SPENDING TIME

I remember when it was a big deal, I mean a BIG deal to pay fifty bucks to get a clock chip added to your computer. You could use the word processor…or the spreadsheet—not both!—AND see the time displayed. It was a vast luxury, especially if you were in college and you had a wristwatch and a wall clock. I had some explaining to do to my parents. Anyway, is there a computer today manufactured without a clock function? Time may be money, but I think time is getting cheaper. Maybe time is linked with the sub prime market.

(If the above paragraph seems familiar, my point exactly regarding the non-governance to prevent things from happening at once and repeatedly on the Internet.)

If time is money, and money is paper, then time could be a crane or a hippopotamus. Time could be folded into any number of charitable or uncharitable offenses. You could probably fold it into the wrinkles of your skin. An elephant could be a very wealthy animal, especially if he lived on the bank. And he could simultaneously be very cheap.

Time is limited. God is infinite. Elephants get wrinkles for free. Botox costs money. Money is time. Time is limited. Put your hand on the wall and keep turning left.

I drove home one night along the coastal road. The moon lit the topside of the clouds. I caught glimpses of the ocean between the dunes. I took my time about driving. I knew no matter when I got home it would be late. Late had already happened, and it was in the process of happening, and it would continue to happen until the flip side when late became early, but because my vector had started in late, I would still be late even if my arrival occurred in early. Don’t be tense; walk straight ahead.

Sometimes I feel like I’m just on the other side of the wall to one of my stories. I had been thinking about a woman that night while I was driving home, how to write her into a story. I had so many things to write about that night. In the morning though, I could only remember the topics, but not how to write them. I think the woman was writing a history of France called “Memoir of France.” It had a great title is all I can remember, sadly. I wanted to have a character writing a book by that title because it’s a great title, but it’s not a book that I could write. This will all make sense, or it won’t, but if it is compelling to read, read on.

If a bird could fly at the speed of light from Cleveland to Washington, how many feathers would it have by the time it reached Buffalo?

Writing is very easy. You have to tell exactly what’s there. It’s seeing what’s there that’s difficult. You can’t simply give the blocking of a character without the reader’s understanding of the motive behind that blocking, in which case, the blocking is unnecessasary because the reader already knows how the character will move.

I am impressed by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ characters who live exactly in the present. I guess many of them are poor, so that helps. They can be walking down a road, not thinking about laying stores for the future, but walking barefoot, feeling the heat, feeling the sand, hearing the wind in the trees and the birdsong carried on it. They feel their way in the present, a vibrant intake of senses despite if they have been down that road before habitually.

The Bushmen in THE GODS MUST BE CRASY are portrayed as unneeding of added stimulus. They read the tracks in the sand to know what’s happening in the world around them, check the direction of the wind. They live very close to their world, in its immediate season, and enjoy it.

This is how art must be. Perhaps art was not regarded much when people lived more closely with their immediate worlds, but it could have growing importance as we live farther removed from what is physically around us. Art makes us live in the immediate and consider. Good art comes from sitting still. Good art is timeless, its value is priceless, but I wouldn’t mind getting paid.

I’m supposed to be doing something now, while I’m doing something else, which seems like a waste, but in our era, it is revered as multi-tasking, so I keep doing it, its, all of the its at once. Ah the wizardry of the modern age. Technology is driving toward the greater importance of art in our world. Art, like death, makes us stop and consider. It draws our attention to a single thing. I predict that art will increasingly be revered as a luxury, a luxury that everybody needs.