My life this autumn has been astonishingly busy and empty, thanks to a seemingly endless set of tasks for small outcomes. In the midst of all this, my stepfather died, at the age of 100. Somehow I thought he would never die. He was like a sphinx in the desert, always there, always posing riddles in my direction.
What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.
The letters which follow were written by Gertrude Stein to an obscure, struggling writer named Wendell Wilcox. He had seen Stein’s work in 1926 while he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. He read a borrowed copy of her book Tender Buttons. Fifteen years later he wrote to her:
Friday 23 March 1990
This morning in front of the Felix Potin grocery store, rue du Cherche-Midi, Mme D., my next-door neighbor, came along dragging her shopping cart, full of items bought en function de her chronic constipation. She said, "The concierge is catching it from the building manager! She's spent more than seven hundred thousand francs on cleaning products."
Apocryphal stories would not be worth worrying about if their inventors stuck to the spoken word. What’s a bit of bragging or slander among friends? But when these tales reach print they become accepted fact.
In the fall of 1957 Giacometti was asked by the editors of the French magazine Arts to visit the great auto show which is held annually at Paris’s Grand Palais and to comment afterwards on the relation of the car to sculpture. Could the “beauty” of a car be compared, he was asked, to that of a statue? His essay in reply follows.
Re LSD, Psylocibin [sic], etc., Paris Review #37 p. 46: “So I couldn’t go any further. I may later on occasion, if I feel more reassurance.”
I began the day standing at a threshold of time—the beginning of something, the end of something. I had a method for standing that was called art, then writing. The way I stood allowed me to see how things could begin and end this way—simultaneously.
After a long walk and many stories of Moses, Moabites, Edomites, and Nabataeans, my guide, Ahmed Amrin, took me for coffee in a small park. Tall, thorny and mangled trees, called sidr in Arabic, shaded the garden. Mr. Amrin and the café’s owner, Bassam Abu Samhadana, both came from Kerak. In the center of Jordan, Kerak was known for a magnificent crusader fortress that the Muslims had conquered centuries ago.
In the summer of 1963, the kingdom of Morocco had not yet become infested with tourists, hippies and freaks. I didn’t land as a pioneer, of course, but neither did I follow in the wake of fashion. I could step adventurously upon the shore believing that I had arrived through personal and independent choice.