2002-11-16 12:12 p.m.
strange inspiration

It's all Ray's fault again.

For no reason whatsoever, I started looking at my own profile again, and saw his name on there, wondering, jesus, why isn't this man taking advantage of blogging technology, a la his "Forever and the Earth," telegraphing his daily impressions to the world?

(A quick answer: money. The man makes some every time he publishes his words, so why give 'em away for free? Hell, I had to pay out royalties for a college thesis performance of "Forever and the Earth."

Granted, it was worth it...beautiful piece of work. It's a radio play about a future millionaire who looks around at the literature of his time, and realizes that no author of his time has the brilliance or perspective to chronicle his time, an age of technological and spacial wonders. He wanders the library, frustrated and searching, and he finds Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, and is enthralled. He commissions his scientific team to build him a time machine and rescue Wolfe from his deathbed, keep him alive and vital with future medicine, and cut him loose to chronicle the future for as long as he can. Wolfe uses a version of a telegraph-via-space to send in daily, if not hourly impressions, and by the end, he's written eight novels, a few collections of essays and some poetry. They return him to his own time, and he dies, crying at the beauty of the future, wishing his children, the words he left behind, well. It's a gorgeous play, and I just realized that I ought to get those tapes up here, digitize them, and burn the whole project onto a CD with my sad attempt at a write-up. I'm sure Michael, the man who provided the voice of Thomas Wolfe, would appreciate it.)

Anyway, I'd pay money to read his daily thoughts. In this age of calculated wars over oil and prepackaged media of every kind, we're running short of dreamers of his ilk.

I don't dream like I used to. Even so, I watch people's eyes gloss over when I try to describe the visions in my head; if I could look in their heads, I'd see lots of, "sure, kid, sure"'s.

I don't care. I watch everyone in a race to build a "career" (whatever that is), all-too-willing to suck up writing for soaps or give most of their day to advertising or anything that's a faint dilution of their dreams, convincing themselves that it's worth it because they came close. (I understand people like JMS, who started writing for cartoons and stuff like Murder She Wrote (which folks I talk to insist had great writing, despite starring Auntie Mame) in order to get to a dream like Babylon 5. That's paying your dues, I get that. But doing work that isn't going to lead anywhere in particular (kinda like me being a legal secretary as a day gig � don't start), that drives me up the wall.

I remain convinced that you have to write/create/act your dreams, no matter how hard it is. Ray said as much when I saw him speak: "the hell with all the naysayers; write from your heart, always." Baker Baker (as I'll refer to her here) sits comfortably with me on this topic, which makes me feel better. She's working to get into art conversation, a weirdly interesting field now I'm hearing more about it. And I'm sure I'll hear more tonight.