WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE TO SAY

matisse

Another writer I hold almost the equal of Tolstoy in depth, breadth and beautiful writing, Patrick White, of Australia. He caught my attention when he received the Nobel in 1973. I first read The Eye of the Storm, the novel written after the prize, fifteen years later. From first page to last, it was the most amazing story I'd ever read, and writing as beautiful as Tolstoy's, though mid-Twentieth Century Australian English, instead of 19th Century Russian in translation. A quarter century has gone by since reading it and I can still see the characters, the images as I saw them in the mind's eye, remember the story as if I'd just finished it. I've thought of reading it again, but know it so well, I don't feel need for a refresher. It is the story of a woman in her 80s, the richest and once the most beautiful woman in Australian society, confined in bed with a form of dementia, unable to talk or move on her own. Parts of the story are written from inside her mind, her thoughts, memories, from a clear mind. The characters are the four round-the-clock nurses with their own stories, the woman's accountant, and later, her son and daughter, son from London, daughter from France. Son was the Olivier on stage of his time. Daughter was married to a French prince. Brother and sister hate each other. They don't like mom either, and she has no use for them. No one in the story is likeable. And all the characters dislike the others. They're every one flawed, vain, realistically illustrated characters. It caused me to realize the people I can't like have good and valid stories, like the people I like, maybe better. 

matisse

Another one I loved by White, the Vivisector, a fictional biography of an Australian painter of abstractions, so beautifully written each page is a wonderful place to be-here-now. Another one, Riders of the Chariot, brings memories of the characters, a curious variety of people that come together for a symbolic crucifixion. White's writing is concise, clear, devoid of flourishes, trim and spare. A verse I believe attributed to Kabir, "Dive deep, O mind, dive deep, in the ocean of God's beauty. If you dive to the uttermost depths, there you will find the gem of love." White dives deep into his characters and writes a living story of people you can't help but care about for knowing them so well. I'm not pointing these writers out as the best ever, etc. These are the ones who have made a major difference in my reading and my view of the world. I've come to see that reading has been one of my life's major purposes. Reading and the pursuit of inner growth, it turns out, have been my life's purposes. Reading feeds the growth, fertilizer. Before 1970, there weren't many books available of spiritual writings from the East. Since 1970, we have a major market of books concerning spirituality that get into something beyond you-better-not. I read the discourses of masters from India, Meher Baba, Upasni Maharaj and some others. Zen writings, Sufi writings, Tibetan writings, can be found in abundance now.  

matisse

Without books, my interior growth would have been restricted to having to learn everything by direct experience. I can read Tibetan writings, journals by Zen masters, Buddhist sutras and other writings. At least to be familiar. All my life I never understood people who did not want to read. I take them for not very curious people. I'm ok with people who lack curiosity, considering they're the majority. It's the nature of the world I live in anywhere. However, I cannot limit myself to the incurious state of the people around me. That they're not curious about much is theirs, not mine. Mine is to take care of my own interior needs, concern myself with what's mine, not somebody else's. Everybody has their own shit to go through, reading or not reading, and how they take care of their own lives is the only part that matters. Same as with myself. Before coming to the mountains, I felt separate from everybody else for reading. I can't talk with people I know about books I'm reading. I learned a long time ago never to mention a book, reading a book or the existence of books. I've learned it so well, it has inhibited writing about books and reading here. I do, but not much. Once I started writing a few days ago about reading, I realized y'all who read this are readers. I can talk about reading with you. 

matisse

This is part of why I like writing to y'all. You have become the ones I can open up to, reach way down inside when necessary to look for something obscured deep in the interior Marianas Trench of experiential memory. I can't talk with anybody about any of what I talk to y'all about. I live in a world of interests totally different from mine. My friends have families, shoot deer, drive power pickups, watch tv football, fish, have all kinds of interests that are not mine. And I have interest that is not theirs. We balance well. I like to listen to friends tell hunting stories and archery tournament stories, and I like to hear about working on cars, though it's not an interest of mine to do. I tend to appreciate in my friends their abilities that are not my own. Like Philippe Petit, who walked the wire between the WTC towers. I totally admire what he did. It is something I could never learn the rest of my life if I were to practice every day. I hear a fiddler, or violinist, and listen in awe. It is something entirely out of my possibilities, no matter how much training and practice. I like to read about Crazy Horse, who shot arrows accurately from the back of a running horse in a herd of stampeding buffalo. And he got that rascal Custer. Got himself bayoneted in the back inside an American general's office immediately after a truce. I've learned from reading that Van Gogh did not kill himself, but was shot by somebody he knocked to the ground after an insult. I like knowing such sorts of things. I like access to what other people have to say. Many tell a good story. 

