This is a generalization, but it is a generalization against generalizations. To apply a theory to a book - feminist, Marxist, deconstructionist, whatever - is to arrogantly assume the writer even knows what the hell those terms mean. It shocks and appalls me when I see essays about Cormac McCarthy's "Freudian Conscience in the Move Westward". What the hell does that even mean? To me it is the equivalent of people who said Jar Jar Binks is racist. I mean fine, he's annoying to a lot of people. But that there were those who interpreted it as an attack on Asian culture just the pinnacle of absurdity. Inevitably, the meaning of great novels will be argued over, but it should be based on their CONTENT - excuses should not be made to broadly apply these overarching, generalizing, confining critical philosophies that just have nothing to do with the actual content of the novel. To study great books is not easy. To pick out a few incidental passages separated from the whole and give them the veneer of neo-nazism or some nonsense is the simplest (and most degrading) pasttime. It is so rare these days to read a critical essay about a novel that addresses what the entire novel means and what it was trying to do; instead, the reference section of any classic will be jam-packed with 90% of its pages comprising, "Feminist Theory in The Sun Also Rises", or something along those lines. How can you read a book like Sun Also Rises and somehow think Feminist Theory is the most important thing to take away? That's being judgmental, but I'm not asking for a unity of opinion. Only relevance and a respect for the author and the art he or she has created.
Things I have learned from some time in an MFA Program:
1) It is apparently considered widespread and popular, and thereby unsatisfactory, uncool, and somehow naive, to write a story with Hemingway's Iceberg Principle in mind (show only 1/8th of the story).
2) The white whale in Moby-Dick has no symbolic meaning.
3) No book on your bookshelf leaves you with questions or ambiguities not answered directly by the author (apparently Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'The Road' (of which the author said "I don't know" in response to a NY Times query about what the unnamed environmental disaster in the book truly was) is not on anyone's bookshelf).
4) Because mediocre writers go through 100 drafts of their work, and great writers go through two, you should be taught to go through 100.
5) All dialogue must be subtext (seems to incriminate rule #3).
6) Refer to simple things in complicated ways. Example: "inactive narrator", "unreliable narrator", "comma splices", etc.
7) All novels must be about three things. A journey from innocence to experience, the influence of society upon characters, and the effect of time upon characters.
As a quick response, number one stems from a need to feel as though something greater has been recognized - that the theory of "show do not tell", is the general fault of this generation of aspiring writers - that the 'secret' has been discovered, and that secret is to avoid the greatest influence on the sentence in the 20th Century (Hemingway). Two falls into the same kind of pretension. Saying Moby-Dick is only Moby-Dick may be trying to prove a point of some sort. I don't know. The only point it proves to me is that you read the Bantam Abridged Classics edition instead of Melville's full text. Have some respect old Herman. Hell, for Ishmael. Three underestimates the reader and supports subpar writing. Four, every writer is different. You can't apply broad rules. Everyone should be encouraged to discover their own formula. Insisting upon dozens of revisions leads to over-thinking; the greatest crime, in my opinion, for anyone creative. Five, take a look at any scene from anything McCarthy, anything Faulkner. Lines are included for the sake of establishing a brutally realistic scene, but they aren't saying anything deeper. Six, an inactive narrator can be a literary device and in and of itself is not a valid criticism of a creative work. Talking about a narrator's unreliability is a two minute discussion and is brought up by people who do not understand what the novel is really about - if the narrator can't be trusted, it is blatantly obvious. Move the hell on. Seven, how fascinating would it be to turn those 'rules' on their heads? Satisfying, in the very least.
What I've learned from a lifetime of reading every single book I can get my hands on, and reading everything I can find about every writer I want to imitate, is that for great writing, there must be no rules. Any writer that accomplishes anything beyond their decade makes their own rules. The 'rules' are self-learned and self-taught in any self-respecting high school and by a few years at the public library. And as soon as they are learned they should be broken.
If you are seeking to write only as a profession, if you are looking just to learn to write what other people want to read, if your sole interest in the art of literature is to have a job that you like more than what you have now, then these rules aren't such a bad thing. But by and large - and here come more generalizations - I don't think these rules, these ideas, aim for greatness. They aim for the general. They assume from day one that a future John Updike is not sitting in that room and they aim to teach with that determination in mind. That classes continue to focus on irrelevance is to me an incredible pretension. So often, in the literature classes I have been in over the last few years, someone will not know what they are talking about and speak as if they were. In early years of college undergrad, when I was not as adept at seeing this deception, I just thought everyone was understanding something that I didn't. That I had somehow read all of this literature wrong because I came to different conclusions. Slowly I came to realize that somewhere between 50 and 80% of the class discussion has involved bullshitting. People saying things THEY don't even believe. All that's fine and dandy, too, if you want to join a bookclub. But bookclubs don't put you into 100k of debt.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
The Death of Mount Taquitz
Note: An excerpt from a story I'm working on. Inspired at least in some way by two very bold and not quite justified claims I came across while traveling in the San Jacinto Mountains this past winter. The first authored perhaps by the selfsame genius architects of the tourism industry who came up with the gem "Idyllwild is one of the 100 Best Art Towns in America." The claim - often placed side by side with that latter gem of knowledge - is that the evil spirit of an Indian maiden killer resides in the lee of the mountains. The second claim was uttered in passing by a few very ancient and thereby wise oak trees in what I shall leave to be an undisclosed location along the South Ridge pass, and it said something to the extent that evil shall find no safe harbor in the wild, and that this untruth has perpetuated your society is a mystery of the most profound depth.
See the man. See him laboring through the pines, wind-whipped and reddened and hair blown through and through by the needles of the trees and the icicles of sweat forming like daggers. Grinning. Disturbed. Knees-weakening, buckling now. He struggles to move. There is much blood on him, more than he knows. From his collarbone to his ribcage runs a strawberry burn from a crash to the ice. The blood drips drips down from his hip down his shorts to his knee.
That is me there. He’s me. Watching the granite peak of Mt. Taquitz approach around the curve in the trail. Mountain lion footprints dot the snow. The sun is banking off the snow and warming my bare chest. There is no cold. The wind gusts and then there is cold for a small time but it fades when I sweat. In the crisp air the wood tells no lie and knows no fault but the men who move within it. Far and farther away, miles down the mountainside, miles long ago since passed, there is a warm little town nestled twixt warm little alleyways and dirttrodden streets. In town there are shanties within which scrambled eggs are being cooked by those reading about that day’s weather and who Obama’s killed now. I spit congealed spit from cracked lips which burns through the frost of the trail. They are thrilled by the proximity of the unknown monstrosity I know to be Taquitz. Having lived in its shadow for years they take from that imagined darkness some serenity which exists in a constnat presence. They listen to the thought of the water trickling through the stream from the back window in the woods by the base of the mountain, on the outskirt of town. They drink their coffee in unintentional sync with that town, they breathe the thin air in unintentional sync with that town. This breathing and this drinking is in sync with what goes on in these woods but they do not know that. They will smile at the thought of what I do and I will smile back.
I remember telling someone once: the mountains to me are like a cathedral, and running is just my way of praying. What the hell does that mean? I ask now. But I’m grinning. Disturbed. Knees weakening, buckling.
The road to the trail to the summit of Taquitz is 11 miles of winding root-ridden dirt whose breadth of ice grows as the oxygen in the air thins. Something heavy in those misty pineladen skies. To breathe is to sift through that sky’s bitterness for those things which might sustain you.
Come with me. See where I pause on that trail to observe the bullet-riddled sign on the edge of the wilderness. This area is known for its high population of mountain lions. Please observe wildlife safety regulations. Do not approach, attempt to feed, or touch a wild animal. I plunge on. I am not brave. Do not think I am brave. There is slush frozen to my shins and I spit dehydrated spittle into the frost. The heat of that spit does not break the freeze now.
I have no notion of bravery. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not brave.
Birds crash through the pines and twiddle serenely. The heights have made them scarcer. I see hawks prowling, soaring across the rim of the range and framed to the backdrop of cloud-blue and the tips of whitefrosted trees. Around the bend I come and I can see Taquitz again.
Here is the story of Taquitz: he was a bold leader of an Indian tribe in these very San Jacinto Mountains. In a time when places were not a name but just a place. Taquitz was not satisfied with his power. With his popularity he was able to manipulate his faithful. He stole away innocent maidens, had his way and smote them on the mountainside. In battle he was defeated, though his spirit escaped to the mountains to lurk in the cavernous rocks near the peak, forming that distinctive A-shaped, whitewashed scraggle which juts above the entire range.
His address is 33°45′36″N 116°41′01″W if you’re looking for the bastard yourself.
Here is the story of me: I want to kill Taquitz.
I’d never heard of him until the day before. Rewind and take that blood from my chest drip dripping down to my kneecaps purpled by the cold. Peel away that ugly strawberry-magenta snarl of reddened skin. Pick me up off that ice and put me down in air which men are meant to breathe. Hand me a shirt. In Idyllwild the tourists and vagrants and rich snowbirds and mountain-beaten hick element juxtapose a brutal image. From that twisted visage imagine spewing forth this line of pithy wisdom scrawled on the welcome sign: Idyllwild is one of the 100 Best Art Towns in America.
The hell you are, I said out loud. I felt wise and Buddha-like with a toothpick in the corner of my lip.
What? a passing pack of the touring enraptured said. They had not heard the thought of the water trickling through the stream through the backporch window yet. They had only read of it. They were only just thinking about those scrambled eggs and what the newspaper may say about Obama killing someone somewhere. Oh, that’s interesting, they said, and pointed to that sign.
Below the sign were a series of pamphlets. One was of directions to an art show which would show a copy of a painting that had been inspired by a selfdescribed raw photo entitled: A Wintering Taquitz. Below these directions was the story of Taquitz. The one I have just told you. They did not include his address. I found that for you on my own.
Put me back on the mountain. The trail is called Devil’s Slide Trail. Perhaps the breath of Taquitz gusts down that slippery slope and whips his would be conquerors into the riparian gorge below. Without thought, without effort. This is the Devil. Here is real evil. The root of it. I mean to kill that. I mean to summit and destroy, grinning and disturbed.
A month ago I would have thought this: when Taquitz the Indian committed those crimes and murdered those maidens and betrayed his people, he separated himself from the mountains. He and they were no longer one big One. He violated a thing sacred and for that you do not become part of the earth but you are banished from it. You are sent to some other place, where no chilly mountain gusts can breathe. The mountains are a cathedral. Running is just a way of praying.
Yet this dear friend is not a month ago. This is now. Now those are not just chilly mountain gusts. Those are biting maelstroms which make my lips crack and turn me into a redskin. I cannot make a fist. When my feet land on the ice, it feels as though I am landing on a rounded nub attached to my shin.
I have no notion of cold. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not cold.
Taquitz is a harbinger of this wickedness and it is to him I am drawn. I flatter myself into thinking that opposites attract. You are good, I tell myself. Taquitz is evil. This is why you are attracted to one another.
The trail is become steep again. I run hunched over because this is how you keep down nausea when running uphill for very long. Nausea I still have a notion of. Steadily steadily the burning grips my thighs. I take measure of the trail ahead, the dirt almost entirely obscured by frozen snowdrifts, the branches weighted still with the snow that had not melted and hanging over the path, the woods on either side thick but still offering at points spectral visions of the whitewashed summit. I take measure. To run mountains is to be like a miser counting his pennies, wanting to be broke at the exact moment he has no need of his coin.
The uphill does not end. I understand I am approaching the final switchbacks. Sweat bears down round my brow to my chin and the whipping wind rips this moisture straight off my face like some ethereal force bound for or emerging whence some distant hell. I look to the trees with increasing desperation as if they might offer some guidance but they remain silent and speak in creeks and whistles only at the wind’s demand.
Soon I will kill Taquitz. I catch a glimpse of my thighs on impact. The muscle pressed through the purpled skin made slick by blood and sweat and slush. I have no notion of what murder is. I have no notion of what cold is. This is why I am not a murderer. Nor will I be. Still I grin a bit when I try to spit. Still I am disturbed.
Perhaps you would like to step back from my trot and make for warmer climes. Search out the most arid desert in your memory and place there a girl. Make her a darkhaired one. Hair black as the night, skin reddish-gold. Eyes which can glow green embers should you seek your heart made to become a fizzing crackling electrical thing. Give her broad happy red lips which say hello! without speaking. There.
Make that arid desert into a black night lit by a blanket of stars so extensive you’d be hard pressed to find the black spaces between. Where is there room for God between those kingdoms? The universe full. We needn’t have God. See me, leaning over, kissing the sand from her knuckle, kissing those chapped and sunrusted lips, the desert seeming to caress us in a suspended embrace. That is me being me. You cannot see the nearest towns but we will go to them. The desert will not hold us, even though from where you’re standing, it sure as hell looks like it’s got a pretty good grip. We will go to the ugly places and in those ugly places I will not be me and she will not be she. I do not want to show you this going. You can imagine it yourself. That is me
losing my religion.
Soon the world will become a pyre, I think to myself, back on the mountain, on Devil’s Slide Trail, blowing into my numbed hands, and Taquitz will burn upon that fire.
