Allow me to graze into this piece as it is 6:44 AM here in Green Valley. It is first light in the sky. Rarely do I know what I will write about, letting my unconscious percolate until I feel compelled to say something. I always count on the unconscious because it is a felt-truth for me that most of my written work and behavior is designed and set out by forces unknown to me. I can go through stories and point out when the unconscious spoke for there was no conscious intent to it or design. As a writer I view myself as a spigot, controlling the flow, the off and on, perhaps the direction of the well of water below. At this point, here, right now, I haven’t the foggiest about what will be written. I feel a kind of innuendo flowing about in the crinkum-crankum of my cortex, and I will try to give it voice.
I have made two tough decisions of late regarding two books that occupied a fair share of my thirties and forties, Sojourner and Gruffworld. I’ve decided to part from them, shelve them. An attempt to resurrect them only reveals that they reflect an earlier self, a less-skilled self. I am no longer that person. I am no longer that writer. The feeling which I suppressed was that both works lacked a kind of depth that I now own. I can do better now. I feel that I am embalming these works rather than going on with new efforts. I also experience the resistance, the need not to pursue new work, to linger around like a loiterer at a bus stop. Both of these works, in effect, helped me to learn to write; after writing Sojourner, going beyond 100 or 200 pages was no longer a problem. One taught me how to write a novel — in part, that is. The other book helped me to struggle with thought and thinking processes. Short stories over 30 years instructed me how to compress, condense and get at the heart of feeling or passion within a few pages. The i Tetralogy brought all my skills together for it is the best work of my life, wild and woolly, intense, passionate, ornate and distilled and very, very feeling.
And so my old friend has returned…What is that line from Simon and Garfunkel, “Hello, darkness my old friend…” Or some such thing. I am revisited by fear. Do I have the psychic wherewithal to produce another literary work? Can I churn from out of my gut work worthy of previous efforts? In short, how many triples or homeruns do I have within me? Like all fears I have seen come and go, I have to face them, go into them for there is no other way, at least for me. How do you handle it, reader? If you run, the worst alternative, your life becomes shit. So I heave on my armor, reach for my lance and go forth, shaky and insecure, but you’ll never know that from the look on my face: I will endure; it all will pass. Only in the moment do we define ourselves. As we define ourselves as we tremble, perhaps transcend our fears, metabolize them and feel brave about the whole thing, until the very next cycle comes by: loss of a spouse, nearing one’s end, disablement by disease.
As the days slip by like WD 40 on one’s fingertips, I ask myself what is it that I need do for time and life is precious. Men of my age are dead. What can I ask of myself that will not be narrowed down to happiness, although I do not dismiss that pleasure. I ask myself continuously about how to measure and mark time, that scoundrel; how best to revel in my own creation, this existence I think I “live.” If you stand back and look at the world at large — Facebook, Octomom, Cheney and Bush, Ann Coulter, Ipods, digital cameras, pixels, pop culture, recession, more like Depression, mental illness, H bombs, terrorists and their misogynist heaven, the lunacy of an oil change, the lunacy of making inordinate sums of money, one may realize how nauseating and ridiculous all this is. If you move further back in distance, let us say to the moon, you may come to a kind of personal realization that earth needs to take an extended nap, perhaps a month or so. Imagine all the earth’s population put to sleep for a while: how grateful fowl, beast, plant, air and existence might be. Enter the fray and your life is what it is now, a nettle of burrs and stings; move away from the fray and perhaps, only perhaps, you might march to the sound of a different drummer. I watch and observe the days go by and I struggle heartily to give each moment a personal kiss of affection; I struggle wholeheartedly to define a purpose or intention. Above all, I try not to struggle, which is a bitch, for it implies control, to exists. How very hard it is to be. How lucky the creature that knows no past and no future, who dwells only in the present. Man has been trying to attain that for centuries.
Adieu, for I falter.
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