Hecatomb
“It’s not so easy writing about
nothing.”
~ Patti Smith, M Train
Come
sit with me and drink this wine and we can talk about everything.
I
think it appropriate to begin with a moral hero: the other evening out on a stroll
my eyes
caught sight of an old mandolin player, he set fire to the entire city and sidewalks;
a bawling
ringmaster distributing short stubby folk songs for the souls of sinners.
A
minor celebrity, his hands, outrageously, were the size of over-baked bread
loaves,
they
seemed such an oddity hard-strumming a small implement meant for picking
with
a plectrum, or, more traditionally in history, a temperate quill.
His
performance allowed me to diverge from the static momentarily,
his astonishing
beard, wild windswept mop of golden hair more like hay, distracted me
from
my personal anxieties and tribulations long enough to exhale peacefully.
Amusing!
The slashing riffs and silvery melodies, served as a perfect antidote
to punishing
seclusion and for that, O friend, I owe him unconditional gratitude.
Afterward,
like a fiend, I tore through dank alleyways, delivering my leaden heart
home
into a quilted and rickety twin bed, my icy lips curled tightly into an
unfinished simper.
O
friend, I have to say I hope that you aren’t too disappointed that I’ve not
majored in
English
lit. In fact, I’ve had no prescribed teachings in the art of writing or
otherwise.
I
went headlong into the hinterland, the creative wastelands in search of something
unexpected. And you ask, whose hand was it that reached
way down to guide me along?
A
furtive. I keep a reel-to-reel tape
recorder (just in case) bedside in the event such
a
soul arrives down to chant in long probing repetitive sentences. To be faced with
a
robust greeting from the likes of Bukowski, Burroughs, even Hemingway, or
Kerouac
is
when you really start to live, to actually originate material to be artfully exploited.
I am
sad I was never afforded the opportunity to plunge the dankest ocean-tides with
Oliver
Sacks.
To don a bright turquoise bathing cap, goggles, or a 20s style swim-suit to go
and
snorkel with him focused on a distance swim, at ease with his private
underwater Idaho.
Afterward,
I imagine we sit close together shivering, supping lukewarm tea, nipping
wafers
in thrilling woolgathering silence. Ollie Sacks, my old, hesitant and absentminded
chum,
deathly near-sighted and cack-handed, soft-spoken yet accurate in his
prescriptions.
O friend,
I tell you, I have spent many pleasant evenings attempting to communicate
outward.
Evenings
clacking away raptly on an old manual typewriter atop an exceptional writing
desk
of mellow-pale orange pear wood, the nearby shelves crammed with bountiful
books
all
stuffed into a modest wooden bungalow where I spend over half of my quality
time.
It
is here I map out the stitch-marks of my many mishaps on expensive reams of
paper.
I
rely on ebullient imagination and muscular emotion to craft the narratives –
William
Carlos Williams delivering breech babies, Franz Kafka poems about his refusal
to drop
his trousers while visiting nudist colonies, humorous haikus about Neruda’s
socks,
a one-woman
play starring Virginia Woolfe as the ‘demon bowler’ and another, tragic in
nature,
of SylviaPlath’s plans with a gas stove in the apartment where Yeats once
lived.
It
is also here where I consume airy confections, locally bought, and compose long
profound
letters
that begin with such bulbous first lines like: “I am ready to become your fate.”
I
write these longing letters to someone no longer in my sight or my reach. It is impossible
to
dance in synonyms, it is a constant conundrum and yet I still feel a little bit
hunted.
O
friend, please stay. Here, let me refill your wine. I dislike looseness in a
poem as much as do
seeing
a friendly face depart. We have so much
to discuss, the night is still young!
This
is the very same cheap wine I drank far too much of while reading a tattered
volume
of Albert
Camus poems to soothe a nagging toothache.
An opaque, abstract and strange
experience,
controlled terror to be sure. I observed two dead leaves do a muted dance
among
other perplexities and they wore six different masks for each fluid move made.
