I often go to Gino's in the mornings to write and can’t even consider writing anything before ordering a long macchiato.
I liked Gino who emigrated to Australia from Italy and opened a tailor's shop in Fremantle, and then decided to turn it into a café. And then Gino’s became the life blood of Fremantle. He loved drinking coffee with his old Italian mates, and the Italian in the background sounded like music to me, and made it the place for me to write in the mornings.
For a long time, I sat next to the Sicilians. Dom asked me one day 'What are you writing about'? and I said ‘Criminal Underworld Activity in Australia’. I don’t know why I said that, but they became much less friendly, from then on, and would only speak in Sicilian(they became paranoid about making it into the book, and come to think of it they have just made it into the book, and I might have to go and live somewhere else).
Sometime before, I had mentioned how I had paid for some stone work in Bali and then it had never been sent. When Dom heard about the situation he said 'I have 'contacts' in Indonesia, if you need any help', which was a kind offer, but the missing $200 didn't seem enough to have the man’s legs broken or for him to go missing forever, and which seemed too extreme to me.
Anyway, I love writing at Gino’s but there can be distractions like that. A woman came up to me one day and asked if I had a real job to go to’? And I just laughed and didn’t say anything(which is what I normally do when I don’t like what someone just said). I only knew she had once been a high level political aide(and maybe even once a Head Prefect). It was hard to know what had triggered her? Was it the writing, the reading, the reflection? Was it the inwardness? And she seemed to think that I should be more focused on success.
Should I say, just about everyone seems to have become be a stressed-out Type A personality desperately trying to climb their way up to the top of the secular world. And the straight upward path towards success can quite yang when you think about it, and I can do yang, but sometimes, I also seem to need something a little more yin, and also an inner life. And sometimes it just seems like I need a little more time to contemplate things.
And we seem to have become a little biased towards the outer life. And even the so-called ‘normal’ world can be an unusual place. Anyway, even Carl Jung said the soul has its own peculiar concerns, demands and necessities, and one of those peculiar necessities is an inner life. And if you read Carl Jung for long enough, you can start wondering about your own soul and about its inner life, and also about some of its peculiar necessities.
And we seem to have become more steeped in competitive materialism than even we would like to admit. And how did we reduce everything to economics? Anyway, I can only handle so much of the Trump Towers and the Kardashians and the secular materialism that is dominating everything before I get a nervous twitch and start reciting whole verses of Rumi out aloud, or start wanting to delve more into the Upanishads or the Rig Veda’s. And I am not even really sure that the person with the most toys wins.
And should I say that I was hoping to find the ‘deep place where life flows’ as Rilke said? That I was looking for the green fuse that drives the flower? And I was hoping to admit some of those strange angels that DH Lawrence spoke about, and what would be most lovely of all is if I could ‘yield myself and be borrowed’. And that I was waiting at Gino’s to see if I might be borrowed so that finally, I might then be able to write something.
But I didn’t say any of those things(mainly because I didn’t think of most of them until later). And also because I didn’t want her to contact the Alma St Clinic just down the road. And also because my mother warned me against sarcasm, which she said wouldn’t get me very far, and that still swirls around in my head. Anyway, it did make me think about why I write. And one of the main reasons could be so I can say the things I don’t normally say out aloud in public. And there have been times, when I have thought, maybe writers are just people who are prepared to reveal themselves in public, if I could put it like that.
Writers are just people who are prepared to share some of what is happening on the inside of their own ‘psyche’(and some of their own teeming hidden private unofficial inner life). When most people, are clearly, much more focused on maintaining their ‘persona of success’. Anyway, sometimes even I don’t know how I ever got involved in writing, I just know that I have to do it. And maybe it is good to reveal more of ourselves(and we can’t just hide behind the ‘persona of success’ for the rest of our life). And I like something James Hillman said along the lines that, it is not so much ‘Know thyself ’these days, as much as ‘Reveal thyself’. And writing is one way of revealing more of yourself.
And writers could be introverts who finally started to speak. Or maybe writers are introverts who have gone wild and are now running free like an animal in a wild untamed forest. Or maybe, it is a way of understanding things better. And I seem to have an orgy of entangled ideas going on inside my own head, and writing seems like the best way to disentangle them. And writers seem to love the vivencia’s, or the exciting and life giving insights they sometimes get, and they have tasted some of that sweet ambrosia, and some of that divine nectar, which comes from the gods. And then they sometimes find it hard to focus the ordinary and more mundane aspects of everyday life.
Anyway, people have been writing since the beginning of recorded history. And there is something deeper to writing than just personal expression, or saying what you really think, or revealing yourself in public. And it is not just to understand things better. But writing is also like trying to find some kind of a language or expression or a speech for the tremendous mystery which so much greater than ourselves. And writing is like trying to find the right words, or the right expression or speech for the deepest part of ourselves. And people have been doing that, ever since they first started painting pictures on cave walls.
Gino's
📖 May the creative fires 🔥 continue to brighten your Life and Ours ....
Namaste 🙏
A lovely meditation, thank you.