Winter's Gruel

Originally Posted Tuesday, February 11, 2014

I am more sympathetic than I used to be.  All the girls want to be pretty, want to have fashion or beauty or glamor images.  I try, but mine come out all awkward and strange.  It is the way I see the world, perhaps.  The images are for them something different and I become their "specialty artist."  But they really love the photographers who do the high-key images of them that look like the ones they've seen before.  It is like staying at a Marriott or a Holiday Inn, I guess, or eating at a chain restaurant that is expensive and faux-rich.  I understand why the models like the pictures--they look pretty in them.  I like pictures where I look good as well.  We have that in common.  Maybe I'll try harder.  But really, I just want to change and do something different and grungier, more scarred and tattered and distinct.  I just have to start all over again and work until I develop the look.  But models don't come for experiments.  They want pictures.  So I guess I'll have to experiment on fruits and vegetables until this "something else" is found.  I will tell you straight up, though, that my photographs still thrill me.  They've been through several iterations and processes, and they all have a signature on them.  When you see them, you know whose they are.

They should be in MoMA. 

I return to the factory today after four dissolute days away where I accomplished little to nothing of what I set out to do.  I have fallen into a deeper despair than normal, one that leaves me enervated and in truth a little scared.  A friend just sent me a link to a book by that notorious postmodernist William H. Gass called "On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry."  Dare I read it?  Perhaps it would help.  But my blue seems turning to black right now and all I want to do is rest.  I don't have the money for that and so I eat things like berry and banana breads.  They succor me somewhat, but the results are as bad as most drugs.  I will never be Ghandi and have never aspired to be.  Falstaff, there's the man for me, at least when he was going good.  Hemingway might have thought so, too.  I read an article about the Hemingway Library's posting many of his scrapbooks, letters, and pictures online.  In the nineties, I was invited to the Hemingway First Fiction Awards and went a couple days early so I could go through Hem's archives.  I looked at his wallet from the day he died, saw that his wallet was much like my father's in the things he kept there.  I watched home movies and saw many of the articles that are now becoming virtually available.  Today I downloaded his scrapbooks because I want to go through all the ads that are collected there and to look at the names.  Both are precious.  It looks like Hemingway had quite a start in life.  But he got the black-ass (as he called it), too, and in the end couldn't overcome it.  I am of the age when he could no longer stand it.  Then he died and was dead.  I'm trying to ride the train a bit further down the line, but I can feel the engine backing off, the train slowing, the cars emptying.  The thing to do is not to think about it.  Don't let it happen 'til it happens.  Those were Ernie's words. 

I am trying to believe that it is only the time of year and that I must wait it out.  I must quit asking for so much now and take what is given.  But once you've feasted at some of life's best banquets, the morning gruel is a little bitter to the taste.