Dreaming of Connections

Reading in Julian Barnes's "The Past Conditional" in this week's The New Yorker

Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth, given me an uncharacteristic wink, and murmured complicitly, "I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel."

I'm drawn back to a novel which takes the same imagery to begin as Barnes uses to close

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

and I wonder if that is a good enough reason to remember Jailbird and Vonnegut, wonder if such a connection is of any value, wonder if I shouldn't be able to place Kurt is some larger context and in some more particular relationship to the larger cannon of writing that is thought to be important. Then I think, "What the Hell, self abuse is good enough." Especially after having read Oran Pamuk talking about writers

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

in "My Father's Suitcase" just a few pages later in the same issue of The New Yorker. Perhaps it is all self abuse, innumerable writers pleasuring themselves spewing their words out on page after page in medium after medium.

If as I heard WFB say once eyeing the stopwatch at the top of his clipboard while interviewing an author, "If an unexamined life is not worth living then certainly I'm a corpse." and knowing fullwell that WFB intensely examines his life and that he's just not telling anyone about it, perhaps not even himself, then perhaps writers are no more or less alive or worthwhile than others they just live and measure worth differently. Thinking now about how the NOW, the current moment, is the point of tangency between God and Man, the best taste of the infinite that can be had, I settle back into the hot water of my bath, open the tap for a bit more and read Pamuk's paragraph again thinking of the writers I know, RJK, Migs, Elisabeth and Vito Esterno wondering how writers might be like painters. If writers are painters, then I am a house painter, eh? Or perhaps a madman scraping a bit of color off everyone else's canvass and saving it on my pallette for some grand canvass of my own, a grand canvass which has as yet not even a charcoal cartoon.

Yo soy un conductor, yo soy un viejo Tejano gringo puro. ¿Y, yo soy un pinturista? No se.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be looking for a place to park my truck in Chicago as close to the Dan Ryan and West 51st St as possible until I can get it unloaded at eight o'clock Tuesday morning and all this will be a dream.