Up at six this morning I listen to the rain falling from the eaves. I dress quietly in the dark, careful not to wake Susan. In the kitchen by the light of the open refrigerator I mix half a glass of grapefruit juice with some mineral water. The rain is splashing on the concrete walk outside the back porch. I picture puppies sleeping in a heap in the dirt underneath the house. Dry and warm. Just like myself. Cozy. When it’s raining, any roof is a luxury.
In the study I turn on the lamp and sit down to my table. Here are the notebooks, the manuscripts, the dictionaries, the typewriter, the blank paper. Often times I wonder- why do I still make the effort? What’s the purpose? In the beginning there was no wonder. Twenty five years ago I began passionately to write things down. No training, no direction, no purpose. Only the driven need to record one certain experience on paper. At first it was mindless, but after a while I began to write things down when I did not feel driven. It wasn’t mindless then, and I began to write in relationship to ambition. And I thought a lot about the future.
Last night I sat on the couch in this little room filled with the sound of rain and read about the death of Malcolm Lowry, his last years, his final months, the last night when he died of alcohol, barbiturates, and self pity. He was a sot, a contemptible husband, pathetically unable to take care of himself. While I read – and I was unable to put down the story – I was aware of how contemptuous I felt toward him. Where is the good in writing a book and living a life like Lowrys’? That isn’t what my aim is. His attitude seemed to be that because he had written some work that was praised by literary people he could forego acting like an adult. I was contemptuous of Lowry, but I was uneasy also. This morning I woke thinking about him. I feel aimless, and wonder again that it is all about. Most likely while affair, this life, this living, is about absolutely nothing whatsoever. No meaning, no purpose, no consequence. Nothing but happiness, pain and boredom.
The trees outside my window become visible one by one. The evergreens, the palm trees, the round topped dark green trees whose name I don’t know, the pepper tree hanging low over the pavement of the street. How many times have I described the dawn? What for? Still, there’s something about doing it I like. For example, the dog is up and I can hear her walking her nails across the old hardwood floors. The cat is awake also. I can picture her in my minds eye. She is on one of the chairs in the dining room taking her morning stretch, and I hear her scratching at the rush in the seat of the chair. Pretty soon Susan will be up, then Jon and Jen. Rather, Jen will be up, then Jon. Jon is not too good at getting up.
In 1951 I was a rifleman in Korea . I was 21 years old. Occasionally, as we climbed around through the mountains, a magazine would make its way from squad to squad. I received packages regularly from my mother and perhaps this was a copy of Time that she had enclosed along with her cookies and the canned fruit. There was a review of a new play, or a movie, based on the story RAIN by Somerset Maugham. There was a profile on Maugham that caught by attention, though now I can’t recall why. Perhaps it was his travels in the orient. Rain was described in glowing terms as a work of literature, and Maugham was praised as an important author. I wrote my mother asking her to send me the “book”.
I was quite conscious of asking her for a work of literature. I had never before turned to a book because I understood it to have literary quality. Literature was not esteemed in our family, or in our neighborhood, and no literary matter was ever discussed in my presence by anyone. A month or so later I received my copy of Rain that mother had run down for me. It hadn’t been easy, she had had to go to Hollywood to get it. I remember that our Battalion was in reserve, how I sat in the frozen rice paddy in front of my pup tent and opened the package. When I saw that Rain was only a short story I was excruciatingly embarrassed. I had asked mother to send the novel, Rain, and had worded the request in a manner meant to display a considerable sophistication, a sophistication I knew she did not have. I could not tell from her letter, which accompanied the package, whether she had understood that intent, and I could not tell if she understood how little, as it turned out, I really know about the matter. It was horribly important to me to feel she had not understood, but I was really afraid she had.
