Out In The Backwater
Oh all that drama about how bad it was going to be out there in N. Carolina. The memories, the guilt, the shame. I didn't really have much time for that, I gave it a couple of hours, maybe a little more. But no one threw rocks at me for being a slum lord. I actually thanked one of the neighbors, hey thanks for not throwing rocks at me. The neighbor had been parking his bass boat full of beer cans behind my 100X150 foot untilled, weed-filled garden. He said, aw don't worry about it, live and learn. My ex-renter had come out earlier and retrieved his pontoon party barge parked in the front yard. Him and the neighbor who didn't throw rocks at me didn't get along very well over the previous 14 years. My renter tried to make a point about the boat parked back there, said it was full of beer cans, and I said, oh yeah, I saw a boat full of beer can's being hauled out of here today. We didn't talk much about the barge or the swing set in the front yard or the seven vehicles or parts thereof parked about, some without engines, most without wheels, but he assured me someone was coming to get them, and with scrap metal at such a premium, I do not doubt it. That will only leave me hopefully one large construction dumpster to fill up with the stuff that will not burn or classify as valuable metal. Most of this stuff is just scattered about the property, although the 200 paint cans and buckets are somewhat neatly stored under one of the sheds. The burn pile could be humongous though. Even if I don't dismantle the chicken coop and the dog pen tacked up to the hickory trees. The gaudy Fischer-Price toys strewn about and the cheap plastic pool table I hate to take up valuable dumpster space with but its all got to go. The console TV on the front porch I have moved inside temporarily. I didn't really do much in the 2 days but still made what can be considered a semblance of progress. And everyone seems happy about the changing of the guard even if "everyone" doesn't include me. The house needs lots of work but honestly it did even before I left it. There will be none of the drama or glamour of the urban renovation but hopefully in the coming months I will be able to change for the better the way things look and work out in the backwater.
...more recent posts
What Is A Theorem?
It's like going back to a point in time where failure is lurking with its big stick, ready to cold cock you right upside your head, and there seems to be no way to prevent it. You see it happening and are waiting it out. There is a pain coating every occasional pleasure.
That is the downside of my thinking on tomorrow mornings trip to N. Carolina, back to a house rented out but pretty much neglected for the last 14 years. I haven't had much luck contacting the renters. I'll probably have to break in. It is only through the grapevine that I know they have moved out, as per my request. I wasn't happy with the look of the place when I glanced at it last year so I decided on the spot to begin this process. What I felt looking at it was shame.
I'm not packing anything. Only going down for a few days, to get a feel for what needs done. I have a cheap ass air mattress that doesn't leak yet and a moldy sleeping bag, so I'll throw those in the car along with the bag I haven't unpacked from the last trip to NY. I seem to have retained a lot of memories from this backwater low rent house bordered by woods and tobacco fields north of Chapel Hill. They can't all be bad but I'm going to have to work at it to pull up some good ones. I'm ready to go to work though. I'm going to whistle while I work. I am going to be chipper. I mean, I don't actually live in the past, so it would seem to me that nothing from there can really hurt me. That's not like a proven theorem though, is it?
It's like going back to a point in time where failure is lurking with its big stick, ready to cold cock you right upside your head, and there seems to be no way to prevent it. You see it happening and are waiting it out. There is a pain coating every occasional pleasure.
That is the downside of my thinking on tomorrow mornings trip to N. Carolina, back to a house rented out but pretty much neglected for the last 14 years. I haven't had much luck contacting the renters. I'll probably have to break in. It is only through the grapevine that I know they have moved out, as per my request. I wasn't happy with the look of the place when I glanced at it last year so I decided on the spot to begin this process. What I felt looking at it was shame.