*
I am not as strong in the mountains as I thought I was sitting in the village. Sitting in the village I had but a notion of the animal I wanted to be. Sitting in the village I was surrounded by such finicky and delicate excesses of luxury that I could not help but feel like a growling misplaced lion. I make myself fit the image of a beast completely. I eat everything I can put my hands to. I roam for the outskirts, am drawn to the brink. I lurk in darker and remote places to seek out some acceptable substitute for the solitudinal solace of wilderness.
Yet here and now I betray it. I betray it by giving a whimper as I run because my body is getting ready to collapse in on itself. My legs have gone numb and are spasming. Floods of sweat pool off my head and coat my windburnt skin. Animals do not whimper. Watch the antelope take a beating on the African Sahara by a pursuant cheetah. Watch it heaving in the throes of lactic overload as the successful cheetah rips its flesh out with its teeth. Watch it take this de-fleshing silently and calmly before gathering the strength for a final push to freedom and another few bitter moments of life. Cheetahs can run up to seventy miles per hour. Everyone knows this. But they can not run like an antelope. The cheetah has exhausted itself, this is proven by its weakening grip. The antelope digs to its ancestral reserves and tears its halfeaten ribcage away from the jowls of this desert cat and darts in a vicious determination across the plain. The cheetah gives a brief chase but keels over in exhaustion soon after.
I want to be that antelope. I want to be that antelope that turns back to the cheetah and tramples that sorry bastard into the ground where he lay panting. I want to be that antelope that says, no thing and no one of this Earth can eat me. No thing, and no one.
I am not that antelope, though I want to be.
See the man. See him laboring through the pines, wind-whipped and reddened and hair blown through and through by the needles of the trees and the icicles of sweat forming like daggers. Grinning. Disturbed. Knees-weakening, buckling now. He struggles to move. There is much blood on him, more than he knows. From his collarbone to his ribcage runs a strawberry burn from a crash to the ice. The blood drips drips down from his hip down his shorts to his knee.
That is me there. He’s me. Watching the granite peak of Mt. Taquitz approach around the curve in the trail. Mountain lion footprints dot the snow. The sun is banking off the snow and warming my bare chest. There is no cold. The wind gusts and then there is cold for a small time but it fades when I sweat. In the crisp air the wood tells no lie and knows no fault but the men who move within it. Far and farther away, miles down the mountainside, miles long ago since passed, there is a warm little town nestled twixt warm little alleyways and dirttrodden streets. In town there are shanties within which scrambled eggs are being cooked by those reading about that day’s weather and who Obama’s killed now. I spit congealed spit from cracked lips which burns through the frost of the trail. They are thrilled by the proximity of the unknown monstrosity I know to be Taquitz. Having lived in its shadow for years they take from that imagined darkness some serenity which exists in a constnat presence. They listen to the thought of the water trickling through the stream from the back window in the woods by the base of the mountain, on the outskirt of town. They drink their coffee in unintentional sync with that town, they breathe the thin air in unintentional sync with that town. This breathing and this drinking is in sync with what goes on in these woods but they do not know that. They will smile at the thought of what I do and I will smile back.
I remember telling someone once: the mountains to me are like a cathedral, and running is just my way of praying. What the hell does that mean? I ask now. But I’m grinning. Disturbed. Knees weakening, buckling.
The road to the trail to the summit of Taquitz is 11 miles of winding root-ridden dirt whose breadth of ice grows as the oxygen in the air thins. Something heavy in those misty pineladen skies. To breathe is to sift through that sky’s bitterness for those things which might sustain you.
Come with me. See where I pause on that trail to observe the bullet-riddled sign on the edge of the wilderness. This area is known for its high population of mountain lions. Please observe wildlife safety regulations. Do not approach, attempt to feed, or touch a wild animal. I plunge on. I am not brave. Do not think I am brave. There is slush frozen to my shins and I spit dehydrated spittle into the frost. The heat of that spit does not break the freeze now.
I have no notion of bravery. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not brave.
Birds crash through the pines and twiddle serenely. The heights have made them scarcer. I see hawks prowling, soaring across the rim of the range and framed to the backdrop of cloud-blue and the tips of whitefrosted trees. Around the bend I come and I can see Taquitz again.
Here is the story of Taquitz: he was a bold leader of an Indian tribe in these very San Jacinto Mountains. In a time when places were not a name but just a place. Taquitz was not satisfied with his power. With his popularity he was able to manipulate his faithful. He stole away innocent maidens, had his way and smote them on the mountainside. In battle he was defeated, though his spirit escaped to the mountains to lurk in the cavernous rocks near the peak, forming that distinctive A-shaped, whitewashed scraggle which juts above the entire range.
His address is 33°45′36″N 116°41′01″W if you’re looking for the bastard yourself.
Here is the story of me: I want to kill Taquitz.
I’d never heard of him until the day before. Rewind and take that blood from my chest drip dripping down to my kneecaps purpled by the cold. Peel away that ugly strawberry-magenta snarl of reddened skin. Pick me up off that ice and put me down in air which men are meant to breathe. Hand me a shirt. In Idyllwild the tourists and vagrants and rich snowbirds and mountain-beaten hick element juxtapose a brutal image. From that twisted visage imagine spewing forth this line of pithy wisdom scrawled on the welcome sign: Idyllwild is one of the 100 Best Art Towns in America.
The hell you are, I said out loud. I felt wise and Buddha-like with a toothpick in the corner of my lip.
What? a passing pack of the touring enraptured said. They had not heard the thought of the water trickling through the stream through the backporch window yet. They had only read of it. They were only just thinking about those scrambled eggs and what the newspaper may say about Obama killing someone somewhere. Oh, that’s interesting, they said, and pointed to that sign.
Below the sign were a series of pamphlets. One was of directions to an art show which would show a copy of a painting that had been inspired by a selfdescribed raw photo entitled: A Wintering Taquitz. Below these directions was the story of Taquitz. The one I have just told you. They did not include his address. I found that for you on my own.
Put me back on the mountain. The trail is called Devil’s Slide Trail. Perhaps the breath of Taquitz gusts down that slippery slope and whips his would be conquerors into the riparian gorge below. Without thought, without effort. This is the Devil. Here is real evil. The root of it. I mean to kill that. I mean to summit and destroy, grinning and disturbed.
A month ago I would have thought this: when Taquitz the Indian committed those crimes and murdered those maidens and betrayed his people, he separated himself from the mountains. He and they were no longer one big One. He violated a thing sacred and for that you do not become part of the earth but you are banished from it. You are sent to some other place, where no chilly mountain gusts can breathe. The mountains are a cathedral. Running is just a way of praying.
Yet this dear friend is not a month ago. This is now. Now those are not just chilly mountain gusts. Those are biting maelstroms which make my lips crack and turn me into a redskin. I cannot make a fist. When my feet land on the ice, it feels as though I am landing on a rounded nub attached to my shin.
I have no notion of cold. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not cold.
Taquitz is a harbinger of this wickedness and it is to him I am drawn. I flatter myself into thinking that opposites attract. You are good, I tell myself. Taquitz is evil. This is why you are attracted to one another.
The trail is become steep again. I run hunched over because this is how you keep down nausea when running uphill for very long. Nausea I still have a notion of. Steadily steadily the burning grips my thighs. I take measure of the trail ahead, the dirt almost entirely obscured by frozen snowdrifts, the branches weighted still with the snow that had not melted and hanging over the path, the woods on either side thick but still offering at points spectral visions of the whitewashed summit. I take measure. To run mountains is to be like a miser counting his pennies, wanting to be broke at the exact moment he has no need of his coin.
The uphill does not end. I understand I am approaching the final switchbacks. Sweat bears down round my brow to my chin and the whipping wind rips this moisture straight off my face like some ethereal force bound for or emerging whence some distant hell. I look to the trees with increasing desperation as if they might offer some guidance but they remain silent and speak in creeks and whistles only at the wind’s demand.
Soon I will kill Taquitz. I catch a glimpse of my thighs on impact. The muscle pressed through the purpled skin made slick by blood and sweat and slush. I have no notion of what murder is. I have no notion of what cold is. This is why I am not a murderer. Nor will I be. Still I grin a bit when I try to spit. Still I am disturbed.
Perhaps you would like to step back from my trot and make for warmer climes. Search out the most arid desert in your memory and place there a girl. Make her a darkhaired one. Hair black as the night, skin reddish-gold. Eyes which can glow green embers should you seek your heart made to become a fizzing crackling electrical thing. Give her broad happy red lips which say hello! without speaking. There.
Make that arid desert into a black night lit by a blanket of stars so extensive you’d be hard pressed to find the black spaces between. Where is there room for God between those kingdoms? The universe full. We needn’t have God. See me, leaning over, kissing the sand from her knuckle, kissing those chapped and sunrusted lips, the desert seeming to caress us in a suspended embrace. That is me being me. You cannot see the nearest towns but we will go to them. The desert will not hold us, even though from where you’re standing, it sure as hell looks like it’s got a pretty good grip. We will go to the ugly places and in those ugly places I will not be me and she will not be she. I do not want to show you this going. You can imagine it yourself. That is me
losing my religion.
Soon the world will become a pyre, I think to myself, back on the mountain, on Devil’s Slide Trail, blowing into my numbed hands, and Taquitz will burn upon that fire.
*
I am not as strong in the mountains as I thought I was sitting in the village. Sitting in the village I had but a notion of the animal I wanted to be. Sitting in the village I was surrounded by such finicky and delicate excesses of luxury that I could not help but feel like a growling misplaced lion. I make myself fit the image of a beast completely. I eat everything I can put my hands to. I roam for the outskirts, am drawn to the brink. I lurk in darker and remote places to seek out some acceptable substitute for the solitudinal solace of wilderness.
Yet here and now I betray it. I betray it by giving a whimper as I run because my body is getting ready to collapse in on itself. My legs have gone numb and are spasming. Floods of sweat pool off my head and coat my windburnt skin. Animals do not whimper. Watch the antelope take a beating on the African Sahara by a pursuant cheetah. Watch it heaving in the throes of lactic overload as the successful cheetah rips its flesh out with its teeth. Watch it take this de-fleshing silently and calmly before gathering the strength for a final push to freedom and another few bitter moments of life. Cheetahs can run up to seventy miles per hour. Everyone knows this. But they can not run like an antelope. The cheetah has exhausted itself, this is proven by its weakening grip. The antelope digs to its ancestral reserves and tears its halfeaten ribcage away from the jowls of this desert cat and darts in a vicious determination across the plain. The cheetah gives a brief chase but keels over in exhaustion soon after.
I want to be that antelope. I want to be that antelope that turns back to the cheetah and tramples that sorry bastard into the ground where he lay panting. I want to be that antelope that says, no thing and no one of this Earth can eat me. No thing, and no one.
I am not that antelope, though I want to be.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
Fairly self-explanatory. The excerpt below is from Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian. A gang of soldiers turned vigilante cowboys bent on settling the West is witnessing the approach of an Indian platoon from across the plateau.
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Dropped Dead and Sunkissed - an excerpt
The Morrison kitchen was a nice kitchen for a nice home of nice parents and children. There was ring of advent candles on the table, the first purple burnt to its stub. Ornamental plates decked the cleanscrubbed walls. There was the right amount of mess by the front door where the mail was to suggest proper human habitation, and nothing more.
The chicken potpie had been served into six exactly equal portions, and almost every plate reflected this unique mealtime brand of justice. Gentle protestations of no more, too much filled the dining space as each took their due, punctuated by a modest narrowing of the eyes and a shake of the head with a tired, fauxstretch-induced tilt back from the table. Every eatingplace echoed this habit save for the corner, where a plate had already been scraped clean before the man of the house had filled his beerglass.
For the praise of the ‘amighty, said Mr. Comfort.
What is it, deer?
Mrs. Comfort was dabbing at her unsullied dimples with a napkin.
Woodja take a look at Jack’s plate?
For the praise of the ‘amighty, said Mrs. Comfort. Well I don’t have enough food to even say he’s eaten with us.
There’s half the potpie left, said little blondehaired Sammy Comfort from the depths of her own missized wooden chair.
For the praise of the ‘amighty, the parentals muttered at shifting intervals, the little voice either going entirely unheard or coming from a place that was too far away to reach their ears.
Across the table from Jack was the oldest Comfort child of them all, old Daniel Comfort, who peered through blackrimmed spectacles at the iPhone in his right palm, thumb furiously working over the keys, while he held captive and aloft in his left the pieshovel dripping with gravy and the chickensauce.
Well, said Daniel Comfort from behind his spectacles. Apple’s on the move again.
Out the window behind old Daniel the treebranches were wavering light in the breeze and split the sunrays glittering in that star’s setting. The light cut a semicircle of shadow on the table and Jack could feel the apex of it envelope his head in its warmth. His gaze shifted freely between the upheld pieserver and the branch waving just beyond, the dance of the latter a cruel backdrop to the stillness of the former.
Deer, Mr. Comfort was saying. Have you seen what they did to that place off Archer?
Deer, I haven’t.
I mean old Wellington’s place. You know the one.
I think I do, deer.
There was no change of the position of old Daniel’s arms. Thus emerging from that technological Ovid –
Have you seen what DuPont did last week? I mean…
That place sure could use that show, said Mrs. Comfort. You know deer?
