Dear diary,
My gun is a wand with a loop. Liquid soap is my ammo.
If these sentences seem too cute for you to copy them onto your favorite social network and let them stand as your status update, then alternately you could encase them in quotation marks and add the following explanation.
Here are the sole contents of a sorely besmirched note that I found in the jungle. Now I wonder: Who wrote these words? What might they mean? Was foul play involved?
(I pardon myself for this tacky opening; it was just the first thing that came to my mind today.)
Renewing my driving license
At the start of this month, I was sent a scary postcard by the state. It warned that my license to drive is expiring soon: therefore, they said, I must come to the Department of Motorized Vehicles (DMV) and renew it. About every half decade, they send me a threatening reminder like this; and this latest one really did give me a fright, because I know that they will want to check my vision, which I’m afraid has declined so severely in the past years (from all the reading and writing I do) that I’ll never be able to live up to their standards. Three renewals ago—which is to say, fifteen years earlier—when I faced the eye test, even then I almost couldn’t discern the letters on their chart. And I have not since updated the prescription for my spectacles. Also my vision goes blurry when I’m nervous. So each new time I undertake this formality, I’m worried that it’ll be my last day of legal driving freedom: I’m afraid that my life will spiral into disaster when they deny my renewal – I’ll be forced to make an appointment with an ophthalmologist, who’ll take one look at me and exclaim: “Well you obviously have cataracts, glaucoma, and macular degeneration. Plus your corneas are hail-damaged.” Then I’ll have to do twenty years of follow-up visits and go bankrupt purchasing hookahs of medicinal cannabis.
So let me tell you about my morning, since nothing ever happens in my life and thus a trip to the DMV does actually count as a fantastic adventure.
First, when we pulled into the parking lot, there were no free spots. Or there was only one third of a free spot, for the cars on either side of it were parked over their borderlines, diagonally askew, making the once-rectangular space into an isosceles trapezoid, so our car would not fit. The only thing that you could maybe fit in there is a Harley-Davidson unicycle. So we had to drive around the entire lot more than six full times and wait for someone to leave, just in order to park.
Then when I opened the front door of the place, it caused a loud tone to sound, which made me flinch. And the place was packed. Lowlife criminals everywhere, waiting for service. Of the closely positioned chairs bolted in rows along the walls of the southeastern corner, almost all were taken. There were only two free seats between some thugs near the gloomy part of the room. (My sweetheart came with me: I was desperate for moral support.) Now this might sound like a cliché from a tawdry 1980s movie, but it’s the truth: I ended up sitting next to a guy who had a giant pink mohawk. But he was friendly, in the sense that he didn’t murder me. Plus he smelled enchanting, like superior aftershave.
We were instructed to take a ticket from the dispenser and then wait for one of the clerks to shout our number. Behind their domain, mounted high at the back of the room so that no soul could escape the sight of it, was a signboard displaying a vast red blazing numeral, corresponding to the ticket that’s currently being served. When I entered, the fiery sign read 33: a bad omen, since that’s the age when they crowned my brother Jesus. And when I looked at my ticket, it said 44: also a bad omen, since that’s the age when my brother D.H. Lawrence ascended christward.
I didn’t have to wait long, however, to get my turn at the counter, because many impatient souls left before they were summoned.
So when a clerk yelled “Number 44!” I rose and answered “Here am I”; then I hastened to offer up my paperwork. I pointed out where I had mistakenly written in the place that says Leave this place blank, & also that I had circled a wrong choice in the “Commercial license” section. She didn’t seem to mind. Then I explained to her my fears, saying: “Just so you know, I’m really worried that I’ll fail the vision test—cuz all I do all day is read old books, so I don’t think my long-distance sight is too good.” And this made the lady halt from typing on the register; she looked directly at me with a shocked expression and said: “THAT’s not a very positive attitude.”
Then I felt ashamed, so I said: “Well I’m just trying to imagine the worst, so that if something even tolerable happens, it’ll seem far better than if I had been expecting the best. You see? In the end, I’m really aiming to be ultra-positive, yet by way of super-negativity.”
But the clerk kept staring without blinking, and shook her head like she’d never in her life encountered anyone so neurotic; then she exclaimed: “I don’t see ANYTHING positive about what you just said.” …Then she added: “Is this gonna be cash or check? It’s twenty-six dollars.” And I said, “I got cash.” And she said, “Ah, good!”
