Writing on an airplane is HUGELY productive. An expensive habit. Is it the boredom? Disinterest in the in-flight movie, especially compared to the delights of parsing the safety video? Sustained physical discomfort resulting in yoga-ish inward journeys? Mid-conscious realization that flight in a huge metal tube at lethally cold low-pressure altitudes is an hours-long defiance of the designs of Nature, and Nature ALWAYS wins?
A chant.
Pen to paper. Fingertips to keyboard.
Like thousands, millions, billions high primates before.
A boon, a propitiation to no one around.
I choose not to go numb, though stumbling clumsy and thick.
And frowning at what has been scrawled or tapped more often than smiling.
But I choose to try. To last.
Slogging through a bog, getting sips of strawberry lemonade.
So far with the writing project, it’s been writing by hand while out ‘n’ about, then getting around to typing that writing up by hand on the computer. Doing some editing in that process, especially hiting spots of leaning into the notes and thinking “Wha-a-at the heck?” and reinterpreting.
Finished up typing up manuscript up to the end of May. Broke 127,000 words, still in the middle chapter.
Neil Gaiman, a writer I like in interviews but have never read, said in an interview that waiting for inspiration to strike is something for poets. Novelists need to sit and be at task or it’ll never get done. That’s echoed by a LOT of writers. I’m finding that to be true.
Haven’t had Writer’s Block, but DO suffer from acute Writer’s Avoidance. Finding distractions to keep from the physical effort.
And it is often dreary typing up notes, not liking what I’m going over. But then a gem or scene or description comes on that I like and it’s a relief. Promise of the project restored.
I’m really getting excited for the process of revision after the First Draft is done. It’ll be a while from now, and it’ll be brutal, but the prospect of slimming this thing down to something elegant makes me antsy and happy.
Flying back from Chicago
‘Cloud Gate’ by Anish Kapoor (also known as The Bean”) in Chicago’s Millennium ParkOn a plane headed home. Four and a half hours to kill. Groggy. I typically have trouble sleeping the night before traveling. Not with worry, but wondering if I should dash out and do one more thing in a famous place I may never see again. Flush away the minor concerns of sleeping and packing and proper sleep. Grab the supply of the wines of experience to fill my brain and have it swirl around in the hope that between my eyes and the cheat of a camera it will stain the walls or its residue will settle at the base of memory to give an aroma when scratched.
I packed in stages. Made up one last jaunt. Came back to the room and packed some more, then split the difference: stayed in the room and selected photos with their subdued colors (Chicago was overcast, but mild, the whole time) and lack of depth and sound and smell and motion and will and posted them to share. Wrote terse captions while my sense of geography and paths were fresh. Fell asleep after 2:00 a.m.
Woke up at 5:30. Push-ups. Shower. Wimbledon on television. Reviewed the comments on the posted photos and videos. Enjoyed the attention but also the reward of delivering the boon of new visions or evoking memories for some people who are dear, others I’ve not seen in decades, still others I’ve never met or have spoken with for scant seconds or minutes. An exhaling gust at my deeds and my people. I turn on my heel and remove the shaman robes and set them on the rack, or hand them to someone else to don. Can’t recall if the robes are in a closet or another’s possession. I had to pack, and only know the robes did not drop to the floor.
I get to airports at least two hours early. It’s prudent, but also to get through security and take strolls up and down concourses to get some exercise into a day of being launched across states and time zones, but while sitting on my ass.
An actor from a cult t.v. show (Michael Horse – Tommy “Hawk” on ‘Twin Peaks’) popular 20 years past walked by, slightly hunched, into the Men’s Room. Wiry white hair to his shoulders. Blue denim jacket with a patch of a white hand making the peace sign, words “American Indian Activist” over that logo. He looked well, and not visibly anxious about being in public. I let him go pee instead of saying “Hey!”
On the plane as it ably performs its aeronautical miracle of transport, but the cabin air is hot and muggy. The air nodules in the console above offer no cooling, allowing minimal airflow like pointing a body-temperature, sustained, stink-free dilated fart lasting several hours.