I'm not packing anything. Only going down for a few days, to get a feel for what needs done. I have a cheap ass air mattress that doesn't leak yet and a moldy sleeping bag, so I'll throw those in the car along with the bag I haven't unpacked from the last trip to NY. I seem to have retained a lot of memories from this backwater low rent house bordered by woods and tobacco fields north of Chapel Hill. They can't all be bad but I'm going to have to work at it to pull up some good ones. I'm ready to go to work though. I'm going to whistle while I work. I am going to be chipper. I mean, I don't actually live in the past, so it would seem to me that nothing from there can really hurt me. That's not like a proven theorem though, is it?
Aim High
The Tumbleweed Umbrella
I got a call at 8 o'clock Saturday morning from a ten-year-old boy wanting to buy the N. Carolina house. Mr. Louis, he said, you probably don't remember me but...and then he explained who he was and ever since then I cannot get the image of this boy out of my head, as I remember him from 14 years ago. I am not imagining what he looks like as a 24-year-old.
I am at this sidewalk cafe in NYC called Le Jeep. It is a brisk, sunny morning in May. Le Jeep is on a corner. Me and this homeless guy nearby are watching a two man crew clean out the storm drain across the street. One man with a shovel doing the detail work and the other man operating the boom on the dump truck. The boom has cables and pulleys and at the end of the cables is a bullet shaped caliper device which lowers into the drain hole from which the grate has been removed. The caliper goes in closed and then opens and closes around muck and sludge which is lifted up dripping and then deposited into the back of the dump truck.
People keep tripping over the same mangled umbrella which has blown like a tumbleweed into the middle of the crosswalk. Shadows at the corner precede the people they are attached to but they fail to alert their owners to the mangled tumbleweed umbrella in the crosswalk.
Le Jeep is a cafe on wheels and will circle the block when the street sweeper arrives.
When the crew finishes cleaning out the drain a man comes out from the corner store and hooks up a garden hose and proceeds to wash the stray muck back into the drain. A police van pulls up and honks at the man with the garden hose. He waves happily. Two cops exit the vehicle and the one cop shakes the man's hand and pats him on the back and the other cop shakes his wrist because he may be suspicious of where the man's hand has been.
There are croissant crumbs littering the floor of Le Jeep. Two empty coffee cups with foam in the bottom sit in cup holders. Bernadette has gone off to Pilates so it's just me at the cafe now, and in the back seat the 10-year-old N. Carolina boy who stares quietly out the window without an idea in his head. He doesn't have any friends, except this grandmother. She will die soon and leave her house to the boy's older brother, who is a marine. The boy will wait 14 years and then call me at 8 o'clock in the morning. I will have the night before accepted an invitation to a concert of a band called The Cure. I will be groggy at 8 o'clock in the morning but carry on with a professional attitude. I will say I remember him and I do. He was a distinctly lonely-seeming boy back then, and now 14 years later he spends part of his day haunting me.
I came up to attend the funeral of Bernadette's mom.
Behind the cafe Le Jeep is another cafe run by three loud guys named Steve, Angelo and Tony. Tony jabs the air between him and Steve with his index finger and makes an argument that apparently Steve has heard before. Steve is following with his eyes a woman walking along the sidewalk behind Tony. The woman's dress blows up, Steve whistles, and Tony turns around. Tony shrugs like he's seen better and puffs on his cigarette. I look behind me to see if the boy has followed any of this but he is just staring off in the opposite direction at an empty playground surrounded by an 18 foot tall chain-link fence.
I got a call at 8 o'clock Saturday morning from a ten-year-old boy wanting to buy the N. Carolina house. Mr. Louis, he said, you probably don't remember me but...and then he explained who he was and ever since then I cannot get the image of this boy out of my head, as I remember him from 14 years ago. I am not imagining what he looks like as a 24-year-old.
I am at this sidewalk cafe in NYC called Le Jeep. It is a brisk, sunny morning in May. Le Jeep is on a corner. Me and this homeless guy nearby are watching a two man crew clean out the storm drain across the street. One man with a shovel doing the detail work and the other man operating the boom on the dump truck. The boom has cables and pulleys and at the end of the cables is a bullet shaped caliper device which lowers into the drain hole from which the grate has been removed. The caliper goes in closed and then opens and closes around muck and sludge which is lifted up dripping and then deposited into the back of the dump truck.
