"I of my own knowledge…"

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

7:20 AM. So. To continue –

Papa, I suppose that “The Doctor And The Doctor’s Wife” is built upon your life but is no word-for-word autobiography, or even necessarily disguised autobiography — and critics who approach your work go wrong to think so.

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My friend Christel had asked why the Indian killed himself in Hemingway’s story “Indian Camp.” She said that over the years, some of her students had thought that it was because Uncle George was the real father. So I asked, and yesterday got the Reader’s Digest answer but was told to wait till I had time to really get it.

Monday, May 17, 2010

6 AM. So, papa. The question about “Indian Camp.” And I have another question: Why, whenever I think about it, am I winding up thinking about the story title “The Doctor And The Doctor’s Wife”? I guess I’ll have to reread that to see why — unless you know. I notice that it immediately follows “Indian Camp” in the Finca Vigia edition of The Complete Short Stories. Reread it. Don’t understand it. So, papa –

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Sunday, May 16, 2010

8:45 AM. Okay, Papa, I am ready to chat, but I don’t have a topic offhand. Perhaps you do?

Oh yes. The prompting yesterday about Reynolds should serve to reassure you that whatever is happening here isn’t just your making it up in one part of your mind, and disclosing it to another — but, I know it won’t, and here’s why. None of this can ever be proved either way. And neither can you tell where any of your ideas come from, or your dreams or daydreams, or the text of your improvised speech. Nor, for that matter, the raw material of your writing, or even where the sure intuition comes from that lets you edit what you have written, choosing this, changing that, discarding the other.

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Saturday, May 15, 2010

6:45 AM. From Green Hills Of Africa, nearly the final page:

“We have very primitive emotions,” he said. “It’s impossible not to be competitive. Spoils everything, though.”

“I’m all through with that,” I said. “I’m all right again.”

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Friday, May 14, 2010

7 AM. Papa, re-reading Babe In The Woods, the novel you helped me write a couple years ago, was fun! It had been long enough since I’d looked at it that it was new to me again. Now, obviously the level of technical skill I could bring to it was nowhere near what you could have brought to it, but for me it was a breakthrough. I well remember being so surprised first at how easily and well I put it together in a pretty short time and then — when Rita reminded me that a year and a half before, you’d promised to help me write a novel — that I could have forgotten and yet used the assistance. Not sure I have a question here, but thanks anyway. I suppose I might ask, “why me?”

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What’s going on

My ongoing communication with what I call The Other Side — meaning, minds not currently attached to bodies, regardless whether they have ever been in the physical or not — has ratcheted up in breadth, intensity, depth, and specificity within the past few months. Six days every week, I have arisen early and have engaged in such conversations for anything from about an hour to perhaps an hour and a half at a time.

Until now, I have been posting these communications (under the heading Conversations With Hemingway) every Monday, and sometimes on Wednesday as well. Obviously, starting after the fact and then reporting once or twice a week what is being received six times a week means I can only continue to fall farther behind day by day.

On Tuesday, August 3, 2010, the guys upstairs suggested to me that it was time to catch up. So, beginning today, I intend to post transcripts of these sessions two or three per day, until the record catches up with the current moment. They have also suggested that I digest, analyze, and interpret this long series of communications, thus producing a book. I’m willing. Only time will tell whether I’m able. But there’s no reason why I can’t post the sessions in the meantime, and that’s what I propose to do.

So you’re going to see a lot more Conversations with Hemingway.

The series that I have been posting each Friday, calling it So You Think Your Life Was Wasted, is part of the same series of transmissions, only much earlier in time. I am beginning to think that when I do the analysis that has been suggested, I will find that the entire five-year sequence needs to be considered as one body of information, rather than two or more. And in any case to turn that series of transmissions into a book would require the same analytical work that this later series will require. So I think I will suspend posting those older transmissions pending a clearer sense of how the whole body of material hangs together.

The Revolution titled A Farewell to Arms

Thursday, May 13, 2010

10 AM. All right, papa. As you will know from tuning into this station, I found A Farewell To Arms different this time. Perhaps because I had just come from your later works, I found this one disappointing in the love story, riveting in the war story, for a total effect that was much less than The Sun Also Rises, which had been written earlier, or, of course, Bell or The Old Man.

You are reading with the benefit and this advantage of hindsight. You can see how the work falls down, but it is much harder for you to see how revolutionary it is, how hard-edged, next to the novels that were being published at the same time.

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