The man of the house took a moment to rip from his potpie laden fork and with a hearty swallow said something about needing to give that bastard Higgins a call about the gutters.
Did you hear me, deer?
What?
I said that place sure could use that show. You know the one. Where they go in and give it a fixup and all.
She twiddled her fingers in the air and cracked her wrists when she said a fixup and all in a motion of both carelessness and happily detached pre-eminence.
Whatsitcalled. Dreams of Your Home, or something.
Ah, said old Daniel, shifting in his seat. Ah-ah. So Meredith has finally Facebooked me. Ah-ah.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or - leveling his eyes on his mother - may I be
excused?
America’s Next Top Home, said Mr. Comfort through a Coors Light mustache. He patted his stomach and looked about with something amounting to a sly grin.
No, that’s not it…
I do wonder what she was waiting for, said old Daniel, using a shoulder to slide his glasses farther up his nose. The motion of his shifting figure blocked the window from view across the table.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or may I be excused?
Mama, said Sammy.
I wanna say – no, wait – Extreme Top Makeovers, is it?
What’s this now?
The man of the house had just finished his brief foray into sidelonging irrelevance and had returned with answers. What we should do, he said, is call up that bastard Higgins tonight. That way he’s getting the message first thing. Have him come take a look at the gutters later in the day.
Mama.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or may I be excused?
Mama.
What is it, sweetie-candle?
Jack. She nodded to her brother.
What is it, Jack honey?
May I be excused?
But we’ve just sat down for our family dinner, she said.
Thank you, he said. And he stood from his chair, kissed his sister on her forehead, and left through the front screen door with a tinny whine echoing his steps down the walk.
***
The air was rich with burnt charcoal and pine drifting on the cool breeze, tempered by the warming glow of the sun. It felt good on his neck which was cold and stiff from sitting for so long. He knew then that he would not be home for nightfall.
For a time he walked. He did not know how long. He walked until his legs felt loose again and his stomach was light and he remembered that he had on his running shorts underneath his jeans and without hesitating he stowed his jeans and his t-shirt in a bush by the side of the road and he began to run.
He ran down the tarpinched cement block and veered away to the other reaches of the town, staying upon the road and the letting the woods he frequented pass him by with a blush of gentle farewell, the hopes of home kissing their warrior away to a foreign battle. Sometimes he ran to go places and for that purpose only was he concretebound. Soon he realized he had found a place that he had not been ever and continued still. Sweat beaded down his collarbone, his chest, pooled in his feet which squished with each stride. He wore no watch, told the distance he’d come only by the level of burn in his legs and how much the dancing ape in his chest had subsisted.
He’d come through a stretch of developments and apartment complexes hidden between groves of trees too thick to invite bipedal exploration. His vision was made murky by the sweat and he peered from those clouded orbs into the greens to search for an opening. And when they did come or he imagined they came he turned his gaze away to the dirt freckled sidewalk and his worn footdrops upon it with regret for that was not the way onward.
There was a little town by the end of the trees and it was beaten well by both the sun and what those who moved prepossessed in better circles might know to call as this economic climate. Singlefloor square homes with cement porches and lawns littered with windblown trash were the vanguard of its outskirts. Sidestreets led to fenced properties whose identical layouts flanked one another and were differentiated only by the type of weeds which grew unkempt in that section of this lot of long forsaken aesthetics. People, when they moved about, did so strangely, in sweatshirts and jackets toting plastic bags on their staggering ventures, as if seeking to make their condition more horrible to test the limits of whatever might be watching. Through this humid squalor the boy ran and when he came to the town’s edge he suddenly understood a tremendous thirst in his burned throat and like a cruel mathematician counted each continued step as yards away from the assured point of rehydration.
It was there that he turned, on this obscure brink of nowhereville, giving a nod from where he knew not towards the old man sitting frizzled and filthbearded by the gas pump in the shade of the overhang. He gathered his momentum and headed for him.
When he realized he would not make it home without water he did not know. The sun flicked through the trees in cruel nauseating step with his stride and when he spat it was a thick congealed wad that made it halfway across his cheek and stuck to the burnt flesh puckered by sweat. In horrible daydreams he imagined great towering stone fountains with bubbling waterfalls spilling out into an iced brook of cold sports drink. The world faded in focus but finer images at random sharpened themselves in his mind: passing cars became traveling boxes of salvation with holier oils held in juice bottles and soda cups. No though came to him and no thing was seen by him outside of the perspective of water. He giddily entertained fiendish hypotheticals as a matter of idle entertainment: were he to know it would take five years from his life, would he still welcome that fire hydrant bursting open? If he would never again fall in love with a girl, would he still welcome the road transforming into a gushing river of Gatorade? The answer would be no. All he knew of death he knew in that moment yet still he understood the principle of sacrifice. At the point he had brought his body to there was no conscious decision of morals or principles but only a realization of what is what, and such is how the boy came to know himself.
It was as though he had no peripherals. Even as he came back down the road to his town on the narrow shoulder split from the dirt by a ragged edge of crumbling asphalt and the cars were riproaring by him with the hot stink of motoroil burning on a summer’s day still he knew not his distraction. Little girls selling lemonade offered him a cup free of charge. Give one to the sweaty boy, they giggled. Sprinklers fanning the lawns at the edge of town. Mexican landscapers passing coolers filled with iced liquids. Middleaged women by the more moderate homes womanning their own gardens and flicking a hose from the shade of the porch outwards. Of all this he saw and contemplated nothing and he staggered on.
He came to the neighborhood a tripping and squishing spectacle, his skin pale and sweat pruning his fingers and palms. Long red chafe marks marred his sides beneath his shoulders where his elbows passed in friction pumping these long miles.
The street to his home was a long alley now in his tunnel vision, the simple ranch houses only neutral colored blurs. There was a row of cedars paralleling the road which stood still and erect under the sun and provided spits of shade to this otherworldly figure.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear the shouts of children at play, the crack of a capgun and an uproar of commotion. A woman scolded her faulty oven from the cracks of a passing windowsill. A crowd of teenagers played basketball by a hoop down the street, the echo of the bouncing ball ricocheting off the hollow parts of roofs and walls nearby before losing itself in the willows and ivies beyond the houses. Expletives of domestic fortitude came his way from god knows where. All this superimposed, coming to his pounding skull in varying degrees of ultraclarity and obscurity, this other normal world of man that somehow still existed after all his trial.
Old Mario across the street may have said hello to him, may have waved with a furrow to his brow. The dribbling at the court ceased and had he known to feel many pairs of eyes on him he would have but he hardly cared. He sat by the garden and drank.
***
He had once read of the great Joan Benoit who had said she swore after every marathon that she would never do that again and yet each time there she was. To say of the boy that he empathized with the great would not be true. By the top step leading to his room his leg gave from him and he collapsed. He smiled to the carpet and there he lay prone with eyes titled like a madman till came the shrieking of the dinner horn.
Song of the Day: 'Flightless Bird, American Mouth', by Iron and Wine
The chicken potpie had been served into six exactly equal portions, and almost every plate reflected this unique mealtime brand of justice. Gentle protestations of no more, too much filled the dining space as each took their due, punctuated by a modest narrowing of the eyes and a shake of the head with a tired, fauxstretch-induced tilt back from the table. Every eatingplace echoed this habit save for the corner, where a plate had already been scraped clean before the man of the house had filled his beerglass.
For the praise of the ‘amighty, said Mr. Comfort.
What is it, deer?
Mrs. Comfort was dabbing at her unsullied dimples with a napkin.
Woodja take a look at Jack’s plate?
For the praise of the ‘amighty, said Mrs. Comfort. Well I don’t have enough food to even say he’s eaten with us.
There’s half the potpie left, said little blondehaired Sammy Comfort from the depths of her own missized wooden chair.
For the praise of the ‘amighty, the parentals muttered at shifting intervals, the little voice either going entirely unheard or coming from a place that was too far away to reach their ears.
Across the table from Jack was the oldest Comfort child of them all, old Daniel Comfort, who peered through blackrimmed spectacles at the iPhone in his right palm, thumb furiously working over the keys, while he held captive and aloft in his left the pieshovel dripping with gravy and the chickensauce.
Well, said Daniel Comfort from behind his spectacles. Apple’s on the move again.
Out the window behind old Daniel the treebranches were wavering light in the breeze and split the sunrays glittering in that star’s setting. The light cut a semicircle of shadow on the table and Jack could feel the apex of it envelope his head in its warmth. His gaze shifted freely between the upheld pieserver and the branch waving just beyond, the dance of the latter a cruel backdrop to the stillness of the former.
Deer, Mr. Comfort was saying. Have you seen what they did to that place off Archer?
Deer, I haven’t.
I mean old Wellington’s place. You know the one.
I think I do, deer.
There was no change of the position of old Daniel’s arms. Thus emerging from that technological Ovid –
Have you seen what DuPont did last week? I mean…
That place sure could use that show, said Mrs. Comfort. You know deer?
The man of the house took a moment to rip from his potpie laden fork and with a hearty swallow said something about needing to give that bastard Higgins a call about the gutters.
Did you hear me, deer?
What?
I said that place sure could use that show. You know the one. Where they go in and give it a fixup and all.
She twiddled her fingers in the air and cracked her wrists when she said a fixup and all in a motion of both carelessness and happily detached pre-eminence.
Whatsitcalled. Dreams of Your Home, or something.
Ah, said old Daniel, shifting in his seat. Ah-ah. So Meredith has finally Facebooked me. Ah-ah.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or - leveling his eyes on his mother - may I be
excused?
America’s Next Top Home, said Mr. Comfort through a Coors Light mustache. He patted his stomach and looked about with something amounting to a sly grin.
No, that’s not it…
I do wonder what she was waiting for, said old Daniel, using a shoulder to slide his glasses farther up his nose. The motion of his shifting figure blocked the window from view across the table.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or may I be excused?
Mama, said Sammy.
I wanna say – no, wait – Extreme Top Makeovers, is it?
What’s this now?
The man of the house had just finished his brief foray into sidelonging irrelevance and had returned with answers. What we should do, he said, is call up that bastard Higgins tonight. That way he’s getting the message first thing. Have him come take a look at the gutters later in the day.
Mama.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or may I be excused?
Mama.
What is it, sweetie-candle?
Jack. She nodded to her brother.
What is it, Jack honey?
May I be excused?
But we’ve just sat down for our family dinner, she said.
Thank you, he said. And he stood from his chair, kissed his sister on her forehead, and left through the front screen door with a tinny whine echoing his steps down the walk.
***
The air was rich with burnt charcoal and pine drifting on the cool breeze, tempered by the warming glow of the sun. It felt good on his neck which was cold and stiff from sitting for so long. He knew then that he would not be home for nightfall.
For a time he walked. He did not know how long. He walked until his legs felt loose again and his stomach was light and he remembered that he had on his running shorts underneath his jeans and without hesitating he stowed his jeans and his t-shirt in a bush by the side of the road and he began to run.
He ran down the tarpinched cement block and veered away to the other reaches of the town, staying upon the road and the letting the woods he frequented pass him by with a blush of gentle farewell, the hopes of home kissing their warrior away to a foreign battle. Sometimes he ran to go places and for that purpose only was he concretebound. Soon he realized he had found a place that he had not been ever and continued still. Sweat beaded down his collarbone, his chest, pooled in his feet which squished with each stride. He wore no watch, told the distance he’d come only by the level of burn in his legs and how much the dancing ape in his chest had subsisted.
He’d come through a stretch of developments and apartment complexes hidden between groves of trees too thick to invite bipedal exploration. His vision was made murky by the sweat and he peered from those clouded orbs into the greens to search for an opening. And when they did come or he imagined they came he turned his gaze away to the dirt freckled sidewalk and his worn footdrops upon it with regret for that was not the way onward.
There was a little town by the end of the trees and it was beaten well by both the sun and what those who moved prepossessed in better circles might know to call as this economic climate. Singlefloor square homes with cement porches and lawns littered with windblown trash were the vanguard of its outskirts. Sidestreets led to fenced properties whose identical layouts flanked one another and were differentiated only by the type of weeds which grew unkempt in that section of this lot of long forsaken aesthetics. People, when they moved about, did so strangely, in sweatshirts and jackets toting plastic bags on their staggering ventures, as if seeking to make their condition more horrible to test the limits of whatever might be watching. Through this humid squalor the boy ran and when he came to the town’s edge he suddenly understood a tremendous thirst in his burned throat and like a cruel mathematician counted each continued step as yards away from the assured point of rehydration.
It was there that he turned, on this obscure brink of nowhereville, giving a nod from where he knew not towards the old man sitting frizzled and filthbearded by the gas pump in the shade of the overhang. He gathered his momentum and headed for him.
When he realized he would not make it home without water he did not know. The sun flicked through the trees in cruel nauseating step with his stride and when he spat it was a thick congealed wad that made it halfway across his cheek and stuck to the burnt flesh puckered by sweat. In horrible daydreams he imagined great towering stone fountains with bubbling waterfalls spilling out into an iced brook of cold sports drink. The world faded in focus but finer images at random sharpened themselves in his mind: passing cars became traveling boxes of salvation with holier oils held in juice bottles and soda cups. No though came to him and no thing was seen by him outside of the perspective of water. He giddily entertained fiendish hypotheticals as a matter of idle entertainment: were he to know it would take five years from his life, would he still welcome that fire hydrant bursting open? If he would never again fall in love with a girl, would he still welcome the road transforming into a gushing river of Gatorade? The answer would be no. All he knew of death he knew in that moment yet still he understood the principle of sacrifice. At the point he had brought his body to there was no conscious decision of morals or principles but only a realization of what is what, and such is how the boy came to know himself.
