, the night ending without that last party messing with you, hanging on, oh we're not keeping you are we?  "there is a party coming...  I ordered appe-TIE-zers for them."  You've got to be kidding me.  "Are joo KEEDing me," is a favorite expression of hers.  The fool then arrives up the stairs with great ado, singing in his high-pitched way "hi!" expecting me pleased to see him.  Hi, he says, several times, a little louder.  I turn slightly around, and nod.  Yeah.  He approaches the bar's mouth and enters, wanting a hug.  I put my hands and his chest and push him back just enough.    He goes sits down, surveys the five plates of food that have just arrived, starts eating.  The rest of his party arrives ten awkward minutes later, one young fellow arriving loudly and knocking platers askew with a clatter as he sits.  "Play some Christmas music," he shouts.  "Is this all we can order, I mean..." gesturing to himself, "because it's me."   "Come have a drink with us," he sings at some point when he realizes I am heavily ignoring them.  "It's a Saturday night."  I want to avoid them.  Silently, I bring them more bread.  The rookie is breaking down the school kids checks into separate checks.  I bring them six glasses of water.  I am trying to be polite.  I'd like to spit.  I grit my teeth.  A former neighbor of mine, inexplicably, is with him tonight.  No one pushes for anything to drink.


The lovers have long ago parted, without consummation of their relationship, and one is left standing as it all fades away, fades away, to be left on a shelf tucked away gathering a dust that belies its once great significance.

The Southern conference college graduate young professionals are having a tailgate party, it sounds like, on this rainy Saturday afternoon on my street as I get ready for work.  The bass notes thud through the walls, simple video game repetitive, two notes, three, maybe, and over the monotone a gang of rappers is angrily shouting.  The voices of the young men carry boisterous over the familiar soundtrack and the low low low bass.  A single rapper incants something, words spaced with mathematical evenness.  Occasionally there is a group shout to assert masculinity.

Invited to a friend's get-together, an informal party to mark the lifting of Prohbition, here at a small embassy quarters near the river, the attempts of my trying to schmooze linger as misguided attempt, that attempt followed by the sad inevitable wandering around 9 PM in Georgetown, checking out a wine bar, then approaching the bar at the Four Seasons where somm friends work, both of which were mistakes.  My real self does not translate in such places of show, and it's probably good that I felt hunger and got a cheeseseak at George's House of Felafel before cabbing it home.  The somm guys are too busy to engage or make any attempt to hook me up, and I give them an imitation of Dave Chappell.  I talk to a few women, but it doesn't go very far.  "Do you write poetry?"  "We all do," I try to explain. I feel a gentlemanly desire to express interest in the real life of a fellow human being, but everyone seems distracted by the idols of the evening, its rhythm.

Yeah, what am I doing at an embassy function talking with State Department people?  What am I doing at Bourbon Steak pretending I care, though I do care about what restaurant people are up to.

I am a refugee from the world of liberal arts, trying to find my values, trying to be them, and yet it gets lost in the shuffle before a busy bar and I'm smart to just go home.

When I first came to town I found a little hamburger place, the kind with a distinctive style building, small, with a pitched roof, a name like little tavern.  Slider style burgers you'd get, six at a time, with the buns still connected, american cheese, onions off the flat top.  It was at the western end of Georgetown, on my way into town from Foxhall Road where I lived, a small house, half of it, with two nice women.  To get to the burger place meant I was exploring the town.  And there was this cat Luis, who worked alone, cooking, taking orders, manning the counter, and Luis was from Africa.  The little burgers were a treat.  Hit the nail on the head.  And Luis was a nice guy to talk to.

And one day, when I found a night job in addition to the day job thing, as a busboy in a restaurant, guess who was the dishwasher, in charge of a mound of dirty place, my friend Luis, who turned out to be from Nigeria.  He had a friend Che, sounded like Chee, and he too was a nice guy, sometimes a security guard, and later in life, when I saw him he was selling shoes somewhere in Maryland and he told me to slowly pronounce Myo Ho Renge Kyo, which I did not immediately realize was Buddhist, the Japanese way to say Om Mani Padme Hum, which itself is an invocation of the Lotus of Enlightenment coming from the mud of the world through the water of life.

