Thursday, June 3, 2010

New old one

I wrote this a few months back. I wanted to post something because I'm going to be busy for the next few days & I like to put at least one entry in each week. It elaborates somewhat on what I started explaining at the end of Psychic Warfare about the suffering inherent in writers. The girl I mention is no longer around, and that's the only part that makes me hesitate about posting this.
I'll apologize in advance then.




 I call her "Miss Go Lightly" only because her name is Holly, she doesn't remind me of Audrey Hepburn's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Quite the opposite actually.
Holly is uncomfortable around people, that's one of the things I like so much about her. She gives me one of those slight smiles where only the ends of the lips curl up
at my name dropping, her eyes dip downward from my gaze.
We're both agitated in the company of strangers unless we've been drinking, that was one of the qualities about me she found initially compelling.

  As John Berryman stood on the cold concrete of the Washington Ave. bridge, looking at a gun metal gray Minnesota sky, I wonder if he jumped because he thought he had lost "it". it being that intangible thing that writers posses to help them write, and most are constantly in a state of panic about losing.
  I wonder if John Berryman figured his last verse his best, and wondered if he could ever produce another one better. Or maybe he had the feeling that he needed to stop now, before he became a caricature of himself.
 I suppose he could have been more calculating than that. I imagine he had to know that by jumping from that bridge on that dim winter afternoon, he would be forever etching his name onto the pantheon of accomplished writers.

  It's 12:30 am on a Tuesday night, I'm walking slowly down the beer aisle of a grocery store. I'm not shopping, I'm buying. I know exactly what I want, the Pabst Blue Ribbon at the end of the aisle. I always walk slowly down the beer aisle, imagining the good times and great conversations possible in every bottle down the row. The multi-colored labels reflecting off of the light is like a carnival for the

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subconscious. The different tones and moods, all marketed to; the starkness of Session, somberness of Guinness, the impossible standards of Miller High Life. and finally, at the end, the Sesame Street of liquid patriotism, brought to you by the letters P, B, & R. A vision in red, white, & blue.
 I grab my pack and make to exit, giving wide berth to a young man in a baseball cap and Tevas hoisting a case of Natural Light. He looks intoxicated already, and sways like he want's me to run into him. I have no less than 3 weapons on my person, I'm not worried about an altercation. I'm worried if he has an "it", and if he's afraid he might someday lose it.

  Vachel Lindsay was the heir apparent to William Butler Yeats. His verse literally sang across the page with such meter and rhythm it's impossible not to chant it out in your head. "Mumbo Jumbo will hoodoo you" he wrote in The Congo. Not yet knowing that his own mumbo jumbo was going to shortly hoodoo him. He drank a bottle of Lysol when he thought he had lost it.
 The wandering poet having made his final stop in the bathroom of his little house, and leaving his final stanza for his wife to find blue faced on the floor.

 I met Holly at a friends party. This is over a year ago now. We would see each other at parties and talk alone outside about films and books for hours, chain-smoking and gulping down keg beer. I felt like I had known her for months before she finally gave me her phone number, telling me not to use it. She said she didn't like talking on the phone, I believed her without question. Neither of us has ever said that we need to take it slow, it is just something that we have done. On the rare occasion that I see her more than once a week, I fear that I might be smothering her.

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  The darkness people mention that is supposedly inherent in writers, seems to hold it's own arcane appeal. One gets the idea that when darkness is mentioned in this  context, it is the same way Victorian era Europeans used to describe Africa as the Dark Continent. Or what Bruce Springsteen meant in Darkness on the Edge of Town.
{get back to this thought later}

  If the it that writers refer to when they worry about losing it is their mind, then Hemingway certainly lost his "it".
He blew it all over his breakfast plate one fine morning. Leaving little shards of his skull to mingle with his egg yolks, and turning his orange juice into a dark red pulp.
Just as much as acclaim, writers use their output to gauge proficiency. An auteur who produces one thin sheaf a year that only 20 or so people read, is not usually considered an accomplished writer, their misery might seem part and parcel. But Ernest Hemingway wrote great heaving reams of work. The man wrote prose like crack hookers blow cock, twenty pages a day in his lean times,
-and everyone read Hemingway!
Perhaps the reason Ernest chose to gauge his own success so suddenly and so violently is tied to what it means to identify oneself as a writer in the first place.
 A writer is expected to turn it on at will, to never have a dry spell without the fear of losing the "gift", because seemingly, all writers tend to believe that their talent at writing is the one thing that can actually be lost, just like it were a set of keys.
Maybe this isn't such an absurd notion altogether, for writing is one of those things that you have to continue doing in order to identify yourself as a writer.

