Most likely from
the mid-seventies: reflections, deliberations, depressions, hopes, whinings…one
of a series..)
In the slow evening inside with cigarette smoke and coffee
and all the tiny maneuverings of a soul weary of the work world outside which
is yesterday and the day before and the day before and will be Monday after the
weekend and Tuesday after Monday, I force myself to the typewriter like a
journeyman setting to an arduous labor, attempting to define what has been
defined so many times before and so much better. I rummage through the debris
of my life, knowing that it is not particularly distinctive debris, no more
special than the debris of a thousand other lives, and perhaps composed as much
of a thousand other lives as of my own, rummage through the debris looking
for...what? A thread, a thought, continuity, inspiration, a gleam of light, a
golden ray of “yes that's it of course” out of which to compound once more magical
rainbow words mounting to inestimable stars. But not abstract words, not the
words of the arid places, the dry rocks and stony deserts, not the words baked
beneath the analytic sun until, dried as raisins, they cease to live, no,
rather words pumping blood into the carnivorous maw of thought escaping itself
and surging toward reality.
The actions of a soul breaking out of self-imposed bonds.
Self-imposed? There was a commitment proceeding, a trial of some sort, a
verdict, a sentence, a condemnation. An unfair judge, an unjust judge...
Or merely ramblings looking for a focal point. And to feed
the ramblings without some sort of discipline does little good. The thing is to
write, they say, write, use every word, every sentence structure at full speed
until becoming second nature it ceases to be a matter of man before machine but
becomes man and machine one and neither one the reality of the thing, but there
being something else, something driving both the man and the machine and it
being with that something that the man, the soul of the man, has his real
business, that the soul of the man attempts, however haltingly, however
audaciously, to contact to reach to touch to smell to experience to live with
to love to die for to rhapsodize upon to imitate to confound.
Classicism and romanticism…who knows? It is no more than a
matter of speed. They are the same thing. Romanticism is classicism speeded up,
only speeded up so audaciously, so demonically, that the end ceases to connect
with the beginning and races instead full bore toward the conclusion always
eternally and forever contained in the starting point. It is circular, god is
circular, we run in circles, wedding bands, circles of acquaintance, circular
time, circular planet, galaxies curving in upon themselves, the alpha and the
omega, circles, circles, circles, and the soul dizzy with the knowledge of it,
dizzy with it and ready, willing, to pass out, to fall into the one great
circle but not yet, not yet able, there being something else, this body, the
fact of body, and the soul, imprisoned and yet unwilling to relinquish its
prison, knowing somehow that the prison is also the source of liberation...