And today, when I wanted to make a note about something I'd been reading about, which note would be only vaguely related to the main subject then on my mind, I recalled that I had somewhere written about the origin of my usage of the gimmick known as connecting the dots. I know I've referred to connecting said dots, but the origin! It's important. Why it's important is because it is sort of a Meme-Trop Hobby-horse of my own human being, as it were.
It's like this. Way back when I was a little kid and lived in a house to which was attached a big studio used by my father who cranked out illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, McCall's Redbook and all the rest, (read my book), I would on occasion when he wasn't busy wander around the studio, and what most appealed to me were the things he tacked onto his walls, which included notes to himself, sketches, letters from people, pictures, pages from magazines, photographs, and, usually near the wall phone were newspaper clippings, including one which stayed up for years which was a column written by his friend Bob Sylvester*, who had a regular column in the New York Daily News which was mostly about Broadway and movie people and occasionally about Montauk and his favorite sport, which he enjoyed along with my father, Surf-casting. I don't remember what this particular column was about but it was written in his usual style, which was to write a sentence or two about something, and then go directly to something completely unrelated, without the use of a paragraph, using instead a series of dots. Dot, dot, dot, like so. ......(Like that.)
Well, I thought Sylvester, (That's what everyone called him, not Bob), was very cool, and I thought his use of the dot dot dots was also very cool. In retrospect one reason for my appreciation of the gimmick is that I, being attention deficit from birth could really have used that gimmick in my speech, in order to appease those who tried to listen to me converse. Well, it didn't work as speech, so eventually I started writing. Too bad I never got to have a column.
O.K., so now that we're straight on that, I want to go on to the expanded use of dots about which I've already spoken in a previous blog, which is connecting the dots where there is, rather than isn't some sort of related meaning, but the writer is assuming, if not jumping to the conclusion, that there is some relativity to the two subjects, which calls for the usage of the term "Connecting the Dots", as a metaphor.
This metaphorical usage can be an important tool for any writer, but it also happens to be an important tool for crazy people, who use it to calm their mania, schizophrenia, homicidal rage, or other symtom. [Lacan; symtome] And I, who am certifiably sane, get sometimes uncomfortable when I dabble in what is for me ordinarily a very pleasurable occupation. (Writing in the dot-dot format.)
Which leads me back to the ever hovering present. While reading Ingo Swann's book Psychic Sexuality, just now, he mentions Sinclair Lewis's book Mental Radio, which is about his, Lewis's, wife's psychic abilities; so I quickly add that to my Kindle, and now, as I happen to read more than two books during the same now period, I'm also, now, re-reading Rebecca West's biography, by Victoria Glendenning, and I'm at the point, p. 162, where she mentions her friend Dorothy Thomson, who, it turns out, was the second wife, after the Mental Radio wife, of Sinclair Lewis, and I think, well, now that is cool; or, something like "well that sort of connects some dots!" [And no, I didn't even think of referring to Ms. Thomson as Dot.] ..........Jouissance.
*See photo above.
*See photo above.
No comments:
Post a Comment