People keep tripping over the same mangled umbrella which has blown like a tumbleweed into the middle of the crosswalk. Shadows at the corner precede the people they are attached to but they fail to alert their owners to the mangled tumbleweed umbrella in the crosswalk.
Le Jeep is a cafe on wheels and will circle the block when the street sweeper arrives.
When the crew finishes cleaning out the drain a man comes out from the corner store and hooks up a garden hose and proceeds to wash the stray muck back into the drain. A police van pulls up and honks at the man with the garden hose. He waves happily. Two cops exit the vehicle and the one cop shakes the man's hand and pats him on the back and the other cop shakes his wrist because he may be suspicious of where the man's hand has been.
There are croissant crumbs littering the floor of Le Jeep. Two empty coffee cups with foam in the bottom sit in cup holders. Bernadette has gone off to Pilates so it's just me at the cafe now, and in the back seat the 10-year-old N. Carolina boy who stares quietly out the window without an idea in his head. He doesn't have any friends, except this grandmother. She will die soon and leave her house to the boy's older brother, who is a marine. The boy will wait 14 years and then call me at 8 o'clock in the morning. I will have the night before accepted an invitation to a concert of a band called The Cure. I will be groggy at 8 o'clock in the morning but carry on with a professional attitude. I will say I remember him and I do. He was a distinctly lonely-seeming boy back then, and now 14 years later he spends part of his day haunting me.
I came up to attend the funeral of Bernadette's mom.
Behind the cafe Le Jeep is another cafe run by three loud guys named Steve, Angelo and Tony. Tony jabs the air between him and Steve with his index finger and makes an argument that apparently Steve has heard before. Steve is following with his eyes a woman walking along the sidewalk behind Tony. The woman's dress blows up, Steve whistles, and Tony turns around. Tony shrugs like he's seen better and puffs on his cigarette. I look behind me to see if the boy has followed any of this but he is just staring off in the opposite direction at an empty playground surrounded by an 18 foot tall chain-link fence.
It Turns Black
The bloodstain by the debris pile on the Dumaine sidewalk was by noon the next day turning black. The stain was large. More blood turning black than I think I was prepared to see. The 17 year old boy it belonged to was in the morgue. He was cooling off now about 14 hours. He wasn't alone. His friend was with him, also refrigerated. I had not seen the second boy's bloodstain. I think he bled out in the grass of a lawn two houses down. I was worried it was some boys I might know but it was not. These two boys were Lafitte project exiles, and had survived last week's drive-by attempt, but not this one.
I was on the block two days previous delivering some furniture I had taken possession of 2 years ago, after the last big hurricane.
The furniture I was returning was coming from my house six blocks away and the person to whom I rent my place had very graciously allowed me and my party to stay there during our four day visit for Jazzfest, while she escaped to a Florida beach.
The person to whom I was delivering the furniture has been mentoring kids on that block of Dumaine for the last 13 years. I participated briefly for a couple of years back in the mid to late nineties. Some of the boys I knew are still around, in their early twenties now, and I got to see three of them, just long enough to say hi and shake hands or in the case of G, who is on at least a temporary probation from entering the property, just a wave.
F looked good, has cut off his long hair, I think in an attempt to distance himself somewhat from the street culture. He was imprisoned last year for a couple of months on a false murder charge.
L got out of jail a few months ago and also looked very good, and was carrying one of his babies.
S is doing two to five so I did not see him in person but did finally get to see the documentary my Dumaine friend helped produce and S is in it briefly, projecting a thug-like personality, but admitting he does not want to die on the street. And not wanting to may be enough but some of us fear it may not be. He could survive though because not all these kids die on the street and the fact that two were murdered on Sunday and a few blocks away two more on Saturday (with a third in critical condition) and the previous week 8 more were killed around town, in a city of barely 300,000, does not change the fact that people are surviving, while all around them blood stains slowly fade.
