I'm worried, but what good does worry do? Worry comes from thinking. There is no need to think when you feel badly. It is time to do.
Doing is complicated, though, if you have gotten out of practice. I am out of practice. But for a few things that I do over and over, I've done little. There is much that I don't want to do that needs to be done, and if I think about that, I worry. I'll simply change my mind, I tell myself. But it is more. I have forgotten how to do the things I don't wish to do. Or rather, how to start them. Once I am doing them, I'm certain I'll remember. And after a while they will be done.
This is true of the things I used to want to do as well. I find myself not doing them because I've forgotten how to start or only remember the trouble and what can go wrong. Again, however, it is a matter of beginning. Once into the thing, there is an automatic response that keeps a clever person going.
That has been the difference between my life and the lives of many I have known. They have been able to do the things that need to be done and to eschew the things that are frivolous extras. My life has been the reverse of that. And now I have no money but a lifetime of things that others refuse to believe. They wish to leave me with nothing.
Yesterday I went to the one remaining bookstore in town and found some nice surprises. There is a new book of Hemingway's early letters. I read through a few and most of them are too early, but there are more than a handful of letters that provide some insight into the mind that shaped the craft. And on another table, I saw a paperback entitled "F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Short Autobiography." It has a goofy cover and appeared to me to be some Reader's Digest style biography for kids and dolts, but then I saw that it was edited, so I opened it. It was a collection of personal essays. I bought it immediately. Having read but a few so far, I can only hope that the rest are as fertile a ground. The essays are witty, and much of what he does and how he is doing it is immediately apparent. It seems a style guide to writing with wit. The essays span twenty years of his short writing career, so I am anxious to watch his style and technique evolve. It will be sad, I'm sure, like studying Dick Diver's descent.
And while I'm rambling. . . Donald Draper/Dick Whitman's descent, I'm certain, is based partly on the knowledge of that.
And my own? Oh. . . I have based it upon them all.
Great ramble: doing is complicated. Was trying to figure out how to 'do' this morning but I'm afraid it has escaped me...
ReplyDeletePoem 3. of 20 poems on drinking wine
ReplyDeleteI built my hut near people
yet never hear carriage or horse.
"How can that be?" you ask.
Since my heart is a wilderness, the world fades.
Gathering chrysanthemum by the east fence
my lazy eyes meet South Mountain.
Mountain air is clean at twighlight
as birds soar homeward wing to wing.
Beneath these things a revelation hides,
but it dies on the tongue when I try to speak.
R, Yes, doing is difficult. I don't.
ReplyDeleteL, 3?
This woman's breasts seem partially albino and without specific gender affiliation. They are not female, not in any way that I've ever known femininity to be. It is as if they are hills like white erections, but conflated so as to be more homosexually male than the product of being a n actual, natural female.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what to say next, but they are there to be something, and something noticed, they have an affirmative action nature to them, they demand more than mere equality.
It/they is/are grotesque and I am troubled by it/them, as if they/it are/is not a true "them" at all/some.
It is soft, understandably pornographic but not for pornographic pleasure. It is ironic without humor. It is absurd and triggers for the mind, like bottle rockets that will never fly.
I do not wish them away, but I also do not wish them at all. They are made by men, for men, transported along by women, some woman, probably across state lines, smuggling while they can, and when the money's good.
Smokey and The Bambies....
-Cue6
You say such terrible things.
ReplyDeleteWell, they're fake, right? It is not I who has brought this awfulness into the world.
ReplyDelete