"I of my own knowledge…"

Monday, June 18, 2011

Reading Norberto Fuentes’ Hemingway in Cuba, not well organized or thought out but a valuable point of view.

Papa, how does it strike you?

It provides good leverage to turn your attention and your insight in ways I probably couldn’t do directly. And this is worth a line or two of explanation.

Sometimes you may get an impulse — buy this book! Read that weblog! Re-read this or that! Generally you’re pretty good about following such impulses. Think of such suggestions as pointers. Here, if you will look over here you will learn a fact or hear a point of view or see an unsuspected connection or — mostly — make an unsuspected connection because you’re two connected bits are common to your mind but not necessarily anybody else’s. It would be much more difficult to put these extended thoughts into your head. So — leverage. You know more now about my life in Cuba. I can tell you more subtle, more complicated things that otherwise I couldn’t.

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Monday, May 2, 2011

11:30 AM. So, Papa, the thought that came to me a few minutes ago, did you inspire it, or if not where did it come from? The thought is, you named the book “The Sun Also Rises” – and I don’t know that I ever really absorbed the implications of the title.

Thank you. It certainly has taken long enough for that to penetrate. I would have thought it so obvious as to need no comment, but 90 years on – or nearly enough – apparently it still isn’t obvious to people.

I feel like you want me to say “none of the critics ever noticed,” and it makes me nervous lest Hemingway scholars might be able to say, “not only did they notice, but the real Hemingway knew they noticed.”

Well, it’s understandable, but I don’t see what you can do about it. If you’re going to go exploring, you’re going to have to take some risks.

I suppose so. And so –?

I don’t remember anybody ever, anywhere, seeing the title in its proper light. They all saw Gertrude’s comments, and somehow they read right by the quotation beneath hers, reading it as “vanity of vanities” rather than as, “this too shall pass away.”

It also rises, meaning the war was the end of something but something else was going to take its place?

You can’t confine symbols to one meaning, you should know that. It also contrasted Spain’s continuity with France’s dis-continuity, and with the West in general. Nobody would have to tell the Spanish that the sun also rises; it’s only the degenerate sophisticates who get stuck in a moment as though the world was created that morning and would go on in that condition forever.

So you were painting a moment. Shooting a photograph.

All my work was photographs.

Whose idea was it, then, this morning? Mine? Mine by way of you? Or what?

You don’t have the right definitions to talk about it. Ask your guys, some time. They do good theory.

All right. Tell me, is there any reason I couldn’t do the book on you and the myth? Starting now, I mean?

You’d need to give some thought to the predominant emotion, or feeling, you want to convey. Get that firmly in mind and the rest is exposition.

And I need to do that.

It’s the only way it will be yours and not borrowed.

Okay.

Now that I am settled into my new place in Charlottesville, I am hoping for a new series of conversations such as I enjoyed last year. This came yesterday.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

4:20 AM. All right, gentlemen, I hereby call this meeting to order, after a good long time. I haven’t sat down to chat on a regular basis since — when? December? November, maybe? First came getting the book into shape, then came a genuine hiatus in Florida with Charles, then a fast search for a new place in town, a month spent preparing to move, and a week and a little unpacking and arranging. But since yesterday Nancy brought me most of the houseplants she had protected from the move by keeping at her house, and since she helped me put up more pictures, I’m about ready to declare myself more or less resettled. And now it’s time to begin new habits, I think. So –?

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In December, I finished writing The Cosmic Internet, presenting a logical explanation of what I’ve gotten from the guys upstairs on how the world works and what our place in it is. Upon completing the task, I had a sense that I should do something out of my ordinary routine, so I decided to take a vacation. At my friend Michael Langevin’s suggestion, I went with my old friend Charles to the Florida Keys. (Because of the generosity of two other friends who are letting us stay as guests in their house on one of the keys, I am spending more on books about Hemingway than on lodging.) The first full day in the keys, we went to see the Hemingway house and museum on Key West. The next morning, I had a talk with Papa — my first in what seems a long while.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Seems odd to realize that yesterday was our first full day in the Keys. Now we have nearly 2 weeks ahead of us with nothing planned and nothing we need to do. And I have several books, of varying quality.

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Thursday, June 24, 2010

5 AM. I stopped at Barnes and Noble and bought five Fitzgeralds. Re-reading The Great Gatsby first, because it is an old friend, and perhaps will ease me into reading him as his short stories definitely did not. Also, the next volume of Nevins’ history of the Civil War arrived in yesterday’s mail. Quite a plethora of books to read; I’m a little bit overwhelmed.

Good morning, friends. Anything special on your minds today?

No? Then I guess it’s up to me. All right, Papa, let’s talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald and me. Yesterday I was moved to buy five of his books, after having been unable to read the book of his short stories that I had borrowed. Other than “The Lost Decade,” they seemed so shallow and even silly — just an impression from titles, and reading the first few pages of “A Diamond As Big As The Ritz” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” — that I returned the book and thought I was finished with. But then I return with Tender Is The Night, The Beautiful And Damned, This Side Of Paradise and Gatsby. I’m wondering: why.

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Monday, June 21, 2010

5:30 AM. Solstice today.

So, to work. Yesterday produced a couple of things I didn’t expect, not least that Carl Jung rather than Ernest Hemingway should start off. Perhaps someone could explain to me why it is that after I have written, and orally transcribed, and proofread, and sent out on the computer, and printed and put into a looseleaf binder the day’s take, I can remember none or sometimes almost none of what was said.

It’s just as well. It is in this way that you are kept with the mind empty of expectations that provides the least interference with what is offered.

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Sunday, June 20, 2010

4:45 AM. So, Papa, let me pose the question this way. I am more and more inclined to see your essence as a model — not the only model, but one model — of a complete man, intellectually, physically vigorous. Yet there is the negative evidence, your mental problems, for example. Your inability to get beyond certain fixed ideas — “my mother is a bitch; my father was a coward” — regardless of the facts. I can’t quite phrase my question because I can’t quite grasp it. I’m hoping you can take it and run with it. For all I know, you — or someone but probably you — are suggesting it, in the first place.

No, not Ernest, not at this moment.

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Saturday, June 19, 2010

6:50 AM. All right, Papa — or anyone with business for the morning.

Your life is changing — everyone’s life is changing — more so than usually. More so both in the sense of “faster” and in the sense of “more extensive.” This is what you wanted, or why come into a life in these times? But that doesn’t mean that you’re automatically ready for the changes, or again what’s the point of living in these times? If you already know — already live — everything there is to know or to live — what tedium! Instead, what interest, what drama!

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Friday, June 18, 2010

Nearly 6 AM. [I have been doing some informal counseling for friends, and Thursday night’s session provided an example of how we can get trapped in ways of seeing things that prevent us from seeing straight. Since I work from the assumption that anyone on the other side that we are connected to knows what is in our mind -- including our memories -- I thought I'd see if Papa Hemingway had learned something, seeing his own tendencies from outside, so to speak.]

What do you think, Papa? Looking for my eyes, can you see the mental processes that progressively distorted your life?

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Thursday, June 17, 2010

6 AM. I certainly missed doing this, yesterday. And more or less wasted the day. I haven’t yet got used to that “do something else” part of the routine.

Stirred up a bit of discussion yesterday. The distinction between discernment and condemnation isn’t all that clear to some people. But I don’t want to keep on about the subject unless that’s on the Upstairs agenda. What do we talk about today, Papa?

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