You imagined yourself into your future

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I haven’t forgotten that the over-arching question underlying this blog is, “What is the meaning of life?” Although it may seem sometimes as if the matters I pursue here are merely of personal interest, I suggest that the underlying question is always there, and is important to us all, at one level or another.

This particular entry was written while I was visiting England four years ago. I had just bought and read Michael Reynolds’ The Young Hemingway.

This entry begins with my addressing Hemingway and ends with the guys on the other end of the line prodding me to do something I was reluctant to undertake. (Exposing my own shortcomings may be a way to make real what otherwise might remain only abstraction. Consider it my gift to you.) I feel like the writing and publication of The Cosmic Internet is partial fulfillment of this commitment.

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Hemingway: Symbols and the limitations of scholarly analysis

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

What a strange and wonderful thing, to have learned how to converse either with the shade of Hemingway or with some representation of that shade that my mind has made up (which I don’t actually believe is the case, but recognize that it remains a possibility) and not only enjoy the process but continually learn things. While engaged in going back over my conversations with Hemingway, thinking to make a book out of them, I came across this one that should be of interest.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

A thought that has come to mind repeatedly is how much good thinking is contained in your books that, for some reason, makes no impression on The Hemingway Myth. That myth is not really larger than life. It is distorted, with certain elements exaggerated and others ignored — suppressed, I sometimes think. The result misses you entirely.

And so does biography based on external fact, as I’ve said. What we do is only part of our life, only part of what we are. Why we do it — in what internal and external circumstances — is rarely obvious. That’s why these professors keep coming up with their theories, trying to explain everything. But nobody’s life can be explained, just explained away. And I never could persuade anybody of the fact.

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Hemingway on government and Harry Morgan and us

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I am putting together a book of my conversations with Hemingway, with the intent of showing him from the inside. Regard these as merely imaginary conversations, if it makes you feel more comfortable with them. Whatever the source, the wisdom and the point of view they reveal repeatedly surprises me. As this, from a year ago.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

7:30 AM. I wake up, Papa, thinking about you and the Communists (having still been reading For Whom The Bell Tolls, of course). Is that what you want us to talk about next? If not, where would you like to go?

Do you really want an abstract disquisition about politics and government?

More, I’d like something on you and government.

You know my views. Government is a form of necessary protection racket. They have the ability to make you pay, and make you do things, and they use it as much as they dare. You have to have it, I’m not saying you don’t, because if you don’t have one protection racket, you’re going to have another one — but you don’t have to like it, and you certainly don’t have to see it as anything but what is. I mean, you don’t have to put a lot of hopes on it.

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Conversations September 24, 2010

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, September 24, 2010

4 AM. Not so good. Was awakened at 2:30 or sometime like that — off to the recliner, but a few minutes later I was at the computer, then back to sleep. But now up again, so how much sleep could I have gotten? Even though I am brewing coffee, I can see a need more sleep. Back to the recliner, I guess.

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Conversations September 17, 2010

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, September 17, 2010

5 AM. Up, I guess, since my nose filled and made unconscious breathing impossible. Not an impossible night but a disturbed one. Thank God –thank Ed Carter! — for his recliner, which makes everything easier.

I had a couple of things surface but I can’t remember them at the moment.

Yesterday I re-read Shadow Dancing In The USA, a book by Michael Ventura that I discovered in 1986 and reviewed for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. That was when I discovered him, and for a long time it was the only thing of his I had. I was surprised to see that his first essay concerned how we are not unitary individuals, but communities.

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Conversations September 4, 2010

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday, September 4, 2010

4:45 AM. You were going to conclude your list of the way our lives change by discussing how we express various aspects of ourselves.

And, as you knew immediately, this was a major topic far too important and too involved to be dealt with as an afterthought or even dealt with on the same basis as the others. Nor is our list necessarily complete; thought would suggest other ways in which lives in the three-dimensional world change. But it is complete enough for our purposes.

Now, in talking about change in various aspects of a given group, we come to the center of our explanation/argument. For, you will remember, we said that various “levels” of reality each changed within the level, and both did and did not affect other levels, an impossible paradox, surely. And we said that “levels” like “individuals” is a convenient fiction. And above all, we said, as above, so below, which says, investigate your own level closely enough and you can come to understand the repetitive pattern that constitutes the reality in which we live and will always live.

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Conversations August 13, 2010

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, August 13, 2010

6:30 AM. It feels like I’ve lost the morning, starting this late, which is ridiculous not least because I tried to stay in bed longer so as not to get up at four or whatever. But I have a headache and don’t feel particularly in tune.

I did do a little bit of work yesterday. I have now gone through the last half of December 2005 and the first half of January 2006, making notes on cards, and noting themes in a separate place. This is going to work. It is reminding me of things I have since incorporated into my life, and of other things that I had forgotten. I can see that it is the intermediate step — the next step, anyway — that will make it all manageable for me.

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