9.25 Fredric Jameson has died, and I’ve never read any of his books. Many a writer I grew up loving is dead. The young do not fill that vacant space. Wright sounds old, is old, makes me wonder all the more what will help me in my waning years. Already I am thinking about death at life’s midway. I know it’s too soon but does it help to say it? The poem of life must be filled with the living—people if you can get them, but we accept any creatures great or small, so there’ll be meals to cook and serve to strangers’ greedy mouths, doubts to utter in chat rooms, mediocrity to affirm or challenge. If heaven’s the dynamic vector of good moments expressed perfectly, a trans-temporal, trans-spatial community, but one’s lived a solitary life, what then, fathers? Whose smiles, whose words, will eat at my table? Perhaps the characters and narrators I’ve lived with here will come for tea? It’ll be thrilling, holy, I guess, but the hills before us now seem to go on forever… 9.27 I’m near the end of your stack of letters, Frank, and can’t wait to flip back and begin again! It’s never happened before but here I am, 41, wanting to play you on repeat. I’m nearly through Luke and then it’ll be John and I’ll start the gospels again. What a diet! You’re in rare territory and that’s how I feel about you, so full of life, grasses shooting up some arche in your bones. Your knees I think must have been boney, and your shins. I see you always thin and dashing, slick-haired, handsome Frank. All heroes are handsome: Saul, David, Rama, Joseph–we love handsomeness! Why not? Since time moves slow for us let’s make things pretty. I never got to see those Picassos downtown and now they’ve traveled on. September’s such a scramble of meetings. That’s why you only hear from me a little. Meanwhile, be your well-dressed handsome self out there in a country manor by a window. Whoever you’re waiting for do you really think they’ll come that way through the garden? 9.30 So we begin again, and you are young again, Frank. Take me with you to the fount of youth! I’m 41 but turning back’s easy when one’s a book! To sound like (and be!) an adolescent invoking Pan! I like the way you do it—not too old-fashioned, not hip, just you, being already recognizable, a harmony of personality. What I’d like to be. It’s only artifice skeptics would have us believe. But do you believe it? I don’t. A person, me, writes you letters for a year and you start to believe I exist. Yes it’s true and how many muffins and cups-a-Joe got us to this point? Ah! It’s heaven. Five geese arrowed north and west last Friday, sundown. Why headed there? It’s growing cooler. Maybe they know how journeys begin, how cold wind tightens us up for years to come...
“A rich man does wrong and even proves himself to be the one wronged. A poor man is wronged, and he must apologize.” Sirach 13:3.
Think of it! Today’s world.
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Dreams! Joseph dreams the sun and moon and eleven stars bow to him, and his father, Jacob, tells him to shut his trap. No one need interpret the dream. We know what it means.
Yesterday someone I barely know says he dreamed he was shrinking, smaller and smaller, and I put my arm around him, and he returned to his proper size.
Charles Wright, when he was eleven on a camping trip, sleep-walked to the edge of a cliff, was woken by a bear breathing near him:
Notley:
Did I dream Here ere a nex- us some unre- laity will be Ours you know How do we enter it the real en- tity ex- Isting as I am most real think- ing and lead- ing but This ri- diculous it sort of walks in body body (Speak Angel Series, 273)
Melville, Mardi:
Dreams! dreams! golden dreams: endless, and golden, as the flowery prairies, that stretch away from the Rio Sacramento, in whose waters Danae’s shower was woven;—prairies like rounded eternities: jonquil leaves beaten out; and my dreams herd like buffaloes, browsing on to the horizon, and browsing on round the world; and among them, I dash with my lance, to spear one, ere they all flee.
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Early in life, surrealism is like thrashing in a bed, throwing things in a China closet. Iconoclasm. Later, one starts to look for the ridiculous that is there in the world and find the hidden truth in it. Iconodulism.