The Shape of What You Live

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[Image: “Angular Momentum,” from xkcd.com. The tooltip/”hover title” at the original page says: “With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)”]

From whiskey river:

Remembering

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

…and:

You’re really just an ongoing set of events: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. The awareness is keeping up with those events, seeing your life unfolding as it is, not your ideas of it, not your pictures of it. See what I mean?

(Charlotte Joko Beck [source])

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The Shock of What You Already Know

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For one reason or another, while sort of spiraling down the drain toward the end of this draft of Seems to Fit, I’ve been thinking some about Merry-Go-Round.

Don’t fret if you don’t recognize the title Merry-Go-Round. This was the novel I wrote back in 2007-08, and apparently last mentioned here at RAMH in a post about two-and-a-half years ago. In response to a hypothetical question as to its genre, I once offered:

Well, let’s see. It’s sort of a thriller. It’s sort of a near-future or parallel-world kind of story. There’s some funny stuff. And it’s also political. Does that help?

Now that it’s been at arm’s length, so to speak, for a few years, I doubt that it helps… but I still can’t think of a much better way to describe it, not without leaking a whole lot of plot details. You can read its prologue (here) and know a little more — at least maybe get a sense of the sort of world the action takes place: why it’s a “near-future or parallel-world kind of story.”

I don’t know what if anything I’ll ever do with Merry-Go-Round. At the time, it felt to me like a warming-up exercise. Maybe it will someday justify working on some more. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking particularly about a passage from about two-thirds of the way through.

All you really need to know to read the sample yourself is the following (repeated in a text box at the start of the excerpt):

This excerpt from Merry-Go-Round leads into a “big reveal”: what exactly has happened to one Walker Bryce, citizen of an unknown country — not quite the USA? (Of course it’s not the USA. It can’t be the USA, can it? Not with the dome of the Capitol building in the capital city, clad in stark gray steel armor?) All Walker knows is that he’ recently been… kidnapped, hasn’t he? or rescued? after being held… held… a prisoner, was it? Yes, rescued… yet kept in some sort of hospital… And now he’s being escorted out, finally, by a woman he knows only as “Tex.”

Not sure why I’ve been thinking of this passage in particular; it doesn’t have anything to do with Seems to Fit, nor with my work or personal life. I have to say that I do like the depiction of the scene — the details — especially given that they’re mundane, but being regarded by someone who at least believes he has never seen anything like them previously.

Maybe that sense of wonder — the shock of the familiar, the strangeness of the expected and hoped-for — is just a metaphor for what every writer hopes to induce in every reader. Maybe we can’t always (sorry, Herr Kafka) write books to stab our readers’ souls, to wake them up with a blow to the head — or to make them happy, for that matter. But at least we can write sentences and story lines that make them go: Whoa. I’ve never seen that before, have I?

The password for accessing this excerpt is the full name of the character first mentioned there (capitalized just that way, and yes, with the space between first and surname).

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A Conspiracy of Pages

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[Etching: “The Hall of Planets,” by Erik Desmazières, #5 in a series of eleven illustrating  an edition of “The Library of Babel,” by Jorges Luis Borges; click to enlarge]

From whiskey river:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.

(C. S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory [source])

…and:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy?… Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

(Franz Kafka [source])

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Slow Enough (To See the Large in the Small)

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[Image: Still from Institute Benjaminta (1995), by the Brothers Quay. For an interesting interview with them about it, see this page at the Electric Sheep site.]

From whiskey river:

In reality there has never been a day in our lives (and maybe not one hour or even one minute) when something happened that did not eventually lead to significant results. However, in the onward rush of events it is usually hard to see these patterns.

(Manjusvara (David Keefe), Writing Your Way [source])

…and:

There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization. And if they break into their capital, lose a thing or two in these attempts at incarnation, then soon, jealously, they retrieve their possessions, call them in, reintegrate: as a result, white spots appear in our biography — scented stigmata, the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights and days — while the fullness of life waxes, incessantly supplements itself, and towers over us in wonder after wonder.