I thought it an interesting coincidence.  Luis, my burger friend, there with a most important job, cat-like, doing this incredible job just like he did at Little Tower, scooping up a spatula full and down on the little buns and into the bag, where they would season here in my poor imitation of Hemingway, the onions, the yellow gooey cheese, the squirt of ketchup and mustard all making something more than the sum of its parts.  Luis lasted awhile.  Wirey, tall.  Big small, dark skin.  Athletic.  Chee replaced him.  And then after that first crazy year at the original Austin Grill with everyone worn out, working hard, the crazy white guys on the line moved on and the kitchen was a Salvadoran team.  And I found it all interesting.

the day off is unexpected.  the last night crazy, $2700 in sales without any high end wine purchases.  you wake up stiff.  tight in the neck.  you don't know what to do with yourself, you find yourself alone, nowhere to go.  it's grey out.  you should start your christmas shopping.  you should do your laundry.  you should get out of the house.  green tea, a few pills first.  a burger reheating in the toaster oven.  the landlord upstairs neighbor is home.  you woke to the sound of laundry below you, the front door opening, closing.  last night, a lot of glassware washing last night.  too much.  bus tub full of silverware, crazy stacks of cleared plates.  let the downstairs people run food.  crazy night.  a system breaking down, the little walkie talkie beeper going off, food is ready down below, what do you want me to do about it, I have my hands full, the busboy has his hands full making coffee, the waitress has her hands full trying to get the next table sat.  64 needs a better wine recommendation.  the band wants another round of beers and order their dinners.  the drummer makes them loud.  what's the weather like, how warm, get a haircut?  black mold on the bathroom tile, brings a sense of shame.  start the laundry, take a nap, everything at a standstill.


See, Doctor, I'm afraid of writing.  I feel odd about it.  I'm afraid to go out of the house like I used to and sit at the coffee shop and write in my notebook.  Yes, I like the Zen of my own place, but it's a bit more stimulating to be around people, guess it's just human nature.  Home, you get distracted, by dishes, the pile of mail, the need to vacuum the bedroom.  I used to be pretty brave about it, going out to write. Then after I was done with the book and published it, then, you know, discovering the truth of no reaction to it.  And this is a great thing to discover, a real truth.  I'm not going to manufacture some false importance about a piece of mysterious mental matter, as matter is ultimately hollow.  I'm not going to go on some marketing spree claiming some nonsense that is all false.   "Magnificent prose, brilliant plot, a real page turner..."  I don't think so.  As soon as you say something, it's no longer true.  The book itself knows the truth beyond, and that's why it's good, because it's gentle and polite and makes no claim on the truth.  It realizes its own insignificance, the null and void nature of any mental construct.  What is love?  Hah.  It blows away.  Another mental construct that the mind created out of feedback to itself.   Something you got carried away with.  Meant well, anyway.  Don't try to possess anything, because you can't.  You shouldn't.

Writing itself as a process constantly changes, just like we do.  The purpose of it changes.  Even the purpose of what you wrote before.  Castles made of sand, melts into the sea, eventually.  Redefine writing.  Make it the provenance of the Zen master.  Art is ultimately simply about itself.  Making it abstract, even as it attempts to show reality.  Wyeth paints his studio, the view out the window.  He paints old Maine people, how the old ancestral house reflects them.  Even the most real of realist paintings down to the blades of grass.  You go to the house, you walk up to it, and it is itself.  You can merely try to portray it, trying to catch what you see.

How do you pin down a motive, a desire, a thought?  Was the character in your book being non-possessive?  Maybe that's a good thing, but maybe it wasn't understood.  As we conventionally see love as a bit possessive, in some ways.  But then one would want to be part of an exclusive couple, of course.  It makes a good story.  Holy matrimony.  Structure, like a job, a framework, a support system.  Unrequited love a thing for poets.  You need someone to keep your sorry ass company as you get old.  Someone to talk to openly and honestly.

Well, what sort of world does the artist, or the writer, perceive, and what does he evoke?  Could he evoke a world of great unselfishness, great peace and simplicity and honesty, the sensibility of a realist?  Could he do that?  Would he be understood by other people?  Would they make assumptions about him, or has he made assumptions about them?  Would he be a headache to deal with?

