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You sit in front of the machine which sits on the
desk which stands on the floor of the room, a small room though not as
small as many of the other rooms you have written in over the years.
Where do you begin again, you who have never sold
but one poem, you who have been called the finest unpublished writer in
the country, you who have never been able to decide if you are a genius
because of some of the things you have written, or an idiot because only
one friend has acknowledged you. You have heard it all, the contemptuous
cliches about perseverance, the naive tripe about opportunity that not
only keeps you from touching reality but...
"You must stay in your room."
"Why?"
"Because"
"Because what?"
There is never an explication that suits you. It
is only that there are others who have a say, sometimes a large say, over
what you do. They have always been there, since the earliest moment you
can recall. You have rebelled against them, cooperated with them, cajoled
them. You have showed your hand to them, bluffed them, walked away from
the table. Once, when you were winning big, you burned their money in a
clear glass ash tray. For that, and for that above all else, for that alone,
for that beyond any other explication, they have never forgiven you. Even
those who were not there, those who may not have even been in the city,
those who may have been perched in their offices in another state or eyed
in the vineyard in some foreign country know that you did it. No, they
can not tell you that you took a match to the greenbacks. Such an idea
would never enter their mind. If you had been insightful you could have
invested that money for forty four years. If you had been generous you
could have fed a family of those you don't know for a month or more. If
you had combined the two things you could have kept a family alive for
a lifetime.
Instead, you are now in your room, in your little
box, and though it is not as small as some of the other boxes you have
written your way from, it is still a box, solid white but for the brown
carpet. You have had to bring all the other color to it yourself, the cards,
the post cards, the paintings, the photographs. The yellow lamp, the red
flashlight, the chestnut dresser, the gray writing machines. And the books,
history hooks, novels, bibles, poetry,
science, mythology, politics, painting, music, backpacking,
massage, chess, telephone, checkbooks, coupons, not to mention the folders
and files full with your own work, red, gray, black, brown, blue, green;
and the writing tablets.
You decide to begin with the photographs, one of
Rilke, the other of Monk. There are also two framed photographs of the
(Here you need to leave your room for a moment because the one thing you,
no, the two things you do not have in the room is a decent atlas and a
decent memory. You have a small atlas, one of those TIME desk reference
things. This in fact stands in front of one of the in question photographs,
atop your other desk, with the thesaurus and dictionary, the three books
snugly kept within the box of its cardboard frame. Your memory too is this
way. It is not until you have gone out into the front room, been tempted
by the television and it's disastrous flood stories, and actually carried
the atlas back to your cubicle that you recall without needing to open
the book that the name of the mountains are the...) Grand Tetons that you
tell yourself should be hung on the wall, not standing on the desk, slanted
against the white wall obscured by reference books, oriental bottles, orange
marmalade jars that are now used for storing pennies and pens, a plastic
bottle of anti-fungi powder, a taller bottle also plastic, of Aloe Vera
Gel, a note pad, a metal measuring tape and a post card with sixteen moves
from a mail game of chess.
These photographs are not your concern at the moment
though. The two photographs you wanted to look at with a much closer eye,
which you wanted to attempt to describe, are those of Monk and Rilke. They
are off to your left and alternate with two other post cards (paintings
by Henry Miller), full of color, all standing on the window sill, angled
like the framed photographs, only these are held up by the cheap white
blinds. Your postcards are in black and white, the Rilke and the Monk that
is. They are both wearing suits, white shirts, silk ties. Rilke wears a
vest too, and he stands in front of a window, one of which has blinds just
like the ones in your room. This discovery gives you an eerie feeling.
It is the same kind of strange coincidence you have found in his poetry.
You do not let this sidetrack you for long though. You think about the
Sonnets to Orpheus the Dueno Elergies, The Spanish Dancer, The Panther,
the fingers trudging through the snowy piano keys; but then you pass over
to Monk whose suit is lighter than Rilke's, gray, or perhaps green whereas
Rilke's is almost definitely black. Rilke leaves a shadow on the window.
Not Monk; he is up against a darker background and the lighting is from
up above, brightest just under the eyes and on the top of his cap, a round
cap which probably has a name, a name you do not know. This is one of your
problems. You do not know the names to so many things. The great writers
you have known, those you have read, no need to name them, seem to know
the names of everything. You are trying to think of an example of this,
a part to a sewing machine, some obscure thing that only a tailor's son
would know, or the name of a flower. Nothing comes to mind, though at the
time you read these things you made a note of it. You looked them up later.
You wrote the definitions down on a sheet of paper and you used this list
like a pallet. You used these words in your own tales, words you no longer
remember the meanings to. You made strange images from this mixing of unlikely
words, nearly alliterated your way to arpeggios of obscurity. To those
few you let read it, it was completely obscure, as obscure as Rilke's suit
or Monk's background, as obscure as the Romantics were to Ivor Winters,
or Roy's poems to Manny.
This fiction, of course, has not been created yet.
Roy and Manny are as of yet merely ideas in your room. There are no photographs
of these characters as there are of Monk or of Rilke. Imagine, creating
a room full of writers, all failures like yourself, writers who need to
work at doing something else because they have not even sold that one poem
you sold, that poem you received one dollar for, a dollar you probably
should have framed and hung on the wall with the framed photographs of
the Grand Tetons, which also should probably be hung on the wall.
You question whether this way of writing will ever
help anyone, you who for a long time (have not been certain which is which,
whether or weather) have believed that all art has mysterious qualities,
that it links you to some necessary ingredient that nothing else except
perhaps love, perhaps (prayer, perhaps meditation) sex (you like these
forks in the road. You can imagine your novel being like this, both Monkish
and Rilkonian, (Rilkenian?), the high road and the low road simultaneously.
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