RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,072
(the curved needles of fate)
Among the many things that
worried me all my life, besides
money and staying at least solvent,
has been clarity. I've always tried
to remain very clear in what I was
doing, saying writing; what my
intents were. Clarity, for the creative
person, or the creative act, is very
difficult to achieve, and to then
maintain. When I'd see those
guys, working along the west side,
at their tasks, whatever they were
and menial or not as they may
have been, they always seemed
to be clear on one thing : the
precision of the one act that
they were doing. It is only
when cross-purposes and mixed
intentions get involved that one
loses that focus. A person begins
to fritter away time, lose the
intent. Some fashion guy who
opens a shoe-store - high-end
and of the fashion crowd - he
'produces' nothing, has his head
in 15 directions, thinking of style,
trend, the store look and the
store fixtures, the attitudes
and poise of his employees,
and all the rest - having little,
at that point, to do with shoes.
Perhaps he merely picked as his
subject, shoes, because they
were easily saleable and stylish
with the breaking trends. It's a
lost-in-space deal before it even
gets rolling. A writer, for instance,
can't be that way - the focus-beam
must remain on, lit, and must hone
in on something, precisely, and
not all over the place. It's a nice
thing to get done, but it's not
easy.
-
Let me use an example. Ernest
Hemingway - to be frank, not an
author I'm over the top with, but
a highly interesting character
nonetheless. Picture him, faced
with the problem of getting across
the idea of men out hunting birds.
Look at this wonderful evocation
of scene he came up with : "In
shooting quail you must not get
between them, or when they flush
they will come pouring at you,
some rising steep, some skimming
by your ears, whirring into a size
you have never seen them in the
air as they pass." That may be a
one-position scene, in fact a single
sentence, but it punches home
with all the wallop of a champ.
If everyone wrote like that, we'd
simply be overwhelmed. And he
was never known as a 'writer's'
writer, the kind who gets heavy
and florid. It's simply 'accurate'
writing, but done with polish.
It was an ideal too; something
to be reached for.
-
My confusion always stemmed
from home. I remember lots of
things, but I don't recall any
moments of 'learning' in the
sense of picking up information
as knowledge. My father, for
some reason, from his Navy
days had a stack, from an old
subscription I guess he'd kept,
of a glossy, military sort of
monthly called 'Modern Aeronautics.'
They were intriguing and fascinating.
Articles, specs, diagrams, photos
and stories of any of a hundred
different versions of military craft
- nothing in color, just a white,
glossy, paper, a bit more thick than
usual, and black, and some blue,
ink. Captions and things usually
set off in blue. There were the
collected, monthly, recollections
guys who'd flown 'this' or 'that;
accounts of wartime aerial dogfights,
bombing runs, all retold. At first I was
all confused. I'd never known my
father as having had any flight or
airplane interests, except maybe
when he'd begin relating tales of
his South Pacific fleet days being
under kamikaze assaults. Those
Jap planes lunging in low and
furious, and something called
'Zero' bombers, as I recall. He
was a 'Gunnery Captian,' having
something to do with the big deck
guns and their maintenance and
use. I forget the calibers and all
that; they had swivel-bases, and
circled around trying to pick off
the kami's incoming, before they
successfully suicided into the
ship(s). Maybe that was the
lingering residue that kept the
plane subscription coming. At
first, I didn't even know what
'aeronautics' meant to be saying.
It seemed Greek or something,
in origin, to me.
-
Surprisingly, in my father's very
sparse telling of these tales, there
came across to me a 'clarity' that
surprised me. He never meant it
that way, hadn't even a clue, but
his stories were vivid and succinct,
and he seem still infatuated by it
all. That was a stunner to me, for
otherwise his life with, in most
other aspects, quite mundane.
-
I've told this before - my father
was an upholsterer, by trade, redoing,
stripping and re-packing and sewing,
new fabrics, etc, older furniture. He
hated the new, cheap stuff; furniture
mills in North Carolina selling cheap,
soft-wood junk with lousy fabrics, in
shopping center parking lots, right
out of the big trucks they'd drive up.
Not even a store or a showroom.
To him it was all an atrocity, and a
betrayal, he had a real feel for the
craft, for the old furniture, the kind
from past generations, that have
been in families for sometimes
100 or more years. He did a lot of
work, from home, right in the small
basement workshop area he'd rigged
up. We'd find old coins and odd things,
some from the 1800's, down in the
cushions and paddings when he
ripped stuff apart. Not always,
but lots of times. That was his
life's work, in any case, and it was
a weird sort of fate : he'd only gone
in that direction because, back on
that Navy ship, one of his jobs was
sewing up the dead, in burlap or
canvas, for burials at sea. The big,
curved needles he used for that
piques his interest. It turned out
they were upholstery needles.
So, after he mustered out, with
his GI Bill money he went to an
upholstery craft school in Newark
NJ. It was all that accidental, but
turned out fated too. One focus?
Could he have written it as well?
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