Walter

alternative_ego

The writer who does not write showed up today, then hung around into the night. He didn’t do anything but waste my time throughout. He talked ceaselessly and insisted on showing me endless streams of worthless information in various mediums. He spoke, he shouted my name repeatedly. It’s one of his tricks. I imagined his name was Walter. Walter the non-writer, the smooth circumlocutor. Let’s talk, he says to me. I do not talk to him. I haven’t said a word to him in all these years and I have never invited him inside, where he shows up intermittently and remains until I force him out. He talks and dances and provokes me until I’ve had enough and grab him by his curly wig to toss him onto the street. His world is smaller than the size of a paperback. Don’t write somewhere else! I shout into the midnight silence.

Fiction, literature, notes, prose, Uncategorized, writing

teeth

Drums rain from the sky. Is it real?

Water flows within, disturbed.

Only music sets me right.

Who’s writing? Not me!

The detective carries himself with dignity, poise. He is forty, “a good age,” according to Colombian writer Evelio Rosero. Nothing is real. All the inspiration gone, dried up. I worry about writing more than I write. I worry about time and missed opportunities and money — especially money, always money, and I remember an anecdote about the infamous poverty of Cormac McCarthy, who once couldn’t afford toothpaste. Luckily I can afford to clean my teeth but they clench at the thought of the author of Blood Meridian and Outer Dark penniless, suffering the pain and indignity of decaying teeth.

DylanThomas, literature, poetry, Uncategorized, writing

That sanity be kept (D. Thomas)

fullsizeoutput_e4d

That sanity be kept I sit at open windows,

Regard the sky, make unobtrusive comment on the moon,

Sit at open windows in my shirt,

And let the traffic pass, the signals shine,

The engines run, the brass bands keep in tune,

For sanity must be preserved.

Thinking of death, I sit and watch the park

Where children play in all their innocence,

And matrons, on the littered grass,

Absorb the daily sun.

The sweet suburban music from a hundred lawns

Comes softly to my ears. The mowers mow and mow.

I mark the couples walking arm in arm,

Observe their smiles,

Sweet invitations and inventions,

See them lend love illustration

By gesture and grimace.

I watch them curiously, detect beneath the laughs

What stands for grief, a vague bewilderment

At things not turning right.

I sit at open windows in my shirt,

Observe, like some Jehovah of the west,

What passes by, that sanity be kept.

— Dylan Thomas

Fiction, literature, prose, Uncategorized, writing

The Mexican

distantstars

Rumor was he came from Mexico. A big Mexican — the biggest I’d ever seen. But he didn’t look Mexican. He was a gringo with red hair and green eyes. A giant Mexican flag.

Hammer, he said.

I hefted the sledgehammer with both arms and handed it over to him. Wind ripped and tugged at us violently. The big man took the sledgehammer with one hand and set himself to strike the coffin. Bare branches crashed and screamed above our heads. It seemed the wrong time to ask where he was from.

The big man smashed the wood with one blow. Darkness surrounded us everywhere. We always worked by moonlight, but tonight the skies had shifted unexpectedly, veiling the moon and leading the storm’s charge. The big man tore at the coffin with his bare hands, his massive back to me. I heard a noise like a pig squeal and swung my rifle in that direction. Wind perforated my clothes, cut into my skin.

I’ve got something, he said.

I leaned over his crowded frame but could not see in the darkness.

What is it? I said.

He stood, unfolding his shoulders to stand erect. His body extended vertically so that it seemed he was being born, his head rising upward to the skeletal tree branches whipping with the gales, to the moon shrouded in the distant black. He turned and I noticed the eyes first, golden light embedded deep in the eyes of the skull, the Mexican’s hands enveloping the artifact to respect its delicacy and power.

What is it? I said again, mesmerized.

Then weightlessness, light fading to black.

I woke on my back with the Mexican standing far above me, trees surrounding him in the moonlit background. The wind had calmed. I could not move or speak, but fully sensate and aware, felt the granules of earth on my skin, felt the coolness of the dirt on my face rolling down my cheek, as the Mexican worked silently, just the rhythmic scrape of steel shovel into broken earth.

Bolaño, Excerpt, literature, nonfiction, notes, prose, quote, Uncategorized, writing

Bolaño’s literary kitchen

BetweenParentheses

“In my ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior, whom some voices (disembodied voices, voices that cast no shadow) call a writer. This warrior is always fighting. He knows that in the end, no matter what he does, he’ll be defeated. But he still roams the literary kitchen, which is built of cement, and faces his opponent without begging for mercy or granting it.”

— Roberto Bolaño

Excerpt, Fiction, literature, notes, prose, Uncategorized, writing

Echoes of silence

notes

I imagined him leaning over the page by candlelight while the rest of the hospital slept, night after night, his true voice pouring from the pen in measured strokes, filling the void of sound in his throat and in that quiet building with the voices of multitudes. The cold winter months abated, new growth sprouted in the crystalline valley below Clyvesell, and Wade was there looking out the window and writing. Sun scorched the mountain relentlessly in the summers and Wade was there with his notepad, cloaked in the solitude of night, stealing sleep during the day when he could. He worked his jobs, he attended therapy sessions, events, activities when required, which was often. But he lived for the night, when the echoes of silence throughout Clyvesell could not hush his mind, his pen.

literature, Neruda, poetry, Uncategorized, writing

I Will Return (Neruda)

Snow

Some other time, man, or woman, traveler,

later, when I am not alive,

look here, look for me

between stone and ocean,

in the light storming

through the foam.

Look here, look for me,

for here I will return, without saying a thing,

without voice, without mouth, pure,

here I will return to the churning

of the water, of

its unbroken heart,

here, I will be discovered and lost:

here, I will, perhaps, be stone and silence.

— Pablo Neruda

Truth Front

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