Twang!
In Paris, during the spring
of 1926, when I first met Ernest Hemingway, he seemed reluctant to advise
me about rewriting. Admittedly, he was in the midst of a divorce and his
first novel, The Sun Also Rises, wasn't behaving as he had hoped during
that first draft. But this was my maiden consultation after my gamete fission
twenty-five years later, and I wanted to make the most of it; so, I pressed
him. He glared over his apero of kir royale at the canopic reflection of
my dreambody in the foxed mirrors of the Café Deux Magots and growled,
"The first draft of anything is shit."
Good point. Somewhat later,
in a more besotted state at #2 Place de L'Odéon, he caught another
glimpse of my wraith upon the skin of light wobbling off the meniscus in
his glass of Cote de Brouilly and confided, "Never sit down and think
about what to write about. Sit down and write what you thought about. Makes
for less rewriting."
Onward! While in Paris, I move
along to 1857 and consult with Nathaniel Hawthorne during his vacation with
his family after relinquishing his position as American consul in Liverpool.
He sees me in the cheval mirror of his suite at the Gare du Nord hotel and
at first fears the absinthe from dinner is still percolating in his blood.
I think he actually continued to believe that, but before departing I got
him to confide that "Easy reading is damn hard writing."
1719 at Twickenham, southwest
London, Alexander Pope and I convene in the grotto of his villa, where he
enjoyed strolling in the garden. He noticed my dreambody within the pollen
haze under the tall border hedge of foxgloves and dogroses – and his
opinion of my presence centered on his understanding of me as a daemonion.
I wasn't about to try to fill him in on quantum physics, hyperspace and
the wave function of the psyche as a dreambody when, in fact, I was there
for his thoughts on rewriting. Believing he entrusted his opinion to a psychic
reflection of his own mind, he averred, "Words are like leaves, and
where they most abound much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. Prune
wisely. But prune."
Next stop in the self-reflecting
universe, back to Paris to consult with John Milton during his stay there
in 1638. We meet in the Tuileries Gardens, where he mistakes me for an angelic
apparition. I don't disabuse him – and he readily offers this about
rewriting, "The purest efficacy of expression requires extraction of
all that distracts from the prime import."
Right. My conjugating wave
function is spreading pretty thin by this point; yet, I'm eager to press
on – to 1597 and London, where John Donne, secretary to Sir Thomas
Egerton, has taken a fancy to his boss's niece …
But here the language gets
a little wonky, and trying to extract that metaphysical's opinion on rewriting,
I strain to snapping the loop-the-loop of quantum gravity lassoing the past
and ...
Twang!
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