#33
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!