It was as though he had no peripherals. Even as he came back down the road to his town on the narrow shoulder split from the dirt by a ragged edge of crumbling asphalt and the cars were riproaring by him with the hot stink of motoroil burning on a summer’s day still he knew not his distraction. Little girls selling lemonade offered him a cup free of charge. Give one to the sweaty boy, they giggled. Sprinklers fanning the lawns at the edge of town. Mexican landscapers passing coolers filled with iced liquids. Middleaged women by the more moderate homes womanning their own gardens and flicking a hose from the shade of the porch outwards. Of all this he saw and contemplated nothing and he staggered on.
He came to the neighborhood a tripping and squishing spectacle, his skin pale and sweat pruning his fingers and palms. Long red chafe marks marred his sides beneath his shoulders where his elbows passed in friction pumping these long miles.
The street to his home was a long alley now in his tunnel vision, the simple ranch houses only neutral colored blurs. There was a row of cedars paralleling the road which stood still and erect under the sun and provided spits of shade to this otherworldly figure.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear the shouts of children at play, the crack of a capgun and an uproar of commotion. A woman scolded her faulty oven from the cracks of a passing windowsill. A crowd of teenagers played basketball by a hoop down the street, the echo of the bouncing ball ricocheting off the hollow parts of roofs and walls nearby before losing itself in the willows and ivies beyond the houses. Expletives of domestic fortitude came his way from god knows where. All this superimposed, coming to his pounding skull in varying degrees of ultraclarity and obscurity, this other normal world of man that somehow still existed after all his trial.
Old Mario across the street may have said hello to him, may have waved with a furrow to his brow. The dribbling at the court ceased and had he known to feel many pairs of eyes on him he would have but he hardly cared. He sat by the garden and drank.
***
He had once read of the great Joan Benoit who had said she swore after every marathon that she would never do that again and yet each time there she was. To say of the boy that he empathized with the great would not be true. By the top step leading to his room his leg gave from him and he collapsed. He smiled to the carpet and there he lay prone with eyes titled like a madman till came the shrieking of the dinner horn.
Song of the Day: 'Flightless Bird, American Mouth', by Iron and Wine
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Science versus Romance
I don’t like to use the word hate, as a matter of personal principle. It makes me disgusted with myself. Yet sometimes you just develop certain prejudices, fair though they may be, no matter how hard you try.
Example: I hate vacuums, the Chinese government (for so many reasons), cartoons, Sarah Palin, and numbers.
Vacuums – understandable, you are probably saying to yourself right now, and I appreciate your support. I agree with you, who likes vacuums? No one interested in being happy, that’s who.
I assume the Chinese government probably likes itself fairly well, or at least parts of itself like itself, but I wouldn’t think it’s hazardous to assume anyone else does, aside from bizarre Satanic cults interested in the spoiling of the Olympics and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese.
Cartoons? Well, that’s kind of an unrelated argument.
But numbers - I just might hate numbers more than anything on this list, with the possible exception of vacuums. Numbers are the cold byproduct of the pisspoor attempts by society to rationalize and organize itself. Numbers lead to scientific progress, which borders on that list of things I hate – particularly when ‘scientific’ is blindly used as an adjective to justify literally anything (let’s see, things that count as ‘progress’: industrial waste, the atomic bomb, cloning of full human beings like in Moon, the perfection of handguns and other devices designed for the sole purpose of ending another person’s life, online report cards, and the perpetuation of a culture of instant gratification which thereby spreads severe lethargy with the effortlessness of, let’s say, a Mad Cow Disease, or a Foot and Mouth Disease. Your preference.
There are a lot of things and a lot of people which you can blame for those little horrors, but to me it comes down to numbers. Motivated, also, perhaps by a vicious desire to avenge those tortured and wasted hours of my youth with my nose buried in a geometry textbook.
I realize now, looking back on high school, middle school, even college, that my epic struggles in Physics and Calculus were not solely the byproduct of my lack of ability. Something deeper lurked in my hatred, one of those things that you always know about but cannot quite put into words, something defined by emotion and gut instinct more than organized communication or logic. But now I think I have a grasp of what it was: numbers were just so irrelevant, just so antithetical, to what I wanted the world to be and to what I wanted myself to be, that to spend so much time seemed such a waste.
It’d be like if Jesus had gone to an ITT class over at the temple, straightaway after woodworking. Just ain’t happening.
Numbers not only take away from a focus on more relevant topics of study, they guide us into the same line of thinking which has caused immeasurable suffering in our world. Specifically, I mean scientific ‘progress’, as in what Kurt Vonnegut spent his whole life trying to curtail, time and time again.
To justify the death of numbers, it is only fair to give them a farewell by noting one of their positive upsides: statistics. Without statistics we could not measure the harm which numbers have done. Before numbers came to places like Africa, where a large portion of the world’s suffering occurs today, life was much better. Imperialism, colonialism, and missionaries were the carriers of this number-born disease just like they were the carriers of so many other city-borne plagues, except this one - the plague of numbers, more commonly known as unthinkable suffering, widespread poverty, genocide, persecution based on race and religion - has no known scientific or medical or numerical-borne cure.
Popular misconceptions abound when it comes the history of the impoverished in the world. Starvation, disease, dehydration, and unthinkable urban suffering and decay as know it today did not exist on this planet until roughly four hundred years ago. Exceptions can be made to the romantic view of primitive cultures: yes, they fought wars, yes, their environmental practices were not always perfectly in balance with the land. But overall – as a massive generalization – tribes, rural communities, nomadic nations, were without the ‘benefits’ of scientific progress, and therefore, they were without all the unspeakable numerical horrors which accompanied European expansion.
Simple, rural, tribal societies all over the world were plunged into these horrors in the wake of the success of numbers as they were forced to live unnatural lives suddenly based on capitalistic, materialistic ambition instead of personal happiness and survival. Massive metropolises began to form. Resources were not available to provide for everyone. In these unnatural conditions, squished together by colonials impressing upon them a new way of life, their populations skyrocketed. The system of capitalism relies upon the suffering of many for the success of the rest. In what became known as the third world – places not wealthy enough to successfully implement this numerical plan – justice and happiness slipped away together, back to the mountain, to the plain, to the river from which they were borne.
It is hard for most to imagine a life without technology and luxurious creature comforts at every turn. Repulsive, even, to those who have been bred to be lazy. Yet the benefits of a simple life are of a far deeper value. To live as we were meant to live, communities driven by face to face contact, nourishment provided by a brotherhood and sisterhood of trusting labor, capitalistic ambition replaced by the thrill of being alive, of tearing through the wild jungle in search of red meat, of feeling the satisfaction of physically providing for your friends and family, of using your life energies to truly help a society thrive.
Numbers cause our lives to be wasted on nonsense. The universe has given us one chance at existence, and yet people see fit to spend those precious seconds quibbling about the size of their cars and debating accounting technique while living vicariously through reality television and slowly oozing away their precious life-fluids to the sands of time. And now, today, heartfelt efforts are made by this numbers world to ‘save’ the poor. Imperialists, colonists, may not have as significant of a role to play – but missionaries and ‘volunteers’ are still dogooding their way across the globe, in a largely genuine (to their credit) effort to help those who have been afflicted by four hundred years of scientific progress. “It is time for us to consider that our way of life is not alive enough to be shared,” Ivan Illich famously said in his speech ‘To Hell with Good Intentions’, in which he controversially lambasted America’s volunteer corps.
What it comes down to is a shifting paradigm, a changing of what we see as ‘development.’ We can complain all we want about ‘greening’ society, about painting our Earthships with ‘sustainable’ paint and toting around copies of An Inconvenient Truth everywhere we go – but that is not going to really change anything. To truly solve the problems our world faces we need to think outside of accepted paradigm. A market based society (world, even) seeks market based solutions for its issues. Money is carelessly thrown at third world countries. Grieving ‘first world’ Christians satisfy the slight ache in their heart by donating a few hundred dollars a year. Yet these are problems which can only be resolved by the freeing of minds. Dollars are part of the problem, thus they cannot heal the problem – they serve as a band-aid at best, and as a comforting thought to capitalist consciences worldwide, at worst.
And we are left with numbers, figures, which are truly horrifying, which we are largely ignorant of, and which most of us will see, shake our heads sadly at, and turn the other way, because we feel powerless. But we have looked away for too long. How can you in good conscience go on living without considering the massive ethical problems which these numbers pose? It is not just time for the world to wake up to these problems – awareness is but the first step in what must be a two-part process. It is time to radically change the way we live, or die trying, and I need no further proof:
1/3 (percentage of people in the world that are under-fed according to the World Health Organization)
1/3 (percentage of people in the world that are starving according to the World Health Organization)
1/3 (percentage of annual deaths – roughly 18,000,000 people a year and 50,000 per day – due to poverty related causes, according to the World Health Organization)
19,500 – ~400,000 (present number of civilian deaths in Sudan’s Darfur region incurred by the Chinese-sponsored Janjaweed militia, according to various international estimations)
1,000,000 (number of Rwandans murdered under the Hutu Power Ideology – an inflammatory, prejudicial, fear-mongering policy first sponsored by the Belgian government during occupation - during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, according to various international projections)
270,000,000 (number of deaths as a result of poverty since 1990 – mostly women and children – according to the World Health Organization)
500,000,000 (number of people in Asian, African, and Latin American countries living today in what the World Bank calls “absolute poverty”).
I write this last sentence, only so that numbers do not have the final word.
Song of the Day: Only fair to give credit to Rilo Kiley for the title.
Example: I hate vacuums, the Chinese government (for so many reasons), cartoons, Sarah Palin, and numbers.
Vacuums – understandable, you are probably saying to yourself right now, and I appreciate your support. I agree with you, who likes vacuums? No one interested in being happy, that’s who.
I assume the Chinese government probably likes itself fairly well, or at least parts of itself like itself, but I wouldn’t think it’s hazardous to assume anyone else does, aside from bizarre Satanic cults interested in the spoiling of the Olympics and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese.
Cartoons? Well, that’s kind of an unrelated argument.
But numbers - I just might hate numbers more than anything on this list, with the possible exception of vacuums. Numbers are the cold byproduct of the pisspoor attempts by society to rationalize and organize itself. Numbers lead to scientific progress, which borders on that list of things I hate – particularly when ‘scientific’ is blindly used as an adjective to justify literally anything (let’s see, things that count as ‘progress’: industrial waste, the atomic bomb, cloning of full human beings like in Moon, the perfection of handguns and other devices designed for the sole purpose of ending another person’s life, online report cards, and the perpetuation of a culture of instant gratification which thereby spreads severe lethargy with the effortlessness of, let’s say, a Mad Cow Disease, or a Foot and Mouth Disease. Your preference.
There are a lot of things and a lot of people which you can blame for those little horrors, but to me it comes down to numbers. Motivated, also, perhaps by a vicious desire to avenge those tortured and wasted hours of my youth with my nose buried in a geometry textbook.
I realize now, looking back on high school, middle school, even college, that my epic struggles in Physics and Calculus were not solely the byproduct of my lack of ability. Something deeper lurked in my hatred, one of those things that you always know about but cannot quite put into words, something defined by emotion and gut instinct more than organized communication or logic. But now I think I have a grasp of what it was: numbers were just so irrelevant, just so antithetical, to what I wanted the world to be and to what I wanted myself to be, that to spend so much time seemed such a waste.
It’d be like if Jesus had gone to an ITT class over at the temple, straightaway after woodworking. Just ain’t happening.
Numbers not only take away from a focus on more relevant topics of study, they guide us into the same line of thinking which has caused immeasurable suffering in our world. Specifically, I mean scientific ‘progress’, as in what Kurt Vonnegut spent his whole life trying to curtail, time and time again.
To justify the death of numbers, it is only fair to give them a farewell by noting one of their positive upsides: statistics. Without statistics we could not measure the harm which numbers have done. Before numbers came to places like Africa, where a large portion of the world’s suffering occurs today, life was much better. Imperialism, colonialism, and missionaries were the carriers of this number-born disease just like they were the carriers of so many other city-borne plagues, except this one - the plague of numbers, more commonly known as unthinkable suffering, widespread poverty, genocide, persecution based on race and religion - has no known scientific or medical or numerical-borne cure.
Popular misconceptions abound when it comes the history of the impoverished in the world. Starvation, disease, dehydration, and unthinkable urban suffering and decay as know it today did not exist on this planet until roughly four hundred years ago. Exceptions can be made to the romantic view of primitive cultures: yes, they fought wars, yes, their environmental practices were not always perfectly in balance with the land. But overall – as a massive generalization – tribes, rural communities, nomadic nations, were without the ‘benefits’ of scientific progress, and therefore, they were without all the unspeakable numerical horrors which accompanied European expansion.
