[Image: “Rushing (New Jersey, September 2022)” by John E. Simpson.]

From whiskey river (part I):

The Next Time

I

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle

Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes
Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means

Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.
Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
And so many people we loved have gone,

And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds
Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this

Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew
How long the ruins would last we would never complain.

II

Perfection is out of the question for people like us,
So why plug away at the same old self when the landscape

Has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines
To flock towards? The great motels to the west are waiting,

In somebody’s yard a pristine dog is hoping that we’ll drive by,
And on the rubber surface of a lake people bobbing up and down

Will wave. The highway comes right to the door, so let’s
Take off before the world out there burns up. Life should be more

Than the body’s weight working itself from room to room.
A turn through the forest will do us good, so will a spin

Among the farms. Just think of the chickens strutting,
The cows swinging their udders, and flicking their tails at flies.

And one can imagine prisms of summer light breaking against
The silent, haze-filled sleep of the farmer and his wife.

III

It could have been another story, the one that was meant
Instead of the one that happened. Living like this,

Hoping to revise what has been false or rendered unreadable
Is not what we wanted. Believing that the intended story

Would have been like a day in the west when everything
Is tirelessly present—the mountains casting their long shadow

Over the valley where the wind sings its circular tune
And trees respond with a dry clapping of leaves—was overly

Simple no doubt, and short-sighted. For soon the leaves,
Having gone black, would fall, and the annulling snow

Would pillow the walk, and we, with shovels in hand, would meet,
Bow, and scrape the sidewalk clean. What else would there be

This late in the day for us but desire to make amends
And start again, the sun’s compassion as it disappears.

(Mark Strand [source])

As I write this, I’m in Durham, NC, on a two-week scouting mission. The Missus remains down in Florida; I’ll pick her up down there and then we’ll return here, to this rental home, where we expect to spend a few months… until we finally find a space to hunker down for real. Inertia is defined both as the tendency of a moving object to remain in motion, and as the tendency for an object at rest to remain that way. Guess which definition we’re hoping to experience more of?

(It’s crazy how much of our “stuff” we no longer even remember owning — it’s all still in storage in Florida, half of it unseen for three-and-a-half years… and yet how many of those things, weirdly, we miss with an intensity bordering on passion, or maybe even mania. I told her a few weeks ago that I really miss my desktop computer, with the full clacking keyboard and the widescreen monitor and the giant external hard drive. Sick, or what?)

We don’t expect to live in Durham indefinitely; it’s just a convenient locale on which to center our home search. But for now, I’m taking pleasure in seeing yellowing leaves outside the windows, and knowing there are too many things just beyond eyesight than I will ever be able to see or to photograph.

Garrison Keillor’s recent novel Boom Town, like much of his fiction, centers on the town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota — a thinly veiled version of his real hometown of Anoka. In it, he — the narrator — returns there from New York City for the funeral of a boyhood friend; he finds the town both very much changed, and very much the same:

A company, Tomorrow Tomato, [now] made an inclusive tomato sauce from diverse varieties raised on family farms in a variety of eco-societies. Norm and Nancy’s granddaughter Normandy invented a very soft facial tissue with 8 percent lamb’s wool and 5 percent spiderweb woven into the paper. Her husband, Max, created a nameless ginger ale aged in oak barrels: very successful. People asked him, “Why no name? You need a name.” And he said, “Whatever,” and so that became the name and he put out a Whatever mug, an earthy clay mug that became a Thing and went viral for a while, like Totality Tote Bags, which became wildly popular after the price was doubled. “These kids understand the New Economy,” said Norm. “Plenty of people have way too much money and that’s your market. Don’t bother selling stuff to paupers.” Normandy married Max when they were eighteen. He had hair down to his shoulders and it was an alternative ceremony, with an epic Walt Whitman poem (“O comrade and aficionado, come, take my hand, you are comely and possessed of secret longings, come travel the open road under a banner of affection, shameless, glistening with wordless desires.”) and the soloist sang “Purple Rain,” which is odd for a wedding—“I never wanted to be your lover, I only wanted to be your friend” and Nancy’s mouth was bleeding from biting her tongue. Norm said, “We thought it’d last six months but it’s been a year and a half.” He admired their enterprise. Normandy was 20 and drove a green Jaguar and had Zoom meetings with executives at Chanel and Dior and Pankake. Elon Musk called her once. She knew Sandy Frazier. She was hot stuff.

Lake Wobegon had been a farm town of two thousand, an exporter of its young people, and now it was booming. Two brothers, Jake and John, created Woke alarm clocks that sound like crickets and a woman says, “Rise and shine, renew your spirit, resume the struggle, resist the system” and a carillon plays “We Are Strong Together” and you hear marching feet, a bass drum, and a gong. They were made in a factory in Mumbai for $1.75 apiece and retailed for $68. Jake’s girlfriend Ashley came up with a dance video that teaches math, Let’s All Go Rithm. Nobody learned from it but the concept was fantastic. Her business partner, Hailey, created a detoxifying spread made from honey and locusts and then developed an app called Constant Companion that traces your daily routine and if you forget why you’ve walked into the kitchen, a voice in your earpiece says, “You probably came to warm up your coffee.” Then it lists other options.

(Garrison Keillor [source])

And then there’s this, from an article entitled “Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?”:

If we could see our childish selves more clearly, we might have a better sense of the course and the character of our lives. Are we the same people at four that we will be at twenty-four, forty-four, or seventy-four? Or will we change substantially through time? Is the fix already in, or will our stories have surprising twists and turns?…

Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character?

If you have the former feelings, you’re probably a continuer; if the latter, you’re probably a divider.

(Joshua Rothman [source])

A continuer here, I think. I picture myself as something of a human Lake Wobegon: suffering bouts of self-inflicted change, rarely even radical change, but somehow always oscillating around the same center. As always, I guess we’ll just have to see.