Episode Details

Since I quit drinking alcohol and smoking pot or tobacco to avoid running out of steam and finish sentences skidding at the top of the gravel voice, my journaling has regained the life it once had, which is a pleasant surprise and a valuable benefit. When I did thick spirals of smoke, my quiet thoughts were lost forever. Or worse, if possible, from the deep buzz only reached to the edge of awareness such bland trifles as "I smoke. And I draw the leak from my breath." Of course, with that trivialities, I missed out on the precious foam of the days and the hours that shape fiction in all its forms. Now, the only thing left for me is to read between the lines, to find out what I deliberately omitted because there is always more in what is quiet than in what is said.

Before presbyopia and those bad habits took their toll on me, I wrote both correspondence and journals by hand, allowing myself be carried away fearlessly by the stream of consciousness, listening intently to the graze of the nib on the paper, as if someone were riding the waves with the intense fury and spontaneous imagination of a runaway horse.

Unlike the great authors whose calligraphy is sheer shorthand, mine was so affected that frills became psychedelic a bit out of my control, a reflection of the sensuality that overcame me, the secrets and whispers of dangerous writing. Kundera rightly said that youth was the quintessential lyrical age.

So, one day, I stopped writing by hand. The combative Japanese pen became a sort of Excalibur, the sword in the rock, waiting for the return of the true king. There was an old correspondent who complained bitterly and who, after much begging, managed to convince me to go back to paper and ink. But I felt a bit ridiculous feigning the frills that once effortlessly came out of me. It was like forging the signature of someone who wasn't me. And of course, from the carnality that overcame me, I only have the deep relief of not waking up every morning with that irritated cobra looking for trouble while it hisses the music of the blood. 

All of which brings me to the gastronomic dichotomy that I intend to deal with.

On the one hand, I present a raw piece of fish with a strong odor and a sticky texture. However, marinated beforehand and seasoned with dill and juniper berries, it is as appetizing as, say, that marvelous salmon I ate in Bergen, Norway, day in and day out.

On the other hand, the same piece of fish, since in Norway salmon is not farmed but a national treasure, which, for a change, I also learned to make between fjords while listening to Edvard Grieg in a log cabin, always with a stopwatch in hand, using a bamboo steamer basket seasoned with ginger, leeks, and butter sauce.

The first is the dictatorship of pleasure, and the second is perpetual frigidity. Apologies for this perverse logomachy, but it’s crucial to manage the dosed thought so as not to frighten away members of the audience from the outset.

OK now, let's get down to business.

To go through the rocky lyrical age, one needed bold authors like Henry Miller, who wiped their asses with the censorship laws of their time and didn’t mince words. Like so many other readers, I had a great time with Tropic of Cancer. Bored with implied and unnecessary complexities and debatable meanders, reading with no-holds-barred of any kind was quite refreshing, to say the least. What would have happened if Gustave Flaubert hadn’t held back narrating the same vicissitudes in Madame Bovary? Why didn’t he do it in his heyday?

The answer is somewhat disappointing. No publisher would have dared to publish it, not for lack of courage, but because in Flaubert's time, there were laws that restricted the freedom of creation under the pretext of obscenity. In fact, the poor b*****d had to face a trial for morality and decency simply for daring to write on the subject of adultery in 1856.

Henry Miller had t