The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was a hopeless romantic … well, when I first realized I was a hopeless romantic, a state of mind that for the most part has afflicted me my entire life, I was a fan of Richard Brautigan. Brautigan was a product of the ‘60’s, as was I and possibly as were a few of you, altho you may not have scrambled the eggs in your brain the way we did. Richard eventually shot himself in those eggs, depressed that his fame hadn’t followed him into his later, sadder years. I was saddened that he couldn’t just accept the trajectory of his career and maybe make the necessary adjustments, but then, fame isn’t following me much of anywhere so why try to walk a mile in Richard’s boots.

In 1966, hot on the heels of Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General in Big Sur, he wrote a book called The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, which was about a guy who kept a library for anyone who wished to drop off their unpublished or unpublishable manuscripts. Kids who wrote in crayon, people writing their boring memoirs, teenagers spilling their angst-ridden guts, you name it, the librarian in the novel accepted, quote, “the unwanted, the lyrical & haunted volumes of American writing” unquote, anytime day or night, no questions asked. For a would-be wannabee writer, this was a pretty notion. Nowadays, of course, we got the internet for all that. I even have a blog … so I guess I’m the librarian of at least those slim archives.

And of course there are Brautigan Libraries all over the country from Vermont to Washington where manuscripts can be dropped off and where they’ll presumably be cared for and probably remain unread. Literature, apparently, is a lot like news in these blog-riddled days where we’re awash in unedited, un-verified flotsam washing up on the debris-strewn beaches of our consciousness. For all I know, this, like plastic, will be the defining characteristic of our epoch. Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts. Put that on the gravestone of the 21st century.

Walking recently with an old friend who’s a writer, we got to talking about our late life chapter as artists. In the course of our conversation strolling the moss and fern world of the Sauk River up north, meandering under huge fir trees and listening to the language of the river, we commiserated about the publishing world and gave voice to the usual lament of writers since time immemorial. Meaning, who reads us?

Which eventually gives rise to the question, why do we write? Would we do it if we knew pretty much nobody would read what we wrote? Neither of us have anything but a puny audience. We’re the perfect candidates for Brautigan’s Library. Haul those unpublished manuscripts in late at night and ring the silver bell at the entrance, let the attendant put them on a shelf while we walk away.

My friend may have a different answer than mine, but I would write if I were the last man on earth. For the same reason I play a song on my banjo even if no one is around to hear it. For the same reason I make stained glass windows without caring if I sell them or not. For the same reason I build furniture and guitars and too many banjos, none of which I’ve ever sold. For the same reason I built a glass studio and a sailboat and the house we live in now. Because … in the end what we’re creating isn’t just a poem … or an acoustic guitar … or a song … or a stained glass window. We’re creating our life and these are the bricks, these are the doors and the windows, these are steeples. Corny as it sounds, this is why we write, why we make music, why we dance, why we grow a garden, why we get out of the bed we’ve made every morning. Because somewhere along the line we realized life is our real canvas and the world is our creation.

The folks who tell me, and there are plenty, oh, they don’t have a creative bone in their body, couldn’t paint if they took classes the rest of their lives, well, I’ve got bad news for the artistically invertebrates. We‘re all artists. We just don’t know it yet. I was pretty old when I discovered I had more than just a funny bone and if you want to know the truth, if someone had told me I’d end up becoming an artist, I’d have laughed in their face. I couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag, couldn’t make a decent stick figure much less a portrait, never took an art class, didn’t come from a family that appreciated art. My point is that art isn’t necessarily something you’re born with. All those stories of Mozart writing symphonies at 5 or Michelangelo painting masterpieces as a kid, forget about that, those are what stop us from even trying. Those are the myths that need to be ignored. Art isn’t necessarily the Sistine Chapel mural. Sometimes it’s just the way you arrange a bouquet of flowers or the change you make in a recipe for dinner. Art is simply … and as complex … it’s simply self- expression. It’s a way of seeing the world that’s uniquely yours. And in the end, it changes the world.

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