Last week, there was a certain book I needed to read. In order to read it, I had to take a trip to a store embedded in a mixed retail/outdoor fun/restaurant area. You know the sort—face painting, hermit crabs, a fountain. As I approached the store, I saw two children in see-through balls floating on a shallow pool of water. Another child was still on land, crouched, with one hand up. He was in a ball that was being pumped full of air from a very loud machine. The hand was up, I assume, to keep the air from hitting his face. The parents seemed if not happy, relieved. The children looked scared, but since I have heard the phrase “scary fun” used before, I know it’s also possible that they were having fun.
Plastics are what make this possible.
*
I moved into a new apartment this fall, and the only place to put the writing desk was right there, as soon as you walked in the door. A poet-friend visited and said, “That’s a strange choice.” I also have a front porch for the first time in years, and feel very self-conscious whenever working. The desire is to pull the desk into the most secluded part of the apartment and to keep the lights off. But then the desk would be in the way, and why bother moving the desk now when I might move myself someplace else, say, New York or Kentucky or Shullsburg?
There is at least one throbbing desire shared by writers, and that is to be left alone while writing. For no one to know that that is what we’re doing at the time we’re doing it. There is a good pile of books featuring professors and writers who lock themselves away from their families in some attic, or the school office, or a hotel room. There is a larger pile written by people who have done the same. Small space, few windows. Emily Dickinson. A Room of One’s Own. To be alone. To have loneliness. May the ball you float in along the shallow pool not be see-through.
*
“But what about Hemingway?” a friend asks me, the friend with whom I guiltily shared those pig ears in my Monday post.
Hemingway (allegedly, and perhaps this is apocryphal) hired someone suffering from “an odd disease resembling leprosy” to meet visitors at his gate. This person was supposed to tell the visitors that he was Mr. Hemingway and that he was crazy about them.
Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald, “I haven’t been drinking, haven’t been in a bar, haven’t been at the Dingo, Dome nor Select. Haven’t seen anybody. Not going to see anybody. Trying unusual experiment of a writer writing. That also will probably turn out to be vanity.”
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, he said a few more things we might all know or feel: “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing…. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
I recently tried to watch a movie about Hemingway at a friend’s apartment. The movie portrayed him as some kind of circus ringleader, even a minor stalker of long-legged women. It was such a portrayal that the television actually broke halfway through, and we hauled the television into the corner, and drank wine and chatted as we should have been doing all along.
*
This year I’ve been looking for a job, finishing my degree. Don’t worry. This is not one of those pieces.
Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The job market seemed to have a hint of that about it for your humble correspondent.
And so I expanded the job search beyond the academic. I disrupted the patterns I had previously relied on to accomplish the work, such as solitude and custody of the eyes and generally staying away from beaches. It was uncomfortable, making a mess every system that had previously worked. There was a lot of traveling for interviews and for observing the lay of the land, which was pleasant, aside for the time the bus caught fire and suffered an explosion. The bus never did fully recover after that.
Neither did anyone’s plans, but it was beautiful, to see each plan twist into something new. All they needed was a ticket stub, a borrowed pencil, a truck stop telephone.
*
There is an idea that making oneself vulnerable to change courts change. It is an idea similar to sitting at the writing desk each day for a prescribed amount of time in order to court the muse. I was putting my hours in on both. And on the other things, too. This year, I wooed.
At the airport I’ve many times caught myself staring into the eyes of every person who hurried by as if he or she held an answer, perhaps tucked behind the ear like a quarter.
One morning in Miami I decided to sit by the bay for an hour. There were two chairs there, side-by-side. My impulse was to move the other chair so that no one would interrupt me, whatever that means when one is sitting by the bay. But it was a new year and so I fought the impulse. I sat, and saw that there was an unsmoked cigarette partially hidden in the sand in front of the other chair. A man did come along and sit. He told me about his daughter and the time he’d met her, and about driving the commuter lanes in DC. We chatted for at least an hour. He found the cigarette, of course, and smoked it. All along it had been waiting in the sand for him.
This type of incident occurred the most—accidents of seating and so on that led to long and lovely conversation.
A month ago, I was certain good news would come, that it would show up at my door. So I made a supper. Good news deserves good food. As does the messenger. But no particularly good news came as far as I could tell. So a friend came over and we ate on the porch and chatted with my beautiful poet neighbors and their beautiful poet child for a bit. It was another kind of good.
The supper was too heavily in the vein of Field of Dreams. I know that now.
*
Right now, I’m looking at the chair where I read each morning. I’m not sure what I will do with that chair. The reading makes me fonder of it than I should be. I have moving trucks booked for next week, each tentatively arriving at a different destination. Perhaps I’ll cancel them all.
My friends, enjoy your chairs. Your doors and your attics, too. When it’s time, though, go down to the Dingo. If you’re inclined, go to the beach and have a cigarette.
The pleasure, this week, has been all too much mine. When you get a moment, write me a note and tell me about your health, and what the cattle are going for at market. With any luck, by the time you read this, I’ll be wherever it is I’ve been going to this time.
P.S.
A poem by Robert Bly--
"The Wagon and the Cliff"
The pin fails, and the wagon goes over the cliff.
The doctor steps out a moment and the boy dies.
We might question Emerson about this moment.
Please don’t imagine that only people are greedy.
When a crow lifts off, its ungainly wings
Can carry a thousand Mandelas to the Island.
Hippolytus resisted women a little too much
And the Lady of the Sea decided against him.
His horses agreed to drag him along the stones.
The mourning doves singing from the fence posts
When I was a boy woke the whole countryside.
But a dove’s breastbone is a cathedral of desire.
Sometimes the saints make us seem better than we are.
Our ancestors, on their passport photos, knew
The sound of a bird being pushed out of its nest.
Some smoke of sadness blows off these poems
Because the writer has become accustomed to failure.
These poems are windows blown open by winter wind.
Kathy, it's been a lovely week. Thank you.
Posted by: ryan braun | August 02, 2014 at 02:21 AM