Bill's Notes

BTW, I am mentally checked out after an intense week of frenetic editorial activity and my brain is currently just kicking out all sorts of random thoughts, a mad stone forest of undigested thoughts, the tangential shreds of a life that no longer concerns me. Okay, I copied the latter part of the predicate of the last sentence from Tropic of Capricorn. I went to find the quote but I've googled and it's gone. Trust me. It's a good quote. But regardless of its merits it's inappropriate here but none of it concerns me; I'm interested in truth.

And here's the truth. The ultimate truth. The one thing you really need to know.

Oh wait, I tried a different pattern of words on google and found it.

Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men struggled to earn a decent death so my own life came to resemble a tomb which I was constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a stone forest the centre of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead centre, in the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I befriended someone, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have meaning. Perhaps in reading this, one has still the impression of chaos but this is written from a live centre and what is chaotic is merely peripheral, the tangental shreds, as it were, of a world which no longer concerns me.

By the way, this rough diamond was found amid a steaming pile of crapulent insane repetitive extended analogies and a blooming thicket of prolix sesquipedalian verbiage.

Where was I? Oh yes. Truth. Let's see. What did Virginia Woolf say ... oh stop it. This is not that self-indulgent. I said it was just random shit kicking out of my mind. Woolf wrote in "Monday or Tuesday." I always got the sense that Miss Thingummy just wasn't that hot. I reproduce the entire story here.

LAZY and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect—the sun gold on its slopes. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for ever and ever——
Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring—(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)—for ever desiring—(the clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday; light sheds gold scales; children swarm)—for ever desiring truth. Red is the dome; coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry “Iron for sale”—and truth?
Radiating to a point men’s feet and women’s feet, black or gold-encrusted—(This foggy weather—Sugar? No, thank you—The commonwealth of the future)—the firelight darting and making the room red, save for the black figures and their bright eyes, while outside a van discharges, Miss Thingummy drinks tea at her desk, and plate-glass preserves fur coats——
Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners, blown across the wheels, silver-splashed, home or not home, gathered, scattered, squandered in separate scales, swept up, down, torn, sunk, assembled—and truth?
Now to recollect by the fireside on the white square of marble. From ivory depths words rising shed their blackness, blossom and penetrate. Fallen the book; in the flame, in the smoke, in the momentary sparks—or now voyaging, the marble square pendant, minarets beneath and the Indian seas, while space rushes blue and stars glint—truth? content with closeness?
Lazy and indifferent the heron returns; the sky veils her stars; then bares them.

Did you read it? Did you? Did you read it all? Every word. Congratulations. If you read it and understand you will have grokked the quintessence of modernism and need to read no more of it and God bless us everyone. Want a hint, mes amis? Compare the ultimate sentences in the last two paragraphs. Note the parallel construction. Is Woolf saying truth is like the veiled stars, and closeness is like them bared? Do we fail to find truth in seeking truth, and so content ourselves (in this world of marble square pendants and herons flying overhead and mad stone forests) with intimacy, and thereby find truth? Who knew there was an undercurrent of romanticism in modernism and Virginia Woolf. (I still think Miss Thingummy needs a date, but don't look at me.)

So he said: "Once there was a boy
Who woke up with blue hair
To him it was a joy
Until he ran out into warm air -
He thought of how his friends would come to see;
And would they laugh, or had he got some strange disease?"

The people sat waiting
Out on their blankets in the garden
But God said nothing
So someone asked him, "I beg your pardon:
I'm not quite clear about what you just spoke -
Was that a parable, or a very subtle joke?

God shuffled his feet and glanced around at them;
The people cleared their throats and stared right back at him

So the Crash Test Dummies seem to agree with Woolf (who I guess struggled with intimacy too but not speak ill of the dead) and Henry Miller has written about self-intimacy and how wonderful it is to be Henry Miller and not to have to go to work anymore.

So now you know the ultimate truth.