clickety-clack

Print is dead. Nobody reads books anymore. Letters are dead. Nobody writes letters. Ray Bradbury just died. He wrote about people burning books and being addicted to giant screens projecting 24-hour soap operas. That day has come, he knew it would come, and now it has and he has died. Before he died, he finally gave into pressure from his publishers to release Fahrenheit 451 for Kindle. Kindle is not the same as 24-hour soap operas on giant screens to which people have become addicted, I understand, but I still find this ironic. Paper is made from trees. Best we use less paper. The trees are dwindling; it's all dwindling. Kindle is not in itself an evil, but I remember reading an Asimov story as a child in which all the kids had to read their books on computer screens. I said to my dad, "this is awful, I would hate to live in that world," and my dad said, "you will live in that world one day. sorry."

Before Maurice Sendak died he said he hated e-books. He said something to the effect of "if that's the future of books, whatever, I'll be dead." I would never have seen him say that if I didn't watch the Colbert Report on my computer in the mornings. I don't have giant TV screens and I'm not addicted to a 24-hour soap opera, I don't think. But I have a Facebook account. So, perhaps I am.

I'm writing a series of books for Kindle. These books will not have my name on them; it will be someone else's. If they were going to have my name on them, I would not be doing it. If I were not doing it, I would not be able to pay the rent. I do not feel sorry for myself; I feel grateful to have some means of paying the rent. Many people do not.

Often I become stuck, partly because the subject matter of these books is not that interesting to me, and partly because I have always become stuck when writing. No matter how interesting the subject matter, no matter how personal or necessary. To write is to be stuck.

Of course I wish I had the freedom to lounge around all day thinking of the stories I'd like to write and then writing them. Slowly, carefully, being stuck for hours at a time but free from fear. Of course I wish that.

Today a friend posted on the 24-hour soap opera site a link that made me cry. Partly because it's easy to make me cry and partly because the link was about children writing to authors who had helped them. Who had given them something beautiful, something that made their lives better. I was such a child. I never mailed any of my letters off, but I wrote them or daydreamed them and most of all, I knew that there were some writers in the world I would never meet who had, literally, saved my life. C.S. Lewis, Madeline L'Engle, Tolkien, many others. They told me stories and comforted me and promised me that adulthood would be better. They gave me somewhere safe to go in the meantime.

That is why I started writing, too. To give myself somewhere safe to go. On days like this I wonder if my series of Kindle books appearing under someone else's name will do this for anyone. And if not, it makes me feel sad and useless. Because that's the only point of writing at all, isn't it? To help someone, to ease their pain a little.

So all I ask for today is to find a way to help someone, somewhere, through the medium available in this world I have lived to see. This clickety-clackety, shiny-screen world that doesn't feel like paper and doesn't smell like ink. Even here, I'd like to feel useful.

late is the hour

Once, it seemed, I could say "swing" and it would mean "father."
At one time, sometime in my past, metaphor was the only language.
And a grand, sloppy language it was--sweeping over whole years
of my life. Drenching all memories in meaning.

To be sane, I have attempted to see meaning in less.
I mean, in fewer things.
Reserving meaning for the big moments--
the ones shaped as keys.

It is a more even way to proceed.
And I have come to dislike the tumblings,
the upheavals. At least, that mood takes
me less often.

But I still love, deeply love, always will love
the mind's ability to wander. Vastly,
and without apparent motivation, over the
topography of what is perceived. The
dramatic, meaning-making urge of human
thought, encapsulated in language, so
frail and imperfect.

The moments of the mind at its most distinctly human:
when contemplation of the word "fragile," for example,
becomes both sound and story.

I do not know if it is any more remarkable than
whatever way it is a horse thinks. Or a dog. Or a bird.

It only is, and it is the type of mind that I came into.
That I inhabit. And I do love those most fragile
and pointless turnings of consciousness.
They brought poetry into being and it is only
through them poetry can exist.

A very species-specific endeavor, poetry.
To me, this fact gives it no more weight
than the dog thinking "supper time,"
or "I'd like to go for a walk." All things are.
Yet I need the abstract, the unnecessary. An inherent
contradiction that is nonetheless true.

And that is just one way to be. Others are
like me, others are different. What I really need most
is the mystery, the contradictions. They please
the brain. They entertain and renew. Without them,
there is only stagnation. The mind grows self-satisfied,
weak. Moves in lazy loops.

May nothing ever
answer all the questions.