Skunk
is sitting at a table. He’s attracted a woman, or more likely he to she, but
there they sit. She asks what he does, and he tells her, and that leads to the
obvious question and sets him aflambe. She’ll glaze over half way through, and
by the time he’s done, her chair will slide back and she’ll be gone. He’ll
appreciate the view of her walk-away anyway and consider it something, not
lost, but gained. So here goes:
Have
I written a book? No, I have not. I have compiled a thousand words…constructed
thousands of paragraphs, miles of sentences. But a book? No. Too constraining. too structured, too disciplined. Too hard. ...Have to have lived a life...Something to say. My words are not
from experience. My words come from the ether, and channel through me, to…who
knows? (Christ, I sound like so many self involved, closet cases ...speaking in
abstraction & clichés, ...meanings empty, vapid verse). Maybe the next guy down the
street who is writing along with me, word-for-word, thought-for-thought, maybe
he knows. Maybe he has the same awakening, the same revelation, the same mental orgasm. Then, too, I read words and say godthatscrap and reflect back, blurry, wondering if they were
my words born from some other mother. So foreign so distant.
The
constant observer, the eavesdropper. I do look and I listen. The mortal souls
that share our space and air, so familiar but, so too, strangers and
eccentrics. I love dialogue, the bits of pieces, the rogue voice, the common
voice. I don’t much care for punctuation – I know it’s essential but resent
it’s formality. If I feel like a coma, I comma. It’s the rhythm in my flow…I almost said ‘dance’ but that’s an image we’ll not stir. Dialects come. Word choices are easy, fluid, but often odd. I simply transcribe. I habitually refer to it as the TV down the
hall – someone else’s apartment – loud enough to hear as background, but
sometimes cutting through your consciousness, quite clear and compelling. It's like my mind is 'apartmentalized' little units with their own life form inhabitants. The
voice at the back of your head – conversations passing in traffic, often going
in the opposite direction. Or, that thing you read in the paper or the scene you
passed in the bus. There's a poodle on the roof of a passing car, the owner/driver oblivious to it's fate. Before you can scream it's too late. It's gone. You see and hear stuff everyday, every friggin minute of consciousness, and sometimes UN-consciousness. Pixels...particles...These are pocket scraps, post-it notes, not literature. This
is painting without the paint. Like painting itself, the work of it, the art of
it, the discipline of it…and in my case, the lack there-in….because there is Work to it. There's GUTS to it. I admire it so. I am a really messy painter,
often frustrating myself with my own clumsiness and tendency to make mud…maybe mixed with fear for lacking talent. So I stay a nothing in the first place. I sketch.
It’s less of an investment. It’s quick and immediate. I point, I shoot. You
make it – you capture the thought, don’t over-think it, or think it at all -
it’s done. Sometimes trudging, and depressing, you wad it up and throw it away
- but sometimes suddenly wide open. like Vince Lombardi – Run to daylight – and when that hole opens up and you see the field
for what it is – it’s breath, it’s width, the sky, the stands, the sounds,
explode. It’s not even that you feel the running – you don’t – you just are. Sometimes it’s like that.
The jazz of it. Writing short stories, not worried where
they are going or how they intertwine. No diagrams. No complexity beyond a
page, or four. Economy. Playing rifts, not writing the concerto. Have I written
a book? If disjointed text and context are to be accepted…if structure is an
issue…a demand…I don’t know. And ‘not knowing’ means I have not. Is that
important? To some, certainly to most writers, it is essential, and I know I am
not most. But the guy down the street can be saying that too, and he’d either
be right, or just as wrong.
Who's Vince Lombardi?
Right
now a marching band is strutting a block away, the horns are playing a simple
rhythm. Drums tapped lightly. Their feet in beat. They are not on display, not
in full regalia, but awaiting their moment, to strike. The horns bide the time.
That’s what I’m hearing as they march away. Farther down, a mile or so, as they
approach downtown, I hear the blare and pound as they explode in sound.
