Cold Mountain and Ending August of 2014 - 8/29/2014 (Part Two)

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. 

Continued from Cold Mountain and Ending August of 2014–8/29/2014 (Part One) sch 6/8/2025] 

I really want to discuss Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road (Harper Perennial, 1991). What an odd autobiography! What great writing! A monument to the fickleness of public taste and how talent can survive. I am glad to have found her. I think I am better for the experience.

Hurst mixes the folkish with something more formal. It pleases and impresses my Midwestern ears. We do try sounding not as uppity as Easterners, but do like it known we have had an education.

I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon's nest. It was hard on my family and surroundings, and they in turn were hard on me. I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, "What if there is no me like my statue?" The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. 

Chapter 4: "The Inside Search"

I wish I had such wisdom, or wrote so well.

 Nothing in Cold Mountain moved me enough to copy it down, as with these paragraphs from Dust Tracks on a Road:

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry seasons and rolling around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. people can be slave-ships in shoes.

Chapter 8: "Backstage and the Railroad"

***

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they at dwell therein.

Chapter 10: "Research"

Hurston spends more time on her anthropology career than her writing, or her marriages.

 What Hurston wrote in the following paragraph I found applicable to me. It also applies to others I know. I never pursued writing, decades back when everyone thought I ought to be a writer and I thought everything was crap.

I wrote "Their Eyes Were Watching God" in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish I could write it again. In fact, I regret all my books. It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning. Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolsih for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no book would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself "Why?" afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhre in space whicdh commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen  when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. You have all heard of the Spartan youth with the fox under his cloak.

Chapter 11: "Books and Things"

I think that paragraph certainly applies to me, and it also applies to more things in life than writing. 

Being white, I'm not so sure Hurston's comments on race issues circa 1941 are really within my ken for remarks. I do think her observations continue to have validity - especially since my imprisonment - but surely some things have changed since then. If nothing else, we have had James Brown, Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammed Ali, Prince, and Barack Obama. I would say there were/are millions of less public displays of change. It also seemed to me that she makes a point only recently recognized by whites: blacks are not a monolith. Read Dust Tracks on a Road. See what you think.

I finished typing the last major draft for "Cruising Down a Blind Alley." I did a read through of the first 21 pages with Joel. I want to rework the first sentence. Joel thinks it is much improved. This one really wears me out. I worry still over the last paragraph - that I mix too many metaphors. I think Joel finds the narrator/protagonist unpleasant. He is - depression has him in its grip. I think back on my own depression and the memory scares me. I am satisfied I have got him so far. But the whole remains as it was yesterday. Reading the Robin Williams obituaries made me remember a lot of what I had forgotten. Being told in the first person brings everything into the story as it is perceived by the narrator's diseased mind. Not so easy. I can say this is not creative writing workshop writing - or so I think. It may be I hurt myself by wanting these stories to be both part of a series and self-sustaining. I know where this one fits into my wider goal. That may hurt it on its own. For with the wider story is about the town and the town, the Bridges legacy, are characters in the broader story. The backdrop has a life of its own. And this story has about driven me crazy. I really have no idea what will become of these stories without Joel! Enough for now.

sch

I think the past 11 years show me to have been too optimistic about American race relations, and Hurston's views are not without validity. sch 6/8/2025