Vision Quest

Sometimes the evening or night skies seem to crack open with flashes of that sudden, extraordinary force known as lightning.  Often, the lightning appears with a growl of thunder.  You stand transfixed, telling the cosmos it has got your attention, and you cannot help but revert to that selfish aspect of individuality where you wonder what the cosmos is trying to show you or, perhaps, what it wants of you.

Moments later, after you have wondered these questions, you return to being the tiny drop of water, recognizing the ocean.

This is the only productive posture.  You believe that individuals who see themselves larger than the cosmos and larger than they are run the risk of becoming an unintended protagonist in a humorous story.  A salient quality of humor is to show such persons being reduced to proper, human size.

In your travels to the interiors of your inner landscape or the perimeters of your external neighborhoods, the goal is to collect and store images you will later attempt to collect.  Being a citizen on this planet has responsibilities.  The least you can do is take the time to look for beauty, to make decisions, to try to understand how some of the many things about you work, to know if the birds in the estuary are ducks or loons, perhaps even to understand the difference between a rabbit and a hare.  

This is not mere rhetoric or hyperbole.  One of the most beautiful lines of poetry you ever heard is to be found in a poem by John Keats, in The Eve of St. Agnes.   He is telling us how bloody awful cold it is.  "And numb the herdsman's fingers as his rosary he told." You can see those chapped, cold hands, telling the beads.  Then comes the line you so love:  "The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass."  

As you gloss over these images you've found, listening to their stories--or listening to the stories they tell you, because images are just as capable of telling lies as people are--you enjoy trying to fit them into stories of your own.

You've seen any number of lightning flashes in numerous parts of the world where you've visited.  From a course you took in astronomy, you recall that there are three essential types of lightning, those within a cloud, those from cloud to cloud, and the kind that hit you, lightning from cloud to earth.

Of course the lightning that hit you was not the from-cloud-to-earth kind, rather the splendid force between the things you visit and see and save, each packed away in its own energy, each sufficient as it is, in a way like those ecosystems in a bottle you were used to making in grammar school.  A pleasant looking jug or large jar, sever fish, some sand, rock, plants.  Suddenly a small world, able to support the fish, provide air and yes, even interest for the fish.  One of the earliest things you can remember writing was which you thought was more important, an ecosystem with fish, or an ant farm.

At the time you wrote it, you thought it was difficult to get too excited about either ants or fish, but since you had to make a choice, you thought you'd rather a fish for a pet than a bunch of ants.

From time to time, when a line of ants appears outside your back door, you recall this sentiment and realize you may have shorted the ants when you were in grammar school.  These ants outside your door do not seem to want entry into your kitchen.  Perhaps this is a judgment.  Ants seem to have a social genome that is strong on agenda.  You pause to watch these ants, wondering whence they came, where they will go, what agenda of theirs, hidden to you, is no secret to them?

You are struck by the lightning of secret connections between things, by the mysteries of whether the ducks in the estuary are mallards or teals or pin tails or maybe loons.

You are struck by the heartbreakingly beautiful way a person walks or the sudden playful impulse of a smile.  Why does your cat spend so much time on the top shelf of your bathroom, amidst your shaving cream, lotion, brush?  Does a spider, which has eight legs, sound like two horses walking toward you

What mysterious attractions are out in the world and why, when they connect for you, do they create lightning strikes that char your whiskers and brows, cause your skin to tingle, affect your breathing, and keep you up nights, writing so quickly you have scarce time to get the words spelled correctly?

Is this the lightning of love?

Voices at Night

The best coffee shops to write in soon reveal themselves to supply, in addition to drinkable coffee, a steady influx of customers with disagreeable voices.

Customers with agreeable voices tend to produce an engaging hum, redolent with cheer or industry.  Customers with disagreeable voices cause you to experience a sphincter-like squeeze, a tightening of focus to overcome the disagreeable nature of the voice.  Such are the mechanics of using coffee houses (those with good coffee) as places for work, whether from a note pad or a laptop computer.

