In the back of my mind is what will I write next. I should , like Pilate, wash my hands of writing, but I can’t, not really. It is tied up with my drive as a person which is considerable. A few words here on a pad, a phrase or so, a complete sentence over the days amounting to so much verbal dandruff. I have learned over the decades not to force it. The unconscious will speak in due time. So I sit in my car on Franklin Avenue in Huntsville waiting for noon and a luncheon I am attending for museum docents. And I compose this opening paragraph. A few of my books began as scribbling in my car.
As I look back at the eight books I have written, I realize all that verbiage came from my well of the unsaid. I don’t know what to make of all this scrivening. I am not adamant about posterity. If all of it went up in smoke, I don’t think I would mind as much, for I believe at 79 it was all just an expression of a life’s living, like marbles very much in play in a circle. Can a man who plays the trumpet ever keep, retain or realize songs he once played? It is all temporary and has its important uses at the time.
Books, audios, oiled canvases are the expressions of inner maelstroms — think van Gogh. An art critic, Robert Hughes, considered him an ecstatic. I liked that. Maybe my writings are ecstatic moments and I need not be overly attached to what they produce. They are of the moment.
I think my being old has burnished my feelings so that I am not so much with creating now as I am with letting go. Perhaps we come to realize that the obverse side of attachment is letting go.
The books I’ve written are testament to what I have felt, what I have thought, all disguised by writer’s artifice to make them graceful, readable and understandable. I think it is vomitus, each of us capable of producing this in our own way. So I had eight books of life’s striving and pain to upchuck. Pay it no mind. You have it as well. I feel spent by almost 51 years of writing.
Fires are banked and the ashes glow. I am with respite and gentle reflection. I am passive. A friend who admired my work has said that what I have written should be preserved even if I am not well known, that it should not be lost. She meant well, a gracious thought. I confounded her with the thought that it was of no real importance as my passing itself, is of no importance. I think of slap happy teachers with their erasers in hand and blackboards. Humorously it is of no importance in the cosmic game of evolution. What is important, only for me, is the present moment I inhabit.
Carpe Diem fades out as Tempus Fugit enters to control the outcome of the game.
Time, what I once observed as an elusive vole, vanishes, leaving behind life’s desperation. To commit to print as if to stay Time’s passing is the writer’s quixotic quest. And an impossible dream. Much the same as planting a flag on some far flung away sandy shore and proclaiming it for Spain. Silly creature is man. All is vanity, vanity of vanities.
Kilroy was here says it best.
Someone once said to me that Y is a crooked letter. I cannot answer why I write, given the ridiculousness of it in an indifferent universe,. Perhaps this anecdote from Auschwitz says something.
An inmate surveying the horrors of his existence and the emotional death within the camp, said to a guard: “Why?”
The guard responded.”Here there is no why.”
I have given up asking why, leaving me with a cosmic hole in my fractal self.
A few hours ago I posted the ashes of Nina to her nephew, David, to disperse on her brother’s grave site. It is fitting that they reunite once again. David will read a poem she wrote from NMM and he will say a few words I asked him to read. I only had her for two years. At this same time my son has become alienated from me. The reasons are complex and perplexing. Nevertheless, he has no idea of my pain…may passion..and my agony as a human being. How can he? He is only a son.
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