Split and Crazy

[For information about this image (“Mirror Mask”), see the artist’s statement at the foot of this page. Clicking on the image above will enlarge it, if you want to experiment.]

From whiskey river:

This writing stuff saved me. It has become my way of responding to and dealing with things I find too disturbing or distressing or painful to handle in any other way. It’s safe. Writing is my shelter. I don’t hide behind the words; I use them to dig inside my heart to find the truth. I guess I can say, honestly, that writing also offers me a kind of patience I don’t have in my ordinary day-to-day life. It makes me stop. It makes me take note. It affords me a kind of sanctuary that I can’t get in my hurried and full-to-the-brim-with-activity life.

(Terry McMillan)

…and:

Get yourself in that intense state of being next to madness. Keep yourself in, not necessarily a frenzied state, but in a state of great intensity. The kind of state you would be in before going to bed with your partner. That heightened state when you’re in a carnal embrace: time stops and nothing else matters. You should always write with an erection. Even if you’re a woman.

(Tom Robbins)

Not from whiskey river:

Madmen

They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor’s smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in—
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of “the writer”? The particular writer. By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward — the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth — and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing.

There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.” That’s a light enough comment upon the disappointments of encountering the famous, or even the moderately well-known — they are always shorter and older and more ordinary than you expected — but there’s a more sinister way of looking at it as well. In order for the pâté to be made and then eaten, the duck must first be killed. And who is it that does the killing?

(Margaret Atwood [source])

The police should be here soon.

It’s I who called them. Halpin’s the name.

Let me take you back, and take myself back too. (What good is it if I take you back and leave myself here? Who then will tell you the dark tale?) Back to the beginning of this unbelievably tragic affair. Perhaps the truth can then be seen, emerging like the image in a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps it will not, but lie there (the truth) in myriad pieces, waiting for a surer hand and a more perceptive eye than mine to put it all together. If people are hurt, they’ll just have to be hurt.

Call me Halpin — Martin Halpin. Some of my friends call me Marty. Some few call me “Chuck.”

Better not think about it…

The lake is speckled with little whitecaps flicked up by the wind from the darkling Canadian forests. It’s beautiful in an unearthly way. One would never think that next door, in the den, Ned Beaumont lies on the floor, his head bashed in by an andiron, or some other blunt instrument.

It’s all unreal.

Let’s say that I’m Martin Halpin. Who cares? For the purposes of my story that name will do as well as any. If you’d prefer to call me by another name, that’s all right, but remember what it is you choose to call me so that when you hear the name “Martin” or “Halpin” or even “Marty” or “Chuck,” and so on, you’ll know it’s I. I’ve done all right as Martin Halpin for years, and I’ll keep on doing all right. If there are any more years!

The police are on their way.

I called them about two minutes ago.

Next door, in the den, Ned Beaumont is slumped in a chair, a bullet hole above his right temple.

(Gilbert Sorrentino [source])

All three of us — I the guy, I the writer, and the “I” on the page or screen — have always been a little in love with Linda Ronstadt. So maybe when I heard her rendition of Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” doesn’t matter: maybe it really doesn’t matter that I was such a musical Philistine (shocking, I know) that I’d never heard Nelson’s own recording, nor even Patsy Cline’s. Whatever. Still — Le sigh! (as Pepé le Pew sometimes moaned) — whenever I hear someone mention the song, Ronstadt’s is the voice I hear.

As for the song itself… well, I can’t think of a purer expression of a writer’s sentimental turbulence as he addresses a work whose end nears.

[Lyrics]