Focusing in over disagreeable sounds helps you filter out distractions from that one voice you're listening for, trying to entice from the shadows.  This voice is your inner monitor.  Of course it is your voice, but you have so many of them, all sounding like a bunch of tenors and baritones, auditioning for a Puccini opera.  You're auditioning for the right one, the one best suited to be the teller of the story or narrative at hand.  You must take care not to be seduced, wherein you hear voices that sound like writers you admire, perhaps even adore.

There, you have said it, got to the basic point of willingness to risk sounding like yourself.  True enough, you get some interesting effects sounding like any number of writers you admire, say Denis Johnson, or Willa Cather or Louise Erdrich, but those effects also sound like them.  Tempting as it is, you need to edit out such things.  Once you are satisfied with the risk of sounding like you, you're giving control to the characters, letting them be as they wish to speak, which is often contrary and in pleasing ways quite remarkable for you.

Only today, by listening carefully to a friend, you captured this awareness, as though it were some rare breed of butterfly or lepidoptra.  Characters are best when they do not say what you want or expect them to say.  If you find yourself wondering where a particular exchange is going, story-wise, think of the potential for the reader who stumbles upon a story of yours.

You were somewhere in your late twenties when you began listening for voices in your head, relieved when they came, because Rachel, your mentor, told you she heard them all the time, dis-abusing you of the notion that dialogue was an attempt to imitate the cadences and locution of conversation.

Thanks to Rachel, that went away in a big hurry.  But then there was a time when you thought you were one of those who saw things.  A number of your friends, and writers you admired, say Ray Bradbury, or the recently departed Fred Pohl, saw things.  You were good at seeing loose change in sofa cushions, but the more you looked for clues and nuances, you began to hear the chatter going on about you, ambient talk of things, broadcasting, setting forth nets of social interaction.

When you first began teaching, you were a bit cautious about saying such things because you'd already come to understand that writers--well, writers, artists, musicians, and actors--were a bit other, and you did not want to start making it seem that you had to be other to be one of them.  Except that all of "them" you knew were, and those who accepted you did so on the basis of you being other.

After a year or so, you tried out talking about seeing visions or hearing voices, to which an agreeable graduate student told you that she was glad to hear that because she'd been hearing voices as long as she could remember, voices that did not sound like persons she knew, at least not until she realized they were voices of people in her stories.  She invited you for dinner one night, serving you not only the fry bread she'd promised, but making a special occasion of it by serving red Jell-o.  As you were leaving, her husband took you aside and said he hoped you realized what having red Jell-o meant and how pleased he was to have you come because he was growing a bit tired of green Jell-o

You are from a culture where Jell-o is frequently used in context with something else, such as the way your maternal grandmother mixed it with vanilla ice cream.  Thus your understanding that even the smallest things speak volumes if you listen to them.  For instance, being invited home to visit a classmate one afternoon, you were offered a snack of chocolate milk and a slice of buttered bread, which had been sprinkled with sugar.

Your mother, the detective, was pleased that you had been offered a snack, somewhat put off by the fact that the chocolate syrup was Hershey's rather than the Bosco or Fox's u-Bet syrups, close to insulted by the sprinkling of sugar on the bread.  "They are not like us, that's for sure,"  your mother said.  One of your first lessons in anthropology.  The slightest ritual speaks in ways that reveal information.

When your classmate came to visit you, you were aware of your mother going to considerate lengths to make your guest feel comfortable, including a siphon bottle of seltzer water in case your guest chose to make chocolate soda.  Also the prized sugar bowl, in case.

There is yet another kind of hearing voices, and you're pretty sure it comes from the experiences of being out on the prowl, listening.  At night, for instance, there are places where you can hear the chatter of cicada, the hoot of a barn owl, the rush of traffic, the unmistakable approach of someone on a skate board, and perhaps a territorial encounter among a group of cats.  Where you used to live, off Hot Springs Road, there were often coyotes, some doing the equivalent of texting others from their group with distinctive yips in varying pitches.

There are night sounds of ideas colliding, things speaking in ways you'd never have supposed.  Your friend who instructed you in the voices of trapped words and dreams and stories, and who now has shown you things about dialogue, adds to the things you have to listen to at night to hear the steady thrum and wing flap of reality, about to take off, and the conversations of persons and things and animals, trying to sort out reality.

