Tag: creative

Startled Mirror

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Once I was a child I looked upon the world as an eyeflash of hope – shatters of stars thrown across the night sky, I said to myself that that is where I will be someday.

that is where I’ll be someday

And that I wondered about those stars, and wrote on papers, multiplying my age by tens and wondering where I would be at each point, who would I be? who would I love? who would love me? and I wondered if I would be rich? well-liked? Poor? Scorned?

I had no fears. I loved the world, even when I felt they did not love me back.

But then the first of those decades struck me – a strange ruffling wind tossing me over the sea under a night sky born anew and still there was hope because hope had yet to be born, writhing in its placenta, rueing a fierce-eyed tenacious grip, clinging to a vestige of what I felt to be the right path.

However, that path was but illusion. I walked it fearlessly, regardless of destiny. I had youth on my side, and in youth there are days to burn like tinder, one twig after another until the pile becomes depleted and we scrounge for more to keep the fire burning.

And then the people came, because I had never noticed them before. They had faces that all looked alike, as they do now, not any of significance, but rejoicing in their commonality, the pale fish-eyed thin-lipped galley slaves rowing to the rhythm of commerce, to each wanting the glimmering sheaf of light on the other shore, the other shore not their freedom, or their salvation, but what they can own, what they can have, driving picket fences into the earth to shut others out and bloat flatulently under rich fruit trees regarded itself as a bounty of the earth, and not the property of a tenant. And the ripe fruit drops and decays into the earth.

The dreams of the child become the dashed hope of the ogre-spector of adulthood. Eyes are grim, skin turns to gray, wrinkles crease a riverbed of woes across the astonished face and others, and even others still, use that frightened disbelief as another peg for commerce. Ah! With those fears, like many others, I can capitalize on vanity, insecurity and old age. I eat greed with my lust, eat lust with my greed. On Sundays I pray to be a better person, so that I can step back into the poisoned river and begin my workweek anew.

The child that wondered stands at the precipe of decades later, astonished still at his reflection, that of the startled mirror unmitigating in its refusal to reflect what we want to see. We have allowed ourselves to become slaves to numbers.

Age is our whipping post.

It has become the monster at the end of our youthful dreams. The Hegira from child to adult is but a trail of glass-shattered tears.

He turns. Lights off. Dreams no longer a melodious cargo, but an embargo on our past, taxed and regulated for the blank-face masses. We drag our feet to the grave and stand looking down into an open stinking pit. The moneymakers are waiting to push you in and take more. We have allowed ourselves to be vessels for others to capitalize on, from the individual to that Hydra called government.

Astonished we have no other recourse but to step in.

On Channeling

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

I tell Caitlin that I “have to channel for a minute,” and begin to write, with a gathering of strange Blakean energies gather forces to launch front he tip of my tongue through my fingers and I see nothing else but what I am thinking to write, that certainly will be come a most splendid misfire, or the touchstone to some other idea, that I believe it could humble me, or even alienate me, but none the less it stays sincere and moves through the channels of the heart, there I confess through my dictate the winding and churning of an idea seeded by emotion and watered by innovation, there can be nothing else as intermediary, it can only be encouraged like wet desire and the prodding of a child through the doorway into the world…

Writing becomes an act in itself, not the night or its stars, or the sea and its waves, but the page and its words rolling back ever-certain, ever-urged toward its own shore, breaking at frothy import the intention of its well-aimed volley.

Or it misfires.

But in accidents there lies the most important discoveries. Here in the world I cocoon myself within, I harness the silken thread of divine thoughts invincible.

The result is a page broken and tumbled, like a fallen statue that once held its subject to a loftier aim, but now, reduced to rubble, foiled, only to resurrect

in time

its time

will you be there for me

will you be there

will you?

[Update] Lost Notebook is Found

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

I evidently left it in a break room at work. Maybe people read it, maybe not? There’s something to say for having messy handwriting, that only the most determined will try to wade through a slew of retrograde cursive…

So, was it so important? Yes, to me it was.

Maybe an excerpt:

In a cave she walked after turning away, and the old man followed, walking his dog whose snout skimmed the wet sand and the rolling cold wash of the sea. The cove was set away from the beach proper, where large glacial erratics had been rolled into place to form a getty that stretched out about one-quarter mile into the sea.

As she strolled, her bare thighs wet with the splash of waves that deliciously licked them, her toes touched her shadows. Her feet were stark white under the sun. She did not look back. She knew already that he would follow abidingly, as readily as the dog. By the time she reached the getty, she began her ascent over the stones.

The old man stopped, unwilling at first to climb, but to stand and watch her lift her long tawny legs over the wet-dark boulders. The sea rolled around the old man’s shins and then his knees. The dog moved further away. He dropped the leash. The dog walked several feet away and sat squarely on its wet haunches shivering.

On the highest stone she stood looking at the sun, her neck craned and cheek tilted, feeling warm fingers trace the fineries of her hot skin. She closes her eyes listening to the sea. The bubbling gurgle between the rocks and the slapping hiss of the incoming tide began to sweep over the furthest reach of the getty.

For several minutes she stayed that way, as if in adoration or invocation to a god or some such pagan idolatry. Her hands unfastened the first of her garments. The straps of a thin top slipped off and dropped in a heap on the rock, her small breasts leaning into the hand of the hot sun. A strange thrill of union to her grand lineage, of legions of others like her stretched to the ancients in blind obedience to the equinox, thrilled her.

