At this time I am preparing a bio for my book, “This Mobius Strip of Ifs,” for the publisher Chris O’Byrne of Red Willow Digital Press. When all this is submitted in addition to two summaries of the book for the back cover, I suppose, or for advertising as an Ebook and print version, it will be published. So over this weekend Jane and I are both scrambling to get everything in order for the publisher’s once over. The art of writing, for me, has always been the art of revision, to keep saying more by saying less, by thinking thin, or by shaving close. And so summaries and bio are being scrupulously reviewed and edited. While all this is going on, here I am in my early seventies pressed to managed a whole lot of writing, some in real time and some coalescing in my noggin.
An almost completed book of short stories, “I Truly Lament, Working Through the Holocaust,” terrifically edited by my pal, poet David Herrle, is being subjected to my final wringing out of the prose — sequencing stories, writing additional lines here and there, deleting paragraphs or lines so that the pace is a good canter rather than a leisurely trot. Jane will help me in ways I know not of the computer to format this and that, to rearrange the table of contents, to space, and all that sweet stuff that makes one’s words look splendid on the page, printed or not. I am excited over the fantasy that 2011-2012 might see two books published — hurrah for being 71! No golf for me. Books to the end of time, of life.
Everyday I walk for exactly one hour at a reasonable pace, sometimes jogging an old’s man’s jog. I think of the flic I saw last night, “Cowboys and Indians,” with Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, now in his late sixities. Craig turns to Ford, who still has his mojo, and says “Old, man” to him. Oh, Oh has time flown by! Craig, by the way, steals the movie, bony, sinewy, fast, quick, sleekly put together — Jane likes his ass. I mention this for I am quite tuned in or sensitive to the passage of time which is dealt with in essays in the above book now nearing publication — tempus fugit. So while walking for an hour a day to fight off plaque buildup in my other carotid artery, I think of all kinds of things, especially writing tasks to be accomplished in the near future as well as my psychological stirrings of what next. Like an impatient child, I can’t wait to propose the Holocaust stories to O’Byrne as my next effort, for it is a powerhouse of a book, a “sibling,” Herrle has called it, to The i Tetralogy.
Although Jane and I had a humorous chat about how I can walk for an hour without a device in my ear to endure the tediousness of exercise, I stated that I think, or that I am not empty and do not require Muzak piped in, although I am moving on that front and will factor in some Debussy, Borodin, et al if I can. While I walk I think of the next book and plot out in mind how it will be divided, or what are the sections to be. In the past I would come up with the first sentence and then devise the last sentence of the book with the idea that I would drive my energies across this arc, until like Robin Hood’s arrow, I hit the bull’s-eye. The next book will be about Eastern thought as I have experienced it in the West with the main focus on Krishnamurti (see the last blog). I intend to fabricate parts of it as if I had met the spiritual teacher who died in 1986. I had a chance to do so but money issues prevented me. It would be a kind memoir of my struggle with his teachings, rather his testimonies, over the decades. I first came across him in a social work class, “How People Change,” in 1975.
What I am intending to do is to reflect upon my interactions with Krishnaji as I read his books over the decades. Perhaps it will be suigeneris, reflecting upon how this spiritual teacher impacted upon a secular Jewish atheist, what I took from his teachings, rather, his questioning. I am enthralled more by the question than by the dead-end — the answer. I have always been attracted to Eastern thought or what has been called the perennial wisdom. And in Krishnamurti I found the bottomless well of being. I wrestled and haggled and angered and bridled with his teaching. Often I would leave his writings for years and eventually I returned to drink from the well when in anxiety or facing personal issues of intensity, more seeking in his questions what to ask of myself rather than to acquire answers, which he decidedly never gives, the genius of his teachings.
So, the task, I think, is to write about my involvement with his writings stemming from 1975 and what if anything I have garnered from them. Or, is it all a low-key infatuation with a mind that I cannot fathom too well but I know, on many levels, is a remarkable mind that offers me what I would call wisdom? As I said in an essay in “This Mobius Strip of Ifs,” I have a liking for the transcendental and then I went on that I would like to write a book in that field. I can’t wait to sink into it, to freely write about this romance I have had for at least thirty-six years. I know that at least one chapter will be my feeble attempt to state what I have learned from Krishnaji. It may be a blank page. I wonder about all that.
So as I do my laps tomorrow at the gym, I continue to plot, think out, and concoct my next book. I have written about K over the years and even wrote short pieces about him which I think, at least for now, i will incorporate into my next effort. You know, dear reader, at this time in my life nothing holds me back as I write: I have no expectations, I have no fears…I am free, to paraphrase Kazantzakis’ epitaph, who by the way, was an intimate of Krishnamurti. All the great minds get to know one another, for they are the caul of mankind.
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