This is, of course, exactly what you're trying to do, wandering books and stories during the day, streets and dreams at night.

What bird is that?

What ducks are those upon the inlet?

Are they warning us or telling us it is all clear?

Listen, they are saying.  Listen.

Aspects

There are other aspects of love than those relating to things, such as tangible items, say a fountain pen or pocket knife or book, and abstractions such as artistry or humor or curiosity.  There is love for a place.

In not too many years hence, you will have spent half your life living in a place, Santa Barbara, which you can admit to loving, not only because of sudden, heart-breaking aspects of natural beauty, but because of consequences arising from it being, at heart, a small town.  In some ways, gated community ways, it is as much a metaphor as the city of Jerusalem was rendered by Muriel Spark in her novel, The Mandlebaum Gate.

There is a clear love for the city of your birth, Santa Monica, which presents itself to you from time to time when you have the leisure to wander its streets.  At such times, you see landmarks that remind you so much of your father, and the elaborate routines he developed to get himself out of the clothing stores he once owned there, or in more recent years, the locale--now a Chinese restaurant--at 516 Santa Monica Boulevard that was called Boulevard Luggage and which, at certain hours of the day actually was a shop where one could buy luggage or bring in damaged luggage for repair.

At the same time 516 Santa Monica Boulevard was Boulevard Luggage during business hours, it was also a place where serious investigations into the relative speed of thoroughbred horses were argued to the point where the investigators were willing to back their beliefs with money.  Five Sixteen Santa Monica Boulevard was also a place where, in its upper balcony, you conducted a brief series of love affairs with model airplanes, followed by romances with building radios, and then, on a Remington upright typewriter, a gift from Noah Bowers of a pet store, two doors away, a series of short stories intended for such publications as Ranch Romances, Dime Detective, and Thrilling Wonder Stories.

Such were the demographics of the time, along with the entrepreneurial curiosities of your father that the basement of 516 Santa Monica Boulevard became as well as its upstairs functions, a place where those with additional spirit of speculation could participate in a crafty combination of gin rummy and poker called Paiute, while at the other side of the room, a more traditional Asian observation of the sciences of speculation called Pai-Gow could be indulged.

For someone who'd yearned for adventure as a boy, Santa Monica was the equivalent of a constant discovery of treasure maps, and the main branch of the library, a scant two blocks away, drew you as the Sirens drew Odysseus's sailors.

But truest love of all for a place was for Los Angeles, which in aggregate had all the myth, romance, mystery and excitement you could ever want.  Not the least of this mythology came from the worlds of music in Los Angeles, the elegant intonations and song choices of Bobby Short, the thriving individuality of be-bop, a revolutionary way of phrasing melody and causing it to collide in the newly discovered accelerator of harmony; and the plenitude of so-called classical performances, including chamber music at what seemed to you the equivalent of the Emerald City of Oz, the Wilshire Ebell Theater.

In your mid twenties, you were heard to swear that, excepting an occasional trip to San Francisco, what individual of right mind would need any other place than Los Angeles.  Your love was big, tangible, perhaps a bit rowdy, but sincere.  At the time, you still had the occasional recurrence of a dream in which you were separated from Los Angeles, in Miami Beach, Florida, living on the margins of a separation you could not yet articulate.  The wound of separation was still open.

Even when you moved here to Santa Barbara, you traveled to Los Angeles at least once a week, sometimes more often, plunging up and down Highway 1 to teach at the University of Southern California, comparing what you saw and felt there with what you'd traded to, here.
You may well be of Santa Barbara now, but you are irrevocably of Los Angeles, spinning metaphor and simile with her as the basis.  Only a week or so ago, you met another transplant, now here, but of there.  You observed to her that the Santa Barbara of your arrival here in the early 1970s reminded you so much of the Los Angeles of your youth.

Except that there was no Madman Muntz here, nor Earl Scheib $19 automobile paint jobs, much less Clifton's Cafeteria, the Awful Fresh McFarlaine Candy Stores, nor the Curry's Ice Cream parlors with the Mile-High cone.  There was no Garden of Allah here nor Bunker Hill much less a funicular called The Angel's Flight, which conveyed one up Bunker Hill, past a row of apartments where you swore you would some day live.  Nor was there a John Fante to write about such places to the point where you felt you actually had lived there.

