BEATNIKING A PATH TO UNDERSTANDING

Putting aside the memoir today. It's escaping me and that's discouraging. Trouble is the timeless connections within the unconscious. I'm working on Chapter 5: Cast Of Characters. I want to rough out limited bios of the people in my family who most affected me. But as I begin to write about my mother, thought leads to thought and emotion fires up emotion and soon enough the hidden connections between my mother and my ex-wives takes me to the moments in my marriages when I feel my mother in the images of my exes. I find myself

far off target, in a memory that belongs to another chapter. I mean, when you understand that the abuse your mother suffered as a child is connected to how you picked your wives, what chronology can contain that awareness? Where do you write it—when the twist was put, without your knowledge, into your psyche or when decades later you finally discovered it hidden there? When I understand my life, everything seems connected to everything else. I wonder if another structure is called for? One without a chronology of any sort, but, I've tried that too, and I can't imagine anyone reading it with any patience. Think I'll go home and pick up where I left off in my third read of Steinbeck's East Of Eden. Let me tell you about finding myself with James Dean in the movie East Of Eden, cold and lonely atop a freight car heading to Monterey to look for his whore mother—connection to connection to connection....