And it's all relative anyway.  Reality depends on your perspective, ultimately.  We can share our reality, and it makes sense to others, we all can see the Big Dipper, but the more personal things, the more private things, are mysterious.  What sort of love is there in a couple that's been married twenty years?  Or between people who once kissed passionately but who haven't seen each other in twenty years?  What keeps a person who lives alone keep on going?  A dog, a cat, a bottle of wine, an old house, a habit of painting things one sees?   A habit of writing...

On one level maybe you're an idiot, on another maybe your a decent person with as few bad intentions as possible.  Sort of a thing that attracts a Melville...  Or is just old Disney movies from a simpler time in which people are kind-hearted and happy?


out into the cold to the market.  purchase some meats, lamb and merquez sausage, onion, baby kale, sweet potato.  there's a guy with a haircut doing a wine-tasting.  don't know where, how, to fit in.  if you taste then you should buy something.  place full of happy people who have someone else to be with.

Alan Watts describes anxiety as a feedback loop.  A feedback loop, when the receiver, like the pickup of an electric guitar or a microphone, gets too close to the speaker playing its signal, resulting immediately in a high-pitched hum, howl or screech.  (A comparable thing happens when a television camera is pointed at a monitor.)  The mind plays a memory, the brain plays a thought back to itself, amplifying it in its corridors and pathways, 'til it becomes a thought no longer but a loud noise lacking meaning, something that needs to be turned off.  Thus the practice of clearing the mind with meditation.

Wine-tasting night, a good chalky Sancerre, an easy-going and interesting Pinot Noir from the Loire, a Tourraine, imported by Winebow.  I walk my bicycle through the damp woods as a drizzle falls.  The colors of the woods remind of the strange Bois du Boulogne whipping scene in Belle Du Jour, the misty air of a French forest.  The thought goes through my mind that wine is to be enjoyed, today a perfect day, Fall heading into Winter, the story of one growing season, of the years of a grapevine rooted in its soil in a particular place, left to the whims of nature (unirrigated as New World creature of artifice wines often are), all the elements of terroir, of all creatures witnessed in a glass.   Wine is not to be hoarded, rare, expensive, in a cellar, no, there is something quite spiritual about it, and so, as I find later as the customers come in, a glass allows one to scratch the surface of life, to open up some.  And often, I find, people are the same as me, that they too know the tyranny of an overthinking mind, that they too have seen therapists, that they too know an array of people with an array, the spectrum of mental states and issues.  And then the refreshing talk, which happens over a simple quite enjoyable and drinkable glass of good old 2011 Beaujolais imported by Wine Traditions of Falls Church, VA., is interrupted by the talk of the wine consumer.

And this talk, of winemakers I've never heard of, fancy, with price tags, fine wines I'm sure, eventually, luckily, itself fades as a food pairing is made, Bordeaux with Veal Cheeks, Ventoux with Calves Liver.   Talk of what children are up to, family geographical history, Texas.

A woman makes a nice point, earlier, just the two of us in the bar, about putting her cellphone on airport mode.  She's a property manager.  The phone rings often.  She likes to mountain bike out in nature on weekends.

With my own rudimentary understandings, with the legacy of parents that place certain kinds of books upon one's expanding bookshelves, interests that awaken, recede, come back strongly again, with my own experience of almost twenty five years behind a bar, yes, why not;  I stand just as good a shot as anyone of being his own particular sort of Zen practitioner.  And thus, whatever I would write, really would be the geological record of a pursuit of some earned wisdom, not unlike that found in a therapist's office, or in a book such a professional might recommend.  And find along the way, a Zen guide to my own form of sanity, something to share, something going beyond the specific details of crafted cocktails and all that stylish rot.  Wine does not go out of style, and nor does food, nor does wisdom and good mental health.

I wanted to report to you, doctor, that after I wrote and got to work, I dunno, maybe I'm a bit manic, because I felt good.  I went about set up, and the other guy is always late on Monday and there's the laundered seat cushions to put back on all the furniture at the wine bar, jazz set up to do, stocking, but I felt good about myself.  I felt solid, I felt grounded.  I said to myself, well, people don't change;  one a nice guy, always a nice guy, you simply can't change that.  And that's an artist for you, willing to take a stream of people and observe them through the close act of waiting on them, pretty smart actually.  Life kind of made sense again, and I felt like I'm starting to write again, so that's pretty good.