Love for things and abstracts sets you off on the beginner's trail to love for a place.  Such love introduces you to kinds of grief and insight you'd never dreamed possible, not even in the tidal nature of love for the abstraction of writing about experiences, your own and of individuals you invent.

With such love for and understanding of places, you are ready for the equivalent of climbing the Himalayas, which is to say love for another person.

Many dear, cherished friends are available to you only in memory.  Among those left, you struggle to keep yourself aware of the gift inherent in each moment together.  In recent weeks, you've brought an adopted cat into the apartment, setting about some connection that will no longer leave you less an animal friend.  Even as you write this, the cat has usurped your customary chair before the computer, a sure sign that some boundaries have been breached and friendship is on the way.

You have brief flirtations with Australian Cattle Dogs from various rescue sites, looking for the sort of chemistry you had for so long with Sally.

From time to time, your thoughts go back to a waitress named Roberta from a saloon in San Francisco called The Hotsy-Totsy, a name which suggests San Francisco, but not Los Angeles.  "I've heard about you,"  Roberta said, after introductions.  "You don't look so hot to me."

An hour or so later, Roberta threw a half-filled highball glass at you in recognition of a kind of chemistry.

Which is the word you both used after she'd thrown the glass.  "Chemistry."

Some time late, she told you she'd never before thrown a cocktail glass at anyone like you before, although she'd certainly thrown her share of glasses.

Of course there is remarkable, Protean love in friendship, and of course if such a thing as romantic love is to endure, with all the potentials for change raging within it, romantic love requires the greatest friendship of all.

Two individuals embarking on romance are in effect writing different plays, each casting the other into a role that, over the arc of time, each strives to understand, appreciate, and not attempt to change.

The key theme here is to find a person who has never thrown a half-filled cocktail glass at anyone like you before.

Sizzle

The moment you decide to love something is the moment you set a match to a fuse.  Before long, you can even hear the sizzle, then begin to wonder about the nature of the explosion.

You'd already read a number of books before that fateful rainy day when, in place of allowing your class out for its regular recess, Mrs. DeAngelo, with some trepidation, picked up a book, then began to read aloud from it.


"TOM!"

No answer.

"TOM!"

No answer.

"What's gone with that boy,  I wonder? You TOM!"

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about theroom; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom ornever looked _through_ them for so small a thing as a boy; they were
her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not
service--she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well.
She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but
still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll--"

You want to say you'd read hundreds of books by then, because you probably had.  You'd at least read enough so that the principal at your California school had invited you to borrow whichever books you wished from the library in her office.  Okay, at least a hundred.  At least.

The point is, when you heard Mrs. DeAngelo read those words, you knew how in some sense you were screwed, a word you knew then but were not allowed to use unless it had to do with such things as light bulbs into sockets or tops of peanut butter jars properly secured.  You knew screwed back in those days with a sense of meaning that implied something entirely beyond your control and with some probability of being beyond your conventional best interests.  Even then, nine, going on ten, you had some fantasies of what life beyond conventional horizons of a nine-year-old boy were like.

In ratification of this, you asked Mrs. DeAngelo that very rainy afternoon if it were possible for a person to make a living writing such things as that amazing story about a boy not terribly older than you.  He was a boy who had many of the adventures you craved, living in a Los Angeles where there were still empty lots, and where, within walking distance from you, a Goodyear blimp landed from time to time in the midst of a golf driving range.

To her credit, Mrs. De Angelo told you how very fortunate you'd be to be able to write such stories as that one, and how much you could learn about writing such stories if you were to read everything Mr. Mark Twain wrote to, as she put it, get the hang of how he was able to do so.

An indication of how badly screwed you felt, even though at the time you had no way of recognizing many of the implications of being screwed, came when you made a deal, a Faustian pact, really, which resulted in you having in your hands that very day your own copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, for which you parted with twenty-nine cents, the going price for the book at a local drug store.

