OLD LADY WRITER WITH CATS
This house looks like the set for a crime show about addicts or hellions, but you will find no beer cans nor pizza boxes here. Instead there will be small boxes with cats curled up in them, slightly larger boxes with books meant to go somewhere else, piles of files, tear-outs, rough drafts, file folders, and up on the bookshelves jugs of markers, pens, and scissors kept away from cats.
Nor will you find any articles about 5 ways to please a partner, 10 rules for instant success, nor 3 keys to good writing. No contemporary magazines, no mega-laptops. Just one frowzy old lady down in the middle with her aching fingers flying and her hunched shoulders keeping her close to the mini-mac screen.
This is an old-fashioned way to be a writer and no one respects it. There’s no money in it. No publisher wants it. No one reads it. It just grows all the time: a pursuit for an elusive nuclear notion that can transform the world. Well, a little corner of it.
Maybe you’ve run into people who sneer at your computer use which is not employment nor a game. People who assume that emails are likely to include photos of your crotch or ingenious ways to bully the vulnerable. This attitude was once about writing, as though it were one of the black arts or possibly a ridiculous form of alchemy that didn’t produce gold but only lead. This was all applied to writing when people first began to settle at a desk with a bottle of ink and a big feather.
It all starts when someone feels a glowing knot of questions in their gut and taps it for a private kind of energy that drives them as they learn how to write properly. People nag to wash the dishes, sweep the floor, sort the laundry. Even the cats begin to beg for can-opening. The neighbors suspect you’re on drugs.
It’s a real addiction, but not to oblivion. Rather it is a thread that shouldn’t be broken, just followed. For the last twenty years there have been two major tsunamis of thought that have washed over serious thinking writers. One has been an explosive, transformative wave of science that has disconcerted, contradicted, and re-defined everything, including the idea of an honorable identity constructed from religion and philosophy. Now we know each of us is a compound of dynamic forces held together by the impetus of going forward while remembering the past.
At the same time, the dependable structure of society has come near collapse. New awareness of millions suffering in poverty and war, growing knowledge of corrupt monsters who hoard billions of dollars by letting others die, and the looming forces of the planet that may kill most or all of us. The exasperating efforts of the stupid to control voting which is the basic mechanism of democracy.
Professionals have driven out superstitions but no one can break the seal of the unknown. The Mysterium et Tremendum remains.
Death is not defeated — sometimes welcomed. The sentimental primal drive to save babies becomes a death warrant. The practice of warehousing old people with caretakers who don’t speak their language keeps ancients in suspended animation. What about all the people suddenly under rubble, hallucinating?
Stop saying such things. It’s upsetting. Better not to know. Awareness is a curse. Go get the mail — which is mostly glossy ads on cardboard — and hope there’s a prize in there somewhere — a special offer.
There’s no war between science and art. There’s no salvation from either the industrial revolution or fabulous technological techniques or some kind of political movement that will at least let you blow off some rage.
There is just this hunkering down in the midst of the tumbled carriers of print and image, writing for the last time left to you to record and interpret. It’s not quite a psychosis, but maybe an obsession. Few understand.
People see you the way you used to be and demand that you go back to that. Family doesn’t want to hear any reinterpretations about their uncle who was always so funny and happy — they refuse the idea that he was a violent angry man who took it out on kids. They don’t want to hear about a brother who may have been molested as a child by big boys who had no fathers. They don’t want a brother who dies so resenting you that he forbids anyone telling you he’s died. (The other brother as a child once announced he punished his teacher by flunking her class.) They figure that since you have a fancy advanced education you ought to be making a lot of money, but you’re not so you must have done something wrong.
Or is that what you think about yourself? At first the self-defined privileged cohort tried to pull you back when you left — now they turn their backs and claim they never knew you.
Lots of certificates floating around in the semi-sorted debris. Probably worth money. None of them worth the value of the content of that education which makes it possible to feel and follow the thread of understanding that might be captured in writing. The moments of bright insight sometimes come in a row and other times run away. Heroes go flat. Sublime vistas turn out to be painted onto a canvas called a kuppelhorizont. A quarter-horizon that the wind makes billow and ripple.
The old woman doesn’t know how much time she has left. She wants to quote from a book that is hard to find, though it turns out to be properly classified and shelved. Oh, hell, use Google. Found it. So useful she cuts it out and tapes it onto the computer. By then her search has kicked up ads for all the things her demographics recorded for a sales silo algorithm: old lady = quack remedies, recipes for baking sweets, knitting, and (how strange!) sex toys made of the kind of plastic they used to use to make dolls like newborns. Delete, delete, delete.
You are out of space. Please run your app for hard drive cleaning. And the cats are hungry again.
