Holiday Done.

  I can't write about Christmas. It matters too much. Not in the cosmic order of things but to me, simply. As I can't write about Pittsburgh. Or about my mom. Or sex. It's too sloppy, comes out too messy. "I love you!" One of most powerful things you can say. The least powerful thing you can type.
  You can't be more important than the words on the page.

  And when the one overpowers the other you write for shit. 

  Tennessee Williams could write like that but his words don't stay on the page. They get up and walk around. They speak. You meet them, literally, face to face. Print despises indulgence. Theater can handle melodrama. It's temporal. Like us. It inherits all the excuses we grant to the living. 

   

   I have a friend, a writer -a sharp, reputable writer- who won't write about things she loves. Too much. Her family. Her childhood. The city we both spent time in. 

  I used to think that was sad, an admission of weakness or some kind of failure and now I think it's wisdom. It's brave.

   Good writing needs good tooling. It is good tooling. The medium inseparable from the content. When you get to poetry it's practically a visual art. 

  Nothing greatly human by necessity leads to great writing. Nothing's worth reading simply if it's about sin or war or love or children. Often it's the opposite - mush, blather. You spray too much feeling into the words and they end up splayed on the page. Boiled milk. Too many colors come to brown. 

    Passion played out using the proper nouns of the people you knew, the places you've been, turns toward the confessional. 

   Did Beckett write about the War or Joyce or the Easter Uprising? Did Nabokov write about his father's murder or the loss of his homeland? Does Stoppard write about his children? 

  Which great writer, without essential guile, without a mask, speaks from the heart - or about that which lives closest to the heart? 

 And the ones who did? Who looked their most personal demons in the eye, called them into the room and then cast them in their work?

   James Agee dies of a heart attack in a cab in the middle of Manhattan. He was 46.  Fitzgerald dies in a duplex off Laurel Canyon road listening to a football game. Crushed. $13 dollars and 13 cents in his bank account. He was 44. Gene O'Neill locked himself in a room for a decade and broke his health writing 4 plays about his insane family that he insisted were never be performed until he was dead a decade. Anne Sexton/ suicide. She was 46. Plath- you know it-31. John Hersey never wrote anything worth a damn again after Hiroshima. Ditto Harper Lee. Thomas Wolfe dead at 38. Kerouac at 46. Jim Carroll a corpse at 35, body dies at 60. 

   Confessional lit become unconventional suicide. 

   Cloak/ deflect/ defend + Intrigue, deception and speed = Silence, cunning, and exile.
   So in an awful, bloggy personal digression ...I don't know what I'm saying here. A tribute to my fine fine friend who works with such diligence and passion, the guts she has, the fire, how I wish her a long life? How I eat her words like air.
   Or if I'm just a little thrown to realize I'm older now than Fitzgerald ever was, or Kerouac, and if I met Sylvia Plath walking down the the street,  I'd ask a friend, "Who's the kid? Young to be a mother, no?"
  Or maybe it's just today. Tonight. With four inches of snow finally fallen on a barren Pittsburgh. Filling the trees, their narrow little arms outlined in white. January 6. The Day of Kings. The ignored holiday when the three magi reached the Christ. And if you think about it - isn't that when you'd actually celebrate a baby? After it was born? I always think of the poor priests and deacons around the city throwing the big Epiphany service for no one. Music and color and chant and ceremony and everybody's home nursing a hangover, The Slavic minority singing in their churches not far from where I sit. It's Xmas there. Standing, only singing, a religion without any instrument but the voice. How it shakes me. Holy dissonance.
   Christmas. When your mind wanders. The whole city, street by street marked with symbols, talismans, wreathed in evocation. Wired to make you replay your life or the lives you wish you could have touched but only knew them in their work. Maybe that's the best gift in any season: I have Anna Karenina. I didn't have Tolstoy for a father.
  So beware the bio, the portrait that's not a pastel or an oil, the confession, the sell, the branding.
  If there's something to hope for in 2015 it'd be less Eating some Praying and and a healthy suspicion of a Love that dares not do much but shout its name.