A lady came in, a tricky person, not seen her in a while, and yeah, she's a bit tipsy, a bit out of focus, slow with her hand movement.  I gave her a sip, not a glass, of the Beaujolais as she requested with a  slight slur, as I studied her a bit, just to confirm my suspicions.  How much did you have to drink?  Well, probably more than the three Stellas she told me.  The music's playing now and the waiter is sitting a few more people and taking over the reins after I got 'em started.  And this woman, not from America, is kind of like I'd imagine a fanned out cobra rising up from the other side of the bar ready to strike, kind of coming up and staring at you and sort of purr-hissing, words drawn out, have you seen my leather skirt?  And I try to make conversation.  She's out of work.  Watery eyes.  Well, I cut her off.  I don't  want anything bad to happen to you.  Wow, good to have values, to carry them out, to not feel so ashamed of a situation that you try to gloss it over, hide it, contain it from the other customers.  No, just do what you should do.  And the waiter came over later and I said, yeah, I cut her off.  Of course, she's a bar fly, mentioning some of the old bars of Dupont Circle.  Did you..., he asks.  No way!   She's a handful, always drama, no way.

I read in that book you gave me, that we are a continuation of our parents, and there's a point where you mourn less and that you sort of pick up what they were.  Like my father.  I listen to an Alan Watts lecture and I think in the deep alternative way he kept, and there I am, living on with his values, which before, in mourning I've been a bit too chickenshit to do much with.   I mean, I've thought going off to a retreat at a monastery, but Dad was very much in the world, and his spirituality was high, high as anyones, but calm...  And I think he would tell me, keep on writing.  You have real work to do.  Good work.  Good for people.  Good to take away their illusions.  Good to keep them open to less materialistic ways of thinking.

And that's what I value in literature, not that it's great writing put up on some untouchable pedestal.  No not at all.  But that it's true, accurate, real, that in it you've lined up a few things people should consider.  That's why people have written.  That's why they make art.  Giotto on down.


Values, the higher, the more thoughtful, the more careful they are, they are harder to understand, and you can carry them latently for years, not knowing exactly why.  Yeah, sure, you get little inklings, like when you read something about Buddhist thought, like the 'illusion of fixed self,' or like how it's better not to be possessive and materialistic about things, about relationships, desirable things and activities and people...  But that can still be kind of abstract until you can look back at something you've been doing all along over the years and see how non-materialistic, how wise really, even if you didn't think so good of yourself.  Well, maybe you think bad things when you're not living up to your values.  Of course. it makes sense.  Never have I wanted to be possessive in a relationship.  Maybe I wish it weren't so, but it ain't in me.  And I suppose I have to find a way to live by that, and to make it normal, my normal anyway, hard to picture in the mind's eye of popular culture and all its stuff.

I guess it's hard to trust things, maybe even yourself sometimes.  Because we've all been disappointed.

So I got myself down there, to see the Wyeth, before it closed, and I don't go see exhibits as a consumerist, to check off I saw this, I saw that, El Greco, Giotto, Da Vinci.  I know what it's like to be an artist.  I know what it costs.  I know the benefits.  And here's his painting of his old man's studio and then his own.  And the Mall, the day after the day after Thanksgiving, is crowded, and yeah, I'm feeling lonely, having barely gotten myself down there, with some trouble, as if against the stream, and literally so with my mountain bike...  The exhibit is crowded.  And I know these paintings.  I've been to the old house in Rockland.  My mom has the book Christina's World.  I commune with the paintings, Wind from the Sea, and see that, yes, as they are saying, there is something abstract to them.  Even with the literal touches, the shaft of sunlight on pieces of straw in the barn, there is something heightened, deepened about the experience of the present moment, for one a freezing of time, but more than that, a deep look into the real realities of things.  There's a shadowy black cat looking up at you from the bedspread of Christina's bed on the ground floor because she couldn't climb the stairs.  Paintings of old rooms in old houses.  In one he's looking down on the Kuerner farm, past dusk, and there's light coming from a window of the farmhouse down below, and he wrote that he senses a shadow of the man's movement, and in that movement the bare spirit of him.  And the one, Spring Fed, you're looking at this trough like basin where the water pours continuously filling, and beyond cows in spring light, and the pasture rises beyond that, and the note says that Wyeth's father, N. C., died not far away from it, killed by a train hitting his car, 1945.  There's others of his toy soldiers, and that legacy of his father's work, Robin Hood, Treasure Island, illustrations....  a kid would have the imagination to position the soldiers just so, and suggest a war going on.

