Re: A natural question about Unnatural Acts

["Frank Sherwood" <FSHERWOO@Hermes.GC.PeachNet.EDU>]

I learned to write because I didn't have anything else to do.  I 
remember it well.  It was Thanksgiving 1966.  I was home from college 
(my freshman year), and since we had just moved the previous June 
from Delaware to Georgia, I was alone.  The Vietnam War was going on, 
so I decided to try my hand at writing poetry.  That was a stretch 
from writing love letters to my girlfriend back in Delaware, which 
had honed my writing during the summer and fall, but not as unnatural 
as the Hemingway novels I had also spent the summer reading.  But 
perhaps it was a leap into another space, another freedom, an 
attractive distraction.  But of course in the end I guess it's 
inescapable like anything.  Like anything, it--the unnatural act--
makes our identity simply a process.  A habit of transforming the 
unknown into the known we want to know.  But I think writing begins 
with wanting to pick things out of the air.  That sort of mysticism 
or allness.  The idea of consciousness must be pretty similar to all 
other possible or potential ideas of consciousness.  
Frank Sherwood
Gainesville College
Gainesville, GA