On Monday I returned the DVD of the documentary to Dumaine. It was there that this mentor person, who after losing count at five the number of murders on this block in the last 18 months, had said, yeah, the blood is still out there from last night. So that's why I looked for it when I left. It wasn't hard to see. There was so much of it.
Of the five boys sitting on the stoop behind the debris pile in front of which is the blood stain, two of them have guns in their pockets. How do I know this? I am a good guesser.
I'm afraid the New Orleans police force may be suffering from the few bad apple syndrome and that the pressure of keeping law in a lawless and broken town is taking its toll on that small percentage of the NOPD, and they are cracking up. Unfortunately, the community relations damage some of these officers are creating by beating up suspects and planting drugs and projecting a kiss my ass aggressive attitude, is moving the city farther away from real solutions, and losing the police that tenuous thread of support they may have once come almost close to attaining.
Jazzfest was fine, I went one day with Bernadette and our friends from NY, Jesse and Sparkle (and their new baby, whom I haven't made up a name for yet), and my friend from college days, Malcolm Gates. We took off Saturday and I did some work on my house while they drove around exploring the city 2.5 years after the flood. That night we all went to Tipitina's with my nephew (who is not a chef but plays one in the Superdome), and his wife, and we saw the gospel group Blind Boys of Alabama and it was pretty fine. They sang near the end a version of Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. I felt lifted by the Spirit.
The bloodstain by the debris pile on the Dumaine sidewalk was by noon the next day turning black. The stain was large. More blood turning black than I think I was prepared to see. The 17 year old boy it belonged to was in the morgue. He was cooling off now about 14 hours. He wasn't alone. His friend was with him, also refrigerated. I had not seen the second boy's bloodstain. I think he bled out in the grass of a lawn two houses down. I was worried it was some boys I might know but it was not. These two boys were Lafitte project exiles, and had survived last week's drive-by attempt, but not this one.
I was on the block two days previous delivering some furniture I had taken possession of 2 years ago, after the last big hurricane.
The furniture I was returning was coming from my house six blocks away and the person to whom I rent my place had very graciously allowed me and my party to stay there during our four day visit for Jazzfest, while she escaped to a Florida beach.
The person to whom I was delivering the furniture has been mentoring kids on that block of Dumaine for the last 13 years. I participated briefly for a couple of years back in the mid to late nineties. Some of the boys I knew are still around, in their early twenties now, and I got to see three of them, just long enough to say hi and shake hands or in the case of G, who is on at least a temporary probation from entering the property, just a wave.
F looked good, has cut off his long hair, I think in an attempt to distance himself somewhat from the street culture. He was imprisoned last year for a couple of months on a false murder charge.
L got out of jail a few months ago and also looked very good, and was carrying one of his babies.
S is doing two to five so I did not see him in person but did finally get to see the documentary my Dumaine friend helped produce and S is in it briefly, projecting a thug-like personality, but admitting he does not want to die on the street. And not wanting to may be enough but some of us fear it may not be. He could survive though because not all these kids die on the street and the fact that two were murdered on Sunday and a few blocks away two more on Saturday (with a third in critical condition) and the previous week 8 more were killed around town, in a city of barely 300,000, does not change the fact that people are surviving, while all around them blood stains slowly fade.
On Monday I returned the DVD of the documentary to Dumaine. It was there that this mentor person, who after losing count at five the number of murders on this block in the last 18 months, had said, yeah, the blood is still out there from last night. So that's why I looked for it when I left. It wasn't hard to see. There was so much of it.
Of the five boys sitting on the stoop behind the debris pile in front of which is the blood stain, two of them have guns in their pockets. How do I know this? I am a good guesser.
I'm afraid the New Orleans police force may be suffering from the few bad apple syndrome and that the pressure of keeping law in a lawless and broken town is taking its toll on that small percentage of the NOPD, and they are cracking up. Unfortunately, the community relations damage some of these officers are creating by beating up suspects and planting drugs and projecting a kiss my ass aggressive attitude, is moving the city farther away from real solutions, and losing the police that tenuous thread of support they may have once come almost close to attaining.
