Sitaram writes:
Today, I sat for many minutes in traffic, stopped behind a garbage truck which was picking up trash. The truck was almost filled. The sanitation workers occasionally spun about, pirouetting slighly in a dismal ballet, to gain a bit of momentum, as they hurled another plastic bag into the already overflowing truck. Some of the bags hung halfway out of the truck, and burst as the metal plate compressed them, spewing forth in a festive fireworks display of paper shreddings to festoon our motionless parade.
"Sanitation is an imprecise science," I dryly observed, but my witty remark did not merit any laughter from my companions.
I had brought with me a collection of interviews with Thornton Wilder. Wilder notes that "to have a sense of audience as one writes destroys the creative act," rendering it self-conscious and artificial.
Hemingway and Faulkner had an ongoing feud.
Faulkner said of Hemingway:
He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
I thought that Hemingway found out early what he could do and stayed inside of that. He never did try to get outside the boundary of what he really could do and risk failure. He did what he really could do marvelously well, first rate, but to me that is not success but failure…failure to me is the best. To try something you can’t do, because it’s too much to hope for, but still to try it and fail, then try it again. That to me is success.
Faulkner said of his own work:
"As regards to any specific book, I’m trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do…I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world. Tom Wolfe was trying to say everything, the world plus “I” or filtered through “I” or the effort of “I” to embrace the world in which he was born and walked a little while and then lay down again, into one volume. I am trying to go a step further. This I think accounts for what people call the obscurity, the involved formless “style,” endless sentences. I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I’m still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead. I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in a new way. I’m inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don’t have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time. …Art is simpler than people think because there is so little to write about. All the moving things are eternal in man’s history and have been written before, and if a man writes hard enough, sincerely enough, humbly enough, and with the unalterable determination never never never to be quite satisfied with it, he will repeat them, because art like poverty takes care of its own, shares its bread."
Hemingway replied "I may not use ten dollar words, but I use words which are perfectly good, and what I write conveys meaning and feeling."
Sitaram continues:
I never read anything of Faulkner's except for the first page of "As I Lay Dying." A man and horse are posed in a "terrific hiatus," the horse rearing up on it's hind legs; a powerful image; the sort of image which stays with one for years.
Such a powerful title Faulkner chose in "Sound and Fury," from Shakespear's King Lear.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.William Shakespeare, Macbeth act 5, sc. 5, ln. 44
With just a few words we may tap into such a keg of power, the power of biblical scripture, the power of Shakespeare, of Plato.
As a child, I read almost everything which Hemingway every wrote, including all of his short stories. The American remake of "Wings of Desire" showcases Hemingway's "Moveable Feast." Hemingway dwelt with such simplicity on the simple things of life; Nick preparing a snack of cold pancakes to take with him on his hike. How good they would tast later! The satisfaction of a hot cup of coffee, lighting a cigarette. Hemingway's descriptions assume such imporatance for us; the prostitutes in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" superstitiously swallowing waste to protect themselves from tuberculosis.
Such pairs and duos as Faulkner and Hemingway, the Walrus and the Carpenter; pairs of opposites; the workers and the Bourgeoisie, good and evil, faith and reason, works and faith, spirit and flesh, form and matter; constantly recurring themes of the same tension, the same striving and competition.
Plotinus thought matter and flesh corrupt.
Someone wrote an essay about "Himmel Uber Berlin" entitled "Salvation in the Flesh." Oh how those angels yearn to taste a cup of hot coffee, to feel heat and cold and pain, to experience uncertainty and surprise.
We always yearn for what we do not possess, for what we cannot have. We ignore or take for granted what is truly ours.
Robert Ornstein coined the acronym T.W.I.T. for "The Western Intellectual Tradition," namely that we do not truly experience something until we put it into words and share it with others and receive their acknowledgment.
The paper on which I now write is marred by old water stains. I am reminded of the palimpsests of ancient times when books and paper were so precious that it was worth the labor to scrape away old text and reuse the paper for something new. One of Archemides' works was discovered hidden for centuries in a palimpsest.
Reality and life itself is a continual palimpsest of generation after generation of fallen leaves, the leaves of Glaukos and Diomedes, feeling the same feelings, hoping the same hopes, suffering the same pains, over and over, and in their midst, each century, a small, elite, circle of those who try to find some meaning to it all; trying to find something new and everlasting to say, something enduring.
For most of us, it is the coffee and pancakes and cigarettes, the creature comforts of Hemingway, which hold significance.
But it is only a touch of leisure and wealth which gives us the luxury to even write about the joys of food and drink rather than scrape and grovel every waking moment just to find enought to eat and drink.
