THANK YOU FOR THIS DAY

 

raoul dufy

Day 4 of blogathon, the prompt is lists of future artistic goals over the next five years. First thing to mind was McKenzie Wren's opening to Day 2, the chorus from David Bowie's song from the early 1970s, "We've got five years." The other association that popped into mind almost simultaneously was the Soviet Five Year Plans. Through the 1950s and 60s, American propaganda was fixed on evil Communist Russia such that it became reality: Communism = Evil, Five Year Plans are stupid. It's what Communists do. You have to be of a certain age to remember that time, like in my generation you had to be of a certain age to remember the Depression. Nobody bothered to notice what the Soviets were doing was not Communism, but that was neither here nor there. Actuality has no role in propaganda. Calling orange juice ketchup doesn't make it anything but orange juice. This is where a five year plan takes my head. It doesn't mean I agree that five year plans are stupid or Communism is evil, only these are my associations. The language of propaganda. It's not that I mean it really is, only that it's my historical association. It's a bundle of personal and historical associations that makes it an unreality for me to say I want to make the world a better place or I want to spread joy or I want to be an ambassador for good, whatever that is. It doesn't even mean I disagree with people who see the good as something laudable. This is illusion, good is not always "good." Uplifting is not always elevating. I'm getting into splitting hairs territory; it's time to abandon that line of thinking. It leads ultimately to the brain is a universe of atoms floating in spirals through nothingness, which leads to looking out the window at the snowbirds hopping about in the snow the other side of the glass picking up their daily seeds. Caterpillar just now appealed to me for attention, Mao. Took a moment to rub the top of her head and her neck, tell her I love her from the heart. I took the moment to bring my own head back to the world of perception where seeing is believing, leaving off that believing doesn't have much to do with reality, and reality is different from individual to individual. I mean the reality we collectively agree upon, like gravity keeps footprints off the ceiling.

 

raoul dufy

 

My entire childhood was spent in a church where I was told several times a week that I might not be alive tomorrow. Any moment may be my last. It stuck. I've never been able to imagine a future for myself. I've seen too many variables flying about every situation and have lived long enough to see that even Noam Chomsky doesn't know the future. One unforeseeable moment can change everything. Like the assassination of Archduke (?) Franz Ferdinand with an improvised explosive device set Europe into a "World War."  The rings that go out from this one splash in time will continue to the horizon. I have a really strong feeling such an unforeseeable moment is around a nearby corner. 911 was not it, because it was foreseeable and seen coming. "We didn't have any intelligence." Duh. A child raised believing the Truth in the likelihood of not waking up in the morning, plus we might get nuked any day, I've lived with "no hope of tomorrow" as evidence of the importance of living my life today. I've also lived long enough to notice that it aint necessarily so. I woke up a lot of mornings. The last thing I had to say to that argument was to an old preacher's wife, one of the really old-fashioned kind, of which we have many today, a haughty old thing pretending humility, the worst gossip in the church and kept a smokescreen of piety about herself obscuring the inner bitch, the self her husband and kids knew well. She was on the verge of feeble when, going out the church-house door, I assisted her descent of the four steps. She thanked me. I said, "See you next time." She said, "We have no guarantee of that." I thought, Lord have mercy, don't I know it,  and said, "I'll pretend I do, and if I don't it won't matter." She didn't even give my clever young frivolity an harrumph. It was the last time I saw her. She wasn't able to leave home soon after, then hospital and nursing home. She was steeped in a lifetime of old Calvinist, Puritan mind of post-medieval northern Europe and Britain, like her husband and her daddy, believed anything fun was the devil himself, the kind of thinking that pushed me toward atheism. The moment with her on the church-house steps was after my awakening. I don't mean awakening here to mean enlightenment, only the kick-start of awareness. The awakening turned me away from heavy serious thinking to a more light-hearted attitude toward experience. I don't mean Boca Raton Barbie, nor do I mean System Of A Down.

