On a dangerous creature, Earnest Hemingway
In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channel. (From paragraph one of A Farewell to Arms, by Earnest Hemingway).
Earnest Hemingway lived and how he lived made him a good writer, and a very difficult man. Now, today, he writes about life in the way one might not like to accept, honesty is forbidden. While few ever had know him, not as a man. Only will the avatar the writer who remains immortal teach and he was a damn good writer, he declared that himself. Who bled at his Corona for you. Left on the studio floor were his blood and guts, exposed by truth and with that dark underbelly ripped open wide and torn so, opening his heart and by soul twists like a knife blade in deep moral inquiry. Who are the real humans? He asks with a pen beside him dripping blood in those silent disciplined early mornings, the best time to bleed is in the quiet before you wake.
While he was shaking in the shadow of booze or in love, for how else can a writer write but in such torture and pain. Expressed to remain sane. Now that is too often true of you too, and only then will it become, “that beautiful addiction”. Each time most glorious and there again for you. The deep dark knowledge, where you go to find your creature. A way to find true happiness so why stop. For when that old wound remains held open for you, by the creature. The love and guilt, where you find peace. You feel like an oozing hole is there and both painful and bitter and with the scars that are torn and ajar and left open only slightly. Then you weep and only just enough for the words to slowly leak out over your exposed white skin. Open wounds are there to stare at, again and again.
Who can live like that? Only the damaged and authentic like Hem. Labels are for other people, narcissists, racist, womaniser, the alcoholic….. on and on. How do they fit? It was all done just for art. He wanted everyone to think that he was bad and tough. And who he was will remain a secret, an inspiration as an artist and a mystery as a man, the truth hidden forever in that iceberg (a theory he conceived).
When I feel like cutting loose and becoming a living art, he is beside me. That is why he continues to make me angry. Reminding me that I am living an ordinary life, when I want to breathe in the wretched air from the ooze off my wounded soul.
Now to that unique writing method. Where one observes, and describes the actions the way they are, full of injustice, challenge and madness. Describes them such in detail, writing on how one must discard a wife, to explore another, and consume all gossip and damn conventions.
Is not such Art glorious and that pass it offers. To die for one’s art is glorious not tragic. Art is truth. Live and make art, and then write about it. But get it right.
Write about love, about despair. Two lovers rowing across a dark lake. In a boat and pregnant, the girl lover bailing. Who will die trying to birth a child, the essence of his passion dead and then the all consuming guilt never written down. You must imagine that for yourself. The price! Pay for what pleasure was had. The man and his conscience are consumed in guilt. Hem said it and without saying a word. Such geniuses infuriate everyone.
The worst thing he wrote about is how we love so badly, the deceit, the bullying and abuse. Oh, how inconvenient is that to hear. So, while love remains too brutal, not a subject to write on with objective truthfulness and one that should be disguised. Fit only for the trip fantastic and folly plot, like a good rom com, for most that is. Not Hem, he was one of a few masters who did it well. He took off the gloves and hit hard, wrote a truth, in optimistic terms. Hem was a master.
However, liberating that creature was what did him in. It is dangerous when free and allowed to be your hero and allowed to breath. That fellow sinner, between brilliant and mad. Whenever first sight is the star dust horizon that awakens and when you look the creature in the eye and find that then every moment alive is adventure. You and that dark underbelly are unleashed and the one who comes out and plays offers salvation and for free. No mansion. No yacht. No gold. And you accept. Only to remember that in the day light it is still alive and at night, that is shadow living. Not a good look for the coward, not when alone, they need comfort of friends and family. It will in bursting spirit that cannot be contained, not by marriage, morality or law, or friendship, or career, or even fear of starvation, liberate. For that creature knows he will never die. Hem knew the creature so well.