Humainologie creative dialogue tomorrow Wednesday June 9 and the importance of believing impossible

“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it’s in my basement. . . let me go upstairs and check.” - M.C. Escher

You may recall the Queen’s advice to Alice, that she should practice believing impossible things every day. At our creative dialogues in the months ahead, we will have opportunity to explore why that is so important.

Before breakfast yesterday morning, I realized I will be sixty-eight years old this year. I was born in 1943. I should be 78. How could I possibly be 68 years old this year? It happened like this. About five years ago, I did not think I could write short stories. Poems, yes, but - for me at least – it was impossible to write short stories. I decided to try anyway. I began, slowly and poorly at first, then faster and better. Not only did I discover that I could write short stories, I also discovered that my aging process was doing a U-turn. Every year since I have been writing short stories, I have been getting younger.

That sounds wonderful. However, I will have to stop writing short stories sometime in the next fifty years. By 2071, I will be eighteen years old, and the very thought of being a teenager again fills me with dread. Not to mention the thought of going through puberty. It was bad enough going through it forwards. Going through it backwards? No way.

Don’t forget to bring at least one good idea for generating stories to our dialogue tomorrow.

Just imagine writing short stories, and then take a small step and make it a reality. Your opening paragraph itself can be boisterous, as in the opening paragraph from Thomas Pynchon’s short story “Entropy,” appended below this email. And your closing can be as evocative as one from Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Time and Ebb,” as follows:

“…they have vanished like that flock of swans which passed with a mighty swish of multitudinous wings one spring night above Knights Lake in Maine, from the unknown into the unknown: swans of a species never determined by science, never seen before, never seen since - and then nothing but a lone star remained in the sky, like an asterisk leading to an undiscoverable footnote.”

Here once again is the Zoom link for our dialogue tomorrow Wednesday June 9:

Topic: Humainologie creative dialogue Time: June 9, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Jun 30, 2021, 9 occurrences Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86972034113?pwd=M2g3MzEvMWs5dXhHcFVCbVNkVG1idz09 Meeting ID: 869 7203 4113 Passcode: 12345

Just imagine!

Arthur

From Thomas Pynchon’s short story “Entropy”

Downstairs, Meatball Mulligan’s lease-breaking party was moving into its 40th hour. On the kitchen floor, amid a litter of empty champagne fifths, were Sandor Rojas and three friends, playing spit in the ocean and staying awake on Heidseck and benzedrine pills. In the living room Duke, Vincent, Krinkles and Paco sat crouched over a 15-inch speaker which had been bolted into the top of a wastepaper basket, listening to 27 watts’ worth of The Heroes’ Gate at Kiev. They all wore hornrimmed sunglasses and rapt expressions, and smoked funny-looking cigarettes which contained not, as you might expect, tobacco, but an adulterated form of cannabis sativa. This group was the Duke di Angelis quartet. They recorded for a local label called Tambú and had to their credit one 10” LP entitled Songs of Outer Space. From time to time one of them would flick the ashes from his cigarette into the speaker cone to watch them dance around. Meatball himself was sleeping over by the window, holding an empty magnum to his chest as if it were a teddy bear. Several government girls, who worked for people like the State Department and NSA, had passed out on couches, chairs and in one case the bathroom sink.