Today I woke to the memory of an encounter I had on a train from Potsdam to Berlin over ten years ago. A rangy man of noble countenance who wore his balding hair in a long silver ponytail came in through the button-operated doors separating my car from the one to the west. He wore a red jacket and carried a binder crammed with papers. He sat down across from me. What I was reading I do not remember. Maybe something by Heinrich Böll. After a moment the man excused himself and asked me whether I would like to buy a book of poems. I said I was broke, pleite, which wasn't strictly true. He said surely I had enough change to make a token contribution in exchange for his humbly printed but well-conceived cycle of poems. I fidgeted and said I really wasn't interested. I wished he'd leave me be. He insisted the poetry was good, and that he needed readers. And money, if only just a little. I channeled my best philistine miser and told him I would not buy it under any circumstances. Nor, cutting off his modified offer, would I consent to read it for free. I do not remember how long his earnest rap and my flinty reception of it went on before he raised himself indignantly and said that he was a learned man, a cultured man, and it was only because of the anti-humanist values held passively by fools like me that his gift to the world, born of magnanimity, had to suffer the indignity of being reduced to an act of abject beggary. He huffed down the aisle and I tried to put him out of my mind with an obliviate soak in the pool of mass-produced text resting in my lap. It worked until this very morning, when he came rushing back. The revenant wreck of a poet. I would like to say that I have not yet shed all the rational sandbags conferred by my Rockwell-meets-Descartes upbringing on the leaky levee of what is really a mysterious and torrential existence; at least not to the point of easily crediting noumena like curses, omens or clear fault lines of destiny, but as an author my task is to find meaning. Either that or to manufacture it out of whole cloth when it is found scarce, threadbare or demure. I did not have to go searching for the revenant poet; he came to me very soon after I published my first book, as I was setting out to find an audience for it. Yet it is still with a certain self-conscious and modestly guilty sensation that have begun to wonder whether one day I’ll find myself filling that old phantom's shoes. It may not be on a train in Germany. I may not be addressing a foreign student of my own language. But I may by then have committed completely to the hazards of a creative existence freed from the blind toil that passes for life in our depraved civilization--the internal logic of my chosen path will one day force me to choose between seizing the sword with two hands or letting it go from the one that holds it now. I may well be in the position of having to bring my wares directly to my envisioned readership, hat in hand. But what am I saying? That's what I'm doing already! My efforts may run aground on the same loathing, the same narrowness of mind, the same miserly philistinism I showed on that long ago afternoon in my exchange with the old poet. I'll be he and my old self at once, if you like, authentic author and faithless reader both. And while I may not deserve that rejection generically, as an author, I will deserve it specifically for the cold shoulder I turned when once I had the chance to help a worthy man along the twisting path of his art.
This tentative parallel assumes that we both were/are worthy of readership and recognition, which may or may not be the case. The real question is, how can you ever know if you reject a personal appeal to open the cover and turn the page? How can you ever know if you lack the curiosity (and maybe even the courage) to read a piece of samizdat when it lands in your lap? Of course, it may not be as elegant or simple as all that. What am I saying? Of course it isn't. I have left out consideration of the relative strength of the appeal. Consider Henry Miller, back when he was patrolling the Lower East Side with boxes of candy to finance his abortive literary efforts. His entreaties provoked the mockery of a table of well-heeled merrymakers, but their mockery only made him blow his stack and launch into a torrent of rebuke. So powerfully indignant was he that they relented in shame and invited him to share their board of mussels and champagne, buying his wares down to a man. Miller did this with candy; books would have been a cinch. Suppose the Berliner poet had been more insistent or more gifted/charismatic? Would not our speculative destinies have taken a different turn?
Maybe. But I want to return to the notion of telos touched on above. The more I think about it, the more I believe that there was some reason for my encounter with that man, and that there is meaning in reflecting on him now. Not long ago I read something in a Canadian periodical about encounters of this kind. The writer claimed that every man, at the moment marking the end of his youth, has an encounter, whether real, imagined, phantasmal or remembered, with another man who makes him the person he will be until he dies. The writer referred to this other man as a magician. The image I came away with was the proverbial ‘tap on the steering wheel’. I am not ready to concede the end of my youth just yet, nor am I ready to admit that this man half-met will be the one to perform the final calibrations on my life's trajectory. What I will allow is that these expiatory reflections can be of some use in improving my own receptiveness to chance encounters of the literary kind, and perhaps also in smoothing the way for myself and others who are trying to persuade a hesitant readership to open the cover. My revenant in mind, I will board a bus, train or ship with a box of freshly printed books. My appeal will be direct and without shame or equivocation: Buy my book, please. Currents of my heart and soul and bile undulate through its pages. It's good, I'll say. And if enough people just like you buy it and enjoy it, you will have laid track for a literary locomotive raring to bring more and more books to the salubrious light of day. And, I'll ad with a wicked grin, if by failing to heed my entreaty you perpetuate the scorn and suspicion that hang like a miasma over the badlands of independent artistic production, who knows what parched watershed of personal destiny you will have crossed into.
This tentative parallel assumes that we both were/are worthy of readership and recognition, which may or may not be the case. The real question is, how can you ever know if you reject a personal appeal to open the cover and turn the page? How can you ever know if you lack the curiosity (and maybe even the courage) to read a piece of samizdat when it lands in your lap? Of course, it may not be as elegant or simple as all that. What am I saying? Of course it isn't. I have left out consideration of the relative strength of the appeal. Consider Henry Miller, back when he was patrolling the Lower East Side with boxes of candy to finance his abortive literary efforts. His entreaties provoked the mockery of a table of well-heeled merrymakers, but their mockery only made him blow his stack and launch into a torrent of rebuke. So powerfully indignant was he that they relented in shame and invited him to share their board of mussels and champagne, buying his wares down to a man. Miller did this with candy; books would have been a cinch. Suppose the Berliner poet had been more insistent or more gifted/charismatic? Would not our speculative destinies have taken a different turn?
Maybe. But I want to return to the notion of telos touched on above. The more I think about it, the more I believe that there was some reason for my encounter with that man, and that there is meaning in reflecting on him now. Not long ago I read something in a Canadian periodical about encounters of this kind. The writer claimed that every man, at the moment marking the end of his youth, has an encounter, whether real, imagined, phantasmal or remembered, with another man who makes him the person he will be until he dies. The writer referred to this other man as a magician. The image I came away with was the proverbial ‘tap on the steering wheel’. I am not ready to concede the end of my youth just yet, nor am I ready to admit that this man half-met will be the one to perform the final calibrations on my life's trajectory. What I will allow is that these expiatory reflections can be of some use in improving my own receptiveness to chance encounters of the literary kind, and perhaps also in smoothing the way for myself and others who are trying to persuade a hesitant readership to open the cover. My revenant in mind, I will board a bus, train or ship with a box of freshly printed books. My appeal will be direct and without shame or equivocation: Buy my book, please. Currents of my heart and soul and bile undulate through its pages. It's good, I'll say. And if enough people just like you buy it and enjoy it, you will have laid track for a literary locomotive raring to bring more and more books to the salubrious light of day. And, I'll ad with a wicked grin, if by failing to heed my entreaty you perpetuate the scorn and suspicion that hang like a miasma over the badlands of independent artistic production, who knows what parched watershed of personal destiny you will have crossed into.