You had some experience with Faustian pacts equivalent with your incomplete knowledge of  what being screwed meant.  In the case of the twenty-nine cents needed for the copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a Faustian pact meant you'd mortgaged Saturday movies for the next three weeks.

Two days later, you'd finished reading your own copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which seemed to you of a stature grander than any Faustian pact, even not being able to go to the Saturday movie at the Roxy Theater, also called The Garlic House, in what you later discovered was a racist slur directed against certain of its patrons.  You were, as they say, on a learning curve about many things, including how to make a living writing stories with such an epic scope as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

You had no idea how you'd come to dislike Tom Sawyer down the line, partly because of the many things Tom Sawyer did in the book, and his insistence on doing things that produced adventure.

But as you observed earlier, deciding to love something has consequences.  Love a thing deeply enough and the consequences can become lifelong, and as the saying goes, Devil take the hindmost, which is something you came to understand better as you had more experiences.  At those early times of saying Devil take the hindmost, you didn't realize you were relegating on of the more fearsome presences in your universe to the equivalent of the rear end of a chicken.  

You were more afraid of Injun Joe than you were of any old Devil.  You'd heard some interesting speculation about the Devil and God playing games in a book called The Book of Job, and since you'd begun thinking of ways to make a living wage from writing books, you went so far as to consider you might someday write your own version of The Book of Job, trying out for a job rather than being selected by God just because it was clear to God and the Devil how Job loved God.

You thought you understood why Achilles was so pissed in The Iliad. You had to go out of the house to use words like pissed, but once, while at dinner with your parents and sister, you confessed to being as mad about something as Achilles.  Your sister later explained to you the nuances of why Achilles was so pissed, and you decided you'd have to hold onto that one.

At the time, yet another splendid word came your way, and because it was Spanish and connected with profanity, it seemed reasonable to use the word when you were out of the house, in particular when you were removed from California and felt a terrible longing for it, you might even say a form of love.

The word was--and still is--pinche, a favored adjective you would not truly appreciate until its mysteries were explained to you by the bullfighter, Carlos Arruza.  Meanwhile, you were careful with the use of the word, a remarkable secret for a young boy with an owlish face, who was always breaking his glasses.

Thanks to Mrs.DeAngelo, the next book of Mr. Mark Twain you read was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,  which, to use a word you thought you understood well enough at the time, seemed pretty darned swell to you, and kept you in a large sense distracted from the sizzle of that fuse that had been lit.

At the time these tumultuous things were going on within the forge of your psyche, you were learning a number of things that might not on their face make it easier for you to earn any kind of living from stories you might write but would at least give you a sense of what to expect from aspects of love you were able to get a grip on.

You'd kissed a girl named Elise, which at the time didn't seem all that remarkable, and you'd come to realize that a girl named Rena, whose last name in Italian means Sings-while-she-walks or, if you prefer, Walks-while-singing (Passacantando) made you swear you would learn Italian so you could translate other marvels.  

And, having finished A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, you found something to love in ways you'd never expected, caused you to look at things in ways you'd never imagined possible, caused you to wish to add substance to any subsequent adventures on which you might embark.  It also caused you to see things about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would forever change the way that early love effected you.  

The something was a released trapped dream for at least its first eighty percent of duration.  You can close your eyes and hear it begin, deep inside, its voice telling you, yes, you can find the place in you that sounds as true and open and vulnerable as this, and now that you have heard it, you must promise to look and listen for your own, which you can never hope to do without taking the biggest risk of all, which is falling in love.

"You don't know about me,"  the released trapped dream says, "without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before."

In Search of Craziness and Supper for a Cat Named Goldfarb

If you were closer to an Oxford English Dictionary, you would look up the word crazy, to see how its meaning has evolved since its earliest use and, indeed, when that first use was.  Such things, you are pleased to note, still matter.  Even though there is scant room for a set of the OED where you live, you would enjoy finding places to fit it in.

Instead, you have done what you often do, consult your American Heritage Dictionary of the American Language, unabridged, where the first definition of crazy speaks to derangement, which is somewhere within the parameters you consider when you talk about crazy.

