Hecatomb

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.

**

 I have spoken about this in previous blog posts, now Patti Smith's 'M Train' has altered my insides in such a beautiful and profound way. In the pages of her book, she talks about writing a hecatomb, a 100 lined poem. A light-bulb went off in my mushy brain: as a writing exercise, I would write a 100 lined poem. Not as easy as it sounds. Keeping track was a bitch but I did it. When I completed the first draft my cheeks were flush with joy! Didn't take as long as I thought it would but I was propelled by her masterful way with words, they moved me to write (perhaps nonsense) something that I really took pleasure in getting through. Maybe my hecatomb, inspired by the author of 'M Train' is a train-wreck but it was creatively fulfilling. 

It is written in the tone of having too much to say in a short period of time, written as I imagine my nonsensical banter would be with Patti if I ever had the chance to break bread with her.

She talks about artists, for her, who are 'couriers of wisdom' - Patti Smith is mine.

Hecatomb or bust! Yeah!

In propinquity,

Nic