Jazzfest was fine, I went one day with Bernadette and our friends from NY, Jesse and Sparkle (and their new baby, whom I haven't made up a name for yet), and my friend from college days, Malcolm Gates. We took off Saturday and I did some work on my house while they drove around exploring the city 2.5 years after the flood. That night we all went to Tipitina's with my nephew (who is not a chef but plays one in the Superdome), and his wife, and we saw the gospel group Blind Boys of Alabama and it was pretty fine. They sang near the end a version of Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. I felt lifted by the Spirit.
One Shoe Baby
I was sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep parked in front of a fire hydrant at the corner of 10th St. and Second Avenue. I watched belly buttons pass by while Bernadette retrieved chicken soup from Veselka's. Some belly buttons were pierced and some were tattooed. Some were without marking at all but existed so far above the pant line that I had to reconsider the definition of clothing, and in this latter case, where the belly button seemed to be floating so impossibly high, the purpose of clothing was clearly to accentuate nakedness.
As eye catching as public nakedness may be, I was soon distracted from this spectacle of skin by a man with a baby in a backpack. The man was tall. The baby was not small. The man leaned forward against the weight. The baby leaned into the man. As they crossed Second Ave. heading west on 10th I noticed the baby was missing one shoe. I saw the man's future. I heard him getting yelled at because money doesn't grow on trees and neither do shoes. I exited the vehicle with the windows down and the engine running and started out after the man who carried his baby in a backpack. I had no clear intention. Was I going to cobble a shoe while in pursuit, say you dropped this sir, and risk bringing to attention the rare foot disorder which required the baby to only wear one shoe?
On 10th near the corner of 3rd Ave. I passed a vampire sitting on a stoop and he tipped towards me a cup filled with red liquid and said, cheers.
At Washington Square I caught site of the man as he weaved his way around a circle of white men with dreadlocks playing drums, but then I lost him again in the crowd.
The next time I saw him I was exiting the elevator onto the top floor of the Empire State Building, just as the man and baby were entering the down elevator.
Around 42nd St. I had to enter an office building, get a quick photo ID made at the security desk, insert the ID into a turnstile blocking the elevators, go up four floors, make three lefts and two rights, knock on a door, enter and explain myself, apologize for not being Bernadette, explain various lackings that would prevent me from ever being Bernadette, reach a hesitant agreement, pick up her taxes, and exit the way I came in. I offered up my ID but the security man said I could keep it.
At St. Patrick's Cathedral I was close enough to touch the man but when he entered a pew and sat down to pray I stepped back to reconsider my sin of pride which was believing that I could in any way positively affect this man's life.
While the man prayed I crossed the street and entered Sak's Fifth Avenue in search of a bathroom. I had the beginnings of a mild panic attack amidst the eight floors of high end consumer goods as I kept exiting elevators onto floors that only offered women's restrooms.
Back on the street I saw the man loading his baby into a cab and I flagged the next one passing, thinking, is there any way around all this predictable derivation? I mean, I'm going to chase this guy around the landmarks of the city, just narrowly missing him each time, my goals vague, barely even passing muster as narrator, and for what? Just to return with an unlikely timing to a Jeep that has not been towed away or stolen or inhabited by a homeless family who are tapping their toes on the dash while listening to XM 101, the sounds of Jamaica?
I should just go back now. I mean come on, people. The guy is going to circle all the way back to the corner where the Jeep is parked and he's going to find the shoe. Get it? No? Exactly, neither do I.
I did stop first in the bowels of Grand Central for a dozen oysters. Unfortunately though, one of the dozen was apparently grown in the bowels of a dying sea monster and here I just seem to be going down the list of deadly sins because it was gluttony that caused me to eat the damn stinky oyster, even after smelling it I knew I shouldn't. I didn't die though. I just went on living.
I entered the Jeep through the sun roof, installed just seconds earlier for this purpose, so that I could throw you a curve, ha, no, he's not waking from a dream at the end, he's returning from an astral projection, which I guess doesn't really require a sun roof, so I can save on that.
