Una Forchetta
21 July 2008
I’ve come to a fork in my work. As Annie Dillard writes of forks:
Let me pull the camera back and look at the fork in the road from a distance, in the larger context of the speckled and twining world. It could be that the fork will disappear, or that I will see it to be but one of many interstices in a network, so that it is impossible to say which line is the main part and which is the fork.
Yes, that’s how I feel; but substitute “world” for “work” and you have my case. It’s like working my way through a net carelessly strewn to shore.
I’m sure most books I’ve read have bore witness to such a fork, at least once, but don’t show it. I’m sure those writers wanted to scrap the whole sha-bang and take to fishing, but they didn’t. I’m sure they kept on and kept at it with that doldrums phrase on repeat: It’s too late. I’m in too far.
The problem is that now I know where I’m going whereas before I was going, knowing I was going somewhere. So what I have are many pages I flung out into space, well-written pages with burgeoning ideas, just floating there, no life-cord, no string. I’m just thankful that there’s also no gravity so that it all may stay afloat. Now I add the string, now I connect the life-cord, securely, so that when I’m in need all I have to do is give a tug and just the idea and word flow in need will come tumbling, reckless words on pages, that’s all it’s ever been anyway.
Watch me: first I pick the cotton, bending low in the hot field, I learn to mill then I mill it, I learn to twine then I twine it, I learn tricks of strength then I strengthen it, I measure the distance between myself and the buoyant bulk then I climb it, I learn to knot then I tie it. So that all I will see will be a bunch of strings with pretty and colorful notes attached. I will pull here and over there, reckless words on pages, that’s all it’s ever been. That’s why I’m writing this instead!
Stuck in Time
16 July 2008
Our world is laden with possibilities. This is a cliche and it is true. The internet lessens gaps between what we want to see and what we can see, considerably. I get the feeling that this coming generation will believe that all things come at the touch of a button and that the differences, for them, between reality and what is on the glowing screen will be less and less clear. But, isn’t everyone always fearful for the “coming generations?”
Around this time last year I discovered blogs. I charted my discovery here. Before last year I thought that the internet was used to locate hard to locate information. That I am a slow learner is of little importance to me; that I learn is the biggest deal.
This website was created as an effort to “publish” my work, give voice to my voice. Before I discovered blogs I thought this was a website and though some may call it “blog,” I don’t care anymore. I see descriptedlines like a magazine wherein I may “publish” thoughtful articles. Who knows, maybe eventually I’ll get the hang of shorter posts like an interesting link and a sentence, but sometimes I think I’m already in too deep.
Here is my point: I am behind the times.
I was advancing OK until round about the age of 22 when I became waterlogged in Paris during the 1930s. I went back to Russia in the 1890s sometimes but really it was Paris in the 1930s for a very long time. Three years, at least, I’ve lost to this reverse-time stint. Of course I’m not talking about Paris on picture postcards; I was knee deep in Henry Miller’s Paris, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre. Names that spun-up my mind, worked up my senses to such a froth that I had no choice but to hold my head under cold water, write a treatise, or drink. Paris in the 1930s was an unbelievable time, the raw fecundity which gave birth to such staggering creations, well, I still believe there is nothing else to aspire to but that.
Since Paris I’ve advanced rather slowly, Rhodesia in the 1940s, England in the 1950s, now it’s a creek in The States in the 1970s, but reading aside… This is actually about reading and how it creates a very tangible actuality for the active mind; me knee deep in another time. Nothing else can do this but when knee deep in the heightened present.
Listening to this This American Life last night I began to think that for all my preaching, I may be at a serious disadvantage. I have a staunch disability to reconcile with Facebook and if anything is a sign of the times it must be that. I have difficulty finding blogs interesting and a worthwhile waste of time, unless of course they are dumb and then I find them funny. I can’t comment. I’ve never used chat or IM and I have no idea what those acronyms mean or the brackets with the colons. I am at a disadvantage: I am behind the times.
I am at an advantage: I am behind the times. What I have stacked in a folder to my side is a completely original work. . . or an anchor and when I jump. . . it will become lighter than me, off on its own life, its own path.
I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She supplies me with lots of juicy things to think about. Her main entomologist is Edwin Way Teale, just his name sounds old and outdated and Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize. I’ve never read a writer “up on the latest” but then I again, I haven’t read many books published after my birth. I’m at a disadvantage again.
Meanwhile, Time chugs on; meanwhile, I’m grasping for its tail.
Bracciano Italia
July 2008
Ode to Type-writer
23 June 2008
To celebrate the making of the machine that has caused pivot to the whole of my life: The Type-writer. Apparently, one hundred and forty years ago the patent was made. The typewriter is a writer’s romance image, it’s the black and white Romeo and Juliet scene of a paper scattered desk, of love or hate or any other emotion made by the firm strike of the key and then the arm and paper inked with words, lovely words. Here are some swooning, smoking, thinking, writing images of typewriters alone or at work, all done Magnum -style.
For my own ode I will stick to words, lovely words. As has been mentioned here, I am now working on two parallel drafts section by section, making the stiff-transition of typewriter to laptop. It is the laptop I must face for it is the typewriter I so thoroughly enjoy. A typewriter is the largest creative magnitude of free-form, tangible, the possibilities of white paper that addicts me. A laptop is structured, technical; but it is also very neat and gives the impression of getting somewhere. I like WriteRoom OK and the lavender background it allows, but there is no note-jotting in margins, no pencil scratches, no messy stacks of paper, only a glowing screen adorned with streaming words.
The one thing, maybe the most endearing thing of the typewriter that the laptop or desktop can never, will never have, are the movements which give rise to sounds. There’s the bell, the train-track push of the turbine, the horse-race strike of the keys, the three gear advancement of one line down, but the best, the very best typewriter sound is the one of Finished. To be finished means I must pull the no longer white paper out of the turbine which results in the most satisfying finished sound: a fast roll of gears, like a quickly spun wheel, like an axle always moving onward. With the paper out and in my hand and the turbine at rest and keys at rest and my mind at rest, it is with thanks I sigh.
To write on a typewriter is communion with higher ground. To write on a computer is work.