Letter to Susan Thoms

"Everybody's gotta be somewhere!"

To Susan Thoms

Jul 12 at 10:32 PM

Thanks for the mail packet! It arrived here in 10 days. That's about the same delivery time as using our Miami address, but Miami costs you less postage. We pay for the forwarding.

Wish I could have seen/heard the opera described in the libretto. The woman who got moved from the homeless site sure has a good outlook on life. Sorry your neighborhood is having drive-by shootings. Hope that's an aberration. Who is Stella Marrs? She looks familiar, if that's her on the card; or is she a lesbian musician from Washington State? I know Stella Maris was an Italian Line ship that collided with a Swedish ship and went down in the Atlantic. No, that was the Andrea Doria. Who was she? And Stella was a character in Streetcar Named Desire. Oh wait! Her last name was Kowalski; is that Polish for Sea? 

My mind races around a lot lately. I compose paragraphs and pages for my novel in my head all day and night and read Virginia Woolf for style tips and think: I have already lived twice as long as Marcel Proust and he wrote six volumes covering 30 years of his life in about 10 years so if I am beginning now I need 20 years to cover my life which I think has been a lot more interesting than Proust's; but maybe Proust was a more interesting writer although who am I to judge and nobody else of literary judgment has ever read anything by me; who. by the way, has changed my pen name to Keith Burton Cline, since I discovered that there is a multitude of Keith Clines you can find on Google and I have finally opened a Twitter account insisting that my name is Keith Burton Cline and there is only one Keith Burton Cline who is me and anybody else you may meet with that name is the imposter, and not the real me! How's that for a Proustian run-on sentence? I am ordering a book by Karl Ove Knausgaard who is being called the Norwegian Proust because he has written six volumes of run-on sentences without paragraphs covering the minutia of his life from boyhood to ... he's only 46 for god's sake ... how could he have anything to say so young? He writes in Norwegian and 80% of Norwegians (what's that, about 1000 people?) have read all his work so far and it's all available in English now and since I want to be the American Karl Ove Knausgaard I had better get crackin'.

I know you are reading this on a teeny tiny Viagra telephone screen so I hope you are not going cross eyed. I am just fucking around with you. Sorry! Now that I have decided to use the computer and email again I am all manic as hell. Mania is lots more fun than depression, but it is harder to manage. It's like standing under a waterfall of ideas. Just try to catch one drop!

Love, Keith

Gathering My Wits

I've gathered a bunch of notes and scribbles that go back to New York in 1961. It's not a big pile but covers a lot of years. What I intend to do is fill in the blanks as viewed from here and now. Other reference material covers some of my ancestral inheritance of DNA from the Oregon Trail. If I believe in past lives it has to do with the passing of DNA from one generation to the next so that I am the reincarnation of those ancestors who crossed the plains in that respect. I inherited nothing else from them.

Who's talking?

I know I am only talking to myself. I have come to believe there is no one else worth talking to. In fact, there is no one else. I am God. Everything else is an illusion of my own making. Some would refine this to indicate there is a false self called the Ego who is the one doing the hallucinating. The real Self is aware only of itself being aware of itself being aware of itself ad infinitum. That is supposed to be the enlightened state of reality. Shit! Sounds like an infinity of eternity in hell. So I am going for the hallucination. As God, I can make it whatever I want it to be.

I read Conversations with God a couple of years ago and was impressed with the writer's delusion that he really had conversed with God. His ideas weren't bad. But I don't remember talking to him. My book is going to be about conversations with myself.

Hey Me! I'll talk to you in the morning. Okay?

Fixated on Edenbower.

Well, here we go getting off to a fast start at keeping a journal. Jour means day, so this should be something I visit and add to every day. Good luck with that. It's been three years since I opened this blog and this is the first time I have opened it since then. I took me all day to find this Posting Site.
At least the site seems to still be active.

I will begin by describing Edenbower. Edenbower is a place I actually lived between the ages of four and ten. It's part of "greater" Roseburg, Oregon now. Completely changed from the paradise I remember. Absorbed by growth, freeways, strip malls and TraveLodges. But the house where we lived is still there and looking pretty good considering it has been seventy years! Well, this isn't a description. This is what happened. The description of Edenbower -- the place I remember -- will take a lot of telling.

My name is Keith Burton Cline!

I've started a new blog site. Ignore the old one if you come across it. I didn't like the title and couldn't find out how to edit it. I didn't like my photo either. I'll try to cut and paste the three postings I had written. I didn't know how to delete the whole thing, so it still floats there in cyber space. Nobody has ever commented, so I guess nobody found it. So what. This is just a test to see if the new blog works. Or if I can make it work. It has my entire name with the middle name. I just searched that (my name) and found there are dozens of people in the U.S. alone who have my name. "I am, I cried. To no one there!" If you meet Keith Cline in the road, ask to see his credentials. It won't be me. I am the one and only Keith Burton Cline. If you find another one with that name please notify me at once.