Then she waved me over to the Vision Testing Center: this Vision Testing Center consists of an oversized pair of binoculars rooted to a countertop: when you push your face against the eyepiece, your forehead depresses a long, thin button which causes an internal bulb to light up a strip of text (which is a line of random, capital letters). Then the lady said, read off all the letters that you see there, if you can. And I was relieved to note how clear the text appeared (I must have sidetracked my focus-blurring anxiety by indulging in our philosophical argument earlier); so I gladly—even rapidly—recited all the letters of the eye chart:
“Echo… Alpha… Tango… Sierra… Hotel… Igloo… Transylvania.”
Then the lady said, “Great job; you passed.”
So I cheered and said: “This is a real accomplishment for me!” And in my excitement I must have spoken a little too loudly, because all the other lowlifes in the place turned and stared at me.
Then the lady said, “Have a seat on that wooden stool right there, and we’ll take your blood pressure.”
“Um . . . I beg your pardon?”
“Kidding,” she said. “Take a seat and we’ll snap your photo. It’s for identification purposes.”
So I sat down and stared at the lens that looked like HAL 9000, and I waited & waited, and the camera clicked right when I blinked. Then the lady turned quiet and kept looking hard at the photo on her computer screen, which I couldn’t see; so I said, “Is it OK?” And she said, “I’ll let you decide—do you normally appear like this?” and she swiveled the screen around so that I could see it:
My face was all greasy, and my hair looked like a sofa whose upholstery had got torn up by angry cats, and my eyes were half shut – I looked like a drunken old lecher.
So I said, “If we use this photo, the cops will be able to arrest me for simply existing.” (No one laughed at my joke.)
But we tried again, and the second shot turned out fine. Rather, the clerk assured me it was fine. She didn’t let me look at it.
In conclusion, I was correct to be worried about flunking; but it was the portrait that proved my downfall, not the vision test.
Non-denouement
Anyone who follows this public-private journal-weblog of mine knows that my sweetheart and I are currently in the habit of reading one sketch per day from Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Notebook. So the criticism didn’t come out of left field when, as we were pulling our snow-white hybrid out of the DMV parking lot, my true love said:
“How come you write such tripe, instead of fascinating stories with engaging situations and genuine characters like Ivan Turgenev does?”
And I said: “I allow everything that I experience to enter into my compositions. If my writing does not contain richness comparable to Turgenev, it’s because I’m caged in a way that does not permit wing movement—in other words, I’m trapped between the four walls of my apartment, rather than out roaming the Russian countryside and stopping at pot-houses and inns along the way. Just think about it: If I had found myself sharing a bedroom last night with a talkative soul, like in that last sketch we read, do you think I could avoid writing my own ‘Prince Hamlet of Shchigrovo’?”
And my true love said, “Yeah but you wouldn’t fix upon gold the way Turgenev does; you always bleed all over with digressive counter-thoughts before you even establish a passable character.”
“Wait a minute,” I reasoned: “You know that’s not fair. I encounter so few people in my regular life that I must fall back on my own wonderings, to fill the void; in the case of each rare soul that I meet, our time together is so brief, like with the DMV lady above, that I can only present each being as a superficial presence—that’s what they ARE to me—necessity decrees it! If a man deigned to speak to me at length, and really let me get to know him, I would dedicate volumes to preserving him fully: I would represent him as genuinely as is possible. Nevertheless, I think it’s true that I wouldn’t do so exactly the way that Turgenev does. Yet isn’t that preferable? Turgenev is Turgenev—the world doesn’t want a lousy, second-rate facsimile of the master. It’s better if I let myself deviate in accordance with my own whims. Have you forgotten what Roger Shattuck says in his intro to the Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire?
The attainment of a truly great poet lies not in how he illustrates the world but how he transforms it to create a new reality.
Also consider that we have no idea how much Turgenev, in his tales and sketches, is merely ‘illustrating’ what ‘actually happened’ versus transforming experience to create a new reality. For the only reality we know is the one his text presents: we’ll never be able to tell how much of it was faithfully copied from This Nightmare Called History that we inhabit, or how much the ‘objective truth’ was distorted (or as I’d say: redeemed).”
