The Gods Beside Us (and in Our Mirrors)

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[Image above depicts a representation of The Parthenon as it appears at a location in the Second Life virtual world/alternative universe/simulation/etc. Click the image for more information, including a link to the location itself.]

From whiskey river:

We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.

(Adam Zagajewski, from Another Beauty)

…and:

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.

There is my creed.

(D.H. Lawrence)

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Pushing Through

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[Looking back through this post, I see that I’ve used the word “you” a lot in passages manifestly instructional or outright didactic, especially the last section — as though barking orders at

you, the reader. Not so: it’s just me, talking to myself.]

Moonrat, God bless ‘er, last week resurrected the Write Your A** Off idea I had last year. (Not “my” idea, really — I’d sort of ripped it off and just adapted it for outside-NYC writers.) She jumped the gun by a few months, but that’s the sort of spontaneous combustion you get when you mix youth, exuberant personalities, and ideas, and it’s hard to fault her for it.

Several dozen people signed up in the comments to Moonie’s two posts, and we even set up a sort of interactive map so people can log their locations and select a preferred day of the week, and visitors can see who’s participating, on what day, and where. (There’s no real “day” set aside for this: you choose whatever day of the week you want, and do it annually, weekly, monthly, as you will.)

You can see and really interact with the map here, or — if you prefer — here’s a sort of quick-and-dirty read-only view:
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Real-Life Dialogue

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The scene: the living room of a rustic but solidly built house in Vermont, with a gorgeous view spread beneath and a Green Mountainside above. It is a summer morning, and the sun is still low but bright and cheerful. The Guest and The Erstwhile Missus are there at the invitation of D—, a colleague of TEM; the two women teach at the same school, and are in the kitchen talking.

For their part, The Guest and G—, who is D—‘s husband, met for the first time just a few minutes ago. They now share a sofa in the living room. They have their feet propped up on a rugged coffee table which G— himself constructed, starting with actual logs and, conceivably, a blacksmith’s forge and anvil. A former industrial chemist in a Pennsylvania city, he moved to Vermont to be with D—; having utterly changed careers, he has become a successful carpenter. He built this very house, as well as its two predecessors. His whole demeanor seems that of New Hampshire (The Granite State) rather than Vermont: craggy. On the TV over the fireplace, a man in a threadbare suit and thin gray carefully-combed hair reads agricultural news from a sheaf of paper: news not just of weather but of livestock auctions, grain prices, and government-subsidy deadlines.

In short, The Guest is on alien ground, apparently having shared not a single life experience with G— but eager, for TEM’s sake, to ingratiate himself in some way.

Guest: You know, I’ve always wanted to live in Vermont.

G— is silent for a long moment, extending through the end of the segment on TV, several commercials, and the start of a new segment.

G—: (immobile, arms folded, gaze fixed on TV) Why’d you want to live in Vermont?

Guest: Oh jeez, it’s just beautiful here. I mean, look outside right now. (He gestures vaguely at the window.) Seriously — could anything be more beautiful than that? (He pauses to give G— a chance to interject something, anything.) In the fall, oh my gosh, it’s beautiful in the fall. (Another pause.) And if I had enough books and a house as well-built as this one, why, I bet I could be happy living up here my whole life.

Another protracted silence. Another commercial break.

G—: You ski?

Guest: (speaking rapidly) Nope — never been on skis in my life! Actually now that I think about it snow skiing, water skiing no difference, never even held a ski in my hands, actually I’m not very athletic at all, no sir.

The silence oppresses. From the kitchen, sounds of female laughter and the clatter of tableware. The newsreader on TV seems to have started all over again: temperature and precipitation expectations for the day, records of past years—

G—: (only his mouth moving) So why’d you want to live in Vermont?

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Voice Tech Follies

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I’m really not a fan of the telephone: give me good-old when-I-get-to-it email any day, y’know? (People at work long ago got used to the idea that I intentionally sit with my back to the phone — so I never even have to see the red “voicemail message waiting” light. They all email me, even the ones who work in the next cubicle.)