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 Certainly the rapist does not share in this problem, he doesn't lose his title after a year or so of lying fallow, a rapist he remains, even after the testicles are removed so to speak.
 One only needs to commit one solitary act of murder to cement himself in his chosen profession. But a writer that stops writing is a has been.

 {perhaps a more light-hearted stanza here?}

 Writing isn't necessarily therapeutic. Even when it is, it's never as cathartic as we would like it to be. It's how I imagine a closeted teen might feel after he finally comes out to his friends and family. He may be elated about getting secrets off of his chest, but it doesn't really make anything easier.
 Even so, I'm horrified I might lose it. Sometimes I get so nervous about sitting down to write, because if it's not as good as some older piece, it might mean I'm losing the talent, and for some reason, superstitiously believing that when it  is gone, it's gone for good. Seemingly, it doesn't matter that until I started school last fall, I hadn't written a single word in four years. If I can't sit down and write a stream of conscious prose piece in my usual voice, and have it turn out in the first draft. I must have lost the gift.{kinda stupid here MC}

  I met Holly the first week of October, by the first week of May, I had convinced her to meet me for a proper date. A text explaining that she was running late only compounded my nervousness, it prolonged the inevitable moment, and meant that my beer wasn't going to last the remainder of the wait. We had been seeing each other for months but this was the first time we would meet before we started drinking. I tried to map out territories of conversation to lead through if need be

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I attempted to file the subjects I could expand on indefinitely if there came an unexpected lull in conversation. I dreaded coming across awkward, but there was no way to avoid it. I'm uncomfortable in unnatural conversations, and the only way for me to come across as I thought she saw me, was to imbibe a bit more. {stuck, finish later, or start up next Holly stanza still waiting for her}

 It was a splendid early autumn afternoon in Weston Mass. when former model and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton pulled her black Mercedes into the garage of her white bricked Cape Cod wearing her mothers mink coat and a double strand of pearls. Anne had just finished lunch with her best friend and confidant Maxine Kumin where they went over the galleys of her eighth and newest book just then being prepared for publication. With the Mercedes precise German motor still running, Anne opened the drivers side door and got out to lock the door to the garage. No one was home, it was just to be sure. She then got back in the Black coupe and hit the button on the remote to close the garage door.
 With the finely tuned motor of the luxury German car still running, Anne sat behind the wheel and lit a cigarette. She waited.
Look at the descriptors in the previous stanza for a moment if you will. Just from what you can glean from what I wrote about my favorite poet should be somewhat telling: She's beautiful, obviously successful, the mink might have been her mother's, but the pearls and Mercedes were hers. The house in Weston. She's previously published seven books and won a Pulitzer for at least one of them. What led this prolific writer down the grizzled path of mania to die alone in the placental sack of a black luxury car, choking on exhaust fumes in a cinder block room full of canned goods and socket wrenches?
Some might say Anne Sexton was predestined for death, but that's not accurate,

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we're all predestined for death, As the old saying goes about the only things that are certain. Sure, her critics turned on her, calling her "preening, lazy, & flip" towards the end. But surely a confessional poet had to be used to criticism?
Was it the critics? Was it the mental illness? Was it the alcohol? was it the it?
It starts to read like the MS billboards spackled all around Seattle.
 Maybe it was the darkness. Maybe it was writers block. Maybe it was Perry Smith's Big Yellow Bird.
 All I know is that it scares me, and that is the confession.

  My Holly Go Lightly arrived gingerly at the table fifteen minutes later. I hadn't ordered another drink, I hadn't smoked a cigarette. When she sat down across from me, and immediately looked left to the other patrons. I knew she wasn't being aloof, she just didn't really know what to say. I had forgotten every single thing that I had pre-planned to converse about, but offered something on the spot I thought we could agree on. I asked her if she wanted to order a drink, which she did. And we proceeded with our date from there. Sometimes silent, but often talking, and often enough is usually good enough. The point is that I could speak if I felt I had to, but the silences, when they came, were necessary too. Getting to know someone is often akin to getting to know yourself, and besides, Seattle was particularly sunny that day.

2 comments:

  1. You definitely haven't lost "it" sir. I can't wait to read the novel.

    ReplyDelete
  2. wordsareart.wordpress.com/ tag/words/
    thought you may like some of this...

    ReplyDelete

I'm open to feedback, but remember this is a diary. Most of these posts are first drafts and as such are unedited. Editing & revising my posts would negate the purpose of this blog for me. Thanks.