Gardening at Night

After working say for 25-plus years creating new worlds, built with the living pulsing pieces of your own psyche, a writer looks around, talks with friends, family, people - they don't get it, can't see it - means nothing to them.


I think of the writers whose isolation and pain I felt - Bill Styron, John Cheever, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, to name a few - the isolation is the main problem. Rods shooting out of the luck power, lack of an effect on the community, the writer feels like a has-been, an antique, in some circles a joke. In the old days when art was commissioned by the heads of the community and practiced and valued by the community as a whole, work was appraised, debated or excoriated, but always had value as a vessel for stimulation and communication.


In 1846 when Dickens exposed the hideous pollution of coal burning and effects of an inadequate sewer system, he made the elites see it and feel the pain. The writer artist had become an agent for change. In the early 20th century, Rilke, Pound, Williams, Joyce and Breton were stitching something new: revolutionaries breathing a deeper world. Did they have an inkling what their progeny would look like? Orwell knew what his world would become - our world. A mother loves her child though he or she be a monstrously insane nitwit criminal.


A nation's people embraces whatever becomes the status quo until it turns again them. Our technology has turned against us. Bombarded by meaningless phrases, constant violence, standing in an assembly line of shallow emotions, we all feel isolated from one another, and therefore from ourselves. After the creations of Joyce, Pound, Williams, this alienation became a major theme in the middle of the 20th century.


Though Melville had written Bartleby 90 years earlier it wasn't until Camus and Sartre that the reading public became full aware of it. Today only the courageous fact-finding journalist is regarded as dangerous. Writing is an art; reshaping has no audience and therefore no power. But the writer-artist is not dead. We are trying to create a new community and a new aesthetic. The building of community occurs simultaneously with the struggle to develop forms which contain the will of the community. We are far from that place, but inching along. We have planted seeds and had a few good harvests; our future depends on how we care for the garden.