waiting for the Miracle

Colbourne (colby@online.net.pg)
Wed, 25 Mar 1998 20:03:59 +1000

Thankyou. I genuinely appreciate the encouragement and the 'brutal'
honesty - acts of mindless brutality and senseless honesty - more where
that came from please. It's funny because every single post addressed a
different problem I was concerned with. I think that I've pretty much
got the low-down on the lowly profession now - as much as you can get
without actually becoming a part of it. Profession or Disease? I wake up
every morning with a pain in my chest - but does it have to mean I'm a
writer - couldn't it be indigestion, Clinical Depression, Puberty Blues
or the possibility that I was silently stabbed during the night? Maybe
it was something metaphysical I ate the night before. By the time I see
them goddam bananas they're already burning their way down my throat.
My only knowledge of Leonard Cohen is 'Waiting for the Miracle' from the
NBK soundtrack, which is the only contact you could expect for a
teenager. I looked him up on the net last year. Very Interesting.

When you've fallen on the highway
and you're lying in the rain,
and they ask you how you're doing
of course you'll say you can't complain --
If you're squeezed for information,
that's when you've got to play it dumb:
You just say you're out there waiting
for the miracle, for the miracle to come.

Could somebody please tell me a nice little honest something about
Ulysses that will make me read it? I mean, what is it, too? Also,
anything you say means a great deal to me because of your fellow
honorary bananafishship, so I would appreciate it if you would recommend
to me some tangible Classics that are necessary for the redemption,
guidance (or acceptance?) of a troubled youth. Preferably ones that I
can buy.

I have this dream, not the literal sleep-related ones, and not one of
those NBA 'I believe I can fly' dreams where you can actually put on
some wings and take a jump. I'm talking about the dream that isn't a
hope, isn't really a posibility and isn't really a dream. Salinger
arrives at our Bananafish post, with a single anecdote and it's the
miracle we're waiting for and not unlike the U2 'wake up dead man', and
now I've made an unforgiveable and incorrectable(?) comparison between
Jesus Christ and Salinger. But that's the way I see it. In a world as
inexplicably world-like as ours, J.D. is as much a Role Model Messiah as
any other. But maybe there's nothing left for him to say....maybe he
said all he ever wanted to say in the handful of novels that brought us
here. Maybe. 'Wake up Dead Man?' The man, he can never Die - he's the
one that has, and will continue to, awake the dead men.

I know this question is like saying 'What was wrong with Holden anyway?'
or 'Was Hamlet genuinely crazy?' but I'll ask anyway, 'Why did Seymour
do it? - the fall in Room 507? From Teddy's point of view, what would he
say? Teddy wouldn't have done it. How would Seymour have explained it?
Couldn't he just hold on? Say it ain't so.


Godot.