(no subject)
So, now I'm in medical school with Miss America. I worked with her on a group project - it was neuroscience so of course I seemed smart and made some sort of impression - she smiles and speaks to me now whenever we meet. She wears a hearing aid and is not very pretty - definitely not what I expected "Miss America" to look like up close. Still, the proximity (physical, personal, situational) has given me pause. A new flavor of surreality, I suppose, to accompany those more universally tasted by we acolytes of shit.
Don't worry, I could never become obsessed with such a personage. Instead, I bring up my brush with fame (potentially for your observation, reader), due to a remembrance that it evoked, fresh like new again. I spent four years swamped in a place that wasn't a swamp, but was near a very big one - one once covered in cotton, now suffused with (believe it or not) rice paddies, most of which now lie fallow. The old masters of that place have, since time immemorial, turned their spawn loose on a certain town for the purposes of propagation of a sort of cultural hegemony (which persists).
One such crass tadpole (to be fair, he did not meld well with this milieu) was named Faulkner. He soon squirted off to places like New Orleans and Chicago, only to return a few years later with funding gotten, mostly, from the sale of a pulp novel written after his masterpiece. With this he bought his own Sanctuary in a town exemplifying a lifestyle, a worldview which seems to have elicited his revulsion - clearly of extreme significance to the man. In fact, some have observed that this place, and his relationship with it, is the rock from which his words were spilled.
Imagine me, then, a tadpole myself, swimming through the demesnes of that bullfrog. To walk the streets was to stroll through his psyche. Certain locations in particular were referenced specifically (if you can get past the nature of his literary construction, in which Oxford was a town not too far from its literary surrogate, Jefferson), one of which plays a diabolic role in the symbology of his aforementioned masterpiece - something which has been preserved over the years unlike the rest of its storefronts, balconies, genteel affectations. That something's a bit of a secret - I'll tell you if you ever visit the place. Most people cannot, however, share in the joy of commisseration (passed almost 75 years between myself and the man), at knowing the place in one's mind even as he described its ghost. Surreal, indeed - I brushed shoulders with this luminary just living in the place, even decades past his death.
One evening, after a sunset spent kissing away the last of my gin, I ambled over to his house (preserved now as a sort of museum - bizarre - though I was there when its caretakers while renovating scraped from the wall a layer of paint to reveal a large scheme for one of his later works, just above the resting place of his typewriter) where, in the surrounding trees, were a host of fireflies. That night I felt his presence with an immediacy that punched through the surreality. No, he didn't speak to me - at least not with words, though I suppose he'd given his best at that already. The perspective, which I had felt often while reading his work, was refreshing, like a splash of cold in-the-moment to wipe the alienation from my brow. Somehow, without doing as much, he again gave some vague commonality a structure, he gave it a name.
Now, I think, it's my turn to start finding that spirit for myself, to pull it in together, to reach out for the solid parts and get a feel for the shape of its bones. Without those, I can't exert any kind of force outward, through the fluffiness of the day-to-day to whatever is outside. Eventually, I'm going to break these mushy shackles and push through, into the sunlight, where, doubtless, I'll ignite and explode. When I find my freedom, though, it won't be like the others you've read about in the news. I've been facing the facts, but I've been storing up the hope to keep it balanced - and when my balloon pops, that's what you'll feel rushing in the air.
Don't worry, I could never become obsessed with such a personage. Instead, I bring up my brush with fame (potentially for your observation, reader), due to a remembrance that it evoked, fresh like new again. I spent four years swamped in a place that wasn't a swamp, but was near a very big one - one once covered in cotton, now suffused with (believe it or not) rice paddies, most of which now lie fallow. The old masters of that place have, since time immemorial, turned their spawn loose on a certain town for the purposes of propagation of a sort of cultural hegemony (which persists).
One such crass tadpole (to be fair, he did not meld well with this milieu) was named Faulkner. He soon squirted off to places like New Orleans and Chicago, only to return a few years later with funding gotten, mostly, from the sale of a pulp novel written after his masterpiece. With this he bought his own Sanctuary in a town exemplifying a lifestyle, a worldview which seems to have elicited his revulsion - clearly of extreme significance to the man. In fact, some have observed that this place, and his relationship with it, is the rock from which his words were spilled.
Imagine me, then, a tadpole myself, swimming through the demesnes of that bullfrog. To walk the streets was to stroll through his psyche. Certain locations in particular were referenced specifically (if you can get past the nature of his literary construction, in which Oxford was a town not too far from its literary surrogate, Jefferson), one of which plays a diabolic role in the symbology of his aforementioned masterpiece - something which has been preserved over the years unlike the rest of its storefronts, balconies, genteel affectations. That something's a bit of a secret - I'll tell you if you ever visit the place. Most people cannot, however, share in the joy of commisseration (passed almost 75 years between myself and the man), at knowing the place in one's mind even as he described its ghost. Surreal, indeed - I brushed shoulders with this luminary just living in the place, even decades past his death.
One evening, after a sunset spent kissing away the last of my gin, I ambled over to his house (preserved now as a sort of museum - bizarre - though I was there when its caretakers while renovating scraped from the wall a layer of paint to reveal a large scheme for one of his later works, just above the resting place of his typewriter) where, in the surrounding trees, were a host of fireflies. That night I felt his presence with an immediacy that punched through the surreality. No, he didn't speak to me - at least not with words, though I suppose he'd given his best at that already. The perspective, which I had felt often while reading his work, was refreshing, like a splash of cold in-the-moment to wipe the alienation from my brow. Somehow, without doing as much, he again gave some vague commonality a structure, he gave it a name.
Now, I think, it's my turn to start finding that spirit for myself, to pull it in together, to reach out for the solid parts and get a feel for the shape of its bones. Without those, I can't exert any kind of force outward, through the fluffiness of the day-to-day to whatever is outside. Eventually, I'm going to break these mushy shackles and push through, into the sunlight, where, doubtless, I'll ignite and explode. When I find my freedom, though, it won't be like the others you've read about in the news. I've been facing the facts, but I've been storing up the hope to keep it balanced - and when my balloon pops, that's what you'll feel rushing in the air.