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[W r i t e r' s N o t e b o o k] "We do not describe; we are the description." "Woe to those caught in the early, collective fantasies of their own generation. The fantasies will lift up for a while and then transform into an albatross to slowly pull the poor soul to the depths. The condition of being locked into these collective fantasies results not in free people but silly people." With that I said good bye to my old pal Jim. He was emptying something on me, I knew it, didn't appreciate it but perhaps it was the stage of development we were in. We were no longer in idealistic youth, the prime time for mythical ideas that overcomes the evil world we have no interest in. No, we were past that but not quite convinced that the world we were trying to get into was not a pure sort of evil. So a kind of modern abyss. Every step was a stuttering step. Every word was watched carefully so not to betray our disillusionment. We were embarrassed of the mythical beings we thought we were. And the odd thing was that it appeared all people we ran into knew it, knew exactly what state of mind we were in. Rarely we received a sign of "take it easy it all works out." Mostly it was a taunting of sorts. It was the attempt to cut off our legs from running too fast now that we knew a modern truth. When I left my friend Jim, it was dark and cold with spare traffic along Telegraph Avenue. I had a fierce night travelling through the imaginative qualities of the past six or seven years: Sights, sounds, faces. I saw myself as a man adrift but at a specific moment when I discovered I was not who I thought I was, a ball of information welled up and a sense of, "this is the way it is supposed to be," came over me. I connected what I saw in my mind with the casual writing I had started. It was a kind of tentative physical description of walking down a city street and places I had lived. I watched a TV set following me into an alley. What was immanent, what was transcendent at that moment? The raw, exquisite data of physical things I called immanent and the interpretations that danced around the data as transcendent. I admitted problems with the types of physical environments that had been built the last twenty or thirty years. It was the background to all the daily activity; both divine and mundane. The environment always seemed alien to my own sense; foreign and even hostile to everything I knew. I would carry this knowledge through the city streets and always find my knowledge in competition with the raw information of the physical environment: Buildings, cars, bridges, streets, stadiums, post boxes, telephones. Information I viewed as regressive and locked into something that wanted to punish rather than liberate. And sometimes a strange reversal would take place. I would walk quiet streets with fine, broad avenues and that wonderful felicitous architecture the city was famed for. There was a woman at the window, a dog laying up on the white, wooden steps, a man in his car turning his head as he backed out from his driveway, the wind blowing softly through elm trees in a park with a stream rolling through it, dotted with sunlight. And my mind full of problems and solutions! My mind taken away into abstract problems that existed somewhere, perhaps here where I stood, but, they existed since I had seen and experienced, if not the problem, the effects of the problem and that was proof enough for me; as much as the scene I passed through. The phenomenal world had no real ambition to solve the problems that surged in my mind. They existed. Perhaps they lead away from the world and its objects. But, they existed. Perhaps they existed at the very vertex of the phenomenal world. Back to Top
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