 

raoul dufy

 

In the past I attempted to make some plans, but didn't believe them. In late-Twenties I bought a two-volume set of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, to save it for old age. It was something I wanted to read in my later years. I have two sets of the two volumes. I've never opened any of them. They are preserved on my bookshelf. In the mid-1980s I discovered Australian writer, Patrick White and read him, one after the other. Came a day I did not want to read everything yet and be done with him. I wanted to save the rest for my later years for something I know I will enjoy to the max. Neither White nor Proust appeal to me now as something I want to read. I want to finish a couple books by Chris Hedges I'd begun at the same time. I want to finish a history of China that calls to me. I want to find a good history of the Persian Empire. I'd also like to find a history of Kazakhstan before it was broken up into the -stans. I have a wonderful history of the Ottoman Empire that I want to read again. I'd like to reread Diana Eck's beautiful book, Banaras City of Light. And there are so many I want to read again. I want to read more poems by John Berryman. I want to finish the four volumes of Andre Gide's Journals. I want to read more in the discourses of Upasni Maharaj. I want to reread some plays by Harold Pinter. I don't have time for Proust. He's too far down the list. There's no way this body will hold out that long. A few days ago I was thinking I want to take Julio Cortazar's novel, 62: A Model Kit, off the shelf, not to read all of it, unless I choose to, but to read a few pages at a time randomly. The novel itself is in 62 sections or chapters to be read in any order the reader chooses. Thought I might read a few, I love his writing, for the joy of reading his sentences. I went to the shelf and took it down. It's nice to see it again. Too many years have gone by without reading him. It may end up in a stack on the floor, but it was a good feeling to touch its cover and flip the pages. I don't dare say I will indeed read in it. Tomorrow I may say tomorrow. And I may take it as soon as I'm finished writing to the reading chair, put on the reading glasses, have a cup of hot chocolate, feet up off the floor, and read for an hour in bliss with sunlight to read by.

 

raoul dufy

 

As you have accurately guessed by now, this mind doesn't do well with goals. I could plan a goal today and next week it will be something that was important a week ago. For appointments I write in black or red on a wall calendar with inch and a half by inch and three quarters rectangles for each number. If an appointment doesn't get written there, it's forgotten. I've never taken to goals, goals being a sort of plan, the carrot on the stick to keep the donkey going. I can't even conceive imagining one goal, certainly not five, and then five more goals for this year, in addition. It makes my psychic bodies explode. Goals are motivated by desire for success. I'm recalling in ninth grade running around the football field track at a tournament chasing the guy running in front of me I had to beat to win. I never liked that feeling, having to beat somebody to win. It didn't feel right then, doesn't feel right now. It's the winning I have no desire for. I don't want to win a lottery because I don't want the trauma of overnight unlimited wealth and every snake on earth having a bead on me. I like my life on Waterfall Road where I have a hard time finding the money every year to pay property taxes you'd laugh at in awe for being so little. I never wanted to climb the ladder of success. Soon after high school I tried to go against that thinking by reading Atlas Shrugged and Think and Growä Rich. It all made me gag. What do I give a shit about a bunch of rich people needing to live underground because they hate everybody else. I'd rather read Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. At least reading Dharma Bums made me feel cool. Think and Grow Rich made me feel poor and worthless. I could not give my mind to continuous meditation on money and/or success. Robert Lowell was an uber-successful American poet with plenty of money, his name in perpetuity on his chair in the inner sanctum of American Poetry, and he went *pop* that's it cat shit. It evidently didn't mean all that much to him. John Berryman too. Randall Jarrell jumped in front of a car on the interstate at night. They had caught the carrots on the stick they started out wanting, fame, to be well thought of, and in some cases money. Like, Wow. I don't want to find my life so regrettable I need to bail out and see if I can finish saying Geronimo. I'll just take it a day at a time and play like I'm doing something spiritual.   

