ON THE ROPES, BUT HAPPY NEW YEAR

Very good talk with a friend about writing, and disasters, on the eve of a New Year. About why the knowledge of real ‘failure’ is so important, but with life being so short, the only battle being the true fight back. ‘Mohamed Ali on the ropes’. Why should anyone, with their own woes, be interested in a writer’s woes though? Perhaps only to excoriate the publishers and editors, not to mention people you loved, who power-broke other people’s lives and work for their own gain, or security, yet who could not for a moment take a true life risk, write a novel, or do the work that might change, inspire or help lives. It really is writ so large in America, at times, that arrogance that also leads to paranoia and human damage. That’s not to say other countries are so much better, but some writers have called it Ego Consciousness, that has no historical imagination, or true sense conception of the real, internal human journeys, the deep links between us all, and so is lost in conceptions of rights and power alone that blind everyone in the end. Maybe they should spend more time in Rome. Perhaps this little Phoenix Ark adventure itself though is an effort itself to believe in something again. We live so much in tribes, in boxes, in the arrogance of vast markets, and the surface hypocrisies that makes the political fronts sometimes so atrocious. At New year though, as the time counters fall around the globe, on a single, spinning planet, taking many of us through exactly the same temporal space, maybe we will start to wake up a little. As for hurling a stone at the un-hearing Goliath of Abrams, wanting to smack it straight into some cultural forehead, only a book could to that. Have a great New Year’s Eve, and here we’ll try to follow the path of the heart, like Carlos Casteneda. DCD