And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations. This is the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being. An event may be small and insignificant in its origins and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.

(Bruno Schultz, Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass)

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What You Miss When You Don’t Look Up… and Don’t Stand Still

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At the page at the Popular Science site where I first saw this video, the author says:

The video below was captured by Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert. And it might make you cry.

What makes this time lapse particularly amazing — because we’ve all seen plenty of time lapse videos of the night sky — is the four telescopes in the foreground. Watching these instruments work against a black background would be endlessly fascinating on its own. Unfortunately you won’t be able to pay them too much attention. Because damn, what a sky.

Yes. Damn. What a sky.

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One After Another, After Another, After Another…

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[Image: scene from Northlandz, the world’s largest model train layout
(Flemington, NJ). Photo by Vlad Bubnov, on Flickr.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

In the Moment

It was a day in June, all lawn and sky,
the kind that gives you no choice
but to unbutton your shirt
and sit outside in a rough wooden chair.

And if a glass of ice tea and a volume
of seventeenth-century poetry
with a dark blue cover are available,
then the picture can hardly be improved.

I remember a fly kept landing on my wrist,
and two black butterflies
with white and red wing-dots
bobbed around my head in the bright air.

I could feel the day offering itself to me,
and I wanted nothing more
than to be in the moment — but which moment?
Not that one, or that one, or that one,

or any of those that were scuttling by
seemed perfectly right for me.
Plus, I was too knotted up with questions
about the past and his tall, evasive sister, the future.

What churchyard held the bones of George Herbert?
Why did John Donne’s wife die so young?
And more pressingly,
what could we serve the vegetarian twins

who were coming to dinner that evening?
Who knew that they would bring their own grapes?
And who was the driver of that pickup
flying down the road toward the lone railroad track?

And so the priceless moments of the day
were squandered one by one—
or more likely several thousand at a time—
with quandary and pointless interrogation.

All I wanted was to be a pea of being
inside the green pod of time,
but that was not going to happen today.
I had to admit to myself

as I closed the blue book on the face
of Thomas Traherne [*] and returned to the house
where I lit a flame under a pot
full of floating brown eggs,

and, while they cooked in their bubbles,
I stared into a small oval mirror near the sink
to see if that crazy glass
had anything special to tell me today.

(Billy Collins, from The Trouble with Poetry, and Other Poems [source])

…and:

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

(Anna Quindlen, A Short Guide to a Happy Life)

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Midweek Music Break: Wynton Marsalis’s Classical Trumpet

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[Below, click Play button to begin Marsalis: Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro (Haydn) . While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 6:20 long.

[audio:trumpetconcertoineflatmajor_i_allegro_haydn_marsalis.mp3|titles=’Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro (Haydn)’|artists=Wynton Marsalis]

These days the man concentrates, as far as I can tell, exclusively on jazz (recording, playing, mentoring, producing). But my first exposure to him was through his recordings of classical music.

Of course, I’d already decided to like trumpet — cf., the “Midweek Music Break” on Herb Alpert of a few weeks ago. But I can no longer remember how I stumbled on this Marsalis album. (He won a Grammy both for it and for a jazz release in 1983 — the first artist to pull that off.) I didn’t (as far as I know) know anyone who listened to classical music, and knew (know) almost nothing about it myself. Still, I loved it from his first note.

Sometimes, I like to imagine music as the soundtrack for a scene in a movie. In this case (Haydn’s Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro), Marsalis’s trumpet — that instrument at once so bright, so sharp, so soft, so unambigous — seems to tell the story of some master artisan or craftsman who takes complete, speechless joy in every second spent with his avocation. Even the little off-the-script Marsalis improvisation which begins at about 5:05 or so, leading to the piece’s conclusion — even that seems to capture such a person in a flight of free-association fantasy as he stands back to consider how to add one last touch to his handiwork.