Under the circumstances, it might surprise you that I signed up for Google Voice (even more assumption that I might use the telephone?!?)… at least until you learn that, among its other features, it includes a speech-to-text translator.

Closed captioning for voicemail messages — zowie!

Needless to say, it’s not perfect. So far the only person who’s left messages for me is my brother, whose voice sounds so much like mine that even I myself can’t tell the difference except by checking to see if my lips are moving.

Alas, this also means that his voice is husky — breath-driven rather than vocal-cord-driven — and this seems to confuse Google Voice quite a bit. In the most recent message, giving me a heads-up about videos from Conan O’Brien’s final show, the transcription software kept “hearing” the suddenly-former talk-show host’s name as “calling O’Brien.” Earlier, I was myself confused by a transcript in which he talked about his recent “conversation with Oscar.” Oscar? I kept asking myself. Who the hell is Oscar? I don’t know any Oscars!

Then I listened to the voicemail. Oh. He had a conversation with our sister.

Another cool thing you can do with Google Voice is get the transcript — and the recording itself — forwarded to you as email: invaluable if you get so few voicemail messages that you almost never visit your voicemail Inbox. (Like, oh, say… like me.) Here’s the text of Google Voice’s own welcome message:

Welcome to Google Voice! Google Voice gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones, saves your voicemail online, and transcribes your voicemail to text. Other cool features include the ability to listen in on messages while they are being left and the ability to make low cost international calls. To start enjoying Google Voice, just give out your Google Voice number. You can record custom greetings for your favorite callers or block annoying callers by marking them as SPAM. Just click on the settings link at the top of your inbox. We hope you enjoy Google Voice.

And here’s the message itself (which of course is perfectly accurate for this occasion, cough):

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is :29 long.

[audio:googlevoice_welcome.mp3|titles=Google Voice welcome message|artists=Google]

You notice how the voice suddenly switched from that of a”normal” American to a sort of Central European sound over the course of the last couple sentences? I like to think the original transcription was accurate only for one half of the message, so they went back and re-recorded the other half.

For what it’s worth, the “voice of Google Voice” — the one which walks you through the menus, and such — is that of an actress and voiceover artist named Laurie Burke. What a… what a… what an interesting thing to have on one’s résumé. (Although personally, I’d much rather be known as the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Open my Inbox, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, David.”)

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Enchanté

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From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The whale moves in a sea of sound:
shrimps snap, plankton seethes,
fish croak, gulp, drum their air-bladders,
and are scrutinized by echo-location,
a light massage of sound touching the skin.
The small, toothed whales use high frequencies:
Finely tuned and focused sound-beams,
intense salvoes of bouncing
clicks, a thousand a second,
with which a hair, as thin as
half a millimeter, can be detected;
penetrating probes,
with which they can scan
the contents of a colleague’s stomach,
follow the flow of their blood
take the full measure of
an approaching brain.
From two cerebral cavities
in their melon-shaped heads,
they can transmit two sonic probes,
as if talking in stereo,
and send them in any direction
at the same time:
One ahead, one behind, one above, one below…
lengthening the sound-waves,
shortening them, heightening them,
until their acoustic switchboard
receives the intelligence required.
Spoken to in English,
the smallest cetacean, the dolphin,
will rise to the surface,
alter its vocal frequencies
to suit the measures of human speech,
pitch its voice to the same level
as that of human sounds
when traveling through air —
an unfamiliar medium —
adjust the elastic lips of its blow-hole,
and then, after courteously waiting
for silence,
produce a vibrato imitation
of human language:
Words, phrases, sentences…

(Heathcote Williams, Whale Nation)

…and:

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its [absurd] worst… it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.

(Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life [source])

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Blurring Around the Edges

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[Note to regular readers: You may have noticed a change in my online tempo in the last week — I sure have: my visits to your blogs are a little more erratic, my postings here a little less… I don’t know… “focused,” maybe?