The whiteness of her face, like fire illuminating parchment, and eyes shining with no fixed color, but of all colors, and then lids rapturously closed as she sat with knees drawn like Venus in her grove, fixed to her supine posture, breasts upthrusted and sprayed of shining droplets from hand-tossed Atlantis waves, she slowly emptied a sigh into the unerring wind.

There was no mother, father, man or woman, but only the elements desirous of her as if all of it served in slavish devotion to her and her alone…”

Thanks for reading…

There’s Nothing Like a Cheap Paperback …

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ 3 Comments

I believe a cheap paperback of great literature dresses up a book shelf better than overpriced hardcovers and oversized trade paperbacks… I mean just those small ones that fit right in the back of your pocket like it was always meant to be there. There’s plenty I found through my years bought for a nickel or a quarter, or maybe I stole from some flea market table where I didn’t have the dime or quarter, but the title or author drew me to such extremities. I feel guilty about that…

There’s a whole line of Faulkner paperbacks I have with split black spines and mysterious photos of a vanished America that retains the hate and desperation of its people in the American south, of fronds of Spanish Moss and blood soaking in puddles within a rutted wagon wheel path. All the Snopes and Compsons in the world took up a couple of feet on the bookshelf near The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Women In Love.

I have a really aged copy of Kerouac’s The Subterraneans sent to me from Terry Malick. He said he had it as a boy when he worked on a farm where he drove a tractor to harvest wheat. He kept it in the glove box. He told me one December evening in Austin that he “wanted to look cool,” but he never really understood the book at all. A few months back he mailed it to me with a neat inscription.

Cheap dirty paperbacks, the pages pungent of must and experience. If we could lift the prints from the cover, how many murderers and saints have clutched these titles in a search for redemption and resolution?

Maxwell Bodenheim was murdered clutching a copy of Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, and as he laid there in the Bowery cold water flat, the blood sea of his heart pumped out his life essence to stain his Arrow collar shirt.

Once I rode a trolley to Tijuana from San Diego holding a thick paperback of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I never have been able to read it the same way again, with the lift of spring flowers wafting through the air imagining the Salinas Valley.

Right here with me is a Vintage paperback of Faulkner’s Flags In the Dust with its front cover photo of a dilapidated home and Weeping Lilac Tree and I remember reading it, the first time reading Faulkner, and being entranced with the language (and this was not even vintage Faulkner in his prime!):

“They drank again. It was high ere, and the air moved with gray coolness. On either hand lay a valley filled with shadow and with ceaseless whip-poor-wills; beyond these valleys the silver earth rolled on into the sky. Across it, sourceless and mournful and far, a dog howled. Before them the lights on the courthouse clock were steadfast and yellow and unwinking in the dissolving distance, but in all other directions the world rolled away in slumbrous ridges, milkily opaline.”

These words turned me on to Faulkner, and at the time, I think it was a little bookstore in a Massachusetts mall, there was a shelf of them, all Vintage books, each equally enigmatic. Light In August had its cover of a window shade with the mysterious yellow light tinging it, and The Sound and the Fury had its little country cemetery awash in sunset blood red sky.

Pocket paperbacks: a dishwasher in Detroit washing pans with a volume of Stephen King jammed in his back pocket; a socialite reading Lolita in the back of a limousine; an old man reading Beckett on a park bench; a sailor reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild; a bored teen reading Naked Lunch. I would defer to a quality paperback of Ulysses over a grand Folio edition. In between its beat-up pulpy pages, a secret pulses like a buried ember in its bed of ashes, waiting to spark into full flame.

As a kid, we went to flea markets spread out over the lot of a drive-in theater, and there was table after table of people with books, many of them remaindered. We knew they were remaindered because they tore the front cover off, thus stripping the book of its character. Dirt cheap, then, wasn’t always better. I was weaned from young adult fiction to Stephen King back then. I distinctly remember finding an almost-newish copy of the Signet edition of Salems Lot with its slick black embossed vampire girl with that one crimson drop of blood seeping out of the corner of her mouth and no title on the cover. A collectible now, it was commonplace then … and I could never pick up the novel again, because that edition kept with it the entire mystique of the little village taken over by everyday vampires. Who could ever forget floating Danny Click in that book?

I’m not one for memory lane type of blogging, but picking up this copy of Carl Jung’s edited collection Man and His Symbols published by Dell flooded me with memories.

What’s your favorite pocket paperback book?

On a Lost/Stolen Notebook

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ 1 Comment

In August 2017, I began a new notebook, handwriting in concentrated spates of a few hours at a time, all of the writing clusters having in common the character of Violet Sweet, her mother, a dying neighbor among several others. It was a journey of a pure being deriving much from Jungian traits (Aspects of the Feminine & The Sacred Prostitute). There were also items quoted at length from these 2 books and The Golden Bough, and heightened drawings of perception… alas, one day it was just no longer in my satchel bag, or in our apartment, the car, or at work. It had utterly vanished.

It made me wonder: I always have notebooks, most times they are blank as I compose directly into my laptop, eschewing the notebook as only placing effort into something that I would have to do twice (not counting drafts).

I had considered putting my name inside the notebook, with my address and its reward, should it be found, “your conscience.” However, since I place no faith on human values, I left it blank and so the work I wrote is now tossed to the dustbin of humanity in all of its glorious anonymity.

After days of frantic searching. I gave up looking for it, like a sailor lost at sea, surrendering my hopes to my memory of what it was I wrote (much of it done trance-like). Erring on the side of the power of imagination, I have a new notebook to begin the novel anew.

Maybe, as they say, ‘it was meant to be.’

I’ll shall see.