July 25, Dream -- Bear fat

Something about sitting around with a couple of men in a big room with a bunch of young kids, having ordered pizza.

We were sitting around talking about "what did you do with your bear fat?" "I froze it. " "Might as well eat vasoline."

Conceiving of a play part two

July 22nd, continued:

A man, shaggy-haired & in white buckskin -- a bear-claw necklace around his neck -- bright lights, a stage (maybe a podium -- but to the side). he's talking, a voice calls rudely from the audience, interrupting him, "First you called it 'ethos' then you called it 'mystique' and then you called it 'charisma,' but what I want to know is, what are you going to call it next!"

The audience hushes.

The man paces slowly back & forth on the stage, pulling patiently at his beard, looking down. "look, son. If that's the way you heard it I'm not oging to dispute about it. But really, it's like a joke. If you haven't got the point by this time, you never will." Laughter.

-----

Maybe I'd have him doing a "new" lecture, but have it a collage of all the transcripts I could get a hold of. I'd want biographical explanation,

"They wanted me to introduce myself, so I will. I was born in the San Joaquin valley..."

Maybe we coudl pull a handpress on stage -- light it during a certain part of the performance -- have him pace around it.

We'd need an older man -- someone who really looked like him. I'd want as much of Prodigious Thrust as i could get my hands on.

I'd want to quote him directly as much as possible -- and when not, just splicing whatever writing I could get. After I had a good amount of stuff togther, I'd want to --

I could attend the University of new Mexico and write the play, while attending college there. I'm willing to do that.

I can easily see myself doing this. I'd want first to contact Lee Bartlett. and see what kind of reaction I get out of him. I'll go from there.

July 20th, perfection in small things, life as art

It all looks like art if you do it right. Even the putting down of a book; it will angle jsut right in the light, casting a long, meaningful shadow. Everything becomes perfectly placed, as in a movie set -- perfectly chaotic, even.

"It revolves around staying with it." To some, a vibrating, warm energy that flows as an orange column & excites the nerves when aligned with; to others, a calm loving pheeling in the diaphragm. The flowing "rightness."

Staying there, all becomes art.

****

Just as we've all heard eight trillion times, it involves forgetting. Actions consummate themselves, are final and satisfying *in and of themselves.* Life becomes sex, a pleasurable, active, forgetting and involvement.

July 18th, insect teaching

(after finishing a small writing)

"It's so simple you see" -- the fly hovers between transparent wing clouds, swings back and forth in front of the mountains,
"It's just life, that's all. It's not a hard thing to do at all."

He flies away, and leaves me at the desk to write this down.

July 4 still, musings and on reading and Arthur Miller

There's something to being alone up here, a young writer, reading. An author, amongst all this solitude and silence, can pluck loudly strings that send you, as a writer, flying. I was confident with Snyder, and now manic and self-absorbed with Miller.

I was envisioning taking speed-typing classes, so I could keep up with my thoughts, so I could let the original flow flow -- so I could be hyper. Instead, I just eat lots of food to slow down the flood, and watch a pen slowly sweep up after the last tracings of dust in which a party had ensued but you could only guess at it. There will be no typewriters up here -- I'll have to find a way to send all that energy into little sentences, or to somehow hold them in stasis as my slow mule of a hand plods silently along and I pick up the gems left on the road by my leprechaun mind.

Night, same day

it's night, and my thoughts are a-shambles. Read a couple of essays of Emerson's on Printing, and his taste (or insistence) on perfection came round. Set me spinning. I've got some real issues there, man.

Failure, and lack of umph is the ticket here. We're always told this isn't a perfect world but I've seen perfection in art. It's not rigid, and this worlds "imperfectness" surrounds it, frames it.

The pieces had a seamlessness about them. Andrew Wyeth's Helga Series -- in person. There were some pieces in there that were seamless.

There was a dance performance. I, embarrassingly enough, can't remember the name. Judy Brown, maybe. There was a relatively simple piece in her show that was seamless.

Exposure to work of that magnitude stirs hurricane winds in me.

My life, ultimately, is my art piece. This is where some of my fear of failure lies. I am not "a writer." I am B.P.L. That actualization is my art, and nothing usurps that, that is my call. A channel/hollow bone, for the Divine. Beauty, raging and terrible if need be, but beauty manifest. My whole life.

I'm going to write Koenigshauffer.

[John Koenigshauffer is a poet and philanderer I met in Berkeley who is a phenominal writer, and hopefully has sold some screenplays by now so he doesn't have to work in construction anymore. I'm serious, this guy was hot shit as a poet.]