Simple, rural, tribal societies all over the world were plunged into these horrors in the wake of the success of numbers as they were forced to live unnatural lives suddenly based on capitalistic, materialistic ambition instead of personal happiness and survival. Massive metropolises began to form. Resources were not available to provide for everyone. In these unnatural conditions, squished together by colonials impressing upon them a new way of life, their populations skyrocketed. The system of capitalism relies upon the suffering of many for the success of the rest. In what became known as the third world – places not wealthy enough to successfully implement this numerical plan – justice and happiness slipped away together, back to the mountain, to the plain, to the river from which they were borne.
It is hard for most to imagine a life without technology and luxurious creature comforts at every turn. Repulsive, even, to those who have been bred to be lazy. Yet the benefits of a simple life are of a far deeper value. To live as we were meant to live, communities driven by face to face contact, nourishment provided by a brotherhood and sisterhood of trusting labor, capitalistic ambition replaced by the thrill of being alive, of tearing through the wild jungle in search of red meat, of feeling the satisfaction of physically providing for your friends and family, of using your life energies to truly help a society thrive.
Numbers cause our lives to be wasted on nonsense. The universe has given us one chance at existence, and yet people see fit to spend those precious seconds quibbling about the size of their cars and debating accounting technique while living vicariously through reality television and slowly oozing away their precious life-fluids to the sands of time. And now, today, heartfelt efforts are made by this numbers world to ‘save’ the poor. Imperialists, colonists, may not have as significant of a role to play – but missionaries and ‘volunteers’ are still dogooding their way across the globe, in a largely genuine (to their credit) effort to help those who have been afflicted by four hundred years of scientific progress. “It is time for us to consider that our way of life is not alive enough to be shared,” Ivan Illich famously said in his speech ‘To Hell with Good Intentions’, in which he controversially lambasted America’s volunteer corps.
What it comes down to is a shifting paradigm, a changing of what we see as ‘development.’ We can complain all we want about ‘greening’ society, about painting our Earthships with ‘sustainable’ paint and toting around copies of An Inconvenient Truth everywhere we go – but that is not going to really change anything. To truly solve the problems our world faces we need to think outside of accepted paradigm. A market based society (world, even) seeks market based solutions for its issues. Money is carelessly thrown at third world countries. Grieving ‘first world’ Christians satisfy the slight ache in their heart by donating a few hundred dollars a year. Yet these are problems which can only be resolved by the freeing of minds. Dollars are part of the problem, thus they cannot heal the problem – they serve as a band-aid at best, and as a comforting thought to capitalist consciences worldwide, at worst.
And we are left with numbers, figures, which are truly horrifying, which we are largely ignorant of, and which most of us will see, shake our heads sadly at, and turn the other way, because we feel powerless. But we have looked away for too long. How can you in good conscience go on living without considering the massive ethical problems which these numbers pose? It is not just time for the world to wake up to these problems – awareness is but the first step in what must be a two-part process. It is time to radically change the way we live, or die trying, and I need no further proof:
1/3 (percentage of people in the world that are under-fed according to the World Health Organization)
1/3 (percentage of people in the world that are starving according to the World Health Organization)
1/3 (percentage of annual deaths – roughly 18,000,000 people a year and 50,000 per day – due to poverty related causes, according to the World Health Organization)
19,500 – ~400,000 (present number of civilian deaths in Sudan’s Darfur region incurred by the Chinese-sponsored Janjaweed militia, according to various international estimations)
1,000,000 (number of Rwandans murdered under the Hutu Power Ideology – an inflammatory, prejudicial, fear-mongering policy first sponsored by the Belgian government during occupation - during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, according to various international projections)
270,000,000 (number of deaths as a result of poverty since 1990 – mostly women and children – according to the World Health Organization)
500,000,000 (number of people in Asian, African, and Latin American countries living today in what the World Bank calls “absolute poverty”).
I write this last sentence, only so that numbers do not have the final word.
Song of the Day: Only fair to give credit to Rilo Kiley for the title.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Athlete
Down by the old courts whenever a good wind picked up the leaves would scatter about like flurries, paperthin and colored melancholic pastels of golden browns and greens. There were cracks in the cement, bits of grass sprouting through, and the leaves would dance above them, never touching. Spraypainted graffiti marred the once stainless black tar; crude images had been poorly splashed against the backboards, ruining the stately pastoral image of trees in bloom rimming the lake beyond. The nets had been torn completely on one end, where the mesh lay in a dirtied heap by the sideline, and partially at the other end, so that what had once hung straight and true now dangled like any leaf dying in the postautumnal freeze. Staring at the hoop for too long Girard could hear in his ears the swoosh that his fading jumper had made so many times on that net, but it was wrong, lacking somehow – empty of meaning. No chill ran down his back, and when he shut his eyes he did not see the board the way it once was, the way it looked when you lied down on your back between games and saw it practically luminescent against a cloudless summer sky.
Sometimes he would hold his hands by his eyes to shield the sun and all he could see in his vision would be the basketball, the hoop, the blueness. As if nothing else existed. As if his universe contained exactly that: the things of his forming. The world that he knew, cut away from the one which he did not in a dreamlike specter of solitude.
***
When he was a boy the city kids would call him the White Horse. White because he was white and horse because he could play all day without tiring, like a horse. For pickup games Girard would take the NJ Transit over the bridge and into the city.
Any of the parks along Arch or Spring Garden would always be overcrowded if you went during the right time of day, if you knew the right kind of people. Summer afternoons on Spring Garden, crowds massing in old lots, sweatshirts tossed over the fences, water bottles lining the edge of the courts – these were his proving grounds. Only Girard never thought of them that way. He spent all of his twenty dollar a month allowance on bus tickets, just so that he could play with these boys.
Girard slowly earned the respect of the city kids. He made friends with the best player on Spring Garden, a boy named Payden. “My man the White Hizzorse, he would always say, and they would play and Girard would always win. But Payden kept coming back. Many didn’t. And he became better. And so did Girard.
“The hell don’t you play at school for?” Payden asked him once when they were walking down the street after a game of twenty-one.
“Just don’t,” Girard said.
Sometimes he would hold his hands by his eyes to shield the sun and all he could see in his vision would be the basketball, the hoop, the blueness. As if nothing else existed. As if his universe contained exactly that: the things of his forming. The world that he knew, cut away from the one which he did not in a dreamlike specter of solitude.
***
When he was a boy the city kids would call him the White Horse. White because he was white and horse because he could play all day without tiring, like a horse. For pickup games Girard would take the NJ Transit over the bridge and into the city.
Any of the parks along Arch or Spring Garden would always be overcrowded if you went during the right time of day, if you knew the right kind of people. Summer afternoons on Spring Garden, crowds massing in old lots, sweatshirts tossed over the fences, water bottles lining the edge of the courts – these were his proving grounds. Only Girard never thought of them that way. He spent all of his twenty dollar a month allowance on bus tickets, just so that he could play with these boys.
Girard slowly earned the respect of the city kids. He made friends with the best player on Spring Garden, a boy named Payden. “My man the White Hizzorse, he would always say, and they would play and Girard would always win. But Payden kept coming back. Many didn’t. And he became better. And so did Girard.
“The hell don’t you play at school for?” Payden asked him once when they were walking down the street after a game of twenty-one.
“Just don’t,” Girard said.
“Can’t take practice?”
“That ain’t it,” he said, firing the ball off the brick siding of a convenience store.
“Yo he’s like Iverson, dog,” chimed in Payden’s brother Chris. “Practice, mayun, I’m talkin’ ‘bout practice…”
“Practice isn’t it,” Girard said again, and maybe he grinned, and that’s all he would say, “not a game, not a game” chorusing the streets long after.
What Girard had which most of the boys he played with did not was patience. Patience to stand and shoot three-pointers from the same spot until he drained a dozen in a row. Patience to run full loops of the court just to gain a half a foot with which to take a clear jumper. Patience to wait for an opponent to make a mistake on offense (he almost always did) instead of forcing one. Where the patience came from Girard did not exactly know, and only vaguely recognized its existence himself. He only knew that regardless of the speed of some of these incredibly coordinated boys, they lost interest quickly – he knew how to see each defender’s weakness and exploit it thoroughly. More often than not, that weakness was impatience. Girard lived for that instant when he could read defeat in the face of an opponent; the sagging of the eyes, the laziness of limbs following through on motions – and in a gesture of both triumph and gentle admonition drain a loping fadeaway.
***
Girard liked to come back here now, to these courts. He never played, never brought a basketball with him. Did he even have a ball anymore? He couldn’t remember. Maybe. Maybe, he did. There was that old red and yellow one Rick’d given him for Christmas one year (“Merry Christmas, dude.”) No, that had been run over walking home from school senior year.
He stood up, not bothering to brush himself off, patches of dirt and sediment clinging to his blue jeans, his flannel shirt, as he wandered down through the trees towards the lake. The leaves crunched beneath his feet into the tall and waving grasses. As he descended the light incline he could see over the lakeside bushes, the gusts of wind shaking the multicolored trees on the opposite bank free of their holdings. The water churned lightly in disturbance. He glanced down to the dock, distantly remembering the bass he’d caught just where an old woman was now standing. He couldn’t remember what it looked like – only its fine-slippery finish, smooth like a buttered cookie sheet, the way its belly felt when he ran his finger down it before releasing it back to the muddy shallows. What else had happened? he wondered. Where was I then? But he could not remember.
The old woman was hunched over her cane, distributing bits of bread to a flock of collected geese, honking their excitement from across the water as they rushed to the source. Somewhere in the back of his mind he balanced the visceral gratification of providing for another living thing against the all too natural consequences. That old woman would die – in a week, a month, even ten years from now – and the geese would have no recourse, no way to get the food to which they had become accustomed. Their bellies would violently protest as they moved to readjust to the constant hunger inherent in a wild life. Those that did not die would suffer immeasurably.
He angled himself away.
He wandered down toward the lake and towards the thicket of woods, not just away from the old woman but away from the courts and the Y and the apartment complex and all the buildings that he could see. There was a fresh woodchip path paralleling the lake that had not been there in his boyhood, or at least he could not place it, and he avoided it instinctively, walking through the itchy highgrass and the splotches of creek-mud that suctioned his shoes as he strode forward. The gnats buzzed the discolored shallows, lent their hymn to the remorseful lapping of a tired current against the murky shores. Girard’s sucking footsteps made no noise, left no print. The grasses folded back over the earth where an imprint should have been. The hymn beat on steady and slow, renewing itself with the tide. Whether it swallowed the sound of his motion, he did not know. He knew only what he could hear and what he could not hear. Thus spake the lakeside orchestra.
***
What was it, he sometimes idly wondered; was it the way the ball could arc so neatly, so mathematically sublime – drawing a semicircle straight out of the pages of a Geometry textbook - from his open palm, and across the sky, and through the net? Was it the sound – the noiseless noise that gave Nike a logo, that made children stand in the same spot beneath the backboard for hours, attempting to replicate what they saw on television, or in the park that one Thursday after school? Maybe it was a sense of power, of possibility – of knowing you can control and produce something of great beauty, if you only tried hard enough, if only you were willing to feel the pain that came with the pleasure of anything worthwhile.
Fun never did it for Girard; the word was lacking, too childish, shallow. Fun was going to the zoo to see the orangutans. Fun was lazing in the ocean on a hot midsummer’s day, drinking Coke, throwing Frisbee. Fun was wandering barefoot down the boardwalk, playing in the arcades, eating pizza and funnel cake, riding the Tilt-a-Whirl. Fun was hanging out with friends, watching a movie with family, meeting new people, drinking hot chocolate, wrestling with a dog, organizing baseball cards, entertaining simple new pastimes and possibilities about life…
***
Girard was seventeen and a senior in high school the first night he could feel it slipping and her name was Tracey Ellis. She was captain of the tennis team and she was a tall and angular blur of green eyes and white-toothed smiles. When she was excited (like anytime in History class, Girard had noted sophomore year), she would arch her chin up and pull her lips back and raise her eyebrows so that the muscles in her neck pressed against her golden skin. Ouch, he had thought then.
It was a cold October night and Girard had borrowed his parents’ car to take Tracey and his best friend Rick Mallory to the high school football game against Cecilbrook. The wind was gusting a harvest chill; the night smelled of burnt leaves and cooking hot chocolate. An aura of liquor loomed in the deeper patches of fans. Cecilbrook was winning very much.
At halftime he went with Tray to get hot cocoa and a hot dog from the concessions under the stadium. They walked side by side down the steps, overlooking the muddy field and the mist of rain floating in the shadow of the stadium lights. He held her hand, she told him she loved him. He leaned over and kissed her warmly on the lips. It was one of those nights, he thought, that can only be warm if you have the right kind of girl and you kiss her the right kind of way, and Girard had the girl and he knew exactly how to kiss her.
“My man the Whiiite Hiizzorse,” came a voice. “Check it.”
Girard spun. It was the boys from Spring Garden, Payden and Chris with a pair of their friends, decked out in Cecilbrook garb.
“You never told me your boys sucked so bad,” Payden said, cackling.
“You never told me you went to Cecilbrook High,” Girard returned lamely, grinning, handshaking and half-hugging all of them.