Big gourmet headphones (not Bose!) clamped over my head, I am surrounded by rectangles. This journal. Book of poetry on my lap but under the seat tray. When Music player wedged between my legs piping about an hour of The Western Canon audiobook (a chapter about Marcel Proust) before I switch to Québécoise chanteuse Martha Wainwright trills and torches Piaf songs ably and with a full voice she does not commit to her own songs. One bar of organic fair trade chocolate in my belly, another bar of another kind in my bag at my feet. Laptop in that bag. Portfolio holding notes and outlines of a writing project. Kindle. Powered-down smartphone in my bag (pssst… you don’t truly have to shut it down, the crew only needs that for your attention during the tender take off and landing phases – so says science and airline pilot columnists). Girl two seats down jumping from movie to movie on her parents’ laptop. Rows of monitors mounted above us play the CGI cartoon film Rango and I wonder if someone in an airline meeting room raised a hand and suggested they routinely calibrated their monitors. Am guessing that person was shut down by a bean counter or a philistine boss who sees no problem with wildly different hues, washed out or blown out colors that look nothing like what artists and other billion dollar companies intended. The same kind of philistine who thinks the wide screen HD televisions with murky non-HD programs look just fine so long as the stretched image fits the whole screen even with people looking like squat blotchy toads. Usually within minutes in a hotel room I’m trying to circumvent the pokey Fisher Price remote and leaning behind the t.v. searching for buttons or knobs to make the window to the world or to fantasy look normal.
I have a fever. Wish they would hook up the apertured fart vents above us to a frost giant. Can I roll down the window? Frost along the edges show it’s nice and cool outside.
It was a mad and gloomy walk.
It was a mad and gloomy walk, though less than Abraham and Isaac’s.
I had to get back to that patch of dirt, now mud, in the thunderstorm.
Crackling random nearness of the lightning bolts. Warm, demanding, saturating rain.
In cars growing up I would ride with a friend and we would chase down thunderstorms, what a cool way to die, we’d laugh, but we meant it.
Had a lightning bolt struck the car, BARROOMMMED next to us, us teens, we’d have been as blissed as panicked. Up hillsides we’d be close to eye level with the storms and sidle up to the churning forces. Hey.
Harrumphing now, as a man, in my mad and gloomy walk through the deluge I knew I would prevail on the way there, I would get there like a salmon to its ground unless nature escalated. I reached the patch of mud, once dirt, and knew it would be dirt again. I stood on my place. Mine. I would likely never return to it after looking around this last time. Over my shoulder, with a nod bequeathing it to all others in existence by my grace. The gusts and the light and the drama and bursts of rattling noise and the blanketing rain and the ripe damp saturation of everything made my mind quiet. Nothing left to keep dry. My thoughts and wants and memories and wishes no longer had to crackle and rumble and whisper and whoosh – the world was that all around me. Thoughts were a stone on the surface of the water, above the ripples.
Clothes including the boastful, now hubristic waterproof Gore-Tex jacket were soaked and so pointless the only thing keeping them on was modesty.
I still like walking in inclement weather. Boastworthy in a “How’s the weather?” chitchat the day of the walk. But mostly a leaning forward into hard circumstance. Make things wild and harsh, dear Nature (within endurable measure), and grant an interval of peace within.
Death is tedious
A few events in the past week got this going. Photo is of a glass of wine I had tonight.
Death is tedious. It greets you with reminders of each time you met.
Death waits as a body turns against itself, eats an apple while seated on a windowsill choosing whether to nod at its name being called.
Death puts coarse molasses sugar over memory, then sears it brown. You take your teaspoon to crack at the glaze to let the memory breathe and stir it. The shellac cannot be broken.
Death jumps backward to parrot screams, coughs, laughs, a fond sigh, drowsy breaths that were once strong and pressed against you. It is a refrain only for you. You recall the light and who and the touch and are almost there. Almost. But they are the ripples Death has sent forward to you, and they break.