Still, I was excited by having the story, and I read it immediately. It didn’t take long. It was over very quickly, too quickly. It wasn’t much of a story so far as I could tell. I had expected something tremendous, earth shattering, a story that would move a mountain. I don’t know what I expected, but Rain did not fulfill that expectation. After all, if it was work of literature, if it was written about in one of the world’s most important magazine, it had to be something. When I finished the story, it occurred to me immediately that- I could write a better one. And that moment was the beginning of 25 years of effort and use.
I must have not thought about it for long though, not at the time. Rain probably got passed around and lost. I don’t recall discussing it with anyone. Winter passed, spring, and then it was early summer. One hot noon day we were lying behind the ridge of a hill covered with pine scrub and flies. Across the valley a Chinese soldier was pacing back and forth on another ridge, silhouetted darkly against the sky. Some of the guts were taking pot shots at him to break the boredom. The Chinese did not even break his stride. No one could figure what he was doing, or what he thought he was doing. He was probably showing off for his friends. After a while our 57 mm recoilless rifle team climbed up to the ridgeline and took a bead on the Chinese. They couldn’t hit him either. Nothing could kill that Chinese and nothing could faze him. We got to whooping it up and cheering for him and shooting at him at the same time. We got to seeing how marvelous he was and imagining how he was swearing at us, giving us the finger (whatever the Chinese do), making his own comrades laugh just as we were laughing and admiring him also for putting his life on the line to make the whole thing go.
I remember lying in the dirt, sweating, the flies swarming over everything. Two of the guys were talking about a new book that had been published- Forever Amber . I listened to them talk. I had heard about the book also. I read a review of it that was disparaging probably again in Time magazine. The book was supposed to be sexually titillating and it was that sexual aspect of the story that they were talking discussing. After a while I broke in on their conversation and remarked that the book had gotten poor reviews. It was implicit in the words I chose and in my tone of voice that I knew more of the matter than they did and that the quality of my understanding was on a higher level. That was how I intended it anyhow. If they had questioned me about my motives I would have denied my real ones. I would not even have believed what my motives really were. I wouldn’t have understood. I was not accustomed to examining the motives that lay behind what I said or did, but only judging the correctness of my acts. I felt I was probably correct in what I said about the book, after all any reviews published in a magazine knew more than two guys in my own squad, and I was conscious of the rewards I got by saying it. I had placed myself above the two others. I had placed myself in a position for that was superior (that is critical) to that of the author of Forever Amber, and I had created a certain image of myself that I imagined the others would see and which would take the place of the one I believed they did see. I had created and image of myself that I wanted the others to see. It gave me an apparent stature I did not feel I otherwise had. I don’t know why I can remember the incident so completely. Perhaps it was that day when I got a whiff for the first time of a role that was open for me to play, one that I could in fact play. I found a technique for appearing significant. The other role I had dreamt of playing savior of my nation, my people that roll called for too much sacrifice, too much effort, too much blood. I hadn’t been able to conceive even how to go about it. But being a writer, being a critic, there was an activity anyone could get into. After all, what was involved in writing a story, or criticizing a story? What was at stake?
By the end of July I was in the hospital at Camp Cook , California . The hospital is close by the ocean, the mornings were cold and foggy. The wards were one story barracks connected by covered corridors that creaked beneath our feet. Sand drifted over the linoleum floors in the wards and in the passageways. There was nothing to do. I was very tired. Some mornings I would but the paper and pass the entire day reading short paragraphs from it and dozing. Some days I would sit in the recreation room in the back of the ward and watch the fog drift across the deserted dunes where weeds grew in brown clumps. Sometimes, when I was spoken to, it was difficult to understand what was being said.
One morning without any forethought I walked through the covered corridors to the PX and bought a fifteen cent note pad. I would give anything to know the train of events that morning that prompted me to do it. I returned to the ward and sat at the table in the recreation room. The fog was blowing against the windowpanes. It was cold on my feet and on my back. I wrote a description in the notebook of how it had been that last day with my company-rather, that last moment with the blast of the hand grenade, the rifle torn out of my hands, the shock, the bubbling blood, the whiteness of the bone glistening wetly in the sunshine, the shock, the way I sat cross-legged beneath the tree and searched through the leaves for the finger I thought was gone, the shock, the look of the little emptied artery splayed open like an exploded flange.