Partly, true, my spotty attendance is because the pace of my 9-to-5 workdays has gone up. But mostly, it’s because the parts of my mind shared between the online world and the fictional are starting, once again, to be given over to early-morning and (on Saturdays) all-morning writing sessions. I’ve been so distracted by other stuff since November, in short, that I haven’t worked much on the novel. That’s changing — for good, I hope, at least until this draft is done.

In the meantime, you’ll probably continue to find me fading into and out of view.]

The prospect of having a stroke has always terrified me, even more than the prospect of Alzheimer’s; at least to my way of thinking, the gradual dissolution of the self in the latter case is a kindness (surely the only one) compared to the sudden wham! of the former: the blow to some faculties while leaving others intact.

And because I’m someone who lives with words so much, not surprisingly, the most terrifying of all faculties to lose would be verbal ones. What (I wonder) would I do if I could never talk again — and knew it? What if I not only couldn’t talk, but couldn’t even within my own head any longer form a particular word when I needed it? How would I cope with losses like these? Could I cope with them?

Such questions drove the opening of the excerpt, below, from the current chapter-in-progress. This chapter takes place (if anywhere) inside the head of a main character. By this point in the story, the reader, like some of Al’s friends, has seen Al topple suddenly to his driveway on a Sunday morning, and has seen him in the hospital, alive but inert.

All the usual disclaimers about first-draft work apply. :)

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The Sky Calls to Us

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From whiskey river (italicized portion):

The landscape opens its eyes and sits up,
sets out walking followed by its shadow,
it is a stela of dark murmurs
that are the languages of fallen matter,
the wind stops and hears the clamor of the elements,
sand and water talking in low voices,
the howl of pilings as they battle the salt,
the rash confidence of fire,
the soliloquy of ashes,
the interminable conversation of the universe.
Talking with the things and with ourselves
the universe talks to itself:
we are its tongue and ears, its words and silences.
The wind hears what the universe says
and we hear what the wind says,
rustling the submarine foliage of language,
the secret vegetation of the underworld and the undersky:
man dreams the dream of things,
time thinks the dream of men.

(Octavio Paz [source])

…and (italicized portion):

If you had never been to the world and never known what dawn was, you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks, how the mystery and color of a new day arrive. Light is incredibly generous, but also gentle. When you attend to the way the dawn comes, you learn how light can coax the dark. The first fingers of light appear on the horizon, and ever so deftly and gradually, they pull the mantle of darkness away from the world.

(John O’Donohue [source])

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Perfect Moments: The Boy, the Wintry Day, the Film, the Flash of Panic

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On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.

Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing needed to be retrieved from dusty closet recesses. Human bodies needed to be tanked up with caffeine and/or cocoa.

And then there was the matter of The Boy’s hands.

Especially in chilly, dry conditions, the skin of The Boy’s hands — more precisely, his fingers — tended to dry and chap and split rather painfully. Depending on his mood and energy level and the available time, he might choose to ignore the problem; to “lotion up”; or to go the whole hog — applying ointment and BandAid(s) to the affected digit(s). On the afternoon in question, The Boy decided to go the whole hog. Indeed, not only did he swath his index finger in two BandAids, he actually sealed the edges and the fingertip with waterproof tape: the finger wasn’t merely bandaged, it was sheathed in what the Crayola people used to call (in benighted non-PC days of yore) “flesh-colored” plastic.

And then he and The Missus embarked.

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Your Dreams, and the Long Haul

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[Image above: “The Long Haul,” by artist Robert W. McGregor]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Excerpt from
“Sabbaths 1998: VI”

But won’t you be ashamed
To count the passing year
At its mere cost, your debt
Inevitably paid?
For every year is costly,
As you know well. Nothing
Is given that is not
Taken, and nothing taken
That was not first a gift.

The gift is balanced by
Its total loss, and yet,
And yet the light breaks in,
Heaven seizing its moments
That are at once its own
And yours. The day ends
And is unending where
The summer tanager,
Warbler, and vireo
Sing as they move among
Illuminated leaves.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and:

For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!

(Fyodor Dostoevsky [source])

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