Seattle (cont'd)

I think of Five Easy Pieces,
Jack Nicholson, going home,
to the Pacific Northwest,
A Death in the Family, the book.
Myth, legend, ritual. Flu-like symptoms,
encephalitis, Lyme disease, from black-leg ticks.
Lost in the rain forest. The outback. Poets like
Tennyson and Yeats. I remember being sad when Bukowski died.
His grave is visited by hippies, readers. The underground-writing
equivalent of a dead rock star.

One time I described my occupation as
digging up dead Indians. I was an archeologist.
But I never called myself a student of human behavior.
That's like Rick Santorum telling Chris Matthews how society
values the nuclear family. I thought I was a scientist because I studied
the history and philosophy of anthropological theory with rigor. But I could have been
a historian, or a philosopher. A theoretician. Is that inductive or deductive reasoning?
Natur-, or Kulturwissenschaften? Syphilis or yaws. Up the xylem, down the phloem.
Denial is a river in Africa. Is you is or is you ain't an existentialist.

Ginny and I compare Judy Davis movies,
then Judy Davis Woody Allen movies.
I say fear of Lyme disease is a running leitmotif
through Woodie's oeuvre, perhaps exemplified
in the escaped lobster scene in Annie Hall,
the lobster standing in for the black-leg tick.
All you do is look at the tick when you pick him off.
Christopher Walken volunteering to drive him to
the airport. Sometimes I think about
veering into the oncoming lane, the headlights
hypnotize me. No thanks, I'll catch a cab.
Martin Scorsese in the back seat,
like his cameo appearance in Taxi Driver.
"Foreigners On Parade." The Schmenge Brothers:
The Last Polka. Tony Shaloub in Barton Fink.
It's a wrestling picture. I'm about ready for a Coen Brothers
Home Film Festival. Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man
Who Knew Too Much. INSIDE UNDERGROUND WRITING,
UNDERGROUND WRITER, JOURNAL OF A MEMOIR.

I begin to think about calling the three books INSIDE UNDERGROUND WRITING:
TWO ZINE FESTS, A HOOTENANNY, AND A SIDE-TRIP
TO PARADISE GARDEN, UNDERGROUND WRITER: A LIFE OUTSIDE
THE MAINSTREAM, and JOURNAL OF A MEMOIR Underground: Three Months
in the Life of America's Greatest Writer, with a quote from Marcel Duchamp
as an epigraph.

And then, of course, there is the terrific commercialization. So many artists, so many one-man shows, so many dealers and collectors and critics who are just lice on the back of the artists. Some of them are still my friends, but I have no respect for the profession of dealer or critic. And with commercialization has come the integration of the artist into society, for the first time in a hundred years. In my time we artists were pariahs, we knew it and we enjoyed it. But today the artist is integrated, and so he has to be paid, and so he has to keep producing for the market. It's a vicious circle. And artists are such supreme egos! It's disgusting. No, the only solution for the great man of tomorrow in art is to go underground. He may be recognized after his death, if he's lucky. Not having to deal with the money society on its own terms, he won't have to be integrated into it, and he won't become contaminated, as all the others are.

I worked in secret. In obscurity.
In penury and limbo. For 34 years.
I am the man, I suffered, I was there,
Whitman says. Trotsky said Léon Blum
had a career, and a program; Céline had a life,
and a work of art. Maybe my three books will be
like Castle to Castle, Rigadoon, and North.
Or like Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and
Black Spring. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.
Céline finished the third book and died, the same day
Hemingway died. His life and work were overshadowed by
the life and work of the more popular writer.

I'd like to finish writing Underground,
my series of three books about
being an outsider. After that,
I have no plans. I have enough
money to live on while I do that,
without having to break the writing off
to look for, then work at, a stultifying job.
It will be my chef d'oeuvre, or magnum opus.
My coup d'état, as Blaster Al says.
I will have said everything I had to say.
They won't have Jack Saunders to kick around anymore.
It will be my last press conference and last book release party/
ULA read-off. I can retire undefeated. They all said
they'd be there, and nobody came.

What would you call a book
that's mostly poems, and includes a record of
events that happened as the book was underway,
unexpected at the start, when the project was outlined?
Overtaken by events (OBE). Overcome by life, fate, reality.
Overwrought. Too high of a pitch, too shrill. Methinks the lady
doth protest too much.

Delivering the eulogy for my mother was tough.
I broke down at the beginning, in the middle, and at
the end. But I made it through. I concluded that I was
reluctant to volunteer, but did, because I thought I ought to,
I knew she would have done the same for me, if our positions
had been reversed, and I wanted to. Her passing was a cause
for celebration. "She would meet her savior, she was reunited
with my dad, and she is here with us today in spirit."