Lately, I’ve been rereading “Still Life With Woodpecker.”

A long time ago, I read it, before I knew I’d make a career out of writing (and editing). Ah, words, and the sometimes maddening practice of putting one in front of another, and then another, and the elusiveness they have just when you think you’ve got them all, and in the right order. Sitting at a keyboard, typing, or backspacing, possibly sitting on the delete key, and starting from scratch. (Sometimes you have to destroy the story to save it.)

I remember reading the beginning of Tom Robbins’ third novel, published in 1980, and having my eyes opened. Wow, you can write any way you want to. It doesn’t have to be the way they taught you in grade school.

Imagine. It helped teach me to trust my imagination enough to break the rules I’d worked so hard to learn.

If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.

This is the all-new Remington SL3, the machine that answers the question, “Which is harder, trying to read The Brothers Karamazov while listening to Stevie Wonder records or hunting for Easter eggs on a typewriter keyboard?” This is the cherry on top of the cowgirl. The burger served by the genius waitress. The Empress card.

I sense that the novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 — although it writes much faster than I can spell. And no matter that my typing finger was pinched last week by a giant land crab. This baby speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

Hmm, yes, the days before personal computers, but after manual typewriters were the norm.

It gets better, the book. A bit gimmicky, yes, but it was just what I needed at the time to be liberated from the prison of formulaic school-assignment writing.

And how quaint those electric typewriters seem now. I remember a classmate proudly boasting of his new word processor, which would be far superior to the electric typewriter. (If he only knew how soon after that the PC would run roughshod over the concept.)

But I seem to have veered off course, perhaps because the Dell Studio XPS 7100 can rap out a full screen just by moving one’s fingers on top of the keyboard without really giving any thought to which keys one hits first, then next, then next after that, and so forth.

What I meant to say is related to the subject line of the post. If it sounds familiar, then you may know the 1983 song “Make Love Stay” by Dan Fogelberg was inspired by the central (non-typewriter) theme of “Still Life With Woodpecker.” As Fogelberg wrote in the liner notes of the album:

“A sinuous piece written around a chapter of Tom Robbins’ “Still Life With Woodpecker.” Recorded(with my band) on a day off in L.A. while on tour in 1982. A musical question that, unfortunately, eludes me still.” (Dan Fogelberg)

“Make Love Stay was based on a book written by Tom Robbins, called ‘Still Life with Woodpecker’ (1980). It was wonderful, it presumed the most difficult concept a man in the late twentieth century has to really wrestle with how to make love stay, I loved the idea and thought it was a great philosophic moment, so I just direct the music base to his idea…”

It applies, I think, not only to love, but in the later stages of early attraction, the time when something feels like the heart is invested, yet it’s not quite love, and though it has many of the same feelings, it comes before all of the hard work that separates love from the chemical reaction that’s qualitatively similar to that induced by chocolate or other addictive, adrenaline-pumping dynamics that drive us.

The thrill. Newness. Something that awakens us.

In a World Literature class many years ago, a teacher referred to love as question-markedness. I can work with that for now.

How do we make question-markedness stay?

I don’t know, but I think being honest from the start helps ensure that whatever happens, there is a basis for something meaningful and substantial that will remain if some of the other characteristics of question-markedness fade.

That’s why I decided, when a not-too-long-ago milestone birthday approached, that from now on, with someone I was getting to know, I would take off the masks (as much as that’s possible) and appear as I am, flaws and all, letting things fall where they may. It’s a bit scary, I told myself, but it feels right.

Sometimes, when I reach for the certainty I had that it was the right thing to do, rather than to more safely play the games people play, that certainty feels as elusive as … well, you know.

Post published May 12, 2015