Bernadette returned carrying soup and blintzes. As she pulled away from the curb she pointed and said look at that guy with the baby in a backpack. No thank you, I said.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep parked in front of a fire hydrant at the corner of 10th St. and Second Avenue. I watched belly buttons pass by while Bernadette retrieved chicken soup from Veselka's. Some belly buttons were pierced and some were tattooed. Some were without marking at all but existed so far above the pant line that I had to reconsider the definition of clothing, and in this latter case, where the belly button seemed to be floating so impossibly high, the purpose of clothing was clearly to accentuate nakedness.
As eye catching as public nakedness may be, I was soon distracted from this spectacle of skin by a man with a baby in a backpack. The man was tall. The baby was not small. The man leaned forward against the weight. The baby leaned into the man. As they crossed Second Ave. heading west on 10th I noticed the baby was missing one shoe. I saw the man's future. I heard him getting yelled at because money doesn't grow on trees and neither do shoes. I exited the vehicle with the windows down and the engine running and started out after the man who carried his baby in a backpack. I had no clear intention. Was I going to cobble a shoe while in pursuit, say you dropped this sir, and risk bringing to attention the rare foot disorder which required the baby to only wear one shoe?
On 10th near the corner of 3rd Ave. I passed a vampire sitting on a stoop and he tipped towards me a cup filled with red liquid and said, cheers.
At Washington Square I caught site of the man as he weaved his way around a circle of white men with dreadlocks playing drums, but then I lost him again in the crowd.
The next time I saw him I was exiting the elevator onto the top floor of the Empire State Building, just as the man and baby were entering the down elevator.
Around 42nd St. I had to enter an office building, get a quick photo ID made at the security desk, insert the ID into a turnstile blocking the elevators, go up four floors, make three lefts and two rights, knock on a door, enter and explain myself, apologize for not being Bernadette, explain various lackings that would prevent me from ever being Bernadette, reach a hesitant agreement, pick up her taxes, and exit the way I came in. I offered up my ID but the security man said I could keep it.
At St. Patrick's Cathedral I was close enough to touch the man but when he entered a pew and sat down to pray I stepped back to reconsider my sin of pride which was believing that I could in any way positively affect this man's life.
While the man prayed I crossed the street and entered Sak's Fifth Avenue in search of a bathroom. I had the beginnings of a mild panic attack amidst the eight floors of high end consumer goods as I kept exiting elevators onto floors that only offered women's restrooms.
Back on the street I saw the man loading his baby into a cab and I flagged the next one passing, thinking, is there any way around all this predictable derivation? I mean, I'm going to chase this guy around the landmarks of the city, just narrowly missing him each time, my goals vague, barely even passing muster as narrator, and for what? Just to return with an unlikely timing to a Jeep that has not been towed away or stolen or inhabited by a homeless family who are tapping their toes on the dash while listening to XM 101, the sounds of Jamaica?
I should just go back now. I mean come on, people. The guy is going to circle all the way back to the corner where the Jeep is parked and he's going to find the shoe. Get it? No? Exactly, neither do I.
I did stop first in the bowels of Grand Central for a dozen oysters. Unfortunately though, one of the dozen was apparently grown in the bowels of a dying sea monster and here I just seem to be going down the list of deadly sins because it was gluttony that caused me to eat the damn stinky oyster, even after smelling it I knew I shouldn't. I didn't die though. I just went on living.
I entered the Jeep through the sun roof, installed just seconds earlier for this purpose, so that I could throw you a curve, ha, no, he's not waking from a dream at the end, he's returning from an astral projection, which I guess doesn't really require a sun roof, so I can save on that.
Bernadette returned carrying soup and blintzes. As she pulled away from the curb she pointed and said look at that guy with the baby in a backpack. No thank you, I said.
Faulkner Nobel Speech
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. William Faulkner, 1949
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. William Faulkner, 1949