The Poetry, Essays and Intimate Journals of Larry L. Dill
Selected poetry and prose from Blues Journalism: The Austin Years
by Larry L. DillAustia history
Distant Islands
It is past now the point
that once wished for
stood lurking not
bright or graceful in
the darkened dream.
The sleepy clerk sat
sipping black coffee
sweet with sugar
like the fire of distant islands.
Within his eyes floated
half-forgotten memories of
the days to come. He saw not
What was in the past
But what would never be.
--Employee Breakroom
Internal Revenue Service
Austin, Texas
April, 1966
So much good poetry out there I don't know why I bother to write. Take Sharon Olds for instance. I stand there in the B. Dalton Bookstore in the Northcross Mall On a Friday afternoon in December Waiting for the very first showing on the very first day that Geronimo, the movie, is in town. I stand there in the poetry section having had my chuckles at the Gary Larson cartoon books. And I look at what seems to be The only twentieth century poetry book they have. Sharon Olds. And I look at the back page at what I already know is going to be there: That she has gone to the best eastern schools, and now teaches poetry workshops at one of them, And I have this wave of sadness pass over me as I knew I would. Grief, really, like Geronimo must have felt when he finally surrendered. But I go ahead and give a couple of her poems a look and sure enough they are beautiful and thoughtful and elegant and sad but they have the irrepressible joy built into them of knowing that she is talented and fortunate. and I think, why do I bother to write. I keep writing poetry the way the damn fools of the world keep buying lottery tickets. One chance in a million. Only, a lottery ticket just costs you a dollar. But a bad poem can take your pride down with it as it goes. Its like cutting off a little piece of your flesh and handing it to a convenience store clerk and saying would this do for a lottery ticket? But I like the Sharon Olds poems and I look at the price and it's $13.95 in paperback and I laugh and think, how the hell can I afford that? I'll try to find it at the library. And I put it back on the shelf, But you know, I seriously doubt that I would have even looked at that book if I weren't still trying to learn how to write poetry that somebody would pay me for. So, being a failed writer does have one real advantage. You get to read a lot of good poetry while you're waiting for your ship to come in.
--Austin, 1994
How would we be together you and me?
Never work would it.
You lusting after…I don’t know…
Italian men?…A garden?...A house on a quiet street
With a big back yard?...Me to get a real job?
And me just wanting to have sex with you
Morning, noon and night.
You the comic, cigarette smoking psychopath.
Me the depressed, alcoholic whinner.
What a pain.
George Burns and Gracie Allen in Hell.
Better to write the whole thing off as fiction.
Poets are bad about that.
“I Like your poetry!” Square one.
“Go to bed with you?” Square two.
“I sleep alone.” Forget the whole thing.
Sometimes it seems that poets pass out songs
Like business cards at a mixer.
“Here’s an advertisement for my loneliness.”
“Oh well. Here’s one for mine.”
Later you notice there are not enough digits
In the telephone number she gave you.
--Austin, 1993
No words can be as real as me sitting
out there tonight with that old drunk guy,
sitting there in the breeze at midnight
with a fallen angel
who murdered his superior officer in
Vietnam in 1969 after 3 of his
buddies were killed and did 2
years in prison but he didn’t want
to talk about it and grew up an
orphan after his mother beat him up
and he lived on a ranch in California
and drew cartoons and dug a snake pit
in high school and ran away from
home when he was 14 and painted
pinstripes on low rider bicycles in
Los Angeles and almost became a
policeman like his one surviving
Vietnam buddy out of 6 but decided
to travel the country instead and
went to Chicago and Kansas City and
wound up in Austin where he’s been for
12 years and lives in a one room apartment
with no tv and no car and works as a
handyman at a Catholic church and is
going to AA but still drinks and would
draw my caricature the way he used to do
down on Congress Avenue and my long hair
would be missing but my eyes would be
big because that’s the way he saw me in
the glare of the parking lot lights. A
man my age sitting out there, the 2 of us.
A man my age of Mexican descent sitting
out there on the curb by the convenience store
lonely and wanting my ear. So I listened to him and
ate my bananas and he drank beer out of
a quart bottle and kept thanking me for
listening to him while I was thinking that I
should be thanking him. He invited me
to go and see the altar he had built at the church
and I might someday but tonight was the
night of it all. I wish I could tell you
his pain and how proud he was of his
sad and desperate life.