I worked at it all day but couldn’t get it right. I was wide awake and excited. The way I put the words together did not convey the reality of what happened. I couldn’t make it strong enough. I kept leaving things out. What had happened, the movements that had proceeded that last moment, were more complicated than I had known, even if I had previously thought about it. Each separate movement had itself been proceeded by at least two additional movements or possibilities and those proceeded by two others. What had happened to be had been so powerful an experience I did not want to leave out even one single aspect of it. All of it was important. But no matter how I described it, the words I used did not have the power, the sheer reality, of what I had experienced. Compared to what had actually happened, my description of it was weak, like watery soup, and inadequate. The experience itself rode like a mountain over the passages of my notebook, which were frail, and without life. The next day I bought another fifteen cent notebook, and the day following that I bought another one. And the next day.
And I have written about it for years and it has never come out right, and I have never made it as real as it really was. I have become impressed by the superficiality of memory, the uselessness of it. I am struck by how I use memory to fill up the gaps in my life. Often times I am in a state of remembering for longer periods of time that I am aware in the present. I am one of those for who the selectivity of memory operates in the present fashion. I recall the most moving incidents, the most beautiful landscapes, the loveliest women, the most exciting, most fulfilling times. I recall easily the quality of the sunlight during specific moments ten years ago, the contents of interesting dreams, the visions, the hallucinations, the fantasies. I love to remember the most important incidents of my life during childhood, at school, with friends, by parents. I can dwell for hours on what happened to me when I was a soldier, when I traveled, when I was with the bull in Mexico , living in Greenwich Village, the nights at Barney’s in Los Angeles . So much of my time now is spent in ways that are not pleasing or moving, that I prefer to live in memory rather that my real life. It appears that I would rather pass time recalling pleasant moments out of the past than to live fully in the life that I am truly living now. But then, I believe that this may have always been the case. I don’t really believe it is anything new.
It may be that it takes more energy to see, to be aware of, what is happening in the present than what has already happened in the past. Memory can float easily to the top of consciousness, simplified as memory is, while whatever is happening at this moment is varied, multiple faceted, complicated. It is easier to deal with the present after it is over, after it has become the past, and sorted out by memory. It occurs to me there is no word comparable to memory that we can use to describe forgetfulness. Clearly there is more forgetfulness in memory than there is in remembering. Memory must be made up of two aspects, forgetting, and remembering, the balance between the two depending on what we want from memory, what our desire is. The psychologists must know all about this, yet I don’t hear this talked about. And then of course when I am bored with remembering what happened to me in the past, I can always start imagining what I would like to happen to me in the future. Anything but what is going on now. Anything but what is real, what really is existing at this moment.
Why is it that the present moment most often is not so important as the past, or the future? Probably I see this now-we figure out what the present moment is. I want to be able to describe it, and it is indescribable. It is too varied, too complicated, too full, to describe, to identify, to delimit, to embrace. For the first time I see what is meant by the idea- of thought itself- as being limiting. Experience happens too quickly for thought to identify it and sort it out and understand the significance of it. By the time that process has even begun, that process of identifying, and then through comparison making a decision on what is important about it, the moment is gone and I am faced with a new one where I have to begin the thinking, identifying, comparing process all over again and then that moment too is gone.
With memory, on the other hand, I have all the time I need to dwell on the remembered and forgotten experience. I have the time with any certain memory to try to identify it, to explore it, to compare it to other experiences and to what I wanted during the first living out of the experience. I can perhaps find out what was pleasurable in the original experience, why it was pleasurable, and think about how I could get a similar king of pleasure from it.