And my sweetheart said, “I see what you’re saying. And your last words remind me of another place in that same essay by Mr. Shattuck, which I think could be employed to bolster EITHER of our seemingly different stances: my own criticism of what I take to be your ‘random defacement’ OR our mutual love of Turgenev’s ‘balanced compositions’:
There must be creation—and we often see creation first and most vividly as distortion.
But distortion, to be art, cannot be a random defacement of the world. Cézanne’s still lifes are a classic illustration of the reasoned use of distortion—the deforming of an object in order to make it conform to other objects and to the balance of composition. Distortion is both a manner of looking at the world and a technique of representing it.
I guess what I’m saying,” my true love concluded, “—or rather, what Shattuck tells me I’m saying—is that your blogs are not ART. Yet now I realize, too late, that this was hardly worth mentioning, as I recall how little you care about any official designation. For I’ve no doubt that you’ll reply: If what I write is not ART according to our pal Mr. Shattuck, then what I write is not ART: so be it: who cares!”
“That’s true,” I said. “I’ll write whatever & however I want, whether any critic approves of my efforts or not. But you make it sound like I’m impervious to everyone’s opinions, and that’s not the case: I’m overjoyed to learn that anyone likes what I’ve done, and it breaks my heart if I’m despised (or worse: ignored). This is important to stress, because it’s a difference that matters—whether one goes against the grain of public opinion because one couldn’t care less about the masses, just to be a jerk, versus risking displeasing one’s audience for the sake of bringing ALL – oneself included – to a place where none of us guessed we wanted to be. Sublimation for sublimation’s sake. To chance on a heaven above the highest known heaven, via joyful experimentation. I’ll even give our man Shattuck the final word:
I have called Apollinaire a ‘hero-poet’ because he had the courage to follow the beckonings of his irrepressible imagination in both his work and his life. Courage leads us to consider two complementary aspirations which compose one way of regarding all human endeavour: the quest for safety and the quest for danger. Neither is an ultimate value, for neither is satisfying alone. Moses set out to lead the Israelites to the safety of the Promised Land, yet the accompanying dangers have made this an epic story. Christ, stating that salvation is found only by first putting everything one had in jeopardy, made a supreme paradox of the two aspirations.
So that’s the last word. But I want to add a rider: More and more, as I read & think & change, I see that William Blake, for the present epoch, extends that series that goes from Moses to Christ. This assertion is no surprise, coming from me, I know: I repeat it so often; but nobody lights a torch and hides it under a bush (Matthew 5:14-16) – least of all, at the backside of the desert, by the mountain of God, even Horeb (Exodus 3:1-4). So Moses sows the Promised Land and reaps the wilderness. Christ demonstrates gain by way of relinquishment: losing one’s life to save one’s life: revising the wilderness into paradise by watering the desert. Yet what does Blake do? He shows us, once we’ve established the Promised Land, how to keep it from hardening into an Average Empire. Also how this all-important struggle takes place within each individual human, not somewhere out there. And beware the savagery of groups.”
P.S.
In my last postscript I embedded the whole Back in Town demo. Now I have an important decision to make: Should I immediately begin sharing tracks from yet another album, or should I give that last tape a moment to breathe?
I’ll start right in with more tracks, because I don’t care.
This next mini-demo that I’m sharing is the one that I made directly after the abovementioned album. What happened is this: My friend produced that last one with his computer. That was the first time we had done that. Then my own computer, which was very old, died in a massive explosion of fire and fury. So I had to replace the machine; and, when I did, my friend said: Hey, do you want some old software that I don’t use anymore—I’ll load it onto your new device. So I said OK. Then I decided to make a simple mini-demo trial album, just for fun, to experiment with the environment of computer recording, which was new to me. My idea was to follow a rigid formula, very simple: Ten songs, with one rap per song, and each rap would be about a different type of bowl. That idea seemed boring enough not to give me too much of a headache. So I wrote all the raps, and, for background, I chose simple beats and music from the libraries that came with the computer programs. And one particular program had a feature where you could type any phrase, and the program would “read” your words aloud, in a cartoonish voice, which was funny and high-pitched like a tiny synthesized child. So I typed the name of each track into the phrase-reader program, thus causing its fake voice to pronounce the title (alternating with my own voice), in lieu of a chorus, at the end of each track.
Sorry; this was a wordy explanation for such a stupid, silly project. Here’s the first couple parts:
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