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August 14, 2002
Volume 27: But That Seems Now Like a Superficial Analysis
I took Greek Mythology with N for a year. The class was generally unilluminating. We used to write conversations to each other in our notebooks. At the end of the year, his had half the conversations, and mine had half. I was also starting to write satirical sketches, fiction, in the same notebook. When I was in the hospital I asked him to put it 'in a safe place' since I'd left my bag in a friend's car. It must have been an extraordinarily safe place since he never found it again. Those who told me to just get a new book thought I was ridiculous for not doing so -- reasonably, since the notebook wasn't infinite to begin with -- but that was impossible. Knowing what I do now about how difficult it is for me to write, and understanding some of why -- in retrospect it is, if not sensible, comprehensible.
I had never considered it before, but that episode likely explains why I now only use little, pocket-sized notebooks, write on random pages, and always have several dozen of them. For that matter, why I particularly dislike full-size lined notebooks and usually tear the pages out after I'm done writing in one. How ordinarily tidy.
There's a wonderful Peter Falk movie called Tune in Tomorrow where he plays a charmingly deranged writer of radio soap operas. In it, there's a scene where he's sitting with Keanu Reeves (and, in my opinion, this movie may be the only justification for Keanu's existence) drinking tea made from "eucalyptus and uncured tobacco". Keanu mentions he'd "kinda sorta like to be a writer". Peter Falk becomes gravely incensed, saying one becomes a writer because one is "compelled. Yuh got no choice." Keanu says yeah, yeah, he does feel like that. Sure, kid. Well, go on, give it a shot.
Some days I feel like Peter and some, well. I don't know that I ever really want to write; I want audience and I want to communicate. But I often hate writing, where I don't hate any of the other art things I do (painting, photo, music). When I was a kid I hated music. I think I hated it mostly because it was unreasonably hard for me to read the sheets. I dropped math for similar reasons -- obvious, again, in retrospect -- though before I loved math, and excelled at it to the point where I'd be at least Feynman now, maybe an Einstein. I imagine I resist and fear specialization because every speciality has been taken from me -- just as I manipulate love because every love has either died or been severed.
Painting, photo and music are clear cut. I can choose to manipulate a photograph if it suggests something, or I can leave it plain. I can choose to paint something real or I can choose to fool around until something emerges. I can choose what piece of music to play. In all cases there's a set of circumscribed options -- what colours of paint I have or what brushes I have; what I see and can manipulate into the camera's field; what sheet music I have available. I'm not creating, really. I'm filtering -- just as I do with Moon Farmer, or on Google. I'm a superb filter, no doubt. But it's a... it's not good enough. It's unsatisfying. One might ask why, with so few good filters and so many mediocre creators, I would want to be one of them and not what I am. The answer is that it is insufficient to be a destroyer.
I dreamed about it that night; I dreamed of him in a sexual context, which I had rarely done when we were together. The dream was, forgive me, anticlimactic. He brought a cheap black hard-shelled suitcase of commonplace and gaudy sex toys and wore a flimsy bathrobe. He lounged exorbitantly on my blanket-heavy tarnished brass bed. My hands got under his robe; I don't remember what I wore but his hands were under it too. It was ordinary. I might as well have been made of soaked straw. Then someone tried to come in to the room and I couldn't hide him. He's tall, you know! Then I became aware we would be heard and I tried to box up all his gadgets that were sequin strewn on the curling wooden floor. We would teleport somewhere else, I suggested. But it wasn't what I wanted. Sex was waterlogging me with its absence; the sex was so heavy in the air that it was choking everything else. Without dispelling it there couldn't be anything else.
Posted by gtaylor at August 14, 2002 10:40 PM
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