The driverless bookmobile

I'm alone, driving south on interminable Highway 5 from San Francisco to Los Angeles, thinking about things instead of listening to Pandora:

1. Not knowing what art is is exactly its point.

2. I subscribe to Braque's view--the only valuable thing in art is that which can't be explained--having once tried to define poetry to a second-grade school class. That they knew better than I became obvious almost from the beginning.

3. I'm reading Rimbaud again, to see if his writing is any different than it was when I first read it years ago. I don't like the writing, he sounds like some kind of Dr. Frankenstein, but I know Rimbaud's important to me, as important as Duchamp is to me, though I don't get much out of the art Duchamp made anymore.

4. If an artist is an artist he or she lives with the idea that there's only a very very short time left to them, with that sort of pressure.

5. Often, I don't know what I'm looking at, I'm just looking. Seeing seems presumptuous, to say one sees that is. When I'm just looking, without the requirement of seeing, it seems I come closest to seeing, but when I start thinking about what I'm seeing, I've lost any possibility of seeing.

6. What would it be like to be silent all the time? Not like the Christian mystics in the deserts, but like the great classic comedians, Buster Keaton and Chaplin, the ones who used silence to speak to us and make us laugh.

7. Comedy makes the best use of silence, tragedy of words.

Last night, in the Travelodge Hotel near Coalinga, California, I had a dream that I'd designed the first driverless bookmobile. It was an entreprenurial enterprise, a collaboration between Google and IFSF Publications, with a federal grant issued by The Trump Organization. The thing looked like the ice cream truck that drove through my neighborhood when I was a kid.

Here's how it worked: the bookmobile would pull into one of the little towns in the Central Valley, a town like Coalinga or Shafter or Taft, and a pleasant-sounding bell would ring. Sensing the approach of a human being, the driverless bookmobile would ease to a complete stop. The doors--gull-winged like the old Mercedes--would open onto a vast library of the finest literature in the world.