“We’re headin’ out to play on your court right now,” Chris said. “By the lake. You down, right?”
“Uhh,” Girard said. He awkwardly put his arm around Tracey’s waist. He knew it was a futile gesture: he did it anyway.
“Aww shit,” Payden cackled again, sizing Tracey up. “Your homegirl can come.”
“Yeah I can come,” Tracey said, beaming. “I’ve never seen you play.”
***
Over the heads of the trees, down a valley of bushes through which ran a trickling creek, over the flat surface of a baseball diamond marred by its fall incarnation of a soccer field, the stadium lights played dimly over the old court. The lake behind the forest was invisible, enshrouded in black by the trees in the night, ripples echoing faintly in their lapping on the far shores.
It was not pretty, the game they played that night. Rick was his team-mate, and Rick was not very good. Payden was not as good as he once had been. Something was gone from his boyishness, from his speed. Girard was quick and efficient, pointed with his shots and merciless with his hustle. His focus never left the thinly lit patch of cement at the feet of his opponents. His feet never stopped moving, crossing behind one another and pouncing agile at just the right moments with the trim buoyancy of a cat.
When it was over the others clapped him on the back, laughing amongst themselves about something unrelated, suffusing themselves effortlessly from the game as they wandered down the dark street in hooded sweatshirts, doing lazy crossovers. Rick, anxious not to miss the third quarter, ran ahead back to the stadium. Girard was left then standing, slightly meekish – sweat blanketing him thickly and mixing with the mist to give his skin a glowing sheen.
“What the hell was that?” Tracey asked from her perch on a courtside log.
Girard sat down crosslegged at center court, draping his longsleeve over the arch in his neck.
“What the hell was what?” he feigned good-naturedly, pretending to stretch. He knew he should have been upset with himself for giving in so easily, for allowing this clash of his two lives, for not doing something drastic like just holding back in the game a little, or just running away the instant he first saw them, back out of the gate to the stands and down through the parking lot back to his home. The second thought he’d briefly entertained – there was rarely a time where turning on his heel and sprinting as hard as he could in the opposite direction did not hold a tremendous appeal - the first, he had not.
But now he could hardly hold back a grin, a pleasant feeling of well being coming over him as he lay back on the cold, wet pavement. Otherwise innocuous happenstances gave him pleasure; he observed his surroundings from a new light, as though he were seeing them now through a lens that had been absent an hour before. How nicely the clouds lined up in the sky, he thought. How good this pair of jeans has been to me.
Bits of mud were seeping through the strands of his hair, sticking to his skull.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were Michael Goddamn Jordan?”
He glanced over to her, her profile sideways from his prone posture, flecks of gold spotting her hair against the faded light above the trees.
“I’d rather be Grant Goddamn Hill or Christian Goddamn Laettner,” he said. “But O.K.”
She was silent for a moment at this – she was not a Duke fan. From his position at center court he could see her lip furling in confusion at the brief derailment before she longreached it back on course.
“Why don’t you go out for the team?” she asked. He spoke the words with her under his breath, a subtlety she did not miss.
“Well?”
“Just don’t,” he said.
“I mean that was half of Cecilbrook’s varsity right there,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him at all. “If I’m remembering last year right. I mean you’d be good for the school. The school stunk last year.”
“I know,” he said.
“How are you just blowing this off, I mean how are you just sitting there like that, after all that just happened, you have to –”
But Girard stood up, moved swiftly over the blacktop with long strides, went to her on the log and wrapped his arms around her. He had an acute awareness of the moment, of the person he dealt with; knew that there would be a limited amount of times in her life that Tray would ever see that kind of basketball – knew too that there would a limited amount of times when he could silence an irate woman with nothing more than an embrace – and taking on half a high school varsity team all but on his own in a game of half-court was probably one of those times. Mixed in was no small amount of his desire to bask in the quiet of an hour of basketball with the girl, to know what it was to sit back and beat a complete peace, a complete stasis of mind and body; to float unhindered, unbothered, even if for only those few moments.
Long after the sweat had dried on his chest and sent shivers down his back with the gusting breeze, long after the crickets had quieted themselves in the nearby bush and the lights of the stadium distant had begun to dim and the cheers emanating from them ceased; long after that he felt, offering a gentle affirmation, her fingers on the back of his head, holding him in return.
***
Those walks home walks home from the city were always the best time of day. There was nothing like knowing that he had loosed that dancing nymph from his oversoul, that giddy restlessness which never ceased to make his calmer, deskbound hours a trial. When the sun was setting over the city the air would grow cooler, crisp, the clouds purpling in their molding with the night, the sweat crusting the dirt to the side of his face as it dried. Autumn would be best. Cries of children heading home punctuating the dusk. He would let his thoughts wander, then. He would inspect the happiness inside of him with a happy curiosity, like a nutty professor waking up in a laboratory of his own making. What if God had not made the Earth, but only found it? Like a stumbling supernatural deity wandering the great abyss. Hey, here’s a great blue and green ball, He must have said, and oh how fun it could be play with it. What delightful trickery must lie, He must have thought, in the mastery of its movements.
***
Girard was in fifth grade at the Catholic school the day he walked over to the rectory to see Sister Joanne. It was a cold winter afternoon just before Christmas, on one of those days of the year where there is almost no sunlight left once school is over. He even thought he could see the sun setting as he hurried from his last class, splashes of yellow tinging the cloudedges over the tops of the chapel and the big apartments rising through the trees beyond.
The lawn of the rectory was hard and cold, soil hardened by the freezing temperatures, the cement walkway smooth and graywhite leading up to the old wooden arches by the door. It was going to snow that night, Girard reflected. There could even be flurries on the ground by the time he came back outside again. Next time I see you, ground, he said, you will be covered in white. This made him happy, happy in the way that Fridays would make him happy when they came.
Father Farraday greeted him at the door, led him through the old foyer and into Sister Joanne’s office, which was so tidy to the extent that it suggested a desperation to be anything otherwise. There was that distinct old-person smell in the air – thinking back in later years, that would always be what Girard remembered the most. The smell not of death but of things that must be undertaken very slowly, very politely, very tidily.
Father Farraday left with a smile, shutting the door on the way out. Sister Joanne was kneeling behind her desk praying with her rosary beads, and turned to see him when he entered. She possessed a broad, open, oval face, a face that suggested illimitable kindliness. When he had first met Sister Joanne Girard had subconsciously assumed this feature to indicate some inner warmth of spirit, some profound and encompassing pleasantness, the type that a part of him automatically struggled to associate with all religious people. Now that he knew her, he knew this was not true. Now her face was just fat. What had seemed oval and pleasant before was now hanging jowl-flesh. Some people are born with a smile on their face not because they are smiling, but because their genetics have defined their facial muscular structure in such a way that forces the corners of their lips at an upward angle. Appearance had nothing to do with personality, Girard was discovering, contrary to a myth that seemed to permeate the air he breathed.
“So,” Sister Joanne said, seating him across the desk in a plush chair. “Did you wish to talk about your grades this quarter past?”
She looked at him in a way that made him feel guilty for something of which the details he did not know.
“No.”
“I see. Did you wish to speak to me about confirmation?”
“No, Sister. It’s about…is church supposed to be fun?” Girard sighed with relief as he said it, as if dropping a heavy load.
“Fun in what way?”
“Just fun.”
“Well, I suppose it depends what your understanding of what ‘fun’ is, Girard. In a classic sense, yes. The worship of our Creator fills us with His boundless love. Doesn’t that sound fun to you?”
Girard turned red. He did not know what to say, and felt profoundly uncomfortable. His heart was hammering against his ribcage.
“What I mean to ask,” he said, after an agonizing interim of silence, “Is that is it bad if I am not having fun in church?”
“Do not get me wrong,” Sister Joanne said. “There is a certain…fineness, to understanding the mysteries of the Holy Trinity. A certain…subtlety. When in proper contemplation of Gospel truths, you should be filled with a lightness of being. A massive weight is being released from your shoulders, you understand. You are being graced with the presence of God. Exactly what is happening is by its very definition indefinable. Do you see? You can only know it when you see it.”
“Have you seen it?” Girard asked.
“Yes, I have. I see God in everyday life. I see Him in the arrangement of spring flowers in bloom. I see Him when I close my eyes after I get up from praying the rosary and my joints ache. I see Him…Girard? Is that helpful to you? Girard? Girard, where you are going? Girard!”
But Girard was gone, out of the office, down the hall, and out into the grey night, tearing across the snowless lawn and into the lamplit streets, still-mittened hands pumping, the ball in his backpack flopping up and down, up and down, in tune to his bouncy stride.
And Sister Joanne, bearing a frowning smile of almost comical contradiction, shut her office door with not a small amount of muttered generalities regarding the younger generations, and such, and resumed attending to her beads.
***
He’d read a book about music once. One that he’d found in the library, about music and how it didn’t really belong to anyone, and how the whole world wasjust kind of an open orchestra, and it was just silly to think that people could actually buy and sell it. And there were these people – art professors, music teachers, homeless accordion players, etcetera– and what they all said was that it had always been there. The music. From the beginning. Like anything else. No one was creating anything. They’re all just listening really hard. They’re channeling something ancient. Something as old as mankind. Older, even. Older than the Earth. Something that has always been there. Something that was written in the way the universe was made. And what they did was just seek it out. They pictured music as being on this different frequency – surrounding the universe in its every movement. What the best musicians were able to do was relay that frequency. The best musicians were just able to see something which the rest of us could not. The lesser musicians were just replaying something that had already been found.
That was the whole thing of it, they said, was that it was never creation, music. It was discovery.
Kind of like what religious people might think of as God.
***
Once she had cornered him, after the season opener against Cecilbrook. The score had been ninety-four to twenty-seven, in favor of Cecilbrook. Payden Atkins was game M.V.P. with nineteen points, eleven assists, and eleven steals for the triple-double. She had watched from the first row of the stands. Girard was never, for his part, at any point inside of the gymnasium.
She walked to his home, he was reading Russian literature on the sofa with his parents. This was how he liked to think of it. She smiled at his mother who let her in and gave her tea in the dining room. She was wearing a blue tanktop; a sheen of sweat from the strangely hot December night made her shoulderblades glisten attractively. He led her away and into the kitchen, her all the while holding the teacup ceremoniously between parted lips, steam rising over the bridge of her nose, smoking over her pale forehead.
“What’s this Dostoevsky shit you’re reading?” she said, motioning to the book at his side, his index finger marking his place, the pages folded over between his thumb and pinkie.
“It’s called Brothers Karamazov,” he said.
“We were only supposed to read Crime and Punishment,” she said, accusatorily.
“I know what we were supposed to do,” he said, grabbing her roughly by the arm and pulling her farther into the kitchen.
He watched her with some satisfaction as the color went from her cheeks and she turned her eyes away. He never was severe with her – for better and for worse – and on the rare occasions that he was, she knew to pay attention. She recovered fairly quickly, though, pulling her arm back to her side.
“Guess where I just was?” she said, her eyes brimming with that assured glittering of the enlightened.
“The library?”
“Yes. I wear a tanktop to the library in December.” When Girard pictured her words – as his imagination had a restless, inexplicable habit of doing – they were icicles, sharp, crystalline, beautifully and wickedly harsh, with chipped edges dangling precariously in an Arctic mist.
“I was at the stupid basketball game,” she said. Ya wanna know who won?”
“Tray.”
“Cecilbrook did. Ya wanna know the stupid score?”
“Tray, c’mon now. Listen to me.”
“Ninety-four to twenty-seven.”
“Okay. No it wasn’t.”
“The goddamn hell it wasn’t. Ya wanna know who the stupid M.V.P. of the stupid game was?”
“Ogilby,” he said the name of his classmate looking away.
“No, it wasn’t that gangletron 2000 Ogilby. It was that kid Atkins. Payden goddamn Atkins. That’s who it was. He had a goddamn double-triple.”
“Triple-double, but…” he said, offhand.
“I don’t care what the hell the technical term is,” she said. “The score would’ve been closer if it was one on five. Jesus, Girard, for all I know you can beat all five of them.”
“I don’t know,” he said seriously. “They’ve got that real lanky bastard of a power forward. Some kind of 6’6 lanky bastard. They’re whole defensive shtick is to double him up on the best shooter.”
“They’d be fiving up on you, so I don’t even see how that comment is relevant. But that’s not the point. The point is – the point is, it’s embarrassing.”
“Since when do you care about school pride so much?”
“I don’t,” she said. “I care about you that much. I care about you just sitting here reading your book. I care about you waiting for me to be done with tennis practice every day for two hours by shooting hoops, and nothing ever coming of it.”
“What makes you think,” he said very quietly, “That nothing is coming of it?”
She looked at him dead on, the color going again from her face, the flame lingering in her eye.
“You could be great,” she said.
“Great! Hah!” he gave a horrible bellow of a laugh, the echo of a sentiment which it was plainly obvious he did not feel. “The pursuit of ‘great’ is what people have used for centuries to justify all kinds of horrible things.”
“Don’t start with that. Don’t start getting philosophical.”
“From starting wars to neglecting wives,” he continued.