You think a good deal about crazy and its meanings when something you have written comes out sounding too serious.  A friend of yours in India called you erudite, the other day, which somewhat scared you because you would rather be thought of as crazy in any of its permutations than erudite in most of its.

Often when things begin coming out as too serious or formal, you begin to think of some of the crazy poets you admire and of the few genuinely crazy ones you have known.

The first crazy poet you became aware of was William Butler Yeats, some of whose work seems to drip the kind of craziness that matters to you.  He was the one who went out to the hazel wood.  He also wrote this:

I whispered, "I am too young,"
And then, "I am old enough;"
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
"Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair."
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love.
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon. 

Which brings forth questions about whether such things come from or cause craziness.

A friend of his was also crazy.  You used to get drunk of Korbell brandy with a man named Peter, who wrote poetry , and taught courses in poetry at UC Berkeley.  Sometimes, when there was too much Korbell, he would disagree with your statements about Ezra Pound on the grounds that no one could recite things from him.  It was said of you that you had a bad influence on Peter because you could recall things Pound had written.  Pound in his way was as crazy as Yeats.  Among other things, he wrote this:


By Ezra Pound


For the Marriage in Cana of Galilee


DARK-EYED,
O woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandaled,
There is none like thee among the dancers,
None with swift feet.         

I have not found thee in the tents,
In the broken darkness.
I have not found thee at the well-head
Among the women with pitchers.

Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;         
Thy face as a river with lights.

White as an almond are thy shoulders;
As new almonds stripped from the husk.

They guard thee not with eunuchs;
Not with bars of copper.         
Gilt turquoise and silver are in the place of thy rest.
A brown robe, with threads of gold woven in patterns,
                hast thou gathered about thee,
O Nathat-Ikanaie, “Tree-at-the-river.”

As a rillet among the sedge are thy hands upon me;         
Thy fingers a frosted stream.

Thy maidens are white like pebbles;
Their music about thee!

There is none like thee among the dancers;
None with swift feet.   

There was Kenneth Rexroth, who used to invite you over to eat the spicy pasta he made which he could no longer eat because of his hital hernia.  He had to have been crazy to write some of the wondrous poems, especially the translations from Japanese.      Or there was this:


Runaway

There are sparkles of rain on the bright
Hair over your forehead;
Your eyes are wet and your lips
Wet and cold, your cheek rigid with cold.
Why have you stayed
Away so long, why have you only
Come to me late at night
After walking for hours in wind and rain?
Take off your dress and stockings;
Sit in the deep chair before the fire.
I will warm your feet in my hands;
I will warm your breasts and thighs with kisses.
I wish I could build a fire
In you that would never go out.
I wish I could be sure that deep in you
Was a magnet to draw you always home.

There are other crazy poets as well.  Ernest Dowsen, who went all crazy for a waitress named Adele, and who wrote for her:



Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
   Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
   When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
   Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
   Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee Cynara! in my fashion.

You are born into an upper middle class family in Santa Monica.  From the address on your birth certificate and verification from your sister, you were able to park in front of the house where you were taken as a mere infant, whence you grew seeking ways to track down adventure, craziness, insights, and some measure of ability to capture these things in story.  

From time to time, persons have called you that crazy Lowenkopf.

But not often enough.

Trapped Stories and Designated Assholes

Writing is supposed to be a lonely craft, ideal for introverts who, according to some definitions, are more comfortable when they are not in large groups.

With respect, you rise to disagree on nearly every available count.  If writing were such a lonely craft, you'd think there'd be less rather than more of them.  And you'd think that even those who came slinking over to writing because it seemed so easy, and who had yet to discover how difficult it was, would be on to the fact that the entire summer is filled with writers' conferences, most cities, with the possible exception of Victorville, California, and Minot, North Dakota, had writer's groups, and most schools, even colleges and universities of agriculture and mining or some relationship to technical or polytechnical had writing programs.

Even as you write this, you are not altogether certain Victorville and Minot lack at least one writer's group.  Hell, even Jean, Nevada, probably has an un-used house trailer, where writers gather to read stuff.

