What am I as a writer?
What is a writer?
Who am I?
I enjoy writing, I love the solitude of sitting at a keyboard looking out my window onto the street that passes me by in a nice section of Featherston, gateway to the Wairarapa. At night, as now, my ipod giving me an exlectic parade of singers, opera, rock, harmonic with which to just type. Type. Is that the same as writing. Journaling. Exploring my thoughts as I try to clear my mind so that I am not searching for words but simply plucking them from the air, not thinking, typing. Is that writing? Am I a writer? Or am I a journalsist? Heaven help me if this ever gets reviewed on Lumiere. I shudder to contemplate the words that don’t fit my dictionary of travels and travails, no, well to stay away. Keep to my typing and leave the writing for those who profess to be writers. I really and simply love typing. Allowing the constant stream of my imaginings to just tumble out onto the page. Simply tumble even.
But what’s the point I hear you ask?
Good question, I reply.
I have no idea, maybe I am lazy, maybe at a deeper level I am simply angry at the world and don’t want to try and change anyone’s thinking. My laziness is not wanting to structure myself into a novelist, a poet, a travel writer, a block buster, goddamn it, how does one do that? No I will leave that for others and simply enjoy the process of typing.
Wet tire sounds on a wet road, cars stream past my blacked out nightime window giving lie to the fact that this is a small rural outpost to Wellington that big brashy bureaucratic metropolis over the hill. Some would reply that it is me who is over the hill, maybe so. But I have come to this typing thing late in life, past the half way mark, into the last third, almost. I always said and continue to say that I will live to be 100. One Hundred Not Out, what a great title for my autobiography. But, for the moment, I am stuck in a few projects, after all I am not a writer or even a typist by trade, I am a film editor, a story teller with visual imagery which also creeps across into my photography. Story telling. Shit! Does that mean I am a story teller and does that mean . . . I have to write a story?
A real story like The Bone People or one of Katherine Mansfield’s essays, now they, are real stories. I have a painting of, well it’s a print really, just so you know I have economioc constraints at work, but there is the great Wellington woman, the escapee, like me, who left. Katherine Mansfield hangs, framed, behind me as I type. But write she could and I visited her Wellington home and bought a print and some books to make sure the doors were kept financially open for the next generation to discover that aotearoa is not the be all and end all. Now there is my anger. I just now took a pause to cook a couple of beef burgers, some bacon, all laid gracefully on a mesculin salad and washed down with a glass of my own burgundy. Yep, kiwis can call it a pinot, I will stick to what I know best, it’s a burgundy.
As I was saying, there is my anger, living alone, having to watch my finances, having to work to pay for my expensive Leica lenses, bugger! And of course, coming out of that is the fact that that, that’s it, that’s my anger, that’s all of it. No biggie, it’s not rage, it’s not small minded niggledyness, I pray there be such a word, no that’s the level of my anger. A good accessible level of good creative energy which, after all, is what anger is when it’s channelled. Or at least I believe so, some freudian shrinkwrapped genius may say otherwise, “oh he had a really nasty childhood” horse shit I reply, yes, I had a childhood, indisputable. Nasty? Possibly. Harmful? Most likely. But hell, here I am, typing, typist don’t get angry, they get . . . even!
Zane Grey’s wife Dolly, his editor, his business manager, whatever, she got even, he died aged 67, she got the lot. A miserable son of a bitch as far as I can tell but boy, could he write. Yes. And, he became the highest paid writer in the whole god damned world back there in the ‘20’s. Approaching a million bucks a year. Now that is writing change. Who cares the naysayers who referred to him as “that as yet unborn hack western writer”. Bloody hell, who’s counting. Zane Grey single handedly saved my arse as a kid. And so when I found my self sixty and single I went hunting for my childhood muse, searching for Zane Grey’s America, what did I find? ME! Bugger, there I was lurking in the American West just waiting for the connection. I found my self. Out in Young, Arizona. Eden, Utah, Ridgeway, Colorado. Death Valley, Nevada. Big Sur, California. Jemez, New Mexico. Other places sprung up all along the trail. See there I go, “the trail”, such a western phrase, not to be found in Aotearoa NZ. Nope. The “TRAIL” is found in the West. Bisbee, Douglas, Tonto Rim, Pleasant Valley, Monument Valley, Arches National Monument, The Badlands, Zion, Capitol Reef, Tombestone even. Yep, I watched sunsets and sunrises over the Grand Canyon, Coral Sands, Lees Ferry, Telluride and the 14000’ peaks above Ouray. That is what I found and that is where I found myself. Richard Thomas Clark. Ngati Pakeha. Out there in the West. Mormons, Ranchers, Paiute, Navajho, Teachers, Cowboys, Storekeepers, Knife makers, Gun makers. Hatmakers, Leather workers, Saddle makers. Truck drivers, trout Fishermen, Ak 47 toting Stone Mason survivalists. Even, before he dropped dead in the street, the former Beverly Hills Cop, for real. I kid you not. We got on great, two bullshitters bullshitting over coffee at the local service station. Planet Janet who strolled through Ridgeway with her dogs and cats in tow. I love them all, they have added to my life and here I get to type it all out. Maybe there is a story in there somewhere. Maybe. Time will tell. Night folks.