Fame

I had a book about invisibility once. It outlined arcane methods of achieving invisibility. To walk through life unseen. William Burroughs also had a short piece once about this, about how to walk down the street unnoticed by those passing you by. You focus your own eyes on the color yellow, for example, and what you see forces others to look aside. It's a form of sleight of hand taken to an entire corporal level.

Maybe the book is still around someplace, if I sorted through all the detritus of my life. I should dare to throw most of this stuff out in the process. It accumulates in mountains, making it hard to even walk through my office, and I balk, pour another cup of coffee, try to think through the loss, and hesitate. Someday, maybe even today, I'll throw huge chunks of stuff away.

Transparency appeals more than actual disappearance. To be there, to create, and to see the results of one's efforts without having to bear the burden of acknowledgment.

To direct a play and let those on stage win the applause... I don't want to wear the clothes necessary to say "thank you." Is that so strange?

One thinks of Patti Smith, who achieved her name and then retreated into a kitchen in Detroit for a full decade, out of the public eye. (She did come back, once the kids were grown. It is hard to completely renounce the rush of acclaim.)

Or Lao Tsu, whose words are beloved and concise, but who apparently wrote nothing with his own hand.

Or Herman Melville, who faded from view, despite having written great works. By the time of his death, he was so forgotten by the public that the newspaper misspelled his name, called him "Henry" instead of Herman. Was he resentful? Or was his retreat from the spotlight deliberate? Was there enough satisfaction in having written Moby Dick and The Confidence Man and Bartleby that there was no need to be reminded of it by others? Could he hold the volumes in his hand and feel content, with no need to wave the paper in his hands and announce, "I did this."

All these books, finished and unfinished, hidden in closets or left lying on the global streetcorners of unpublicized blogs, waiting to be discovered, home movies with nameless faces, discovered in garage sales and attics...

Somewhere in the stars, there is a reader. I walk through the flowers and spot foxes. It is enough. It should be enough.