matisse by matisse

*

TAURUS THE BULL AND SEA CROSSINGS

    the world is a mirror

Today I applied the first paint to canvas on a new portrait of three musicians from the area. They're sitting in folding chairs at a jam. Two banjos and one guitar. It feels good to be inspired by something new, a composition I like, interesting color juxtapositions to work with. Also saw the Swedish film, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST. It was one of the girl with the dragon tattoo trilogy from the novels by popular Swedish writer, Stieg Larrson, who recently was in the news. He had delivered his manuscript for new novel to the publisher, evidently was happy with the results, undoubtedly a film contract, the elevator wasn't working at his apartment building, he ran up the stairs, fell down with a heart attack and died. What a raw deal. It's like the old feller that said, If it weren't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all. This film today gave me a good idea of the kind of story Larrson wrote. He's a complicated story teller.



It's a good story full of twists and turns, but it doesn't come near Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't mean to crow for classic literature, it's just that since seeing the Bille August film of it, I'm still blown away by Hugo's story telling. I've never read any of his writing. I'd seen Lon Cheney and Gina Lolabrigida do the story about the hunch-back bell ringer, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I never thought of it a story I'd want to read. I wrote Victor Hugo off as 19th Century good writing that I don't care much to read more than a century later. But I forget about Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Melville and others, really good story tellers who can't help it they lived in the 19th century. The movie of the Hunchback of Notre Dame was good enough for me. It didn't draw me to want to read the story. It didn't draw me to Hugo. I liked the story, but didn't get it. I've an idea if I were to read it today, I'd at least come close to getting it. After Les Miserables, I'd like to see the Hunchback again to reassess it. Probably more than 50 years have passed since I saw it, not the same moviegoer then as now.



I don't stop thinking about Les Miserables. I don't feel like it's left me with a mystery, but it left me with such satisfaction in story telling that my appreciation for Victor Hugo went way up. Like every time I read something by Leo Tolstoy, I ask myself why I ever read anybody besides Tolstoy. The answer to that is easy. There is so much else, much of it almost as good. My friend Lucas did his PhD thesis on James Joyce. He said he was told by somebody he knew, who studied Joyce's work, that nobody has read Finnegan's Wake all the way through. The only way to read it is to open it randomly and read as much as you feel like reading and put it down. He said that's as good a way as any to read it.



My neighbor and friend Allan Joyce, who studies his family genealogy all the way back to the Garden, claims a distant connection with James Joyce, no doubt as distant a connection as I might claim with EM Forster, Forster my grandmother's maiden name. My Forster ancestor that left the UK surely was the no-good in the family, the outsider at home, who crossed the sea with a dream. Surely the dream was totally unrealistic, and the crossing on those sailing canoes that killed children and women with disease and despair, the labors of the crossing committed him to his dream with no foundation but rumor. Like a Cuban crossing a sea of sharks to Miami in a tractor inner tube. In both cases, crossing the Atlantic in the 18th century in one of those wooden sailboats that rode the waves like a cork, and crossing the water from Cuba to Miami in a rigged device, the center of a ring of circling shark fins, must have been about the same degree of lethal. Perhaps about half make it, either way. It takes commitment.



All my life I've been an American in the sign of Taurus, Scorpio rising; Saturn, Uranus and Jupiter conjunct the Sun, Neptune at the Zenith. The characterization of Taurus the Bull I warn reckless people about is --- Don't make him tear down his pen to get out. That means don't piss him off. It's a bull in a pen. Piss him off too much and he'll tear down the pen to get at you. I have spent my life avoiding that line. When Taurus within sets to snorting, some shit's about to cut loose. I don't like to get myself into situations where the inner bull is called upon to scratch at the ground with a restless hoof. On YouTube I saw a couple days ago video of a hunter attacked by a buck. The buck stood on his back feet and frailed the man with his front feet like a boxer hitting a punching bag. The buck didn't let up. He kept at the man, hurting him with intent.



Evidently, the buck didn't mean to kill him or he'd have used his antlers. Seems like. He gave the man a sound thrashing with powerful front legs and knife-sharp hooves. He looked like he was giving the man an understanding he'd never forget. I felt like the buck was telling him in deer language to quit killing his women, uncles, cousins, like, when is enough enough? They know what's going on in their world when their mothers and sisters and brothers are killed by the humans that stalk the forest in fall and winter. BANG. Your knees give out. You're on the ground. Want to run. Can't move. A dreaded human approaches. You're overcome by fear, too weak to feel it, and worst of all, the human has a knife, cuts your throat. The light goes out.

*