A
drunken dream, something deeply hidden beneath the scratchy surface. I wrote a
hecatomb
to memorialize the experience. The poem is said to be: ‘a revelatory read in its
slim,
potent
entirety.’ ‘ A crisp account of bizarre fragments. Consider yourself enlightened!’
You
ask, do I feel superior? Auto-didactic? I feel more akin to forsythia pale and perhaps
I
have outraged my audience. An over-eager wag, a touch gauche, too bookish even.
I,
known, both for unflinching convictions and fruitful monotony dusk until the
dawn,
live
a life of abstractions with a deep-seeded need to create meaning where there is
none.
Example,
I penned a pregnant yet punchy commemorative poem about Beatrice Potter’s
family
recipes, it was a victorious effort; and another about the circumference of Tom
Waits’
grapefruit
moon. It all started with a sunrise, leading to nocturnal visions, a vintage
bounce
from
a jazzy stew of art and sound, the surprise of good stars, an overwhelming fear
of death,
and
a litre of dry wine offer. I discovered the depths of winter enough to know its
weight:
the
grittiest, sleaziest, booze-soaked veracities. From a cold concrete floor, I
welcomed
the
drama and gravity of ordinary days. I should have been more diligent then but
it
is a harsh world when you are starting out with fists full of assumptive and
youthful vanity.
New
Romancers, persuasive advocates for creative congruence: sponsored the
burnishing
of that reviled reputation, looked at me there with my sweater caked in mud,
imparted
their suggestive insight employing the elegant swerve into reverent restraint.
I
would hazard a statement to their certainty that I possessed a worrisome tendency
toward
fatalism. To be fatalistic is to believe anything broken cannot be fixed, the
best
any of us can do about the world’s miseries is to discuss them at great length,
eloquently
and with blind faith that all will be redeemed. Such was my ambivalence.
They
said, “You can learn a great deal about a person based on how they cope with a
fever.”
Sickness
was not my end as it turns out and kindness is not condescending, moral of the
story.
I
adopted fastidiousness, the most compulsive way of keeping myself minor,
humble.
Not
the suffocating smallness derived from the illusion you have to be slight to
achieve
greatness but rather the liberating dimension.
Resolve and incentive.
“Make
use of your suffering, deconstruct the perilous barriers to love and then you
may write,
laugh, and adorn your freckled arms with affluent bands of silver and gold.”
O friend,
before you go, let me say, isn’t astounding the way our minds affect our
bodies?
The
correlation between our corporeal and divine distress, the liaison of our
quantifiable
form and that of the soul? I used to
tussle with excruciating uncertainty
with
equal parts rotting guts and grist to be able to utilize my gift despite my
limitations.
O
friend, forgive my mawkish diatribe, I haven’t let you get a word in edge-wise
have I?
You
did ask where I acquired the discipline to catalyze artistic acumen. I felt it
was
best
to be candid and of course I was overcome with the upheavals of my thoughts on
it all.
After
all of that, what’s left is to master the art of growing old, though in order
to do so
we all
must walk our own wayward paths. Yours may take you to the meditation retreats
of
Bali,
to a Montana ghost town on Grasshopper Creek, or the common humdrum of a
suburb.
Wherever
it takes you it is vital to learn how to embrace infinite dissatisfaction, Do
not
censure
the excursion, appreciate it. I could temper this with a world of advice on
ambition
though
it does appear to me that you’ve got drive. You are fortunate, foster, spend it
wisely.
I
wish I had the time right now to tell you about the time I helped catch a 350lb
blue marlin
or talk
about how Einstein and Gödel shaped our experiences with time. I only have 100
lines.
These
subjects may seem most unusual and breath-taking to you yet for me that are
mundane
anchors of constancy and reveal the sincerity of spirit I aim to convey.
Many
thanks for sitting here at this kitchen table, breaking bread, in my weary
company.
I
hope you will retell this encounter to others with the utmost civility, able to
peel
back
the superficial ordinariness to regale in the evocative underneath. I offer
great
assurance that next time we should meet here at my table, our visit will be as
pleasant
and that mutually ennobling dialogue will ensue. And, this I swear:
I will not dominate the
conversation. Goodbye and good-luck.
**