In real life, the real present living moment, where the quality of experience changes from moment to moment quicker than the eye can see, what good does thinking do? Thinking cannot keep up with it. The problem- probably- then is to be in relationship, nothing more,- nothing less, whatever that means. To be in relationship then means to be completely aware without thinking completely open, the entire system experiencing the reality of the moment, not merely the mind.
How can thought keep up with a living -through-the moment? It’s impossible. It is demonstrably evident that we cannot think so quickly as we can live. Thought is one part of living. It is produced by living. Life is not produced by thought. We live in spite of everything, then we die. But while we live thought is a segment of living. Memory is a segment of thought. Why do I choose again and again to live with a segment of a segment of my life, rather than with the entire thing?
It is very arduous to live in the present. It is very unpredictable, unsure. I am not often satisfied with living in a way that my reward is not assured. If I were to live this moment without remembering the past, without hoping for something in the future, I don’t know what would happen. Rather I do know something about it, but it is so arduous and experience I feel ambivalent about having it. I am actually somewhat afraid of it.
I am so trained by my own habit of remembering and imagining that it is very difficult to live without either diversion for more than a moment at a time. Sometimes it just happens to me, or I let it happen, or there is some coincidence where for the moment I become completely alert to what is going on in my presence while at the same moment thought is absent. Those experiences are profound ones. It is as if I see right through something. Memory shifts to the left, like a sheet withdrawing, my imagination moves to the right, and through the opening in the center I see the world as it really is. The beauty of it is incredible. It brings tears to my eyes. It does not last.
One day after work I walked across the street to the Villa Italia for a beer. This particular evening when I walked outside I felt content and at ease. The sun had set behind the hills but the sky was still quite light. I didn’t-t immediately notice anything unusual, but I hadn’t taken more than eight or ten steps when I happened to glance toward the corner and got the feeling-things seemed to be in their usual order-that something was different, that something was “in the air”, as they say. Then I noticed the traffic light on the corner. It was signaling stop, and the red light was on. I was struck by the quality of the light. There was nothing about it that was different from the hundreds of other times that I had looked at it, but there was something about it. The light changed from red to green. The green light looked perfectly like any other green traffic light I had ever seen, but somehow for the first time, I saw how lovely the green was colored.
When the signal changed to red I saw how lovely and glowing it was. I realized that I had stopped walking and was standing there watching the traffic light change. The red and then the green were so lovely, then tears came to my eyes.
I changed the direction of my gaze and looked up Montrose Avenue . I saw the signs on the drug store, I saw the dress shop, the sewing machine store, the appliance store, and farther up on the next corner the post office. The store fronts and the signs looked just as they always had but there was a reality about them, a concreteness, that was totally new. I looked across the street at the lumber yard, then up Honolulu Avenue . Nothing was changed from earlier in the day, everything was in its place, the sheer reality of what I was seeing was so moving I began to cry. At first the building looked washed and clean, spotless, glistening. Then I saw that they were soiled and worn just as always, but that I was seeing the dirt and the wear and tear perfectly clearly and that the imperfections and the dirt itself was beautiful. I thought at first that my faculty for sight had become somehow charged, powerful. Now I realized that everything was charged, the traffic light, the pavement, the buildings, the store signs, by own eyesight. It was all more real, more incredibly concrete that I could explain. I was wiping the tears off my face with first one hand then the other. I didn’t understand what was happening.
I walked across the street to my car. I was aware or everything going on around me in the ordinary way, but I was aware in this new way also. My relationship with the street was not different, but I was aware now that the street itself was different that I had previously thought it to be. It was glistening and beautiful. No one part of it more beautiful than any other part, or less beautiful. I drove up Honolulu through the mall. I wasn’t sad but I was so moved I thought my heart would burst. Only a few minutes had passed since I had first started to see things so clearly. It was still quite light. I drove down a residential street of small houses built in the twenties and thirties. I saw a man standing in front of his house watering the lawn. It was so moving. The colored flowers, the green grass, the water spewing from the hose, I could not contain my feelings. I drove slowly up and down the streets. I didn’t want to stop because I was afraid someone would see how I was crying. Here and there people were puttering in their gardens, mowing their lawns, sitting on their front steps. It was so lovely. Every single thing was absolutely in place and in perfect relationship to everything else. My tears were so profuse that I had to pull to the curb and park. I decided then that I had had enough.