Aristotle mentions in the first pages of the Metaphysics that it was only when a leisure class arose that humanity first turned its attention to speculation.
Time is the enemy of thought.
As I write these words, I am sitting in a coffeshop, surrounded by medical students,
watching all the people with their cellphones and headsets and laptops, and for the first time I begin to appreciate the post-modernist term "grand narrative."
Geisela Burns' daughter called her an "old fossil" because she prefered the feel of a pen and paper to a keyboard.
Sartre rejoiced at the suggestion that one may practice "phenomenology" in a cabaret as one contemplates a glass of beer. I am seated in a city of coffeeshops surrounded by students who have made the shop their livingroom.
Why do they listen to music as they study?
We must always be distracted. Distraction is essential. Why? What to we fear?
Writing a book in one's spare time is a lot of pressure. The pressure is on, to produce words; a stream of consciousness.
I once asked my eighty-six year-old father if he ever dreams. He said, "Yes, I often dream that I am trying to accomplish or complete some task or goal, but in the dream, I am frustrated, there is something which stands in my way and prevents me. He was a businessman most of his life. I am certain that he was always being presented with some new problem to solve, confronted by many obstacles.
As I sit in this coffeeshop, I gaze at a photograph upon the wall, a photograph of a wooden stairway in an orchard, a stairway which leads nowhere. Yeats spoke of a ladder, now gone, and he must once again lie down in the rag-and-bone shop of the heart. What is this now missing ladder? Is it that ladder which Wittgenstein kicks away once he reaches a certain intellectual plateau? Is it John Climacus' ladder of divine ascent? Is it Jacob's ladder, with angels ascending and descending? Is it inspiration?
From Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying:"
"They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse's back. He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse. For another moment the horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again."
Consider William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Both really good writters, but with vastly different styles. The main difference is word choice and sentence structure. Faulkner writes with an enourmous vocabulary and his writting is fairly bombastic. Hemingway's writting is much simpler; it's straight to the point and he doesn't use words that are unnecessarily large. So, vocabulary may make a difference, but in the end being able to speak intelligently on a variety of topics is better than the illusion of intelligence from using large words. Also, remember: Don't use words too big for what you want to say. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very." Otherwise, what will you say when you want to talk about something truly infinite?
Until I read T. S. Eliot's critique of Huckleberry Finn, I didn't understand the book. The point that Tom Sawyer is the actor/director and Huck the audience, wallflower, altruist--is a simple fact I simply overlooked.
Eliot's reading of the book's final line makes a thoroughly entertaining read deeply melancholy. And if what Hemingway says about Twain is true, namely, that Huck Finn appears in one way or another in every work of American Literature thereafter, it sheds light on the melancholy and loneliness that is American literature in the modern age.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.
-William Faulkner
"What a writer should try to do is to make something which will be so written that it will become a part of the experience of those who read him."
- Ernest Hemingway
Sitaram: I just put this poem at my site, which i wrote in 1994
Fr. Joseph: I have just now read the poem. Great truth. Beautiful.
Sitaram: Thanks for visiting and reading, thanks for your kind words of encouragement
Sitaram: Only someone with a diverse backround in eastern and western spirituality can appreciate what I write
Fr. Joseph: I appreciate and quite agree with your ideas and outlook.
Sitaram: I admire Sarvapali Radhakrishnan, and have several books by him and about him
Fr. Joseph: Absolutely. I almost failed for combining Eastern idea in my final paper on Personal Identity. The professor wanted purely "Adran Van Kaam".
Sitaram: Westerners might understand only with difficulty how a Roman Catholic priest could relate to my thinking, and yet, it is really quite natural, given your cultural heritage and education and experience.... the west is somewhat handicapped and lop-sided..
Fr. Joseph: Today is the Solemnity of Christ the King. King who gives ultimate victory.
Sitaram: actually, the encyclical Nostra Aetatis was an enormous leap forward for the Catholic church
Fr. Joseph: By the way, I am going to write on East- West Mysticisn, based on Brain/Mind.
Sitaram: I have a book here which may be helpful, on east/west and psychology of consciousness
Sitaram: Also.. Charles Tart and Robert Ornstein.... on consciousness...
Sitaram: yes... you must look at these books.
Fr. Joseph: I appreciate the depth and breadth of your knowledge. We need your wisdom.
Sitaram: you know... Plotinus had his influence on the west,... but much more influence on Islam and the Sufis... and Ornstein frequently references Sufi teaching stories of Nasrudin as popularized by Idres Shah.
Sitaram: please do email me whatever you write, and i shall quickly review and give you my reactions, observations
Fr. Joseph: My mentor was was a priest for 26 years.
Fr. Joseph: Great. I shall do something of it tomorrow.
