The Book of Myron

      I always heard that Myron, my cousin twice-removed, was the writer in the family.

      Tall, glasses, he looked the part.  But who knows what anyone meant by that.  Families fudge words for their own reasons.  Maybe he was a Sunday scribbler or a neat notator or a private poet.  Or just one of those people who obsessively write Letters to the Editor and will not let you forget it.

      But at his funeral, his sister said something about his opus, his masterwork, the great sum of his writing life.  Later at the house with the sculpted bushes in front and the bathroom with the oaky soap, I told Estelle that I never knew that Myron had anything published.  He never did, she said.  So what was this opus business all about?

     She took me into his study on the first floor beyond the fake orchid.  It was a small room with a desk and some paperback books on the shelves.  A lamp.  It was a place to make phone calls perhaps but I could not imagine a great work emerging from it.

      Estelle took out an enormous looseleaf book with a five-inch spine and packed with pages.  She sat me down and set it before me on the desk, looked at me with white gloves in her eyes, then left the room and closed the door which suddenly sounded like a vault.  I felt as though a shaft of light suddenly lit the dust and a chilly echo filled the void.

     There I was and there was…the book!  I too had hoped to create something majestic and memorable but so far had just written a bunch of stuff.  Had cousin Myron actually done it?  Slowly, with reverence, with doubt, I opened to the first page: The Work by Myron Saperstein.  And there on those pages, in a teensy neatsy little hand, was his output as a writer for 50 years.  Pages and pages of it but only tidbits and tibbits.  The whole book was a vast curiosity cabinet of fragments and phrases, snippets and bits and crumbs.  But nothing matched, amounted to, or came to anything.  Nothing complete or even coherent.  Notes, rhymes, weird words, the literary caboodle reduced to an endless list of bibbly scribbles:

Currents of Robert Fludd.  Unfunny as a joke in Hungarian.  Hasidism has it ism. Psychopathia Eitheroria.   Tetrarchs on the March.  Cervantes at 52.  Twizzlewicks.  The Baal Shem bon mots.  Today or tomorrow I will die or not.  File taxes by 4-12.  Wrong Sandwich karma.  Whicheverwaywahoo.  Then a list of porn stars: Eddy Puss, Walter Wego, Hyman Buster, Dick Willing, Bernie Bush…

Line after line on page after page, and on both sides of every page, of the kind of stuff no one but a compulsive lettergather would keep: I am what am or am I?  The blinketyblink of an uppity eye.   484.  The world is the whirled amen.  Get laundry.  Shit or get off the pot, or not.  Pompous Pilate.  The Gripes of Roth.  Cunning Stunts.  Etcetera etcetera etcetera…

Did the others up in the living room noshing on the nuts and the fruitcake, who called Myron the family writer, know that this was his output?  A dither of nothing but blithers and blabs (from the book actually).  Like Picasso’s cleaning rag or Bach’s bag of unused notes, except that those guys also made actual work.

A Magic Shadow-show.  Man’s Fate or Man’s Fat?  A Guide to Pluck.   Blue small ball!

Poortraits of the rich, unseeworthy.  Leibnots, Kant, and Wontgenstein,  Nothing is lost.  I will be with you for all evers.  Eat me baby.  The Somnambula.  Man is meat that worries…

I tried to laugh but it came out as a snort.  But then I started thinking…surely a writer was someone who wrote, who put words down.  What difference did it make what form they took or even what became of them?  Just like anyone, Cousin Myron was swindled into this mad swill, got a whiff of hisself, watched life piss by, and would one day become a phantom in his own phantastory (all from the book although not in one place).  And he left some words behind.  Wasn’t that good enough? 

Writing was a struggle to be heard, a war on silence, a battle for expression.  It was cruel and grueling.  The moment I put the words down, already I was mired in regret, doubt, secret yearnings, cringing fears.  It reminded me of something Simone de Beauvoir said about going to the Bibliotheque Nationale and how pleasant and restful it was to fill one’s eyes with words that already existed, instead of having to wrest sentences from the void.

And here was Myron having resolved the problem for himself.  Just the words, no need to make them into anything!

I was inspired and vowed at that moment to cut myself loose from the weeds of my own needs…to make notes, in other words, without hopes.  To be a small writer, inches shorter than planned.  Even microscopic.  To become a Myronist myself.

It didn’t take, of course. 

Here I am still trying to put it all together, make my statement, bend the words to suit me, tell a tale, even make a name for myself.  They, and I have no idea who they is, will not let me stop, any more than they will let me write blue small ball.