Old Folks sprang to the easel of a morning,
the writing roaring in his head.
To mix a metaphor.
He was outlining
a book called THE EMPTY NEST.
THE EMPTY CANVAS, he called it.
What
inspired a painter? An empty canvas.
What inspired a writer? A blank page.
The worldwide web was a succession of blank pages stretching ahead of a writer as
far as he could see.
To some, it was intimidating, but not to Old Folks.
To Old Folks, it was inspiring.
He might be a dead man writing, he might
be reading to empty chairs, but at his web site, The Daily Bulletin, he knew
he had a handful of loyal readers who read him every day, at work or at home, downloaded
and printed out his writings, read them and mailed them to their friends, or sent
them to their friends as an email attachment, or linked to Old Folks's web page.
He thought the true form of a book was a book, and of a series of books was a series
of books, but publishing the ink-and-paper book was somebody else's job. Old Folks's
job was to write them, and post them on the worldwide web. Daily.
* * *
What do you fill the blank page with? You can't just fill it full of anecdotes
and ravings.
What does a jazz musician, or a bluegrass musician play, when
he plays music every night?
Songs.
Does he play them the same way
every time? Play the same licks?
No, he varies them. It depends on who he's
playing with, who is in the audience. He may be practicing, learning, or expanding,
his chops. He may be auditioning. Performing. Competing in a contest.
Old
Folks just told stories, stories he made up, stories he had heard other people tell,
and sometimes they were in the form of an essay or a poem, instead of, or in addition
to, a story form.
He wrote to see how they turned out. To surprise himself.
Overall, he was telling the story of his life.
You're born, you go to school,
you serve in the military, you get married, you raise a family, you see something
of the world, especially the world of work, and politics, community life, you bury
your parents, you get old, you get fired, you put the pieces together, and tell others
what you've learned. You die.
You have hopes and dreams, you are frustrated
and stymied, you see others succeed, in your stead. You write about the old eternal
verities of the human heart in conflict with itself, as Faulkner says.
Your
name is mud in New York publishing circles, you win the Nobel Prize for Literature,
you create a body of work, and, if you have to, invent a form to present it in.
What happens to it happens.
What happens is out of your hands.
It's
not beside the point, not at all, it's part of the plot, but you can't control it,
you have to accept the aleatory nature of your fate, the accidental nature of it,
there are forces operating you cannot know about, don't go outside without your tinfoil
hat, the bad vibes will get you, people envy you, people think you are a parasite
and a traitor, an unbeliever, people do not wish you well, you're putting on airs,
who do you think you are, what temerity.