If you like it, too, feel free to enjoy the second (andante) and third (allegro) movements of the same concerto:

[audio:trumpetconcertoineflatmajor_ii_andante_haydn_marsalis.mp3, trumpetconcertoineflatmajor_iii_allegro_haydn_marsalis.mp3|titles=’Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: I (Allegro)’, ‘Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: II (Allegro) (Haydn)’|artists=Wynton Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis]

Look at that baby face in the album cover. That album’s liner notes, from a 1982 Newsweek profile called “Young Man with a Horn,” included this commentary about his jazz playing:

The most memorable appearance at the 1978 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was the most unexpected–a skinny kid with glasses and a trumpet who ambled onstage one day during the mid-afternoon lull, hiked up his horn and blew the top off the jazz tent. One minute he sounded like Dizzy Gillespie, unleashing torrents of sixteenth notes at blinding speed. The next he throttled down into the middle register in an imitation of Miles Davis cool: whoever this local kid was, he was going places.

He was all of twenty-one years of age when this album (his first classical one, and just his third overall) came out. Precocious much?

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From the Dark Side

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I’ve written before (here and elsewhere) about the writing workshop I participated in, fifteen-some years ago.

An odd cast of characters, maybe: three writers of poetry and literary fiction then seeking their graduate degrees in English, with an emphasis on creative writing; one writer of comic action stories (think Carl Hiaasen, maybe with a touch of Elmore Leonard); one writer of horror and science fiction…

…and I.

I was the only one who’d published a book to that point, my mystery Crossed Wires. But I didn’t think of myself as a “mystery writer.” (Crossed Wires‘s prose and structure, I think, suggests the crooked posture of a writer in a genre he knows he’s not suited for.)

I didn’t know how to classify myself. My reading tastes were all over the map. I’d read a great deal of science fiction while growing up; liked reading mysteries and thrillers; had been bowled over by the caliber of the romances published by friends*; was moved and challenged by fiction I read in The New Yorker and similar magazines.

Horror? Well, I’d read a lot of horror comics when I was a kid. I didn’t mind “scary movies,” but didn’t get many chances to see them (other than classics from the ’30s). When I got older, I read some King and Koontz, and — on the strength of the paperbacks’ striking covers — I read some of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series. But for the most part, horror fiction didn’t interest me. Beyond what seemed a core of authors with wider aspirations and deeper, more complex psychologies, y’know, It Was All Just Blood.

But the SF/horror writer in our workshop kept bringing to us his inventive little fantasias of things gone frighteningly wrong. And this got me thinking: I wonder what it’s like to write horror? So I tried it. Once.

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The Gravity of the Everyday

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[Photo, “What’s Important,” by Valerie Everett. Found on Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety —

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light —
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

(Mary Oliver)

…and:

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic — decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

(Louise Erdrich, from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems)

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Real-Life Dialogue (The Wind Beneath My Wings, the Garage Sale Beneath My Feet Edition): A Fragment

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[The scene: a home in a suburban development in North Florida, USA. At a computer upstairs, He stares at a blank screen which represents, in fond theory and — for the moment — ebbing hope, a page in a novel-to-be. He wears headphones, volume turned up louder than normal to mask the downstairs haggling, laughter, and scrapes of wooden furniture on concrete floor.]

She calls His name, loudly, from the foot of the stairs.

He: WHAT?!?

She: Are you selling these shoes?

He: [pause] “Shoes”?

She: Shoes! These shoes! Are you selling them?

He: [confused] I don’t know wh—

She: Shoes. Brown. Made by Dexter. Lace-up shoes.

His eyes go out of focus. He recalls the shoes in question: He had bought them for Their honeymoon, in the far north, because they’d seemed rugged and tundra-worthy. The last time He’d worn them had been when He last did anything resembling yard work, when Tyrannosaurs ruled the cul-de-sacs and saber-toothed cats, the rooftops. Over the years, the shoes had become crusted with (on the outside) dried mud, grass clippings, fertilizer, accumulated grime, the dust of a nearby bursting asteroid, and (on the inside) a salty rime of ancient perspiration. Those shoes. Someone wants to freaking buy—?

She: [impatient] Never mind! If you can’t remember them then I’m selling them!

The blank screen now mocking Him, He shakes his head but cannot reply.

 

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