Redondo

I live in a room of distorting surfaces in my head. Some reflect, some refract, all distort. Each surface presents me with the outcome of an action or choice which the inner mechanism can make. These projections bear little or no resemblance to what actually will happen when I take a particular path.

Here I am, and I have some six hours of writing time in front of me and nothing of interest to me to read. I am sick of travelling already, especially in my head and around Portland. Isn't there some way I could bring this to an end?

What's on my mind now? I am already dreading having to travel by whatever means to go see my eldest son Jason, and spend a weekend with him in Maine, and then on to Boston or New York or wherever it is I am to go next. But I'm not doing much good for myself here in Portland, either. Last night's lack of sleep shook me. What will I do with myself tonight if I can't sleep? I'm already anticipating it and dreading it. But in the meantime I'm writing these words, mainly for the purpose of moving my fingers, and doing something, be it ever so little.

But what do I do when I can think of do it in? Go out for a cigarette and look for some more books...

 

As soon as I have an assignment, I go to work undermining it and making it impossible. Each one I write makes the next one more difficult to write.

In brief, I have found a perfect method for hanging myself up.

The main work of modern man, as I understand him, is to think himself to a point where nothing can be done.

No, I am not going to Europe. I'm going to NY to visit my children, whom I haven't seen in years. What's wrong with that? Plenty!

My son wants me to visit him in Maine. That means I have to get to Maine. From Boston that's not so difficult. But before going to Maine, I have to go to NY. Why? To see my other children, who live down there. I need to get back in time for my return ticket from Boston to Portland, March 15.

What will happen if I don't make that return trip? I don't know, I dread even thinking about it. Maybe that's the subject for another column. What happens if I don't return to Portland. Or if I do?

Why that date? Because I booked the trip months ago, when I had quite different plans. I thought I'd spend a month in Europe then. Now I don't want to go. But I date, or pay for a new ticket.

I have no money to buy a new ticket. So I take the March 15 date as fixed. The air-line won't let me change it. Not even a day either side of the date I fixed. I am stuck with the choice I made months ago, when the ticket was cheap.

So what am I going to do? For today, I am going to write this. I find it almost impossible to write. But one thing hasn't deserted me--I can still put one word after another, and come out with an entire sentence, one that will more or less express the thought I'm feeling.

But do I want to express my thought? Aye, there's the rub. I don't want to express this thought at all. There's the blockage that comes to all of us who would deign to write. We don't want to write what's politic, what will hurt no one's feelings. But also, we don't want to tell the truth. If you don't set out to tell the truth, you can't write.

Listen, I've got problems about spending a weekend with my son. For one thing, how do I get there? I can't very well ask him to do all the driving that'll be necessary to get me from Boston to NY to Maine to Boston. To write what I'm writing here, I merely have to face up to the chagrin, the shame, the embarrassment, of revealing myself as a weak-kneed malcontent. Reading between the lines, I am sure the reader can see that I that case I would have different arguments and would bend all efforts to seeing them. That I do not do this is something I will not reveal. It is something I don't want to know.

Even though I do want to see my children, at this time, at any rate, I must not really want to, because I am letting myself be seduced by problems of time, distance, money, and fatigue. Did I mention that I am 73 years old and not enjoying the highest state of energy? Did I tell you that of late I am having trouble sleeping? That I have come to hate sleeping in other people's houses, where I am supposed to sleep, not lie awake with insomnia?

The first solution that comes to mind is to become the person who writes these lines. That's a scary prospect. I wouldn't be that person for anything in the world, even though I am that man. I don't know quite what to do about that. My desire is to reveal myself to you, but there are things I don't want to reveal. I'd like to present myself as an affable, intelligent man, aware of his all too human flaws in a humorous way. One of these flaws is my ambiguous way of thinking about my children.

Can a man find himself mired in his own tendentious error and still do something about it? That's what these words are sup-posed to be about.

I take up the writing again, after a brief discursus reading Watzlawick's Ultra Solutions, or How to Fail Most Successfully.

What is this book about? Find a copy and read it for yourself and judge whether or not it is relevant to my underlying argument. What am I saying here? I am saying something about the loss of the certainties that force me into dumbness. To understand how to write something is to render oneself unable to write it. I no doubt will see my children, but none of my planning toward that end will prevail. I am looking for the one path, the critical path that will lead me from where I am now to my idealized goal, and the attempt to find and follow that path renders it impossible to find and follow.

 

I think it's safe to say that one morning soon, I will go out to Portland airport and present myself to an airline whose name I have written down somewhere. It is very likely they will take me aboard. Some hours later, I will get out of the airplane (or one very like it) at Logan Field, Boston. There I may or may not be met. If I am not met, I hope to have the name of my hotel written on a piece of paper. I will somehow get to that hotel, and present myself to my sponsors. I am there to sign copies of my new book, which is a collection of three or four of my older books

That's the easy part. I just have to follow instructions, go on a lot of science-fiction panels and say a word or two about topics I know nothing about.

After that, the paths my life could take dissolve into a dozen, a hundred, a thou-sand different ways. I can make a case for any one of them. But I can't really plan for the outcome of any one of them. Because the paths keep on bifurcating, and my attempt to make any one of them a main path only results in further bifurcation. So I will go into it all with a hazy atmosphere, and try not to be too surprised at whatever might happen. My children, if they are wise, will take a similar attitude. With a little luck we may get to see each other, exchange expressions of love, etc. With even more luck, I may find a way to spend a long weekend at my eldest son's place in Maine. Stranger things have happened.

 

RSheckley@aol.com