 

raoul dufy

 

 

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ON THE ROAD THE MOVIE

A few days ago I learned Jack Kerouac's novel, ON THE ROAD, from the late 1950s was made into a film. Netflix had it. Saw it today. It took me back to an early part of myself as well as the beginnings of what became known as the Beat Generation, the Beats. I think it was early 1960 or late 1959 that I read the Signet paperback of On The Road. Several years ago I found a first edition of that paperback for a dime. I don't care about its value. I'm sure it has very little. I just like having it. Senior in high school, barely literate enough to look at Time magazine with a little bit of comprehension, though not much. A guy in my class I assessed cool without being a jock, was reading it and talking about it with the people who read books. I was beginning to read books by then, starting with things way over my head like Alan Watts' Way of Zen, which I didn't get, but it opened my eyes to something. It made me realize I couldn't read with comprehension. From there, I started reading Ben Hur after seeing the movie. The sense I got from the guy in high school talking about On The Road was that I too could be cool if I'd read On The Road, the book that defined cool. I found a copy and read it. So cool driving a Hudson across the desert, everybody nude, the chick playing bongos on the dashboard. The characters not long out of high school drink, smoke reefer, abandon chicks and drag bottom. I don't dare try to read it now. It's nice having a film version of the book, a review without reading it again, like dreaming it.

It has been 54 years since I read it, meaning I remember next to nothing of it except riding a Hudson across America and smoking reefer. The movie showed me I remembered it very well. That's about all there was to it. I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that it was a memoir of a friend who bottomed out, Dean Moriarity. The story is told by a young guy, Sal Paradise, aka Jack Kerouac, who wanted to be a writer, ached to be a writer, tried to write, nothing worked. He's in New York hanging with other young writer wannabes exploring the new world since WW2 with jazz in Harlem, abstract expressionism in painting, turning on to reefer in jazz clubs. In my fantasy memory, the characters had a golden glow about them, ultra cool white people hanging with black people, remembering I was in high school after a lifetime in fundamentalist church, sex crazed since puberty, wanting to get on any road out of where I was and freewheel throwing empty Thunderbird wine bottles out the window. Jump into late teen heedlessness all the way to no turning back. Kerouac and Moriarity were young writers in NY getting nowhere. They decided to cross the country by car. Kerouac kept notes along the way. They were gaining experience, getting down and dirty, working at hard labor jobs for very little, committing themselves to being down and out like it was romantic and cool, young writers paying their dues. 

Moriarity is the kind of guy who never catches on to the necessity to become responsible at a certain point in his life. He doesn't get it. He can't be taught it. And he can't figure out how to live without having a sense of responsibility even to himself. Set out on his own without parental support, he goes through whoever will take care of him until he alienates them to throwing him out saying, I don't ever want to see you again! Actress Kirsten Dunst appeared as the last woman who took him in until the day she said, Do you realize what I've given up for you? In a cast of some dreary characters, she was a refreshing play within a play. In Lars von Trier's MELANCHOLIA, Kirsten Dunst had a charisma that makes me light up when she shows up in a film. Her role in On The Road was short and carried a whole story in her brief moment. Now that it's been a few hours since it ended, her role turns out to be the strongest memory of the film and the first to come forward. When I called the other characters dreary, it was their depression, their aimless Nowheresville gaping about. It tells where these young writer wannabes were at in their own heads. They wanted to write, but had no experience, nothing to write about. Kerouac took off from New York with this guy whose only direction was downward. He watched his friend over a period of a few years fall through a crack in the bottom.