Sitaram: wonderful, no substitute for practical experience
Fr. Joseph: You will find my paper too shallow or superficial
Sitaram: yes.... make all haste to email me whatever.... and do not worry about the finished polished state.... write write write...even stream of consciousness...
Sitaram: do not be inhibited by the thought of perfection
Sitaram: remember the scintilla and erradic flashes of the quantum world, which combine to produce the gracioius flowing laws of the wide universe of newtonian and relativistic behaviors
Sitaram: sparks and flashes become beacons and suns
Fr. Joseph: Today there was "60 minutes" television. Andy Roony was asked for his contribution to a book titled "What makes me American". Andy said "I shall write a book of my opinion, and I don't need to share in your book". So, you will write a superb book on how to understand and live with God.
Sitaram: even get a tape recorder, carry it with you.... speak freely... then get it transcribed... this is one method
Sitaram: Andy Rooney wrote "years of minutes" about his years on the 60 minutes
Fr. Joseph: I appreciate that guy for his style and substance.
Sitaram: I sometimes refer to myself as a "spiritual" Andy Rooney
Fr. Joseph: I would think so.
Sitaram: Who was that Indian, aha , Dinesh DiSouza, "What is So Great About America" (in praise of America)...
Sitaram: and DiSouza cites one great experience in America being the reading of Brideshead Revisited, which he feels he would never have read had he remained in Mumbai
Sitaram: and Brideshead is a wonderful illustration of Cardinal Newman's concept of Illation, a gradual process of years of experience which collectivly transforms and converts
Fr. Joseph: Someone wrote to Andy that he was grateful to God for being closer to Andy and Andy to God! I think, it would be true in each of our case as well.
Sitaram: you know , Wallace Stevens the poet, received Catholicism on the death bed
Sitaram: you must take a look at Stevens' poetry in connnection with your writings on Mind
Fr. Joseph: When you said "reading', I am sure, the material you have here is absolutely wonderful.
Fr. Joseph: I think, we get holier as we grow.
Sitaram: Yes! And "grow" is the key word. Living is change. Change is life and life is change. This is why we cannot ever be perfected. This is why there must be heavens of heavens, and constant movement from "glory to glory"
Fr. Joseph: Give me a list of books that would be helpful for my paper.
Fr. Joseph: I remember that when I was sick, I remmebred all that I learnt from my childhood.
Sitaram: In the Gita "All though I possess all things, need nothing, desire nothing, yet, I am constantly active, and should I cease my activity for the slightest moment, countless worlds and beings would perish which are sustained by the mearest fraction of my energy.
Sitaram: In greek, Panta Rei , "all flows"
Fr. Joseph: Amazing brain, amazing God.
Sitaram: You must look at Robert Ornstein's "Multimind"
Sitaram: Milton, in Paradise Lost, has Satan say "Evil, be thou my good"
Fr. Joseph: I have ordered a book on multiple intelligences.
Fr. Joseph: I have a book Paradise lost, paradise gained by...
Fr. Joseph: Heraclitus must have borrowed that idea and spoke about ' all is flux, constantly changing, and that we can't step the same river twice.
Sitaram: the stutterer who sings without flaw... different parts of the brain perform different things.... there are different forms of genius, spiritual, mathematical, financial
Fr. Joseph: Do yo have any method of transfering from your head to somepne else? I shall subscribe now itself.
Sitaram: well,... were that possible, then we should be robbing those to whom we give... robbing them of the joy of finding on their own
Sitaram: no one can give you anything, you must make it your own, everything is experiential and subjective
Fr. Joseph: Nothing original , right? i mean , brand new.
Sitaram: hmm... nothing new under the sun, solomon
Fr. Joseph: Authentic subjective is objective, right?
Sitaram: I quoted faulkner yesterday regarding this very thing
Sitaram: Reality and life itself is a continual palimpsest of generation after generation of fallen leaves, the leaves of Glaukos and Diomedes, feeling the same feelings, hoping the same hopes, suffering the same pains, over and over, and in their midst, each century, a small, elite, circle of those who try to find some meaning to it all; trying to find something new and everlasting to say, something enduring.
Sitaram: If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us. -William Faulkner
Sitaram: Faulkner said of his own work: As regards to any specific book, I’m trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do…I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world.
Sitaram: Tom Wolfe was trying to say everything, the world plus “I” or filtered through “I” or the effort of “I” to embrace the world in which he was born and walked a little while and then lay down again, into one volume. I am trying to go a step further.
Fr. Joseph: My head is becoming heavy. Shall leave you in peace and blessing. Thanks for sharing.
Fr. Joseph: I think, all tell the same truth, using different words.
The world is transformed with words, one person at a time.
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