Death then leaves to sit on another windowsill, says that it will meet you again in the past, the future, or a sudden now.
You move forward, the only thing you can do, and see the compressed ripples before you, the laggard ripples in your wake, and wonder which of them Death will borrow and send to another.
Attunement by a lusty old man
I’ve been re-reading a favorite book, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, a massive elegy for the sublime in literature. Its tone of defiance and celebration of great art, yelling like Lear at the overwhelming storm of dying standards and political correctness. has always brought great pleasure.
And I hated, as Bloom did, what he labeled “The School of Resentment” — literature critics with political agendas that trounce aesthetics. The late 80s and early 90s were overrun by the massive overshoot by multiculturalists who went beyond consideration and reflection on other cultures to a mad competitive rush to see who could be the most sensitive over the self-identified labels of the day (generally fine) and on behalf of categories they did not belong to (okay in theory, hideous in practice).
And among the things I enjoy now, 20 years later, is the world feels as if the School of Resentment has significantly faded. Gone is the Carry Nation prudery and groupthink of anti-sex writers like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. The feminist field is now as wide and diverse in approaches as it should be, given its constituents are more than half the population.
I credit this book for helping recover my love of reading after graduating college. Showing that it was important to read for reading’s sake – as I’d spent the last several years reading in anticipation of quizzes and discussions and dissecting the works in graded essays and other projects. Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia helped me recover my ability to enjoy and seek out works for their ambition and their strangeness, and that I could fly by the nets of identity politics and engage with art of lasting merit.
But Bloom himself.
The videos I’ve seen of him have been of a man who probably looked 60 by his late 30s yet has held steady within his sturdy torso, resembling a bag of profound sighs (though he rarely sighs). A melodious, despairing, challenging voice that suits his authorial tone. He proclaims himself “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator” as a badge, a sense of resignation, and “a certain fury”. He rarely looks at the interviewer or the camera. He obviously tasks his brain with searches and phrases too much for visual courtesies, though he is perfectly gracious in his words to people.
Naomi Wolf famously accused him of hitting on her while she was an undergraduate student at Yale. If true, doubtless a horrifying, macabre experience, and she’s entitled to her rage at the unethical behavior. Yet his alleged line to her was so sublimely skeezy (“You have the aura of election upon you”), the dirty old woman/man part within us all can’t help but feel a little moved.
But, all allegations, and who has NOT had a shady moment in the “Just trying to get laid” department?
Resolutely fond of him I will remain. Sorry for that Yoda syntax. I remain fond and grateful to the man.
Waking from a nap
I open the window to let in the sound of the rain.
Gust falls.
A police siren.
Subsides. A train whistle to the east.
Another heavy burst. Then quiet, steady.
Passing car in the alley splays the steady runoff down the pavement.
Dry room. Fond room.
Another heave of the wind brings water through the screen,
Onto the windowsill, onto the floor.
Worry later.
The Soul Selects Her/His Own Society
The Soul Selects Her Own Society
by Emily Dickinson
The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —
Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —
I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —
Socializing when you don’t want to is a drag. Even when socializing isn’t a dreary duty, the people delightful, the occasion a privilege.
Yes, everyone feels that way at times.
I really enjoy writing. The concentration. But I need to be away from people I know to do it. If only there were some way to easily close the valves Dickinson writes of, then open them again at will without feeling/being an asshole.
Choices, choices – video games v. art
The last year has meant commitment to writing. Increased writing related to intermittent crankiness and rawness. In this last year, my video game playing has dropped to essentially nil. I love video games. They are mind-numbing (usually) and verrry pleasing to the reptile brain. It’s strange how I’ve not been inclined to play them unless asked by the kids. Have never installed a game on a smartphone, nor on Facebook. Have flushed hundreds, thousands of hours of my life in World of Warcraft. Recently? Nope. Doesn’t feel like it’s a testament to an improved character, simply not something my neurochemical system wants to do. Not feeling susceptible to granular rewards dosed at regular intervals. More cruelly charmless expensive dark chocolate, though, NOW! We wantssss it…