 

 

 

I appreciate that the young Kerouac wrote a memoir of his friend who was simply unable to live in this world. A lot of people are like that. More than we'd imagine. I feel like Kerouac's contribution to American writing is his memoir of somebody who couldn't make it in this world. It's a loving story of a friend he truly valued as a human being, seeing him drag across the bottom until it snagged and held him. It's an American story, even a profound American story. Often I saw Kerouac writing his own version of Henry Miller's, Air Conditioned Nightmare. Miller's journey starts in New York, goes down through the South to New Orleans, then on the northern California. I even felt like Kerouac learned to write from reading Henry Miller. I'd guess Kerouac had access to the Paris edition of Miller's Tropics novels by way of being smuggled into the country until the sensational Supreme Court ruling that they were not pornography in the late Fifties. Miller was the bohemian writer of the moment in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Kerouac was the bohemian writer of his own moment, the 1960s. After On The Road, I had to read The Dharma Bums, another one of freewheeling people unable to make a go of it for themselves in this world; some joined the domestic syndrome, some drifted down into nothingness.

 

 

 

On The Road celebrated the party time of life, between the ages of 18 and 23. That's when we're out of high school, unchained from parental control, setting out on our own with a job, a car, expenses, an apartment, insurance, speeding tickets, looking for babes, drinking and doing every drug there is. Kerouac's story is a handful of young guys starting out from nowhere, ambitious to get somewhere with no idea how to start. He started writing it in 1942, the year Air Conditioned Nightmare was published, and finished On The Road in 1951. It wasn't published until 1957 with much editing for legal purposes that were different then from how they are now. He wrote it throughout his twenties, it's conception in the time of his wild child time of life. I cannot read Kerouac's prose in this time of my life. He's down there even below Kurt Vonnegut in my own personal Olympus of American writers. Kerouac was great for a high school outsider kid to discover, a kid whose life as self had not yet begun. I was too inhibited to cut loose and run wild to such an extreme. Jack Kerouac did it for the frustrated kids of my generation, gave us a fairy tale unto instruction manual on being cool in America. Right away after it was published, Kerouac became the ultra-hipster of the New York "beat" writers. I wondered while watching the film version what meaning it would have for someone not aware of its historical moment. It seemed to me a period piece, a vision of living in America in its time. I like access to the story without having to wade through Kerouac's prose. The film, by director Walter Salles, was beautifully made. Another beautiful losers story.

 

 

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HENRY MILLER AND JACK KEROUAC

        henry miller, untitled

Have just now seen a half hour video of Henry Miller talking at dinner in his last year. It took me way back to the time of my life I was reading Henry Miller in awe, the way I later read Tolstoy and Patrick White. Henry Miller wrote a long list of books besides the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn that just about anyone who has heard of him knows him by, in other words, misinterpretation. In his book Big Sur he tells about living remotely at the time at Big Sur in California, people looking him up because they took him for an important figure in the sexual revolution because he wrote the Tropics and they had the word fuck in them, censored in America until a supreme court decision in the time of the Warren Court. Miller was a writer, not a sexologist, and for the rest of his life was taken for a sexologist because he was the first American writer to use the word fuck. Big deal. It was as stupid then as it is now to be freaked over one of the oldest words in the language. Everybody who has ever spoken the English language knows the word. It's just that the working class uses it freely, thus making it unacceptable to the middle and ruling classes as they don't want to do anything that gives appearance of working class.

This film of Henry Miller talking over dinner I found at UBUWEB, it's ubu.com. They have a long list of hundreds of video interviews or talks by so many people I recognize the names of only a few. I'm going back there to see what I can find. If the others are half as good as this one, I'll be having a good time and spending a lot of time. They have Viking Eggeling, a Zurich Dadaist from Norway, French poets Rene Char and Henri Michaux. This could turn out to be a terrifically interesting site. It looks mostly French. French writing in the 20th Century is some of the best. For the modern French poets, Arthur Rimbaud was the great French poet as Walt Whitman was the great American poet. Rimbaud wrote his entire works in two years, two books of poetry that were not received at all in the world of poetry at the time. He quit writing when he was 19. Died not many years later of a disease caught in Africa. Later became the greatest French poet that ever was and ever will be. Like vanGogh, who never sold anything while he was living, died not even heard of. Now his paintings have values in excess of a million dollars. The Miller conversation reminded me somewhat of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, sitting at the table eating, commenting on the food, talking about artists and writers.