And then I'd had enough, I wanted to stay, but it was time to get going, groceries, ride home, get a bottle of wine and some meat and stuff, vegetables, Whole Foods.  Then home, and home alone, and that's what it felt like, so later I wandered out, called my friend Dan, ended up having a glass of wine upstairs with my neighbor, going to bed.  And the next day I had to drag myself to work, my Monday morning...  But finally by the end of the night, I'm kind of dragged into being convivial, go have a splash with the old Holmgrens who can't get up the stairs, two nice couples at the bar to talk to, taste wine with...  And I even got out at the end of it, after taking off all the seat covers to be laundered, down to 14th Street for a couple glasses of wine (Chianti, 12.5% alcohol) and a little chat, could have pursued a young lady I struck up a conversation with but had to get home...

And now I've began to digest going down to see the Wyeth...  I put my values into action, the demons came, and I faced them, and I'm thankful for that, for the book you gave me, doctor.   It reinforced me.  I've always appreciated Wyeth.

But after finishing my first book, yeah, I fell into a slump, not feeling so good about myself, you know, the usual voices in my head, and maybe not even that proud of it, because it's a bit of a memoir, and you don't want to, you know, invade people's privacy...

"There are literary people who know how to figure that stuff out.  Look at the new memoirs coming out."

Like Cheryl Strayed...

"Yes, exactly, and that's being made into a movie..."

Yeah, Kerouac changed all the names and they made him get signed release forms, something like that.


I remember a paper I wrote, my final one for my best teacher, Benjamin DeMott, and I chose a passage from Islands in the Stream.  The assignment was about cultural studies, about what was going on culturally in such an event, and I kind of missed the whole point of the assignment, pretty much intentionally, because I had a deeper point I wanted to make as if beyond contemporary culture in which I should have analyzed the image of Ernest Hemingway in popular culture.   So there I was, the last class I would ever take there, and I chose to make a study of the artist, what he does.  A man is looking up at his cat up in an avocado tree, writing that down, being fully in the present, the meaning of the cat to him personally...  but still in the present moment, going deep into it, talking to the cat...  And this is Hemingway's portrait of an artist.  The cat is doing cat things.  The man is watching the cat, in so doing being an artist.  And in this act, what the man was doing, I said, was praying.  Maybe I didn't know quite what I meant, praying.  Like, is the old fisherman in fishing praying for the big fish, which then comes, but then he must get it back to shore after catching it and killing it?  Is the prayer answered?  Is that story he wrote, Old Man and the Sea, then a prayer which comes close to the truth when Hemingway the old writer goes back to Spain for this legendary duel between bullfighters, too big a story to drag back, to edit down...

But, yes, that's it.  Prayer.  That's what an artist is doing, being fully in the present moment.  That's why we like coffee shops, because we can be out of the house with just enough stuff going on, this actually happening, a woman walking by wearing Laboutine high heels, sparrows, the proprietress of the tea shop arriving and then talking with her employee out on a bench, two guys at a table over there sketching out a restaurant menu...  That's Hemingway, being alive in the present moment, like here's what it is to be standing on the bridge looking down at fish.

And that's what an artist is doing.  That's what I did in writing a book.  You're getting at deeper reality, the meaning of things beyond the day to day events.    And this is Zen practice.  And you know all those voices can hit you, chimerical monsters coming out of past memories, all the stuff you make up in your own head, as if wanting a story line, but here you are fully in the present free of all that, observing.

Artists can be a certain way, they're generous people.  maybe not always, but Mastroianni, he was a mensch, he loved to stay up late cooking with his girlfriend.  He was generous enough to feel all torn up about Catherine DeNeuve...  Full of humanity, the guy.  And he could play a lowly waiter.  And to take up such a role, that is within the provenance of the artist, to do such a thing, because an artist is often a deeply spiritual person.

What matters about art is not the fuss about style and whether it's good or bad by some new standards, no, what matters about art is whether or not it's true, whether it's accurate...


All these young people want to write, well, that's a good thing, they want to be spiritual.  Nothing wrong with that, even if Fox News would make such people out to be stupid fools.  Be an avatar to them?  Explain what it's about?  Well, I don't know, maybe you let them figure it out, but help them along the way.