You may have noticed some gibberish when you came on site. All I know is that it is WordPress database error or that is what it says,. My son is on it. I haven’t the slightest clue as to what that means. When I go into the greasy compacted mossy mass of information provided by WordPress I am inundated with geekspeak. Clearly the digital age destroys by nature, apparently, the well-turned sentence. Clarity disappears altogether and what is “clear” only a geek can grasp. Wouldn’t it be loverly if instructions as to how to repair the above were as basic as the instructions on the back of a shampoo bottle.
So bear with it as my son gives it a mechanistic prostate exam, truly digital.
Charlene Martel at http://theliteraryword.blogspot.com has corresponded with me over these past few days and I have forwarded copies of my short story collection and copies of the tetralogy for her to review and to put on bookcrossing. Char, as she likes to be called, has been supportive of my writings and what I appreciate is the sense of her excitement expressed through email. To be alive nowadays, or any days, is a rare treat for me to experience, given that a large portion of my life in a secular way was to revivify the dead into living lives while in therapy. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, clients only needed a charge, a boost, a human being to help them start up. I was no reanimator. Without grandiosity, I was alive so that I worked on making them alive. In this culture, in any culture, forces put us to asleep while we are “awake.” To wit, the thing I loathe the most about Cheney, Bush and Rove are their malignant efforts to put us to sleep. I just associated to a line from Shakespeare or Ray Bradbury, “Something wicked comes this way.” I look at the aforementioned three as a writer, man and therapist and I know in my gut, in the fabric of my self, how morally and ethically deformed they are. Cheney’s mother must have lactated battery acid. Rove is fearful of loving sex, he might turn into shattered ice, and Bush has the recovered addict’s false bonhomie.
Now that I have cleared my mind, I go to the Optimist’s Rag, which is a booklet, perhaps a book, I am writing which is going nowhere and may very well be deadly dull; however, I am writing and that keeps me at it, practicing. My intent is to publish it cheaply as an extended pamphlet to give away to friends as an encore piece to my other scribblings. The intent is simple. It is a grotesque self-help book, a savage parody I hope, in which I try to help the reader acquire a sense of emptiness, and if he or she wishes to go beyond that, to acquire what I term “acute emptiness.” I try to put in all the tricks of the self-help book: bulleted lists; short tasks; fill-ins; parables; Oprahesque “wisdoms,” literary “sound bites,” whatever. I despair at moments of it taking on any real meaning but I do know that editing, pruning, severe pruning, might rescue this book. I am on a lark and I just keep babbling, for it really is an expression of my self at this late stage in my life. I am having fun ripping off some of the articles on this site and twisting and disfiguring them so that awareness becomes despicable and emptiness esteemed. I argue that the truly empty person is the happy person and that the self-aware person suffers from self-imposed agony and anxiety. You choose. Sometimes I creep in between the crevices that connect awareness and emptiness so that I can comment on both.
To wit, Nietzsche’s quotation — one of my favorites — is “knowledge is death.” The empty person realizes that this smacks of awareness, causes unnecessary grief whereas denial of death is a really promising element of the acutely empty person and like all defenses, it should be admired, one to be grateful about. And so I work with this, sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously, always deadpan and dry. Sometimes I get so confused that I end up “empty.”
For you movie lovers as I move sideways here, I have a sleeper for you — see The Red House with Edward G. Robinson, directed by Delmer Daves; masterful Freudian flic with a beautiful score. No more than a few dollars. I am about to order my copy. The last scene shows how brilliant Robinson was. Did you know he spoke 8 languages?
Live!
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