Comes a time for a writer—or maybe it's just me—when the writing writes itself. When it does such a terrific job of things that your fingers are not your own as they clack-clack on the PowerBook keyboard. The digits belong, instead, to the writing, the recording.
I find that, aft-brain so occupied with motor coordination, the bow of the brainship sets to mending the discrepancies, paradoxes and conundric and lonely distances between and among the factions of reality each and all clamoring for primacy.
That's a lotta noise up in the noggin.
But the writer's brain, when in that zone, finds in all of it a certain connectedness. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes as surreptitiously as an inverse-thief in the night, the placid surface of a friendly sea appears, both masking and containing the schizoid Brownian character of Existence.
Here I sit, Row 2, Seat C, on a flight to Las Vegas, connecting, of course, through to the current home of my Home: Tucson, Arizona.
A brain at rest is just a headcheese/sweetbread waiting to happen, and so my brain rarely sits still. During the intervals of any commercial flight when twenty-dollar electronic devices are anathema to the functioning of a multi-million-dollar aircraft, what's a brain to do? Well, reading comes to mind, but the only book I have with me is a copy of the Federalist Papers. Damn skippy, that Alexander Hamilton was a brilliant wordsmith.
Ahh, I take it back. It wasn't the only thing I had to read. I had the foresight to Print-as-PDF the Dogpoet's latest entry. So I have that, too, thanks to a bizarrely-no-cost t-mobile wireless connection at SFO. Oh, and there's a silent multiple-choice trivia game playing on the aircraft's monitors.
It's an interesting juggle, keeping so many different balls up in the air, but when you're in this connectedness mode, it's all smooth sailing—those placid seas, remember? Like you can see the telluric currents and you're damn glad you're in a worthy vessel.
Anyhoo.
I've always been the one to win at trivia games. Don't really know why, it just is. Information sticks like lint on a wool suit in a forced-air-heated room. A gift, a curse. Noise. Hyperlucidity. Whatever.
On balance, I totally suck at remembering song lyrics by listening to them, but show me the liner notes and the lyrics are mine in the briefest span of time. Go figure.
So on the one hand, pop culture intrudes in bits: Prince did Batdance; the Italians call Florence "Firenze"; the Ukraine was known as Little Russia.
On the other hand, the expansive, self-complete prose of Hamilton warns of the pitfalls of ignoring the Constitution in language that even today is understandable and all but impervious to out-of-context sound-bites.
I've run out of hands. But still, there's the Dogpoet. The opposite of Hamilton in literal scope but far more expansive in effect. Discomfiture lies between his syllables, bits of negative explication that somehow always add up to the biggest positive number you can imagine.
Michael's writings show the essential humanity that fuels the lofty goals Hamilton so grandiloquently espouses. Whose message is the more universal? Is there a universal? Those of us subject to the winds of time often risk much to find even the crumbs of answers. Strange and unfortunate, then, that questions are eternal while most forms of truth come with an expiration date.
For what it's worth, and nevertheless and with my heretofore wherewithal, I can offer that sometimes the act of writing gets you close to essences both intimate and lofty, but you're not allowed to stand upon them.
At least not for longer than the fleetingest of moments.
The Bourgeoise and others generally lacking and/or appreciating creative thought will insist on misunderstanding my seeming lack of regard for Allen in stating that he was part of some waiting-for-Sam game that started while he was still alive.
With the yard so overgrown with neglect that no one could sit here. With a flashlight, grilling a steak in the wintertime on a rare rainless evening.