Jazz from Berlin

One of the chief assumptions of literary writers is that the art of prose requires acute vision.  Perhaps this idea owes a good deal to the oft repeated anecdote about young Ernest Hemingway who got off a train during the first world war in order to write his impressions about a dead dog on a rail platform.  In any event, by the 1920’s literary prose was assumed to be a slightly dressier form of journalism.  The symbiosis of the modern news photo with fictive verisimilitude became the new mosaic standard by the end of WW I.

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"How can you write such clear imagery when you can’t see?"  I have been asked this question more often than one might suspect and yes, nine times out of ten the question comes from a writer.

The prevalence of the question suggests how deeply contemporary literary writing has become invested in the ohptho-centric view of the writer as photo-journalist.

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My journal is a tabula rasa of the other senses.  I travel a good deal and I record my "post-visual" observations without concern for the expected fidelities of the 20^th century journalist.  I don’t linger on the fact that I can’t see.  I use the notebook as a place of speculation and the freedom this gives me is essential to my practice as a writer.

Here is a notebook entry:

Kurfurstendam (Berlin)

It was raining and I borrowed a hat from the hotel’s doorman.

It was my birthday. I was all by myself.

I was born a twin and my identical brother died just hours after our birth.

I found that I was walking in Berlin and weeping in the rain.

I don’t know: I must have been twenty five years old.

in those days I could see shapes as well as colors so I followed blue jackets essentially at random.

I recited silently a list of jazz standards:

Something To Remember You By

It Never Entered My Mind

Ballad of the Sad Young Men

Why Was I Born?

Ramona

Hi Lili, Hi Lo

The Way We Were

Hush-A-Bye

Every Time We Say Goodbye

Peace Piece

Cry Me A River

Some Other Time

I’m Through With Love

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (As sung by Rosemary Clooney)

One For My Baby

Thanks For the Memories

I Got It Bad

I walked for hours in the rain, blind and lonely in Berlin, with all those songs in my mind…

S.K.