--Ohlen Road Convenience Store
Austin, Texas, 1993
“Behind a neurosis may be a hidden psychosis. Often both patient and therapist are afraid to work with this deeper dimension. A compromise ‘cure,’ which does not touch the true nature of the difficulty, may be settled on. However, if patient and therapist persevere, a mysterious dimension, in which boundaries between the self and the other are fluid, can open, and the sense of the immaterial and the material shifts, seemingly at random….Such tendencies play a role in the mood swings of ordinary life, but in psychosis, they have a menacing finality that threatens to abandon the individual forever in shifting currents of disintegration and horror. The way individuals are ripped apart by psychotic processes brings home the realization that the emergence of a viable sense of self and other must be counted as one of the most creative achievements of human kind.”—Michael Eigen, “The Psychotic Core.”
Writing Resumes
And conducting conversations
Poetry and its divine
Psychotic truth
Buried now at the bottom of the closet
Like old shoes and underwear
Un-typed, unfinished
In need of repair
Scattered as my scattered brain
Holy Spirit missing from the mundane
The mud women never looking at the stars
Never seeing the madness arrive
Growing old, their clay cracking
My flame dying
I crouch and blow
My heart sweeps through my dreams
Like a witch with kerosene
Setting everything on fire
Burning me up with desire
Out over the fences and the trees
And into the empty air.
--Austin, 1986
I don’t know how I wound up at age 42 working in a hardware store. In so many ways it seems the most improbable job imaginable for someone with my interest in books and women and the arts. Of course I've had dozens of improbable jobs. I suppose I drifted into this one like many that came before it because it was an easy one to get and my spirit was so weak I felt at the time that it was the only job I was capable of getting. I stayed because staying was even easier.
“From its brutalizing search for identity my wearied soul rested in a backwater,” he intoned. Of course it isn’t the hardware store itself that is the backwater. It is my being there. Hardware stores themselves are sort of neutral places where the “things” that money can buy are moved around, dismantled, repaired or replaced without reflection or moral evaluation. It’s a microcosm of the technics of a civilization the way a stagnant pool can be a microcosm of life on earth. Everything in a hardware store is tangible. And every problem has a solution that you can see with your eyes. Or almost see.
I remember in John Barth’s novel, “End of the Road,” the hero, at a low ebb in his life, goes to see a psychiatrist who assigns him, as therapy, the memorization of facts from an almanac: populations of cities, crops grown in various regions, rainfall records, etc. Working in a hardware store is a kind of almanac therapy for me. Reality therapy. But still mystical, a kind of mantra. The zen of the mechanical universe. Proper installation of dimmer switches in the bedroom, faucet washers in the kitchen and wall anchors in the living room. It is in the spiritual sense a clean, well lighted place to work, where politics, religion, and art have no meaning. The artful irony of mechanics without meaning, the clockwork rhythm of it all, keeps me in the hardware store as a votive monk is kept at his faithful devotion by his self-inflicted incarceration in a regimen of extra ordinary routine.
But I'm not really trying to romanticize this job. Only to understand why I would settle for it. Essentially my spirit is too free to be here and I want out. I usually think of myself more as a prisoner than a monk. And while a prisoner has more freedom to think as he wishes, he is not free to go as a monk always is. I need this job for economic reasons and because it allows me to postpone the decision to actually do something with my life that has both commercial and spiritual value. At this late hour I am yet to find such a job. And having become a kind of armchair Marxist somewhere along the way, I look always with a radical vision that says such jobs cannot exist for those who know too much.
I'm aware that Marxists are not exempt from ideological myopia but being so aware is all the more reason for me to feel that I can see clearly the irrational and hidden immorality and amorality of the social system I live in. Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" did not become a catch-phrase in our society because it was a funny book but because it is a meaningful metaphor for the absurd nature of western, indeed, all human civilization.
The poetry of "Catch 22" would not be comprehensible were it not for Freud whose theory of the unconscious is but a localized, psychologized and depoliticized manifestation of Marx's theory of historical materialism which, reduced to its simplest terms means, "You are what you eat." You are not what you think you are just because you think you are, says Marx (and/or Freud). You are what you are for a variety of historical, sociological and anthropological reasons which neither you nor your dog is likely to understand any better than astrophysics or internal medicine.
The abuse of the belief that expert Marxists might understand what you are doing better than you yourself do, is demonstrated by the Gulag Arcapelego. Soviet dissidents are looked upon not as the loyal opposition but as mental defectives. When you disagree with the fundamental values of a Marxist state you are looked upon, I suppose, as one who is still looking through a glass darkly. And so you are sent someplace to have the scales removed from your eyes or to be starved to death, whichever comes first.