One of the many places I connect with Miller was when he was talking about how he is a composite of the influences of people he has known, writings he's read, as much as by experiences. I flashed on people I've known over the years I've learned from and held high with respect. I think part of what I learned from Henry Miller was to value friends. Miller valued people he knew along the way, neighbors, more than he valued famous people he knew. Writers' biographies tend to be lists of famous people they knew and consorted with. Miller had friends nobody ever heard of. He taught me to value character in people I know. He taught me that going your own way in Amerika is possible. He was one of the writers in my first years of reading who taught me how to read. Today in the coffee shop, a teenage boy to my left had a paperback copy of Jack Kerouac's On The Road, and a teenage girl to my right had a copy of Animal Farm. It seemed odd in a county where I've only known people to watch tv, at one time, on either side of me was a teenager reading a book I'd read. I spoke to the girl briefly, asked how she's liking it. She'd read it in Jr hi and decided to read it again. "It's about dictatorships." I decided not to go there. I felt compelled to say if you'll pay attention to the news you'll see it happening here, but I couldn't do it. I was curious about the boy reading Kerouac half a century later when it's history he's reading. But I wasn't sure he'd know what I meant.

It's not a kids-these-days thing, but I look at myself at that age and remember how totally inarticulate I was and how terrifically uninformed I was, thinking I knew it all and everybody else was dumb. The arrogance of youth. I chose not to enter that zone. Just looking at myself inhibited entering their beginning minds. They are at the beginnings of their perhaps intellectual development, and I am near the end of my path, which started out where they are reading now. I thought about mentioning to the girl about police state, but I didn't know that stuff then, and don't know that I'd have welcomed an old white-haired turd telling me about police state, and beatnik times with the boy. They don't care any more than I would have then. Though, then I would not have been in a coffee shop even if we'd had them. It did grab my attention that in the last years of my trail through life somebody was on either side of me reading a book I had read in the early years of my own inner development. It did catch my attention, especially because you don't see people with books here. Even among the new people from Away. To see two people of the post-literate generation reading books I read at their age just twisted my mind until it couldn't twist any more. It wasn't a times are changing vision. It was more like, What are the chances of that? Like taking dice and rolling a 5 three times in a row. It's an I-don't-get-it response that doesn't even question. There's no legitimate question that can be asked. How did it happen? Who the hell knows?

I came home and found this video of Henry Miller, a writer from the next step in my reading development. It was in that time I read the Tropics. A friend had given me a paperback copy of the Tropic of Capricorn, which I read like I'd read any other book. Parents had no interested in books or anything I was reading. I was told, "If you have time to read a book, you have time to wash the car," mow the grass, whatever came up to fill in the blank to complete a wise crack. So I had to read in private when they couldn't see me, like after they'd gone to bed. Otherwise I'd be assigned a chore. It was not permitted in the house to threaten to be smarter than daddy. Daddy didn't read, so the young rooster reading was a threat. I might learn something he didn't know. I wanted to read because up until age 4 when daddy came home from the war I'd been read to every night before sleep. I loved mommy reading to me. Daddy came home and mommy couldn't read to me any more. I had to wait til I was in the last year of high school before I could start reading on my own, when I took the garage for my quarters. Television went on all the time. We watched all the westerns, because that's what daddy liked. By the time I got away from them, I hated westerns and still do. John Wayne makes me puke. Had to watch tv with daddy; that's the family thing to do. This is the origin of why I have never had a tv since leaving them. Today's experience took me all the way back to 12th grade reading On The Road, the new paperback, 1960, cool new beatnik drug behavior, by the cool new Jack Kerouac. I didn't understand a word I read, but felt like I was being cool reading something cool. When you're totally not cool, any kind of disguise will do.


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