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[cribdeath]

some imagery of broken trapeze accompanied the opening flowers of this bittersweet spring. softly softly i carried a large box from the fillmore sunrise toward the fog of the embarcadero morning and then into the fiery mission afternoon. i am spending my batteries more efficiently recording the new synthesizer with sounds that correspond to

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[cribdeath]

You met one of them the other evening we spent singing.

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I found this passage this morning on the way home and it reminded me of someone that you know. I wonder if we'll think of the same person even though you have not received a proper introduction (in terms of the person, not the passage).

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Some time ago I went across Paris in a taxi with a garrulous driver. He couldn’t sleep nights. He had chronic insomnia. Had it ever since the war. He was a sailor. His ship sank. He swam three days and three nights. Then he was rescued. He spent several months between life and death. He recovered, but he had lost the ability to sleep.

“I’ve had a third more life than you,” he said, smiling.

“And what do you do with that extra third?” I asked him.

“I write.”

I asked him what he was writing.

He was writing his life story. The story of a man who swam in the sea for three days and three nights, who had struggled against death, who had lost the ability to sleep but kept the strength to live.

“Are you writing it for your children? As a family chronicle?”

He chuckled bitterly: “For my children? They’re not interested in that. I’m writing a book. I think it could help a lot of people.”

That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer’s occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

You might say the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. So we need to be precise about concepts. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac. She is a lover. But my friend who makes photocopies of his love letters to publish them someday is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In that sense, the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is not a difference in passions but one passion’s different results.

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

1- an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;

2- a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;

3- the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. The mainspring that drives this person to write is just that absence of vital content, that void.)

But by a backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.

-Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

[nostril]

i don't know who you're thinking of. i recognized the passage as probably belonging to kundera, and once the word "goethe" was mentioned, i knew it was kundera. coincidentally, about three days before you posted this, i threw the book (of) "laughter and forgetting" across the living room. i don't know why i threw it. i only know i had said to myself that i had read it and that was not going to be the book i would read. instead, i'm reading jitterbug perfume. i bumped into my ex-neighbor the painter. he had it on his bookshelf and was willing to give it away. also, he makes clarinets in the day job, and uses the sawdust for his night job (painting). i had started reading half asleep in frog pajamas. it seemed timely because it was about the stock market...(chris had it lying around. he got to page 24 i think). i think i got to page 24 as well. nothing wrong with the book. i want to read it. but jitterbug made its way ahead.

i like this passage. it reminds me of a me. and it makes me think, especially same passions having different consequences. perhaps we can say same passions begetting different passions.