The Island Magic of Being Invisible

(A Song for My Partners)

Six months later,

a thought occurred to me;

Writing for Youtube is like writing

for radio and TV.

Every writer has at their disposal

the same techniques and tools;

microphones, sound effects

and cameras of every kind.

But if you will succeed

you must limit yourself

to the microphone of your keystrokes;

the sound effects and cameras of your mind.

When we hear the words of Shakespeare

they become music in our ear,

and when we hear Robert Frost

we are no longer lost.

Those rhythms, mental music,

and refrains

remind me of the language

of the Bible of King James.

So what now,

shall we do?

I will try to imitate them

and you will, too.

We will write words

for television and radio.

We will tell stories and our clients

will get rich you know.

We will write essays

and teach everything we show.

People will remember

what we taught them

but forget who told them

that it was so.

We will write songs

that make singers

comprehensible.

But we ourselves

will always be invisible.

Why do we do this,

you and I?

We do it

because we have to,

we don’t need

to know why.

We do it because

we feel compelled.

Writing is the only time

we don’t feel

like we should be doing

something else.

Roy H. Williams

Pennie and I were in New York 40 years ago for ArtExpo in the Jacob K. Javits Center. We spent 3 days looking at more than 10,000 pieces of pieces of art and meeting many hundreds of artists as we walked those 500,000 square feet together. At the end of the show we went home with only 3 pieces, all of which were purchased from a relatively unknown Israeli artist named Reudor Gratch.

We invited Reudor and his wife, Effie, to dinner that night at “One if By Land, Two if By Sea” in Greenwich Village. We had an incredible evening with them.

The next day, I picked up a newspaper when I noticed that one of the serigraphs we had purchased from Reudor was one of only THREE pieces of art the newspaper had photographed for their review of that year’s ArtExpo.

You can see it at the top of this page.