Stored up Ghost

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

By F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"

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Dear Alex,

Towards midnight while driving on I-5 freeway earlier this week, I saw for my first time glimpses of forest fire - up close & close enough to inhale the smoke. At 70+ mph, everything looked smoggy but not bark and bulk inflamed with scornful bliss. Soul of forest, tongue in flames, heart engorged with hope incinerated, fire calls for burial and birth.

The Great Gatsby released in 1925 was born of fire and freshness in the heart of its author, Fitzgerald: “I want to write something new - something extraordinarily beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” The desired pattern consumed 4 years of his drafting and (re)writing to present fire and frailty on pages exhaled from his soul.

The world could not understand his pattern or passion from a tale. He died 15 years later, unrecognized for his work, a failure to himself. Today the novel stands as a Jazz Age masterpiece, the greatest of all American literature, the roaring 20s in concept and embers through infinity.

In my illusion I think of the stories and lives, mine and another, ablaze with promise, streaking through soil and skin, brewing in welts, fat talks, cheap wishes. How much burning of my patterns in excess and haze - barrels and barren fields - would be needed before I could see for my first time glimpses of my ghostly heart? I am no body and no self pity for any body.

Yesterday I saw a new dental surgeon. My gums have been inflamed for quite some time. I have been told all my life I have virtually perfect teeth aligned in pattern which my dentist noted as classic textbook case. But things and teeth are shifting subtly now, perfection and enamel sinking, smoldering below the gum line. Nothing sticks as certainty.

Maybe this is why we are drawn to Fire soaking up our ashes, the Carpenter and a nobody to the world, the world to every body and heart burning from ghostly to glory.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

This quote you chose, let me give you a fuller context, what comes before the line:

“There must have been moments, even that afternoon, when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

Here Nick Carraway, the narrator of this (possibly America's greatest) novel speaks about an "it" that "had gone beyond everything."  And what is this "it"?

The "colossal" illusion of Gatsby of, most of all, himself.

Gatsby's spectacular transformation from before the war being a worthless farm boy to now Leonardo DiCaprio is an illusion as grand as his passion in creating it, so impressive that it touches reality only when necessary, taps oh-so-lightly into the reservoir of human sanity only to give his vision a semblance of earthboundedness.  Daisy was dazzling and then bedazzled.  It's a dream, an American Dream, a murderous idealism.

But that doesn't stop us from chasing it.

For what else is out there?  We know only one tune, the same lullaby that's been pounding into our heads since day one.  If we aren't singing it we aren't singing anything.

"Aren’t you going to sing anything, a tune that we all know, to vindicate and legitimate and celebrate yourself?" Pilate asked Jesus.

Still, Jesus sang nothing.

Yours, Alex