"I of my own knowledge…"

One of the joys of keeping a journal, however diligently or not one does it, is the occasional review, the look back at roads trodden. Naturally, year-end is a convenient time. Found this conversation with Papa Hemingway which was of interest.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

7 AM. So, Papa, talk to me about loneliness. For I got a clear sense, last night, of how lonely you got, and how often.

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Thursday, November 10, 2011

6 AM, nearly. All right, I’m here. [Psychic] Katherine[Rone] said my higher self is mad at me for not listening. I am listening at least at this moment, so please do tell me what I need to hear.

You don’t need to sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of concentrating on your message. In fact, your message can be undercut by contradiction to the message your life itself communicates.

For instance. If you were foolish and financially incompetent and malicious and petty and — add up a list yourself — that would be true and would be seen to be true regardless of whatever you said or advocated; regardless of any true message you might bring forth.

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Papa, I can see that my work is being sabotaged by my own self-doubt. (Is it really Hemingway online? Will anybody believe it? If they do, will they care? If they would, can I put the material into an enjoyable, accessible format? Etc.)

How would you expect to avoid such doubts? That’s part of the territory. You know the writer’s three fears.

I do. I have nothing to say, I can’t say it, nobody would care anyway.

Well, if you know they are common fears, why give it to them when they visit you? Or dwell within you, if that’s the case?

It takes a monumental self-confidence, it seems to me, to be so sure that what you’re doing is worthwhile and can be done.

Yes, or courage to do it without being sure.

All right. Sort of like me working on the novel, not really knowing how I’m going to do it, not having any surer footing — at all — in what I am doing now.

So? That’s part of the admission ticket.

This month’s column in The Meta Arts magazine. (If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you read this here a while ago.) It’s always a question: Among the competing demands on our  time, how can we tell which are legitimate demands for us? Naturally, the guys upstairs had an opinion.

http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html

Monday, October 31, 2011

5:45 AM. Papa, the fourth and fifth dimensions: Time, and then Beyond Time?

Close enough. Or you might say viewpoint over time, viewpoint beyond viewpoint, or overall viewpoint, or really view without the distortion of viewpoint. Now, you can see that to write in such a way as to hint at (for you cannot actually do it) going beyond viewpoint is very difficult, and requires not only skill and luck in the writer but, let’s say, skill and attention in the reader. Luck, too, perhaps, for the reader has to be in the right mental space to be able to comprehend it.

That’s what I was trying for in Across The River. I told the story seemingly from inside Colonel Cantwell’s head, but not precisely. Within his mind — the nonphysical mechanism we all live in, as you recognize — he moves across elements of his past, both what he has experienced and what he has experienced second-hand through reading or other instruction or from appreciating, as in a picture. I believe I achieved that fourth dimension, and it was disappointing to have it not recognized — because of Renata, of course.

Now here is something nobody sees. I achieved the fifth dimension with Santiago, who lay dreaming of the lions at the end. My achieving it was not at the end, though, but throughout, because in careful recounting of his moment by moment actions, and his moment by moment thought or memory, and his moment by moment emotion, I was so close to the moving present that we get beyond time to the timeless. Where else do you think that strange aura around the story comes from?

It is not told fromSantiago’s viewpoint, or from Manolin’s. It may be said to be narrated by God, or the guys upstairs, or the part ofSantiago that lives outside time and space. It is our life described neither from within it nor from without it.

Yes, there is the story itself — the old man striving, and winning, and losing, and remaining himself. There is the effect on the boy. But beyond all that is the strange penumbra that people feel but don’t quite understand, and this is because the story’s atmosphere talks to us of things beyond the story.

I could not have produced the story to order. And it came as a gift, and I passed on the gift. Those who think it’s simple or simpleminded are only one eyed; they cannot sense the presence of that extra dimension.

It is a curious paradox, isn’t it? To get beyond time, one way is to sit on the very edge of the moving line. There are other ways — Tolstoy did it on a mammoth scale — but this was mine.

Just had a very enjoyable chat with Rob McConnell, pre-recording his  show “The X Zone,” which airs out of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

I had a great time, and hopefully listeners will enjoy it as well, and perhaps learn something.

After 11 p.m. tonight, Wednesday, you can listen in by following this link:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/xzone/20110817_seg2.mp3

Got this this morning from the guys upstairs. I imagine that it will resonate for some, and not for others. I offer it for whatever you can get out of it.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

6:45 AM. Glancing at this morning’s SchwartzReport depressed me, as it makes me feel that I am missing, or rather avoiding, the real story of what is happening in our time. Leonard Peltier, corruption, the whole works. It makes me sick to read of it, so I don’t read of it. Is that any way to live? Guys? I know you’ve said we should — well, no, you tell me your reactions to my reactions. Am I living with my head in the sand?

Everybody to his own work. What is one person’s true work is another’s evasion.

It is specifically evasion that troubles me.

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This month’s column in The Meta Arts is the first of three on the subject of talking to the guys on the other side of the veil between physical and non-physical. It’s a process that I often say is “easier done than said,” yet it has its interesting quirks.

http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html

By way of Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC), this discussion with Carl Jung earlier this week. Sometimes you play with an idea for some time, thinking you understand it, and suddenly realize (with a little help from your friends) that it’s bigger and more important than you had thought it.

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Friday, July 22, 2011

Papa, why did you conceive of the land, sea, air book? The scope was way too big to be accomplished. As you recognize, you didn’t have time enough to learn air warfare let alone air realities in the first place. But was Across The River the land book, and Islands the part of the sea book?

You’re confusing yourself a bit. Yes, Across The River was my land war book, and maybe I could have done better to leave out the love story — though I don’t see how I could have, and to have Cantwell fall in a less impossible love wouldn’t have fit in either. But the indirect description of the aftereffects of battle and warfare was as well done as I could. If it was a bridge too far for my critics, I can’t help that. In time the book will rise or sink, and it won’t have much to do with the judgment of the critics of 1950.

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