“You’re not on a team,” she said firmly. “You’re not winning championships. You’re not getting your name in the paper. You’re not getting recruited by colleges. You’re not rising above your peers. You’re not working with your peers. You’re just sitting there…alone…” she paused, hesitant to let fall the words from her tongue. “Hiding. Afraid, almost. If I didn’t know you better that’s what I would say.”
They were silent for some time. From the living room their drifted the sounds of a family at home – sipping of tea, rustle of the pages in a book, the occasional sneeze, the constant of the television playing CNN. The noises morphed into a cacophony of quiet and peace, the calm forging a wicked contradiction between the rooms. And as the two teenagers stared at the kitchen tiling near the other’s feet, they listened with that detached disbelief of the person in despair, who cannot believe that the simplicities and banalities of everyday life were still continuing on as if the world of trouble and tumult had never happened.
“You see the thing is Blah I don’t see your point, you guys have been doing this since day one. What the Republican Party needs to do is denounce George Bush entirely.”
“Do you, uh, realize, Mrs. Blah-Blah, that George Bush has just won the general election for President of the United States…”
“He’s going to sink them, he’s going to bring them down, and the Democratic party is going to rule again…”
“There is a serious difference,” he finally said. Between dislike and fear. And real basketball is about none of the things you have mentioned. Not a single one.”
“Oh it’s not, is it?”
“No.”
“You’re wasting your gift.”
“Innate skill is not my gift. I am the way I am because I made myself that way. Me. Sure genetics played a part in the whole deal. In my limits. What I can…become. But random chance is hardly a gift. It’s not like I owe a favor, or a goddamn responsibility, to the way my cells happened to collate.”
“Well I –” lines creased her forehead as she stammered in frustration. “I think you do. You owe it to yourself. What Coach Quinn always says is ‘the saddest thing in life is wasted talent.’ And that’s true. It is.”
“Tray. Don’t quote Coach Quinn to me. You know goddamn well what I think of that quote. The whole idea is so absurd. I mean, waste on whose terms, exactly? What may be ‘wasteful’ to you and I – take recycling, for Chrissake – is absurd to others. I mean, do you think remote tribes in the middle of Africa are recycling? It’s not even on their goddamn radar. I mean you can’t define things like that. Not in this day and age.”
“Goldbond medicated powder is ideal for those suffering from acute ailments, particularly of the…”
She was looking away now, looking at the blank of the refrigerator behind him.
“Listen to me, Tray. Do you remember the story you told me about when you first started playing tennis?”
“Of course I do, and how is this relevant.”
“Tray. Please. Trust me,” he said, and pulled out a chair for her from behind the refrigerator, and sat her down, and sat across from her in the little alleyway between the pantry and the entrance to the bathroom. Their knees were touching.
“But I’ve told you all about that summer, you – ”
“I know. Remind me again.”
“I was down the shore at my uncle’s. It was during Wimbledon. We were watching it, he used to be semipro, and he taught me to backhand like Justine Henin.”
“No,” he said. “The first time.”
“That was it.”
“The first time you used a racket.”
“Well I bought the old wooden one at my best friend’s garage sale. And then I was alone, and I had just one of those high-bounce pink balls, the kind you said you used throw grounders to yourself as a kid. And I just started playing, like I was Justine Henin and the wall was Martina Hingis, or Venus Williams, or something, but really…”
“Really, it was just you against you.”
“Really it was just me against me.”
“And that was the moment.”
“Yes,” she said, somehow morphing from wistful to suspicious in a single syllable.
“In other words,” he said, “It was just tennis. Nothing else. Just tennis.”
“You’re being cryptic.”
“No cheerleading, no coaching techniques, no after-game barbeques with parents you don’t like, no schedules, orders, discipline – ”
“That doesn’t bother me like it bothers you – ”
“It shouldn’t be a matter of bother at all. I mean your whole life can be one grand attempt at appeasement and neutrality, if you let it.”
“Sometimes,” she said with a flourish, “You need to suck it up. Life’s not that easy. You gotta go through crap to get what you want.”
“There’s enough crap, though, without creating any, for chrissakes. I mean, answer me honest, how much of that joy that you felt the first time you picked up a racket is there when you do goddamn stretching drills, and skips, and all that clown shit, it’s not what sport is. Sport isn’t about drunken fans, and contracts, and scholarships, and memorabilia, and autographs, and trillion dollar stadiums, and used-car salesmen who rip off little kids’ dreams with cheap coaching videos…”
“It’s not all perfect,” she said tersely. “And it can’t all be fun. Not if you want to be a champion.”
“Yes it can,” he said. “Yes it is.”
He sighed. He did not look into her eyes, which were green and gloomy. Instead he eyed the portrait on the wall of the Giant in the Sky, as if he did not entirely trust its confident gait heading in the opposite direction.
“Listen. My point is that I didn’t fall in love with you because you’re captain of the tennis team, or because you almost won districts as a junior, or because you lead the goddamn stretch circle at 2:52…not anymore than I did because of your S.A.T. score, for that matter.”
He heaved a deep breath.
“You’re being cryptic,” she said, but her voice was breaking, her gaze had warmed as it fell over his words.
“I fell in love with you, because,” he began, failing at feigning a levity of tone, his words falling heavily on both of their ears.
She was looking into his eyes now.
“I know,” she whispered.
***
It came to his mind then, an assault of detail in a burst:
The stout, dark Township girl returning Tray’s serve to the far right quadrant; Tray, bounding over in two quick strides; planting her feet, her white shoes smacking the green court; arching her pale arm back, ponytail bouncing over her shoulders; neon orb spinning towards her through crisp air, cutting a line in the sky; the arm, swinging forward, racket held relaxed but firm in her palm, fingers pink from the cold – and then just one sound, that delicious punk of felt hitting the sweet spot between the racket strings, sending the ball sailing just over the rim of the net across the court, reversing the Township girl midstride; the ball landing at just the precise limit of the white line, midcourt, tailing away with a topspin that would be the envy of Justine Henin herself, canceling the stout girl’s desire to even reach her arm out in the midst of her dash back. And Tray – Tray, coming square after the shot, smiling just a little bit to herself, landing so exactly, so evenly, in an effortless completion of the movement – the shadow of which would be the best feet-first popup slide Ricky Henderson ever accomplished – like it was all one great fluidic act, rhythmic to not only her forehand return but the whole set, the whole match.
He saw it like a lightning flash, blinding him for an instant with its brilliance before crackling away. He saw the whole shot, then the upwards curve of her lips, then her shot again. Like someone were switching slides back and forth on the projector of his mind at an endlessly increasing rate. Until the end when all he could see was a blur of inapproachable perfection.
***
She’d left that night much later. He walked her home, under the stars, through the tree-lined streets. Kissed her goodnight by her window-sill. Held her foot in the palm of his hand to boost her inside. Watched her house from the curb on the other side of the road until the glow of her light was muffed out, restoring the block to blackness.
Coming back he walked very slowly. At one point he counted his steps, thinking it may come in handy later. To know. He lost track in the thousands. It was very hard to do all that math on such a night.
***
“It was the motion,” he had told her, walking back home after the match. “It was just so deliberate. It was just so perfect. And it was almost as if everything else was getting in the way. Like not just the crowd, or the fence, but the other girl. The whole court. The net. Your racket, even, and the ball. It was you that was perfect. You, and that motion.”
***
From his perch on the log at the top of the hill Girard had a bird’s eye of the park. The lake, from here, was a massive blue plateau, rippling in its coming and recession. Gusts of wind caught him forthwith, chilling him to his bony center. But it was a good chill, in the way than only an autumn chill by a forested lake can be a good chill. It was a chill that made him want to fold his arms against himself to keep warm, not angrily stalk into an artificially heated building to sulk against the sky. Yes, a storm was coming.
At some point he began to shake without realizing it. In the far distance through the now gray sky he saw the sun sloping slightly downwards in the beginnings of its setting, reddish-gold embers melting in a corner of the sky and letting trickling in bits of bloody sparkles the light that was the last hope for a spectacle of sunset. The tops of the trees along the opposite bank received this light well, their leaves brilliant shades of amber and eggyolk yellow in the midst of a different passing. Watching the sun try to display its setting, and leaves to fall, and the gray sky which belonged to winter take over, he felt an unfamiliar new comfort. Keeping his left arm folded across his chest, he unfurled his right, slipped it into the back pocket of his blue jeans, and pulled out a white envelope.
He let it sit in his lap, bristle in the wind. The front was blank and coffee-stained. The right corner was slightly torn; as if someone had thought about opening it and then abruptly changed their mind.
This was precisely what had happened.
His hands were stiffening from the cold as he held the single sheet open and flexed his fingers, feeling the blood flow return slowly, painfully, as it always had after so many childhood winters of exploring, playing, running to the brink of frostbite. Stopping not out of fear, but curiosity. For how long could you remain between two places? Looking at one, living in another. The disparity tearing physical body in two. A punishment for your failure in balance.
3/1/006 DEER, GIRARD. I HOPE IT IS O.K. TO WRITE LETTERS TO YOU. DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU CAME OVER ONE TIME AND TRAY HAD TO GO TO DROP HER BOOKS AT THE LIBRARY AND YOU STAYED AT THE HOUSE. WELL THAT TIME DO YOU REMEMBER WE PLAYED ONE ON ONE AND YOU ONLY USED ONE OF YOUR BIG ARMS AND YOU SAID NEXT TIME I WOULD BE OLD ENOUGH TO PLAY YOU WITH BOTH OF YOUR BIG ARMS. WELL I THINK I AM READY NOW. MAYBE NOT BUT I STILL WANT TO PLAY YOU WITH BOTH OF YOUR BIG ARMS. SINCERLY FRIEND, CHARLIE (TRAY’S BROTHER)
The letter was dated three springs ago, almost to the day. It had not been two weeks since he had found the envelope stuffed under his front door. That night he had confronted his landlady, a serene woman who drank too much coffee and saw too little sunlight.
“What is this?” he waved the envelope under her nose. “Who put this under my door?”
“You’re being cryptic,” she said, and slowly hobbled away. Her footsteps made no sound on the cobblestone.
***
Vaguely, now:
The tickets. Yes there had been tickets. Dropped off in an unmarked white envelope between a typed note on university heading, Enjoy, you and a friend. Yours, Coach C.
Courtside, the thick necks of the players just feet away. Sweat dripping down their thick necks. Trainers tossing towels, players tossing towels. The hardwood floor was shiny, colorful. Every movement reflected. Beautiful orange hoop. Yes, and glass boards. Strange, foreign things.
And two young men, yes, two men with Eric Snow jerseys where they were not supposed to be. Two men yelling, two men not listening. I’m sorry, but you’re in our seats, Girard had said. Or something like that. Most common of mistakes. Happen to anyone. That right? And then he’d said something more, and then they were standing, and beer had been tossed all over Tray, and Tray was screaming, and he was backing away, and the security guards were coming but they were on top of him, the both of them, and pummeling, and Tray screaming, and a man in yellow holding his hands saying sir, sir? Sir?
Bright lights, big court. His nose felt wobbly, like it was separate. Tray said something that sounded like blood tickets. What had he said back? Did he shrug? He shrugged, probably. Maybe a salty pretzel in his mouth. Tray’s hair golden, straight around her face. So beautiful, and he just shrugged. What’s wrong, what’s wrong, tell me, tell me, what is it? But he handed her his soda to share. He’d never really drank soda, before. Burning in his throat. Arena rumbling but in his ears silence. Complete. Crowd a fading echo. Reading Tray’s lips, the smack of red together. He kissed her, then, probably. Yes, he definitely had. Still, after, something about your nose and my fault and you were always right, and he watched Larry Brown patrol the sideline like a raving professor at a roomlength chalkboard. Iverson never stopped moving. Gameplay was a blur. Sweatbands, fancy mesh fabrics. Cornrows. Thick necks with big animallike beads of sweat running down them. Let’s stay, he had whispered to her, when the game was over.
He had blackrimmed glasses, the newspaperman. A greasy nose. Short greasy hair. Little greasy notebook fingers. Empty stands, no drowned roar in his ears. He’d met him in the bathroom at halftime, read his lips too: You’re Girard Spencer, aren’t you? Girard had his thumb and forefinger around the bridge of his nose. He yanked. He remembered that, the yank. Stars in his eyes. Sure, he’d said. We’re in Row One, Section blah blah…to that extent.
The newspaperman asked many questions. Girard remembered few of them. How is the season going? many of them began. …and will that affect your choice of university? He remembered repeating that, that phrase. Back to the newspaperman. As if to anticipate his response. To give him material. When we are state champions, this will not affect my choice of… Tray shaking her head, don’t tell him thats and why are you doing this’ permeating the nacho-beer stink to the air.
His greasy eyes on her now, asking her now, and do you play sports? And her saying, no.
***
Now he was not tormented always by the details. They came and they went, and Girard accepted them, like they were an inevitability, without sadness or comeuppance. He felt himself a third party to these memories, when they did come. Had that happened to him? Or had he just been watching? Maybe it was a movie. Yes, maybe a very bad movie that he should not have been watching. Movies were so bad these days. He really did not like so very many of them. No he did not at all.
This he saw with detachment. With carelessness. To call it apathy would suggest that he even noticed something to ignore in the first place.
Outside the arena was very quiet. In his boyhood he had always begged his father and his mother to stay late after the game so that they might see the players come out to their cars.
