Simple Narrative

Claude Levi-Strauss said "The idea of beauty can take curious shapes." An essay on him in the London Review Of Books had me rereading favorite passages. The last chapter in the four volume "Mythologiques" is a masterpiece. It's also 70 pages of difficult, complex prose. His big book on Kinship was published by my mentor in the book business at Beacon Press. There's a great little book, an 'introduction' to him, by Octavio Paz. Opened a filing drawer today, I had forgotten what was in it, filled with manuscripts, mostly by poet friends, but I found the first three chapters of my book about building this house. One of the manuscripts stolen in the fire-proof lockbox taken years ago. Nearly killed me at the time, over two thousand single-spaced pages. I wept. I had to read the chapters, they'd been read by a friend and sent back, so there were marginal notes. I was in good form. I like the language, the way it lapses into the patois of construction, and the way things are explained. I was working on the final chapter, about building the stairs, when I was robbed. I never drew a set of plans for this house, I just wrote every night about specifically what I needed to do the next day. So the book completely documented building a house, working, usually, by myself, thinking about things. It holds up well. It was such a labor, building and writing, that as soon as I moved in I stopped working on that manuscript, and wrote a much shorter funny thing, the only copy of which was stolen in the same box. As luck would have it, I've only ever recovered one of the nine sections from that book. The third thing stolen was the Mississippi Book, or, at least the sample chapters and all my research, pages of word-lists and colloquial sayings. Some pages of that were published in small-press mags, but it's almost wholly gone, I can just catch a glimpse of what I was thinking. Mostly, what I write now are single-sitting events, about what happened just a few hours ago, I only make up what I need to, to fill in the gaps, and bridge the parts where I don't actually want to say what happened. Some things are left better secret. You can leave out almost everything and still string a narrative. You don't have to include everything, we're missing a main character here, and it doesn't seem to matter. Who's asking the questions? I think I deserve an answer.

Tom

The inverted tale of the maiden and the frog, you know that one, where the frog becomes angry and kills the entire wedding party. The moral, or narrative, is that you can't spring sudden changes without unexpected consequences. Frogness requires certain traits, adaptive and provisional. Who you slither with and where. How phenomena unfold. The old frog, years later, sitting on his back porch, having a drink and smoking an expensive cigar, turned to the young frog, just losing his tail, and told him to not run, but to walk down, and fuck them all. You read a lot of CLS and it messes with your mind. The way things flip. Which is true, accurate, according to the way we observe the world. How things become their opposite. The situation becomes charged with the energy of the transformation. Intense love, for instance, might become intense hatred, where it's the intensity that matters. The way you might come around to a different point of view. Somehow I've changed Whip-Poor-Will into Chick Corea and it's working better. Solutions to life's little problems, and the moonlight is great, paints a scene. At least spills over. The way things change. This is it, it's a zit, pretty baby, whatever, toenails you wouldn't believe. I'd better go, ranging far afield.