I wasn’t frightened, there was nothing scary about the experience, but I couldn’t stand to see things that way any longer. I resolved not to look at anything anymore, to wait for darkness so that I could not see so clearly. I waited a long time, sitting there in the car. Dusk came but it wouldn’t get dark. I had to do something. I took a chance. I drove back toward the mall. I kept my eyes on the pavement in front of the car. I forced myself to think about other things. I can’t remember what, though that would be interesting -now- to know. I pulled myself together as best I could, wiped off my face, and stopped at Avignon ‘s. I had the idea that if I had a couple drinks I would stop seeing so clearly. The alcohol would interfere so to speak with my sight. I had three quick ones. I was restless in the bar, and out of place. I went outside. It was dark. Now I saw things more in the usual way. I was relieved. I wanted to be relieved of everything that was not ordinary. I wanted to rest. Though I was not tired. I didn’t realize I was not tired until I had had the thought that I wanted to rest. I did not need rest, I needed to be relieved of the burden of seeing so clearly. I drove home and got the kids and we went out to play some pinball at Barneys’. I saw everything in the ordinary way again, and we had a pleasant time playing the pinball machine, the pool table, the drinking.
It is not possible to describe accurately what happened to me that evening. I can not describe accurately, in the sense of describing fully what the experience was. In this instance it is not that I can not get into it everything that I saw or that I was aware of, as with the incident with the hand grenade, but that the later incident is perfectly simple, uncomplicated. Nothing happened, that is. I saw the faces of buildings and passing automobiles with a purity of sight that changed my understanding of their reality. Reality did not change, my senses opened up somehow, my capacity for perception functioned with more clarity than is usual for those few moments, and I saw things in a new light-literally. That was not the first time I have had that experience, nor the last for that matter. But it is the first time that I have realized consciously afterwards that the reality of that particular experience con not be described.
This morning when I came in here to look over what I had been typing, I saw things written down that I had already forgotten. When I was reading how I described moments when memory and imagination draw aside, as the curtains from before a movie screen, my mind made a connection with the concept of the “veil of Maya” that one reads about in eastern literature. Perhaps what I experienced that evening coming out of the Villa Italia would be described in that literature as the veil of Maya withdrawing from before me, revealing to my gaze a reality to concretely beautiful that comparison between good and bad, the ugly and the beautiful, are-in their terrible concreteness- beside the point. Everything is there. That is all there is to it. And it is wondrous. That must be what all the hoop-la is about.
In the hospital after I wrote about the incident with the hand grenade, I wrote about two dreams I was having recurrently. I was able to describe them fully and accurately, to my own satisfaction. Dreaming is significantly easier to deal with that wakeful living. Later on I wrote down other things. The outline for a movie script (based on a movie I had already seen-Sunset Boulevard-but with a certain twist in the plot. I wrote parts of a story or two, perhaps, some recollections about childhood. I can’t really recall what all the scribbling was about. I am certain however that the greatest part of it was the effort to get right what had happened at the moment I was wounded with the grenade fragment, and that I was never able successfully to do it.
The season is changing rapidly. Last night there was thunder and lightening followed by a rainfall. This morning the sun is shining on the trees and the flowered vines and on the east facing walls of the residence for elderly priests. The sky is pale blue, and the birds are flitting around in the eucalyptus tree and I can hear their various songs and calls. The very tips of the pepper tree, and they hang down over the street, are moving ever so slightly, and I understand that the cool morning air is beginning to form its currents. A moment ago, trying to distinguish one instant bird call from all the others, I discovered it was in fact a particular sound this electric typewriter is making.
END