“They might not like people watching them very much,” his father would say, knowing that only in the iciest of hells would his mother consent to another two hours in a basketball arena on a weeknight.
That was how the night felt. Like one of anticipation, from childhood. Waiting to move, from the edge of one world to the next.
***
Only patches coming: the night icy, her shivering, her coldly shaking away his jacket. Him scrambling back to pick it up off the asphalt.
The two Eric Snows there, suddenly, from between the cars,
and Tray screaming,
and a gun was out,
and one was on him,
and he was on the ground.
Tray screaming. The night cold, cold. Face gone numb. Nose breaking again: with a single crack. Time passing. Tray facedown on the ground. Him scrambling up. The gun in his hand now. The report of the pistol echoing through the night: one, two, three, four…tell me that you…
***
There was a light drizzle coming down through the trees as he hiked along the edge of the lake towards the perimeter of the courts. There were a few boys playing there, the report of dribbling having carried through the woods for many hundreds of yards to his spot at the top of the hill. He stood there for a while, lurking, in a manner, he realized later, that would have been disconcerting to any adult watching. The rain began to come down harder – near the Y he saw the baseball players running for cover in the dugouts, he saw the old lady moving steadily towards a car with a swiftness that betrayed her cane. There were shouts over near the old sled hill, parents calling from the porches of their apartments to one another, rushing about to bring all their things in-doors. Girard waited for the boys to stop playing, but they did not seem to notice. These were children, eleven, twelve years old. They did not understand such things as rushing inside from a rainstorm yet. They did not know to care of such things yet. They knew only of their game.
The ball was knocked loose from the paws of one of the boys, and came tumbling over towards Girard’s spot near the corner of the court, where he was toeing a crack in the asphalt. One of them came dashing over, slipping on a corner of paint on the sideline that had not yet been washed away and crashing spectacularly into the asphalt, ball locked between his forearm and his ribcage like a running back. He bounced up immediately, grinning like a madman, a long, weeping scrape speckled with flecks of concrete running up the side of his leg. He looked to Girard, grinning still, sweat and rain pouring down his cheek. Oblivious to the blood.
“Hey man,” the boy said, flipping the ball deftly between his dirtied hands, “You wanna play?”
The boy bounce-passed the ball to Girard, the mud-spattered orb hitting him square in the chest against his new flannel shirt. In his hands it felt cold and warm at once, bristling with bits of dirt, raw from its usage, the grip on it fading. Girard bounced it once, twice. Felt the splat it made against the wet court, felt it come back quickly into his opened palm. He took a step back, then a step forward, over the crack. He looked at the boy. He cocked the ball back. He shot.
_______________________________________
Bibliography, or, where undoubtable inspiration arose from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/27/john-updike-rabbit-run-extract
http://www.dibache.com/text.asp?cat=51&id=173
http://us.macmillan.com/lifeatthesespeeds
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Best American Short Stories 2009 - A Suburban Gothika Revival
"There is nothing safe about these stories," Heidi Pitlor writes in the foreward to 2009's Best American Short Stories - and that is certainly the case, if by safe you mean something that you might lie down with after lying in a desert war zone for two weeks in desperate need of something quiet cushy and warm. What these stories are above anything else is real. They are not an effective escape from the real world - they form no kind of alluring alternative reality a la Harry Potter or World of Warcraft. They reflect back to you, in a thousand ways, the icy indifference of the hand of random chance which we are all dealt.
Yet this is not a collection of despair, per se. The resounding voice at the conclusion is not one of despondency or hopelessness. What many of these stories address is what Edgar Allen Poe described as Gothic: "hidden vices and perversions beneath the veneer of virtue." These stories merely out that veneer, in the way a good Mark Twain burlesque might out some fad of absurdity commonplace on the 19th century Mississippi - the way the financial success of the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn is meant to make society re-evaluate the mob mentality of witchtrialing that has been such a thorough part of American culture from Salem through Hester Prynne and all the way on up to McCarthy and the Patriot Act. Our world has always seemed to have a peculiar way of hiding its ugliest bits and pieces behind that veneer - the same veneer which drove Thoreau to say that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." We are busy holding up a guilded bevy of optimism, of positive reassurances - in many ways we have never passed from that time over a century and a half ago which Twain himself named with a title of one of his books: The Guilded Age.
In her introduction, Sebold (author of The Lovely Bones) notes that "Narrative, after all, is perhaps the most powerful antidote we have in the face of what at first may appear to be insurmountable odds." These stories address issues which Hollywood and most popular literature would rather gloss over. The confrontation which they provide is exactly what a society needs to move forward in the aftermath of epic tragedy. Not only confrontation, but an artistic interpretation which gives meaning, establishes a spiritual resonance, an empathetic bond, between victims and sufferers and all men and women spited by the darker side of the indifferent universe.
Since any reader of any story inevitably passes judgement, it was hard for me not to rank the stories below - not to pit them agaist one another in competition, but to explain my personal view of the collection. There were two stories which I profoundly did not like: Alex Rose's 'Ostracon' and Joseph Epstein's 'Beyond the Pale.' The former because I did not understand it and found myself reading every sentence ten times (this does not mean it was not a good story), and the latter because of unrealistic dialogue and my own personal vendetta against writing about writing (as a rule I dislike all such self-indulgence not in small part due to a quote by Quenton Cassidy given when asked by Bruce Denton in Once a Runner what he thinks of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories: "Yes, I liked them pretty much. Except for all the stiff-upper-lip crap. But the guy went out and did things, you know; I mean you could tell he really did those things, knew about them before going out and shooting his mouth off. He just sat down and tried to tell it as honestly as he could. That's a shitload better than sitting around New York with a bunch of other artistes diddling each other and writing about the state of being Jewish, or how anguishing it is to be an anguished writer.") 'Beyond the Pale' is almost precisely about that: an anguished Jewish writer living in New York writing about another anguished Jewish writer living in New York, the story itself written for a New York magazine. Like rungs on a concentric circle the reader passes deeper and deeper into an exclusive club which - imagining the outer rung of the circles as the ideal perch for the audience - not only is he severely removed from emotionally and intellectually, but in which he feels unwelcome.
On the other end of the spectrum are six incredible stories, of which Annie Proulx's 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' emerges as the cream of the crop. Sometimes the greatest tribute a critic can pay to a movie is to say that it feels like literature; Proulx's story, in that vein, feels like an old Arlo Guthrie or Johnny Cash song, lonesome heartfelt country music before it became branded by the banalities of Toby Keith and co. It tells the story of Archie and Rose McClaverty, young newlyweds on the countryside in the 1880's setting out to make a living. From the start events play out in an almost Tolstoyan fashion of inevitability - there is the distinct sense, like in Old Yeller or No Country for Old Men, that something brutal lurks beneath the silent goings on around this desert homestead, that something dark and horrible is about to shatter the lovely pastoral vision of two people living happily in solitude. As the story progresses - as we see Archie and Rose's respective roles manifest themselves in Archie's looking for a job as a cattlehand hundreds of miles away, Rose left to have a baby all alone in her shack - we begin to understand their plight as part of the land, inextricably linked to the natural elements which have formed them to begin with. Their tale, like any spoken in whispers across the countryside, is just another old cowboy song, sung by those who do not understand but only see the world and the exacting hand of fate. "Some lived and some died," the pentultimate paragraph reflects. "And that's how it was."
1. Them Old Cowboy Songs - Annie Proulx
2. Sagittarius - Greg Hrbek
3. Into the Gorge - Ron Rash
4. Modulation - Richard Powers
5. Hurricanes Anonymous - Adam Johnson
6. Magic Words - Jill McCorkle
7. A Man Like Him - Yiyun Li
8. NowTrends - Karl Taro Greenfield
9. The Briefcase - Rebecca Makkai
10. Yurt - Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
11. Rubiaux Rising - Steve De Jarnatt
12. The Peripatetic Coffin - Ethan Rutherford
13. The Farms - Eleanor Henderson
14. The Idiot President - Daniel Alarcon
15. Muzungu - Namwalli Serpell
16. The Anniverary Trip - Victoria Lancelotta
17. One Dog Year - Kevin Moffett
18. A Shadow Table - Alice Fulton
19. Beyond the Pale - Joseph Epstein
20. Ostracon - Alex Rose
Song of the Day: Miss Ohio - Gillian Welch
Yet this is not a collection of despair, per se. The resounding voice at the conclusion is not one of despondency or hopelessness. What many of these stories address is what Edgar Allen Poe described as Gothic: "hidden vices and perversions beneath the veneer of virtue." These stories merely out that veneer, in the way a good Mark Twain burlesque might out some fad of absurdity commonplace on the 19th century Mississippi - the way the financial success of the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn is meant to make society re-evaluate the mob mentality of witchtrialing that has been such a thorough part of American culture from Salem through Hester Prynne and all the way on up to McCarthy and the Patriot Act. Our world has always seemed to have a peculiar way of hiding its ugliest bits and pieces behind that veneer - the same veneer which drove Thoreau to say that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." We are busy holding up a guilded bevy of optimism, of positive reassurances - in many ways we have never passed from that time over a century and a half ago which Twain himself named with a title of one of his books: The Guilded Age.
In her introduction, Sebold (author of The Lovely Bones) notes that "Narrative, after all, is perhaps the most powerful antidote we have in the face of what at first may appear to be insurmountable odds." These stories address issues which Hollywood and most popular literature would rather gloss over. The confrontation which they provide is exactly what a society needs to move forward in the aftermath of epic tragedy. Not only confrontation, but an artistic interpretation which gives meaning, establishes a spiritual resonance, an empathetic bond, between victims and sufferers and all men and women spited by the darker side of the indifferent universe.
Since any reader of any story inevitably passes judgement, it was hard for me not to rank the stories below - not to pit them agaist one another in competition, but to explain my personal view of the collection. There were two stories which I profoundly did not like: Alex Rose's 'Ostracon' and Joseph Epstein's 'Beyond the Pale.' The former because I did not understand it and found myself reading every sentence ten times (this does not mean it was not a good story), and the latter because of unrealistic dialogue and my own personal vendetta against writing about writing (as a rule I dislike all such self-indulgence not in small part due to a quote by Quenton Cassidy given when asked by Bruce Denton in Once a Runner what he thinks of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories: "Yes, I liked them pretty much. Except for all the stiff-upper-lip crap. But the guy went out and did things, you know; I mean you could tell he really did those things, knew about them before going out and shooting his mouth off. He just sat down and tried to tell it as honestly as he could. That's a shitload better than sitting around New York with a bunch of other artistes diddling each other and writing about the state of being Jewish, or how anguishing it is to be an anguished writer.") 'Beyond the Pale' is almost precisely about that: an anguished Jewish writer living in New York writing about another anguished Jewish writer living in New York, the story itself written for a New York magazine. Like rungs on a concentric circle the reader passes deeper and deeper into an exclusive club which - imagining the outer rung of the circles as the ideal perch for the audience - not only is he severely removed from emotionally and intellectually, but in which he feels unwelcome.
On the other end of the spectrum are six incredible stories, of which Annie Proulx's 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' emerges as the cream of the crop. Sometimes the greatest tribute a critic can pay to a movie is to say that it feels like literature; Proulx's story, in that vein, feels like an old Arlo Guthrie or Johnny Cash song, lonesome heartfelt country music before it became branded by the banalities of Toby Keith and co. It tells the story of Archie and Rose McClaverty, young newlyweds on the countryside in the 1880's setting out to make a living. From the start events play out in an almost Tolstoyan fashion of inevitability - there is the distinct sense, like in Old Yeller or No Country for Old Men, that something brutal lurks beneath the silent goings on around this desert homestead, that something dark and horrible is about to shatter the lovely pastoral vision of two people living happily in solitude. As the story progresses - as we see Archie and Rose's respective roles manifest themselves in Archie's looking for a job as a cattlehand hundreds of miles away, Rose left to have a baby all alone in her shack - we begin to understand their plight as part of the land, inextricably linked to the natural elements which have formed them to begin with. Their tale, like any spoken in whispers across the countryside, is just another old cowboy song, sung by those who do not understand but only see the world and the exacting hand of fate. "Some lived and some died," the pentultimate paragraph reflects. "And that's how it was."
1. Them Old Cowboy Songs - Annie Proulx
2. Sagittarius - Greg Hrbek
3. Into the Gorge - Ron Rash
4. Modulation - Richard Powers
5. Hurricanes Anonymous - Adam Johnson
6. Magic Words - Jill McCorkle
7. A Man Like Him - Yiyun Li
8. NowTrends - Karl Taro Greenfield
9. The Briefcase - Rebecca Makkai
10. Yurt - Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
11. Rubiaux Rising - Steve De Jarnatt
12. The Peripatetic Coffin - Ethan Rutherford
13. The Farms - Eleanor Henderson
14. The Idiot President - Daniel Alarcon
15. Muzungu - Namwalli Serpell
16. The Anniverary Trip - Victoria Lancelotta
17. One Dog Year - Kevin Moffett
18. A Shadow Table - Alice Fulton
19. Beyond the Pale - Joseph Epstein
20. Ostracon - Alex Rose
Song of the Day: Miss Ohio - Gillian Welch
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