From the Shores of the Atmospheric River

I had dinner last night with a new friend, a distinguished poet and visual artist. After dinner we talked for another hour or so, and then I drove home in a deluge my windshield wipers could hardly keep up with. Such thoughts I had! Art thoughts, survival thoughts, drowning thoughts that I thought could be rescued but only after they’d been hurled out to sea.

This morning I woke and found these fragments that had washed up on my shore—

Writing:

Everything fictional should stay fictional—the name of the author included. Not an alias, but a pen name that matches up with the fictional contents that themselves read as if they’re breaking out of a penal institution. No parole is granted and so the inmate must keep escaping over and over and over, re-writing the beginning, middle, and end, over and over and over.

Painting:

Making a painting is like getting a new name—you have to go through all the rigamarole to get into a position where you can finally feel free enough of the past, all the mistakes you’ve made all by yourself and the ones that have been hung around your neck from looking at all that art over the years by artists much more experienced than you are.

Music:

Music is listening, and listening happens when everything planned gets unplanned. It’s like the golden era of jazz, under the baton of Thelonius Monk or Coleman Hawkins. Classical music is the great exception; that Beethoven went deaf in his mid-twenties will always remain a mystery