2001-08-05 - 4:17 a.m. - i really want to turn this into the first section of the first chapter of a novel and i think it might work but i need a story first and all the great stories have already been taken.

there is something beautiful about reading a book and not really knowing what is going on all of the time. When I was seventeen and i read gravity's rainbow for the first time i felt incredibly stupid, like i was not capable of understanding the brilliance of one of the best authors who still wakes up every morning, that is to say, who is not dead. instead of following a story line and occasionally oohh-ing, ahh-ing and salivating over the delicious prose of a master author i spent my time ohh-ing, ahh-ing, and what -the-fucking my way through the book not quite sure if anything was happening and not quite sure if the disturbing sexual content of the book was supposed to give me an erection.

when i re-read this fine novel last summer, just before twenty-one, it made sense. this is to say that it didn't make perfect sense and that was okay because that was what the book was about. like in every life, full of moments, full of details, full of subtleties, there are stories that happen and which follow linear paths from point a to point b. these linear paths are corrupted by detail and everything that we take in, or often times fail to take in, every moment of every day and most of the time, in some bizarre, universal, friend-of-the-cosmos kind of way, related to the linear story that is being lived out. "Gravity's Rainbow" is all about these details that are, in all actuality, the glue for the linear narratives that we all endure everyday. every thought, every dream, every hallucination, ever kicked stone and chewed piece of candy.

and i can't help but think that perhaps in writing about all of this that i am divulging one of the last great truths of humanity and art that is perhaps meant to be unanswered at this particular moment in history, at this particular place. Alas, I am sure as with every other thought i have ever thinked, and every thought ever thinked by everyone that this thought has been thinked more times than i could possibly imagine in my entire life. like if i were to attempt to count how many times this thought has been thinked i could only come close to understanding the number if i counted every star in every hemisphere and multiplied it by the number of times my heart beat in the process of counting and then again in the process of multiplying.

everything to say is said.

and all the people said it dead

so write it down

and ball it up

and sink it tied to weights of lead.

such an old nursery school rhyme i think, or maybe a new one that needs to be introduced to mix and mingle with all the shimmy, shimmy coco-pops and jason and wendy sitting in a trees so that maybe kids will somehow learn to stop thinking completely. afterall if you were told that every thought to ever be concieved had been used already wouldn't you just stop? it goes along with the similar principle of, if every dollar in the world was already owned and everybody stopped spending money and just saved it all for their retirement funds wouldn't you stop trying to botain money?

and so why am i writing this if everythough has already been thought and as a result every moment of every single one of ours lives has been wasted? why should we even try to think that we can attempt to pretend that anything we do has any importance.

here is why: just as every unborn child, sitting in a mothers womb or a test tube and awaits birth or abortion or experimentation or whatever the unborn childs fate is, was not in existence until it was concieved, and hence can not be comprehended by the creators of said being, there are thoughts waiting to fertilize or be fertilized. like so many eggs and sperm the genesis of new thoughts hides within every moment of every day and waits for the precise moment to be concieved and the slowly gestates and evolves until it has eyes and hands and then is born through mouths and hands into ears and eyes. and i can hear the chant of the intellectuals:

pro thought.

pro thought.

pro thought.

and once i read where a man, he was a religious man i believe, went to church as many times a week as his church offered services and prayed at least three times a day after meals -- a way to shake the plaque from his teeth withthe word of god -- shot a poet whose poetry was encouraging people to think and birth new things to be thinked.

when i read that bizarre and disturbing magazine article i could only see images from my youth in the winter of 1991 when our grand country, what country would that be? the united states of america of course drew deadlines with a stick in the sand to be met by some insane man who, incidentally, was the first person who i ever referred to as a 'motherfucker' and hence had my mouth washed out with soap by none other than my own tender and loving mother.

oh country tis of thee.

and the not much longer after that everybody's television sets turned entirely green as we watched a foreign skyline errupt, every night, in a fire not unlike the fire that we call blood that burns in our veins every night so we can't sleep and instead try to put words on paper, or electronic notepads if you will, and foreign buildings collapse inward on themselves beneath the weight of the history of their nation (are a nation, its buildings and its people all responsible for the same history? what if this history has only to do with one man, are all responsible still?) manifested in the form of patriot missiles guided by computers guided by the finger tips of flesh and blood human beings who now have captured and tamed death himself to do their biding, guided by keystrokes and programming. and to answer the previous question in parenthesis, apparently we are all responsible as currently, veterans of this ridiculous and meaningless war use a slogan that goes like this:

we went

we didn't ask why

our country called

and we were proud.

and i wonder if they realize that this isn't a complete sentence. probably not just like i didn't realize, at the tender age of twelve, before hair would grow on my face or other places on my body where real men have hair, that people were dying in all of those buildings and that they weren't just some magnificent special effect brought to us by the makers of star wars(tm).

now perhaps you see the dire effects and consequences we are up against here. we were born motionless into adulthood by war based mostly on greed in which the only people who suffered were people doing jobs to support their families and the people who did the killing have never even touched a gun.

"that's not real"

"its the most real thing you've ever seen"

and so here is to the stillbirth of an entire generation and here is to blown up firecrackers where bullets should have been.

here is to the process of thought and the thought heretics who think its just better to let it all rest.

everything to say is said

and all the people said it dead.

so tie them down

and fuck em up

and sink em tied to wieghts of lead.

and remember earlier when iw as talking about how the first sentence in any book is the most important and then about how i learned that in my creative writing class at the university? well i learned that because one of the questions ont he test for each book was to identify, out of a list of four, the first sentence of each novel. as if by recognizing the first sentence we could somehow understand the importance of the novel tot he human heart.

the only thing that will ever keep us from dying is the burning of the blood in our veins. when that fire is extiguished, that is when life is no more important than glass. then we shatter. when you break, try not to cut those you love. sweep yourself into a neat pile and dump yourself in the trash.

******

write a book.

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