THE WRITER'S BRAIN

The one year I taught high school, I still recall Cameron S. coming up to me after class and saying, "Mr. Thomas, you know all the big stuff, but you miss all the little things." These days, I understand that her "big" and "little" could mean different things than I imagined they did at the time, but I had thought all along that my brain seemed to extract generalizations from reading and from experience but did not accurately recall the details. I recently tried to memorize the process by which DNA via RNA makes copies of itself. The step by step drawing of the process was so simple and mechanical, anybody could understand it, but I haven't retained the details. I kick myself for this failing, yet—in kindness to myself—I do understand that had I been a teacher who taught neuroscience every day, I'd probably be more familiar with terminology. 

the brain, high on life.

Of course, the way my brain functions creates my writing style far beyond any conscious control I imagine I have over the process. However, oddly, the following passages are the opening of the second novel I ever wrote and they are rife with tiny detail. Not a generalization to be found. I'm currently translating Delinquent Lives through OCR software from typed pages to editable files. The novel is stream of conscious and darts back and forth between an adult and a boy. The adult works in a home for emotionally disturbed boys, and the boy is an "inmate" there. The plot is an X pattern which I won't  reveal for fear that no one will buy the novel when I put it out (I think) on Amazon as an e-book:
 

    1

    The Zapruder Super-8 had been hand held and shaky. Specifically, Paul remembered how the blurry blowup caught the piece of skull, hairy on the one side and bloody on the other, and the eruption of blood and fluid blown out in the spray of death. Stupidly, he imagined the fragment’s underside to be a kind of mesh material, like the underside of a toupee, and the fragment itself to be tumbling forever through black and most infinite space.
    “Oh yes,” he imagined exclaiming to others, “I can see myself traveling to the loony bin and back on a piece of bone like that!”

     2

     They walked together on a yellow afternoon in the green, city park through the small, grey, hopping birds. She held his hand. In a paper sack, he carried dry bread broken into crumbs to give them.
     “Sparrows, Jimmy,” she said and pointed.

  He threw the dry, white crumbs to them and watched them gather to feed while the heavy balloon man came down the wide, cinder path under the tall, green, high-branched trees.
     “Those are elms and hickories. See?” she told him, pointing."
     Jimmy tilted his face to their far, green tops which blotted out whole pieces of the blue sky. Then, lowering his gaze, he watched the fat, round balloon man come. He watched the red balloons wave above the round balloon man. Oh! The balloons stretched their strings tight, trying to go up.
     Sunlight splashed on everything and made an eye-hurting dazzle of everything in sight. The sun poured on the tall trees, on a brown dog far away running, on the red balloon cherries in the blue, bright sky stretching their strings. The sun splashed on her yellow hair. The sun lit the long, white hairs on the balloon man’s ears. The sun jumped and leaped from the clear, brightly-ruffled wading pool surface in a dazzle bits of light.
     “Balloons,” she said and pointed.
     “Loon! Loon!” he said and pointed too.
     When she knelt to hand him the balloon string, he smelled the soap in the dish by the white tub at home which she used only. Then he held the balloon string and tilted back his head to stare at the bright ball of red she had given him. The wind moved it. It drifted and tugged. He felt it’s life through the string and he laughed.

A SILENT BOOMER TALKS PILLOW TALK

When "Pillow Talk" with Rock Hudson and Doris Day came out in Oct. 1959, I was a few weeks from turning 22. I'd been out of the Navy nearly a year, and I was dating the young woman who was to become my first wife. To my entranced eyes, she looked like Doris Day in "Pillow Talk". She owned and often wore a tight, black sheath dress, tighter than Ms. Day's white sheath dress in that film. She wore her hair in a beehive, also like the coiffure of some of Ms. Day's photos in other films. My wife combined her sheath dresses with a girl next door's shy allure. Both together, wrestling in my libido, made her hotter than a recently fired pistol. Our adventures as we parked in her driveway in my powder blue, 1957 Chevy after returning from a well-dressed movie date to see "Pillow Talk" must be left to a reader's imagination, unless in a future book of essays, I reveal more detailed accounts. I'm sure I've got essays about film-going running out of my psychic sorehouse [sic].

Poster by Universal International Films

I just watched "Pillow Talk" again, thanks to the Encore Retro cable channel. I'd never before realized how completely false that film is to the human condition nor how ugly and sordid and maddening that film would be to a naive young man and his soon to be wife. The irony of Doris and Rock, playing wannabe lovers in that film and his death by Aids are well known, but as I watched the film recently, I was struck by the smug ugly nature of that whole wholesome striptease act being put on for the gullible audiences of that time. The film's message was if you love me you won't want to fuck me and if you love me you will be so hot for me that it's all a woman can do to resist your irresistible charms. 

Torn by that unwholesome lie festering in his psyche, it's a wonder that any young man's arrow ever found the quiver in his woman's thighs without also feeling a lot of guilt about any possibility of enjoying a good, hot roll in the hay. Pardon the metaphor, but even in this day, a man can't be too careful. There might be a fanatically prudish fundamentalist around any transom, trying to get a peek at what goes on between real, as opposed to reel, men and women. 

3 AM IN THE DARKEST PART OF THE SOUL

Fitzgerald photo from NYTimes

It's midnight as I shut down the process of translating the second novel I ever wrote from typed pages to editable computer files. Only 70 more pages to go of 606 pages. "It's always three am in the darkest part of the soul." That's what F. Scott wrote in his autobiographical collection, The Crack Up. 

I used to feel like that all the time. It's an alcoholic's thing, but I'm free of that for a long time, but I'm amused by my continued striving to "make it" with my writing. At age 75, it's kind of silly, but...what?...I'm not alone in this striving? What writer stops before he drops dead or his mind gives out...if...he hasn't won any recognition? I mean, if he's seriously got the writing bug, if it's something he does almost in his sleep? The few times I stopped writing creatively, I went on letter writing binges and email bombastic adventures or filled journals. If I took all the hours I've sat with pencil and paper, or before a typewriter and, finally, a computer keyboard, I'd pretty near have an additional life...well...a short life, but at least a life of some kind, different from sitting down expressing thoughts and feelings that no one might ever read.

Jung wrote that a "man" was supposed to spend the first half or his life achieving his professional successes and the second half attending to his philosophical life. Well, I did finally do something to shore up my financial picture, but it wasn't doing what I thought I'd love to do every day of my life...writing. No, I did it as a machinist in a machine shop. Somehow, I think I'm trying to combine philosophizing and writing in this last phase of my life. I'm getting pretty philosophical about failure. If it wasn't for my successful and happy life with my wife, Mertie, I'd really be desperate. This is real joy, isn't it?