Below is the old stuff from 2005.

   

Monday, May 23, 2005

Revelations      

While I still haven't touched my painting "in progress" and it has been two days since I posted my inaugural blog I am feeling just a nano-bit better about my creative block. At least I haven't erased the beginning blog. And here's another entry.

About twelve years ago in San Francisco I went to a few meetings of a twelve-step group for artists who were blocked. We were self identified artists. And self diagnosed blocked. It is my opinion that artists who don't do their art are not artists. It's like saying, "I'm a pilot. But I'm afraid of flying, so I don't do it." It is well documented that many artists who suffer from depression and anxiety still manage to produce something upon which to hang their claim to be creative people. The blocked artists group didn't help me. I rebelled against identifying with losers who found the time to rail and whine about their inablity to produce anything, but couldn't apply themselves to actually doing the things they claimed they wanted to do. Or maybe I just saw too much to identify with. What I got was an even greater fear that I am a fraud. A wannabe who only wants the glory without the work. Anyway, it seemed a perverted application of the twelve-step program. So I fled.

I recently read an item by Saul Bellow about how he got a grant to go write in Paris for a year. And he was blocked. He was depressed. He got hung up on writing something deep about two dying men in a hospital and it wasn't going anywhere. One early morning while walking the streets of Paris he received a moment of enlightenment. He realized he didn't have to write The Magic Mountain all over again. He didn't have to emulate any other great writer. He only had to be true to himself and write whatever came out of his own experience. So he went back to his studio and chucked several hundred pages of the depressing hospital manuscript. And he began writing The Adventures of Augie March.Well, I'm a lot farther along in life than Saul was when that happened to him. I used to feel I hadn't lived enough to have anything meaningful to say. Now I've lived quite a long time and I'm still afraid I have nothing meaningful to say. Could it be that writing nothing is the most meaningful thing? According to Gore Vidal, civilization only has about 100 years to go before it destroys itself and most other life, so what's the point of creating anything now? The composer Philip Glass (was it he?) wrote a piece for the piano that was ten minutes of silence. The pianist just sat there for ten minutes and did nothing. Did the audience applaud when he was finished? How did they know when he was finished? Well, that's been done now. I don't see how I could put my name on a non-existing manuscript. Where would the signature go?

When I was in high school I would for a time leave my name lying around on pieces of paper. I thought people would see the name and wonder who that was. I would have a certain kind of fame. I wouldn't be annonymous, but I would still be incorporeal. I was pretty much invisible at that time of my life.

Now I'm sending this blog out into the cybesphere and I have no idea who will find it. I don't know how to link it to any search engine. It reminds me of another phase of my youth, age about ten. I would visit my grandmother's tiny third floor apartment in Portland, Oregon and draw cartoon strips on her kitchen table. As each strip was finished I dropped it out the window above Taylor Street. I thought these bits of flying litter might be picked up by passersby and they would be amazed at the talent and humor of the unknown cartoonist. This blog is like that.

 In the Beginning. Second Try.      

I erased my first beginning. I erased the photos I put in too. Now I wish I could erase the title of my blog and choose a more original one. Maybe shouldn't have a picture. Should be more like Pynchon. This seems to be where I have always stopped. At the beginning. The unimportant details. It's terrifying! I've finished paintings, but only under extreme duress. The painting I'm working on now has been in progress for going on three years. The words "working" and "progress" have to be taken lightly.

I began a journal many years ago. There are about 100 entrys in the first year. Then sporadic jottings over the next twenty years. It's hardly a journal. There hasn't been anything added now for more than ten years. When I look at what's in there I realize I mostly wrote when I was feeling the worst. Hopeless, suicidal, lost soul stuff. Once I felt better I went on with my life, not needing to record the stable times. I'm not a manic depressive. More of a passive depressive. Getting excited beyond passive scares me into depression.

Now I have a blog. Nothing should be easier. I just sit down here and blog away. No need for paper, pen, typewriter, files. I can review, edit, spell check. Erase! Still my best thoughts come while I'm not sitting here. I compose great stuff while soaking in the tub. Or while lying on my sacred sofa. But getting it from my head to the keyboard is just as ephemeral as getting the paint from the tube to the canvas. There are a thousand distractions between the idea and the evidence of it. Another cup of coffee. Ginger needs a walk. I need a walk. Piss break. I need to file my income tax for 2003! Worry about global warming, climate change, George W., Intelligent Design, the War on Terror, preemptive war, Abu Ghraib. Oh shit. I'm getting sleepy. The sacred sofa is calling me to take a nap!

But first this is getting published! No more erasing.

 

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

I Am One

Birthday. I am one. Taken on Dec. 10, 2004 

 

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