RUDIMENTS, pt 1,161
(truth be told; no lies, I really mean it)
Philip Roth used to say that
his 'reviewers' thought he was
the only novelist in America
who never made anything up.
But he also knew that the most
effective lies stick as close as
possible to the truth. That's
a double-sided coin for sure.
Rendering the veracity of a
lie as the key to its veracity?
Round-robin reasoning? Or
two-layered logic?
-
I used to wonder why those
Park Avenue types and all their
psychoanalyticals operated so
fiercely in their Freudian
playground. In the 1960's, any
of that Freud stuff still had a
certain freshness; nowadays
all things have become so
embittered and tumultuous
that none of that hardly matters,
and people simply do not think
that way anymore. Over the
past 60 years, funny to think,
or more than 60, that totally,
sex-infused, repression-grounded
aspect of psyche and self has
mostly all gone down the drain.
People don't even understand that
any longer - liberation takes
its own toll however. Just look
around, and how many people
do you see who are still lost
deeply to their own selves but
who can willingly prank on or
operate within the casts and the
chafes of another, or of a crowd,
or a movement, or a political
party or an attitude. Millions.
My old world is long gone, the
Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa
Maria too having traded their
seafaring labels for some more
weird form of a new fangled
'WIFI-geopositioning instead.'
If Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims
had a equivalent today, or in the
recent past anyway, of which I
speak (I can't speak for today
because I do not live it), it would
probably be, instead of Plymouth
Rock and the Pilgrims, Rock
music and John Wayne. Writers
just don't write about all that
analysis and psyche stuff anymore.
Part of it all is, yes, again, that new
form of snarky irony that has taken
over; as if the writer is always
'performing' or trying to be both
hip and witty, together. It fails,
and any of the old, Freudian, gloom
and viewpoints - all those Herzogs
and Portnoys, Roths and Bellows
and the rest, they're over. Most
fools don't even know them, and
aren't about to get interested either.
(I hate using 'plurals' like that
when they're not plural at all,
but I just did it anyway. Probably
something to do with my parents)?
[Freudian wit]
-
A person lives a long life of 70+
years (one hopes), and winds up
disliking everyone and everything
and living in the past again, by
choice? How logical or sensible
can that be? Not. It's actually
without any reason and makes
life out to be one, large, foul ball.
Way out of bounds, and probably
the kind of fierce line-drive foul
ball that goes into the stands and
rips some 9-year old's face off.
Poor kid wasn't even looking and
never knew what hit him, or her.
Too bad and oh well; it then becomes
the media-story of the next three
days, all the bloviators going on
about the dangers of sport (baseball?),
wanting screens and protections
installed, and then, next step, some
nitwit does an in-depth (supposed)
story on same baseball guy who's
gone soft-in-the-head and wobbly,
beats his wife and pummels his
kids, because of what some beanball
to the head has done to him. Anyone
here remember Jimmy Piersall?
Ban that bomb.
-
Things come in spurts...and I ain't
talking gay things. I mean events
and illogic; reactions and the mass
hallucinations of crowds. Pictures
of oneself in a variegated mirror.
-
One of the quotes I liked, and tried
to keep incorporated into my own
writing, was, again, by John Updike
- I ran across it once, while I was
reading something else; all forgotten,
but this I wrote down. It was from
his period of about 1955, a new,
young writer in NYC. He had just
begun reading Proust, and it struck
him thusly: "It was a revelation to
me that words could entwine and
curl so, yet keep a live crispness and
the breath of utterance. I was dazzled
by the witty smiles that wove art and
nature into a single, luminous fabric.
This was not 'better' writing, it was
writing with a new nervous system."
-
No lie. I really mean it. Sometimes
it's startling, they things we mark and
keep because they make a personal
mark upon us and somehow burn
themselves into out make-up, and
being, and character.
No comments:
Post a Comment