Convention has it that writing is lonely because there is just you and the blank screen or note pad of your imagination, right?  The only time writing is lonely is when the characters all seem to be out on errands related to the other demands on their presence.  You've had those days, where maybe one or two of them will send a grudging note, explaining why they couldn't make it to work today.  Visiting relatives.  Called in to deal with an emergency at work.  Problems with kids.  Or husbands. Or wives.  Or in-laws.

One character you'd been messing with even said he had to be at a faculty meeting, and another wanted to tell you all about why you should stop eating red meat because of what "they" do to animals.  You had a few surprises for them, when they came back.  Really subjected them to things that would have made faculty meetings and quarter-pounder hamburgers seem like what the Germans refer to as kinderspeil.  You know, fucking child's play.

More often than not, writing is so not lonely that you have to go to Cafe Luna or Peet's, both of which have the ambient noise of soccer stadia, in order to get lonely again.

Since your friend put you on the track of trapped words and trapped dreams, you've begun brooding about trapped stories and the possibility for trapped characters.  You knew your friend was on to something the minute you heard those words, trapped words.

A trapped story is a multi-dimensional combination of trapped words and trapped dreams, stories you're always on the cusp of understanding at the precise moment you fall asleep, when there is that shifting of gears effect as the brain waves move you from one state to another, sometimes with such a thunk that you're snapped back into wakefulness again, wondering how you came to be here instead of at that momentary glimpse of understanding and awareness.

Sometimes you have to listen to a lot of crap from your characters in ways similar to the crap you have to listen to with a semblance of politeness and respect.  You've had enough experience and results to know that even persons you have to listen to a lot of crap from are persons you'd do better to treat with respect.  

One of the few remaining persons you allow yourself not to like from the get-go has just died, causing you in the most ironic but understandable way to be sorry he fucking died.  Now, you won't have him to not respect on sight.  There is another such person, who in fact approached you while you were in conference with a client, his extraordinary rudeness extending to the point where he sat at your table uninvited and began trying to chat up your client.  

You had him well on his way in a few moments, happy to know there was at least one individual you didn't have to feel respect for.  Not only that, you saw little potential for learning something of worth or value from him.  He remains to this day a fulcrum on which you can balance your growing sense of respect and admiration for most persons against the possibility for you being meanspirited.  Is it all right, in effect, for you to have one or two designated asshole individuals in life and fiction?

Most of the time, you're aware that characters, if they are to seem like real persons, must be respected, perhaps even loved in some cases.  Like many people, they have to be made comfortable, made to trust you so that they will share themselves and their inner dreams with you.  Call it trust.

Trapped stories are as difficult to prise out of your characters as a whole nut, intact, from its shell.  The problem, of course, is you.  You've set up the story hoping for an easy way out of some ethical or existential situation to which you hope for an answer.  There is a kind of unselfish love in allowing your characters to see through their crap, even though you may have the ulterior motives of wishing to free your own trapped stories.

The more you respect the characters you create, the more you find yourself willing to go that extra moment or two in listening to real persons telling you things you might not have expected to learn from them.

For the most part, you select friends with care, hoping the give-and-take of conversation and concern will cause more disparate things to come together in your imagination, where you will be able to construct a landscape in which the trapped story feels as though it does not have to stay hidden.  It can stretch within its confines, no longer making you as uncomfortable as when you see animals caged at zoos however well-designed and geared for comfort they are.  

You wonder from time to time if you are deliberately adding minor aspects of comfort, equivalents of candy or soda vending machines or perhaps even washers and driers to the cages in which your stories are trapped.

In a real sense, not many persons with whom you are in some regular form of contact will see you as a person who traps stories.  But what of the friend who has spoken to you of trapped words and trapped dreams and who has caused you to consider your own trapped stories? 

Such questions are additional reasons why writing is not lonely.  What better person to talk to about trapped stories than the friend who is also a writer?

Trapped Dreams

Because you've read nearly all his books, found so much to enjoy and learn from in each of them, the career of Graham Greene holds a high position in your interest and esteem.  You recall in particular a long passage in his autobiography where he went on with extreme regret over having used an -ly adverb in one of his novels.

