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random cuts
Flashes of faces, without names, without context. Could be friends, could be a book or magazine, a movie, an image produced by words spread out across the night. Flocks of swans, gaggles of geese, an endless thundering of wings and thoughts, bobbing on turbulent sanity. Bobbing aimlessly to place, to name, arranging, rearranging, and
É my god my god why have you forsaken me? Repeat it like a mantra. It that the phone?
The phone rang about the same time the door slammed. It was the wind and Maya arriving together. Dispatched all the news from Manhattan. Pictured the green grocer, the dried fruit vendors in Chinatown, the cotton candy push carts out on Coney Island, endless block parties in Brooklyn, the sound of squealing children playing in closed off streets, the smell of seafood risotto served on a checkered table cloth in the middle of Mulberry Ave, the laundry hung from a thousand clothes lines and fluttering in the ocean breeze out at far rockawayÉ Suspension wires, wink and smile. The song, the song, the songs of Solomon, the song of Solomon Grundy. The night has finally cooled down I find myself here tumbling along the melody lines of voice echoing with the sound of the city.
It was Tuesday before I leaned against the window and beat fifteen hundred greyhound miles softly into my head cushioned by a black cap I found at the mountaineering store. Eastern Colorado was a snow flurry blown up off the tailcoats of a blizzard. The metal railings of the window stick to my cheeks like freezer burn and contrast against the warm climate controlled interior of the bus. Kansas is a white outÑdriving into the blizzardÑforced to wait for three hours in St Louis switching buses for AtlantaÑAthensÑSaturday morningÑcold and hungryÑno cabs in sight. It was drizzling steadily as walked out of the bus station and headed toward Almont.
in a way that held horror and beauty to be ultimately different reactions to the same observed phenomena. I made breakfast in the chill of morning air, crisp and biting like papercuts.
Back in Moab I went for a quick icy swim in the Green River to wake myself up. Moab is a sleepy town in the off season; a handful of deserted hotels, a grocery store, and a legacy of uranium mining. I walked to the bus station and found that the next bus was two days away. I walked a bit out of town and set up camp beside the river. I was incently minding my own business later that night when I had what psychiatrists and others in the know call acute anxiety attacks. I simply thought I was going to die and for the next twenty six hours I suffered in ways that I did not know I could suffer. Heart palpatations and sweating brow, anxiety and the the feeling that I was outside of time, my heart had stopped and I was already dead. There was no literature to save me, no one to hold my hand. In all that times in my life when things have seemed bad, broken apart, all the loves lost, all the horrors and embarrassments suffered, nothing has ever truly terrified me until that night.
ÒIÕm finally starting to realize that all these things that I think are keeping me from writing, like working on my car or the pinball machine or whateverÉ the point is that they arenÕt preventing me from writing.Ó He wipes the sweat from his forehead on the collar of his t-shirt. ÒThey arenÕt standing in the way like I thought. TheyÕre all actually flowing from the same source and the only thing that changes is how I choose to manifest it. Everything is an act of creation; everything is about the work of creating.Ó
ÒSee thatÕs my point exactly,Ó I say. Dean and I had been exchanging emails on the very same subjectÑthe value of work in creation. ÒIt isnÕt that IÕm lazy or unwilling to work, itÕs that I canÕt work at stupid pointless things. I canÕt get a job and do something just for the money, thatÕs not enough of a motivation for meÉ.Ó IÕm trying very hard to match JimmyÕs boundless dialogue. ÒAnything, whether itÕs music or writing or sitting on rock in the middle of the river, is an act of creation. And the source of so much of my often misplaced rage is that this ÔAmericaÕ does not provide any incentive or reward for creative behavior, for the creation of art. And the businessman up in New York who thinks that he can live without art, who thinks that art is something that takes money and auction attendance and hangs on his living room wall, is mistaken. HeÕs missed the whole point of life. Art is not separate, one does not imitate the other, life is art. Like you were saying about Dylan, the things that unite people are acts of creation and whether those acts arise out of sorrow or joy or pain or anything at all, the fact is that everyone feels those things and thatÕs the point on which they unite.Ó I take a giant swig of beer and feel rather proud of myself for actually chasing down the idea and articulating it.
ÒYes,Ó Jimmy picks up my thought and I can see him mentally crouching down at the starting line, Òand see everything here in this so called America is set up to reward pointless work, busy work that somehow is important to Ôthe economy,Õ but there is no economy. ThatÕs something we made up, there is and always will be only people. People living, struggling, and dying. And your businessman in New York knows that, whether he realizes it or not. Everyone has that connection point. The businessman has a favorite album that moves him, has a song that makes him weep at two in the morning or reads a book that alters the course of his life. Everyone has this point. ThatÕs your job as the artist or whatever you want to call it. You point out the places that the reader or listener already knows, but doesnÕt have a way to get to, thatÕs all the artist is, is a kind of guide, someone tapped into the source. In some ways you donÕt create at all; you merely transcribe what you seeÉ.Ó
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