The stranger who lives outside of us
The road is not the answer, nor can the journeysome writer conjure up something that doesn't live there. That's why he has to seek out the novel thing on the road as one seeks out someone who can no longer be ignored. There are many times when we think we've held the answer and found it to be no more than a dead pursuit whose tracks ended in the snow somewhere out in the middle of an open wilderness - thunderstorm in a teacup, ash heap littered with plastic golden bones, diary that turned out to be a company tax filing. There are times when the feeling of a writer comes over us and we write only a few jaded lines without any electricity whatsoever. That is not true writing. To write is to seek out that stranger on the open road with no reservations and no exact plans for how it will happen. We have to be prepared to stalk it without letting it know it is being stalked, and to do that means we will often need to be just as surprised when he appears in front of us as he is of us. We have to find him as if our destiny is wrapped up in the process and to do that is not exactly a deliberate act of the will.
Moreover the stranger who lives outside of us is more an impression of negative space than anything obviously defined or affirmed into existence. He is tap-dancing his way toward an ethereal realm in a way that is precarious at best to our comprehension and for that reason more than any other he moves with a markedly unpredictable flow; Nor does he like to be caught at the heel. Take for instance the scent of two musky old men announcing their boarding upon a bus. These two are falling out over some trivial detail of expenditure. The one says to the other that he was certain he paid for the chips at their usual breakfast nook, whereas his interlocutor is flatly denying him a proper hearing and croaking only sharp monosyllabic replies to the contrary with his murky blue-gray eyes settled on the world outside indignantly and with total finality. The former reasserts his position again and again and then seeing he's to receive no reaction let's out a dramatic "Oh!" as if not being heard is really driving his point home to all the other commuters. Then there is something else unexpectedly going, because in-between the body language which any Tom, Dick or Harry can delineate, there is the heft of outdated musk coming on stronger than ever and overpowering the whole bus, and punctuated at each stop by the impotent whoosh of the straining bus doors as they struggle to flap interminably open and closed.
The two men are no more than shoulders and hairy necks if you are situated behind them. The bus is a hunk of junk. They are pieces of ham without any real soul living inside them and the bus has become a shell for an audience that is not really an audience. Ex bank managers will try to get the better of each other that way, and in the usual manner of shark-eat-shark, one always wins. They breathe death and remind everyone that life is too short. Now that time is past though. Now you think to yourself, why do these two have so much power over my emotions? Why are they depressing me?
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