Sometimes, when you ignore the early warning signs of your health you find yourself in a hospital bed with tubes and such running out your body and also monitoring your heart. I could have told them before they picked it up on the monitors. Yes, I have a broken heart. Perhaps it was this tired condition that that had caused me to suffer mental constiptation, or writers block. There is nothing worse in this world or any other world than staring at a blank Word document that is as empty as your life. It’s this condition that makes your hospital bed remind you of a basement apartment on the corner of Yesterday Street and Wallace Blvd.
There are two good things about living in a basement apartment. The first is that you cannot kill yourself by jumping out the window. The second, and this is the most important one, you always know that you will be on the way up no matter what you do or were you go. The bad thing I suppose, is a matter of your point of view. All you can ever see is peoples feet as they walk by in the rain. Unless the sun is shining. You can’t always tell when you live in a basement apartment. Or lying in a hospital bed.
When you are lying in a hospital bed not writing, you usually have no idea what it is you are not writing about. Or maybe your mind will fly off in a million directions at once to a million scenes and locations and conversations between characters that have no intention of being remembered by anyone.
In the world fiction it is a rare thing to have characters spring up full blown from the earth and offer the innocence the nakedness, and the courage to your art.
When you introduce live flesh and blood into fiction, then it is bound to become more than just another short story. At the time I began writing these little tidbits, I did not fully appreciate the nature or the depth of my feelings for the characters I invented. Nor did I appreciate what I may have meant to the characters.
What I didn’t understand this particular night in the hospital was the voice speaking to me. ”When you write about me you turn me into a character, you will destroy me to create me.”
When you describe in vivid detail the wild and lively natural things of beauty you confine them to the flicker of a computer screen it does tend to disappear from your life. The counterpoint of view is that you do not make that thing of beauty disappear but you make it last forever. Both schools of thought are correct and both are wrong, just as you or I may be correct or wrong and sometimes a little of both, sometimes at the same time. There is no doubt art can cause the idea, likeness or interpretation of the subject to endure in the minds of man. It is also true though there is little evidence to prove it, that the process itself of transmorgyfying the muse into the art that the muse has no further reason for being.
Those are not thoughts a writer should be thinking not if he wishes to write. These are the thoughts you have in a hospital bed a day after six coronary bypasses.
Now when I think back on Yesterday street and the people I grew up with there in the shallow river of my life I often smile. Right now as I look in the mirror I see a smile. It looks a little ragged, maybe a bit confused, but it is there alright. It lacks the innocence of a small boy at Christmas, but it is a smile just the same. And they say if you smile at the memory of someone from your past it means you loved them.
As a writer who found himself without anything to write about your life can beome a nightmare of nothingness. If you are a writer of fiction you have a myriad of madness to contend with, for you must cast your net wide enough to capture the stars and you dig deeper into your subject matter which is inevitably the human spirit. The art of fiction has very much to do with the art of life as you live it.
So it was one morning in a medicated stupor that I lay in a bed and recalled in vivid detail the way I had lived my life. The voice talking to me its youthful wisdom was right as usual. When you try to describe in detail the wild natural thing of human beauty it does tend to disappear from your life. At any rate besides myself and all the other people who aren’t doing what they ought to be doing, aren’t saying what they ought to be saying, aren’t living how they ought to be living, all because they are not doing what they should be doing with any heart at all.
With an uneasy and over sedated imagination I felt as if someone were standing by my bedside this particular morning. I saw a hazy face, maybe it came with the territory. I had the eerie feeling that someone was watching me think.
It was much later when I finally woke up. There was no one in the room of course.
On the desk next to the bed was a single rose, written in the condensation on the desk top caused by the picture of ice water were these words.
“Stay where you are for a while.
Fix some things. We can wait for you.”
Love,
Mom
Dad,
Larry,
Miss Amarillo 1969
Bill