"Only three things in life I've really wanted to do: shooting, writing, and making love."
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)
I have this love affair with dead men, very dead men. I also have this love affair with a man almost twenty years my senior, and his birthday is approaching while I always forget exactly how old is is going to be. The thing with the very dead men is that I can shamelessly use their name right and left, and given the nature of our affair, there are no legal complications one way or the other. This is all about caressing each other's ego, or so my muse would whisper in my ear.My fascination with Hemingway started with reading "For whom the Bell Tolls" when I was in High School. I remember not understanding much of what was going on with the Spanish civil war, I was fascinated by what was happening between the people. It is time to read that book again, I really have forgotten much. I devoured his books, I loved the way that he wrote, and all that remains is the taste of it. He made love to the words, and that is what I remember that it was like when reading his prose. It was poetry, it was making love with the spirit.
I wonder what it will be like to read Hemingway now, more than thirty years later, and myself being a struggling writer that panicked back then muddled in the confusion of believing that my dreams was nothing that I had a right to.
How do you caress a dead man's ego?
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
I am thinking of a man who is now in London. He is very alive, and somehow, for all my boisterousness, I still can not bring myself to make public much of what I am thinking about the man. This is good.While Camus would despair with the confrontation afforded by beauty, I tend to despair with the confrontation afforded me by ecstasy. Here, another alive man, not in London, but then I do not keep tabs as to where he keeps moving his bent toe, and last time that I saw him, also heard him say something wise about learning not to react. If there is one key to freedom, the ability to not react is one, and if there is another key to that same freedom with a taste of serenity, then it is the ability to not react when confronted with ecstasy and beauty.
You try to follow the windy road of my logic, and it is easy to get disoriented. I am constantly touching the walls, and trying to find which way is up, and which way is down. It is a bit like being in a pitch dark bar room full with people, the bartender being blind, he had absolutely no problem dealing with any of it, not even while giving change. I did this once, it was an eye opener. It does not matter which way is down, and it matters even less which way is up.
If I were to ape Hemingway and list the three things in life that I have really wanted to do, then they are writing, writing and writing. The minute that I jot down that idea the image of the runs at the beach in the morning and making love do come into my mind. Only three things in this life that I have really wanted to do: aikido, writing, and making love. Between Hemingway and I there is one huge difference, it is something about shooting, and it runs through my beach right down to aikido. Now, this could really get windy, and I do not know where it would lead to in my bent.
(to be continued)
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