that summer after the third grade i read two books a day, mostly about heroes, blackhawk, daniel boone, kit carson. we'd left montana for california and i suppose i hid out from the separation, the feeling of hamilton dying as we left it, the life leaving the telephone poles and streets. all the way to the coast, through the idaho snow, i fretted and wouldn't help my mother, my father at army boot camp.
i can't really remember the school in los gatos, how i managed to get through that spring. all i remember is a collie trying to bite me as i trudged home. stories and fantasies, the comfort of libraries, and later years spent browsing in bookstores. there'd come a time in my travels when i became exhausted by greek temples and byzantine churches and i'd look for a book to bury myself in.
hmm, and for the last 17 years i basically abandoned books for taking photographs and browsing books about them. i read very little, yet i often felt happy with pictures. true, all my children's books illustrated and those never left me, whether it was winnie-the-pooh or wind in the willows. at thirteen i had to decide: would i be a writer or an artist. i couldn't draw anything realistically, so the latter seemed out of the question.
starting out a journalist on the school paper, i was led up the garden path by the teacher in charge, who said, 'this boy has imagination.' i took it as a great compliment. i wrote writers at life magazine and the new york times. they actually answered back and were rather discouraging, the profession not glamorous! gradually i got bored the with the formulae of the press, the mechanical approach to expression.
by the end of my college freshman year, i dropped the basketball court for historical fiction, discovered poetry in my sophomore year and didn't realize i was a child falling in love with it. yes, the practical say, write poetry when young, and get over it. i never did outlive it, though i haven't written any in a long time. reading poetry still calms me down, shifts my mind into a different pattern. i have to work to understand, and i escape the repeated coils of my everyday thought.
now, again, i find making pictures not adequate, though i still take them. they seem so perishable, and they don't express complexity. writing takes me on a journey into someplace i haven't been. and now, with everyone having a camera, the process so simple, a picture has become a bit of sand on the shore, surely to get lost in the vastness. while a poem seems to be made to outlast time, if it hits the human heart. not easily done.
i look at all the poets online, and think, why am i trusting poetry so much? i decided today on my tombstone: "He Kept Watch." is that enough? while i'm looking and reading, i forget the future, which, though it may be more interesting than the past, may not exist. the essence of life is fiction, the tumbling consciousness of a complicated species. even memory is mostly made-up. rearranging the pictures doesn't change a life.
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/virginia Virginia City, Nevada
