Bread
18 August 2008
When in the beginning I gave myself a typewriter and sat myself down to write I struggled. I was writing a book and I was also writing page long treaties most days which were my bread that kept me going. As always true to form I will transcribe as typewritten five years ago.
july nine
full tummy, heads all empty and i don’t care
i haven’t been writing very much lately, some words here and there, but nothing sustaining. if i’m feeling hopeless and shiftless it’s my own fault. but i shouldn’t slack on my writing. if i want to stay alive i have to feed myself, keep my mind healthy which is best done right here. maybe i’m scared of the solitude i endure when i sit here hour after hour, scared that i’ll lose experiences if i remain; when nothing else should be as important as what i can create with my mind, the words i can let flow. so, drown, submerge, whatever must be done or i will no doubt loose what i started. i felt alive when i first started writing, empowered by my creating, but then i felt this was not sustaining enough, but it is. true, my money is running low, but where did the term starving artist come from? i can’t subject myself to the pointlessness of getting a job, then i shall surely drown, surely loose what i have started. i will loose the belief in what i am doing for a fucking lousy buck. i can’t think it’s me vs. society, that does me no good either, well, it’s not that i’m against society for that’s the best point of reference, the best launch into myself, a reflection of a high degree. (Henry Miller says: Everything external is but a reflection projected by the mind machine.) and it’s not as if i need to embrace society either, all i need to do is to reap from it. be the gypsy, take and take, so that one day i may give. i have my own answers, i can’t be afraid to look them in the eye with a penetrating realization. i need to breathe through my words, inhale, exhale, i am. to loose this power would be self-defeating to give in to the other powers without the strength of this one would be just as bad. as much as writing requires that i live inside myself i need to live outside, i need to find the correct balance. i’m 23 years old, living in rome with the infinity of my life before me, limited and unlimited and only the realization of it as such is standing in my way. today i knew i was going to write, yesterday i wanted to but the world got the better of me and then i feel bad, like spending my last money. i can traverse through foreign countries, thinking and self-reflecting all the while but when i choose to settle down, to own things, to have constants, i get lost. when i see a number of things on a continuum of static being i fall into the same. i forget my own becoming, it becomes less important and it isn’t. it is all that i have, however intimidating and tedious. when the outside opposition dwindles, i give in and pronounce that there is nothing to be opposed to because i have failed to see that the biggest opposition i face and will ever face is myself. so, as i wrote in tunisia, here is my bucket. my well is open and tumultuous and all i have to do is to face it, eyes wide shut.
Rome Italy
July 2003
Good Waste, Bad Waste
14 August 2008
Bad Waste: Waste: To use, consume, or expend thoughtlessly or carelessly; squander. “We live in a disposable world,” so said someone to me lately. My jaw dropped in disbelief for shock came up over me and washed into my mouth on a wave; I responded, “That’s not what my father taught me.” I was taught that everything is used until it is finished.
I think he who said such a thing wanted to shove the blame of disposability onto the products he bought; I think he wanted to not feel as bad for creating so much trash. Waste is made. And though our society encourages fly-by night treats wrapped in plastic, coffee bought in paper cups, plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic toys, aluminum cans, paper wrapped, candy wrapped, shrink-wrapped bounties, we should feel shame for clogging the earth’s pores. After all, “We love because He first loved us.”
“Haste makes waste,” is the old adage. We tumble through our lives at an ever increasing break-neck speed. Back in the old days it was easy: silverware was made of silver and tin cans out of tin. Now it’s all made out of plastic and we can’t but help ourselves to think: plastic is trash, cheap shit is trash, because in essence it is. That’s why we have been given some choice, a free-will, a brain to make decisions for all our choices have outcomes.
My dad used to tell me of his tribulations. His dad was even more of a hard-ass for waste than my own. His dad put water in the catsup and squirted it on the french fries. Now my dad doesn’t eat french fries and cuts the plastic top off the catsup so that he can get at all those hard-to-get gobs and streaks; now my dad puts water in the dishsoap and I do too.
There are of course “the movements” and as long as one doesn’t get tangled in jargon and “rules,” – for all groups, -isms and -ists, are the same — they are OK. Movements coming to us from our life-soldiering sisters and brothers evenly distributed along the States’ most westernly and most easternly coasts: organic marketers, fair-traders, raw-foodists, recycle advocates, sustainability preachers. They all have small ‘ecological footprints,’ as they say.
Good Waste: Waste: a. A useless or worthless by-product. b. Something, as steam, that escapes without being used. Life makes waste. Like Annie Dillard said, it is death which breeds fecundity, it is death that keeps us going. That senseless waste abounds is a condition of which we have zero control. And that’s OK, because I wouldn’t be able to so acknowledge my life as such, without it.
I got thinking about waste, good and bad, after my friend said such a shocking thing and after I had to again throw away another stack of papers. Art makes waste and the waste is like steam for it pushes me forward ever forward. If I decided to keep all that shitty writing I would be wallowing about in the quagmire, wondering and backtracking, thinking, “What went wrong?”
As Simon says, “Waste is part of the process.” It’s unavoidable, it’s good and bad and in-between all at the same time and there’s nothing that we can do about it but use what we have been given until it’s finished.
Summer Vacation
4 August 2008
When the school bell rang on the last of the last hours of the last of the last days, it reverberated, “Freedom!” at last. The hours and the days welled up before me and dammed, for childhood’s time is slow; the hours and the days were waded through, pleasurably, and I never got wet.
Freedom! to read any book, to run barefoot through fields, to play Super Mario Brothers, to play with friends, to eat at any hour and to eat anything. “Yes,” I thought childishly to myself, “this is what being an adult must be all about. Freedom! in choices of thoughts and action.” School was something one made it to the end of and then after that of course, freedom! of choice and action. Too bad the populace dictates; too bad they had to go and take it all away.
Summer vacation only lasted for so long, as did the summer vacation of childhood’s nubile emotions. Then entered the march of consciousness, then stuttered in the morose world of adults. No more bells, easy starts, easy ends; no more summer vacations.
Summer vacations, I just had one, though the question must linger: how much is mine deserved? Well and good, I say, like an eraser for obstinate questioning which has risen like a fork jammed into my work. Why not? I say, though writing is a work I loathe to be parted from. Everyone should have a vacation.
What kind of summer vacation would you demand?
I think it is cruelty of totalitarian standards, this obscene treatment of adults in the grand ole’ USA. You see, Italians and Europeans in general are well-versed in vacation time. You wouldn’t be a true Italian if you didn’t take a vacation in August to go swimming and beach-bumming. The restaurants close, the clothes shops, sometimes even the grocery stores. This wouldn’t be Europe if they weren’t allowed to enjoy themselves, receiving three-times more vacation time than their American counterparts. Instead you sit before a glowing screen, bored out of your minds.
An anecdote: From the last two jobs, one long standing, my mother was fired on the account of taking too much time off, too many vacations. “Margaret,” I imagine them saying, “you shouldn’t be enjoying yourself. You should stay stuck here, as if with a hole drilled into your head, like the rest of us.”
Rise up Americans! en masse! Flood the chambers of the “higher-ups.” Reach into their lower desk drawers and ring the bells that they have been hiding. Brrring! Brrrrrring! Can’t you feel your heart jump? Can’t you feel your life-waters rising?
Note: While on summer vacation I received this comment on an oldie but goodie: Henry Miller and the Life Abundant. Thanks! and Thanks always to the Cosmodemonic Blog — devoted to that immortal god of challenging literature, Henry Miller — for the continuous link!