Sunday Drive With the Doves

A conversation with Larry Eigner

Larry: Any amount, degree, of perfection is a surprise.
Me: Any amount, degree, of attempts at perfection leave me panting on the fainting couch
Larry: too much of or too frequent a good is distraction
Me: which is why I play freecell rather than writing poetry
Larry: and words can't bring people in India or West Virginia above the poverty line
Me: which I find enormously upsetting. I had an idea as a child that words were exactly what we could use to exactly alleviate poverty, war, racism, idiocy.
Larry: As they come, what can things mean?
Me: When they are overwhelming: Iraq war, Israel making war on Lebanon, Seattle man murdering Jews. More important here to me than meaning is how do we curb violence? greed?
Larry: I feel my way in fiddling a little, or then sometimes more, on the roof of the burning or rusting world.
Me: You are braver than I am some days when I just want to lie in the fetal position in the pantry on the cool cool floor in the dark.
Larry: "to care and not to care...to sit still" Careful of earth air and water mainly perhaps, and other lives, but some (how many?) other things too.
Me: To be alive is to care and then not to care and then care again, to create, then scrub the lawn furniture, then sit at the table with a rose in a vase and write, making a statement that what one person does with the materials of her life and brain and and heart and intuition matters.
Larry: What first (off)? What next?
Me: What to do, what to do? as the babushki say in Russia, but then to let that go, that fatalism, that defeatism, that belief that the horrific news we hear daily, hourly is all the news of the world. Which it emphatically is not.

Larry Eigner's portion of this conversation taken from "Approaching things Some Calculus How figure it Of Everyday Life Experience" from The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book.