You are no great fan of -ly adverbs; ask any of your writing students or editorial clients, but this acute sense of regret from Greene has remained with you for at least twenty-five years.

Another bit of information about him, you think from The New York Times, described the final years of his life, during which he apparently felt unable to write or possibly felt disinclined to write stories.  As a consequence of his years of disciplined writing, he was still driven to put words on paper, thus his preoccupation with starting each day by recording as many of his dreams as he could remember, straight off on awakening.  After writing in as much detail as possible, he'd stop for breakfast, read a bit, then return to his writing, at this stage sorting his dreams into categories.

When you first read about this, Greene was still among the living, causing you to think that should you ever reach such a point, where you no longer wished or felt able to write fiction, keeping track of dreams and attempting to classify them seemed ever so much more plausible an activity than golf or lawn bowls or some form of hobby.  

You even experimented for a few days, capturing some of the details of your dreams, once or twice even before breakfast.  The experience neither excited nor bored you; it did not leave you with any special insights nor was there some conversion-in-the-desert sort of revelation where you knew that you must do this henceforth as a way to infuse your writing with some greater sense of the essential you.

Dreams have always seemed to you a natural enough process, one you set no great store by nor on the other hand thought of in any disparaging taunt.  From about that time in your life, particularly when working on short stories, you were not so much dreaming about them during sleep hours as revising them or improvising them as you lay in some state between wakefulness and sleep.

Dreams for you are interesting at about the same ratio as waking thoughts and speculations; you gain insights from each and are happy with the exchange, on the theory that for you, an insight is a gift, a connection between two or more things that previously seemed unrelated infuses you with a sense of being inside the universe rather than a distant witness to a part of it.

In a way, dreams make the most sense when they are seen as illusions.  This is so because of the illusory nature of so many things about you, including some of your own actions and beliefs.  Thus dreams are links between the worlds of day alertness and night ruminations and vulnerabilities.  The common denominator is vulnerability.  Days, you're vulnerable to illusions about you and illusions of your own creation.  Nights, you're vulnerable to the tricks your senses and memories and daytime goals play on you.

Dreams and illusions prank you, and you are used to that playfulness of spirit your dreams bring you.  Once in a great while, they prank you with horses of the night on stampede, a herd of female horses at full gallop over your sensitivities.  These nightmares inject a sense of horror or fear or antipathy to images and events that in ordinary dreams go unnoticed, thus they are in a sense dreams with a scary sound and sensory track.

Most nights, you go to sleep in anticipation of prank dreams that have pleasing outcomes, or of what you think of as working dreams, where you are going over a story on a line-by-line basis.

So far, these paragraphs define the state of dreams in your life and the state of you in relation to them.  The same friend who caused you to consider trapped words has brought you yet another gift, beyond trapped words and six yellow tomatoes.  The same friend has brought you to consider trapped dreams, which can easily mean daytime dreams as well as the ones of the stampeding and pranking horses.

The concept of trapped dreams comes to you as a gift, not unlike trapped words or jewel-like yellow tomatoes.  You unwrap the trapped dreams, holding them up to darkness and light.

You have no doubt that the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, would extend his notion that we cannot bathe in the same river twice to include the fact that we cannot dream the same dream, even a recurring one, twice.  At the very least, the dreamer in a recurring dream has changed, throwing more prank into the notion of illusion.  In the same way witches have familiars, perhaps dreams have attendant pranks.

A prank in a dream will, for instance, have you going into a formal meeting wearing a three-piece suit, but no shoes.  You have not worn suits since you were running publishing companies, and often, not even then.  You do sometimes go about, shoeless, but this is as a result of some serious deliberation on your part.  A prank in a dream will inject fear into a situation that would ordinarily bring you pleasure.

What kind of prank is a trapped dream trying to play on you?  The joke, awake or asleep, is always on you, an important thing to realize, even as you try to slough the joke off on characters you have created.  This does not make you even remotely like Job, although you do come from the same culture, one which is about to celebrate yet another new year in a few days.

Awareness that the joke is always on you gives you a greater sense of understanding when dreams appear to be trapped, then come to you, offering you bribes to release them, or stealing your shoes before they leave you.