In America the common belief from the President down to my coworkers at the hardware store, is that we have it much better. That is because, materially, we do have it much better. But it is also because as a culture we are much more ignorant about the injustices upon which our prosperity depends than we care to know. Soviet style Marxism is as untenable a Marxism as the inquisition was a form of christianity. But the ideological and morally uncritical banalities in which American culture dresses its chauvinism makes us look like arrogant fools to most of the rest of the world.
With such a viewpoint as I have expressed here it should be easy to understand why it is hard for me to go out and find a job that is financially rewarding, intellectually stimulating and spiritually meaningful, and how I can find the place I do work (and the multitude of places I have worked) as totally lacking in all these things. If I'm wrong about why I'm where I am instead of where I wish I could be, that too should be understandable. As Sartre has said, "No one, either in the east or the west writes or speaks a sentence or a word about us and and our contemporaries that is not a gross error." Sartre's statement is so strong that it wrecks action and puts us back in a stagnant pond, the prisoner of an ordinary job where the question of whether to think or not doesn't have to be answered. "Huis clos." No exit.
Catch 22: A man who tries to escape military service on the grounds that he is crazy, can't be crazy because such actions prove his sanity. "Huis clos." No exit. I work in a hardware store at the lowest level of humiliation I can tolerate (and also the highest), feeling bored, depressed and useless because I believe that to work there is more noble than using my talents to better myself in a system I feel is fundamentally dishonest. "Huis close." No exit. I realize that the world is full of radical writers who support themselves as social critics, editors, teachers. I guess I want to be one of them. But my reluctance, variously described by my friends as fear of success, or fear of failure, lack of courage or lack of talent, stems, it seems to me, from the undeniably dead end conclusion to which my "truths" have led me: success itself is a lie. For behind and beneath every successful person are the victims of that success--the wives, the children, the friends whose dreams were denied so that some one of them could "make it."
It sounds, when you say, like an excuse. And so perhaps it is. Either way it is paralyzing. for what I really want, finally-- intellectual recognition and the love of women--I cannot have, either because they are objectives that are morally unacceptable or because they are impossible dreams.
And so I stand condemned to failure either by my own values or because I can't flap my wings hard enough to get off the ground. Does it matter which way I look at it? Does anyone see this in a way that offers me some hope? Is there something I can do quietly with the rest of my life that can bring me joy? Is there some way to achieve nobility without accession to privilege? Or must I languish in a hardware store fitting sewer pipes together in little mock layouts? And cutting keys and mixing paint until the end? Must I endure the silent humiliation, the petty self-absorption of customers who think that sales clerks are machines that owe them something smarmy, materialistic and trivial?
People who come into my store don't understand that their shiny, chrome plated toaster ovens are assembled in Mexico by dehumanized peasants whose fragile agricultural world has been shattered by industrial greed. Must I live out my days in the company of bosses and coworkers who themselves are living like the desperate souls at the gates of Dante's Hell with no hope of death because they never really lived?
This is what technics has come to. What it has always been. Nothing akin to the rise and fall of a woman's breast or the curve of her hips. Nothing to do with love. All work is prostitution. How could any prospective employer take me seriously after seeing what I have written here? And yet how could they not? Surely I can be seen as a survivor. I have not despaired. I have not wrapped myself in some cowardly cloak of religion or political affinity. I stand like Camus, full face to the absurd sun. If not nobly then at least honestly. Life is not what you make of it but what sense you make of it. I know what beauty is. I understand pain and hatred. I know from my own experience that actions speak louder than words. I have been loved and I've been despised. I know the truth is elusive but the human spirit remains irrepressible to me.
Larry L. Dill lived in Austin off and on 7 times between 1963 and 2003. He worked in Austin as a dishwasher, fry cook, bookstore clerk, delivery man, warehouse worker, taxi driver, highway materials inspector, television cameraman, advertising copy writer, pet store manager, remodeling contractor and teacher. He has worked at the University of Texas, the Texas Education Agency, the Texas Highway Department, the Texas Employment Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Census Bureau, Austin Community College and the Travis County Jail. His longest stint (7 years) was as hardware store manager in the 1980’s. He wrote Hardware Store Blues in 1986.
COMPLETE INDEX OF THE NEW HOPE JOURNAL ON THE WEB
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2007 by Larry L. Dill