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| When Zelda the Cat needed an audience for another preposterous story, I volunteered my services. |
"I tell you, Paul, you humans sure made an art form out of insanity.
The other night, I had buried my mouth in a bowl of milk when
Ernest Hemingway appeared. Guess who comes running up to him?"
"Don't tell me. It was Sigmund Freud."
"Exactly. Well, here is what happened: Dr. Freud is out of breath
by the time he catches up to Mr. Hemingway.
I gotta tell ya, Ernie. You were right when you said
'Dawn Powell is your favorite living writer.'
"But Hemingway misunderstood the out-of-breath German psychoanalyst.
He thought Freud said 'Dawn Powell is my favorite writer.'
"So Hemingway punched him. Then Freud, with bloodied face,
goes all the way to the Supreme Court which ruled both men
to be idiots because dead people cannot sue. Case dismissed."
"But why did Freud praise Dawn Powell?"
"Because of something I gave him."
"What did you give him, Zelda?"
"Jigsaw-puzzled quotes from Dawn's 1956 diary,
when she was fifty-nine years old."
When I was young I never knew what it was to be young. I only knew what it was to be me
–and that didn’t seem to be young but intimations of immortality...
I laugh at my own jokes–because I don’t make them. A character at the bottom of the well
makes them and when they come out it’s as surprising to me as to anyone...
You really don’t know your dear old friends at all. You pick out a part of them
that you need for yourself at that moment...You find a cozy vacuum in them
that is not them and you fill it with yourself...
The big loose unkempt unfinished apartment and its chores, as well as my family ones,
make me feel like a still good racehorse who is supposed to win races
after finishing the plowing and trucking.
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Footnote
The next Dawn Powell page is here.
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