Your Man For Fun In Rapidan

An Unhappy Devotion (Dedicated to Peter Schilling, Sr. and Jr.)

2012-01-25T05:19:00.000-06:00

From a very early age Maraini had beensingularly, almost frighteningly obsessed with divining all of the secrets ofmagic. He was fortunate in one particular regard: as a boy he had lived in alarge industrial city in New Jersey, and located on the already beleagueredmain street was a cramped and dusty old magic shop whose owner was only thesecond proprietor the establishment had known in its more than seventy years ofoperation.

This would have been somewhere around1963, and the owner of the store was very old. His name was Gaylord Shattuck,and he had recently retired from the professional practice of magic and wasdevoting what was left of his life to writing a scrupulously researched historyof the genesis and evolution of every trick and illusion known to him. Amonghis small and dwindling circle of confidantes, Shattuck would boast that - atleast in the world of magic - there was now nothing he had seen that he did notunderstand or could not place in an historical context. When Maraini first setfoot in the shop - still called Sharpovsky's Magic after the original owner,and still crowded with posters and other relics from its early years - he wasten years old, already a serious boy and a serious student of magic who hadvirtually memorized every book on the subject that he could find in hishometown library or at the New York Public Library, which he visited a halfdozen times a year with his mother.

Gaylord Shattuck had seen youngstersparade in and out of the store for forty years; they paid the bills manymonths, and he had a rote patter that he used to sell them the basic gags,pocket tricks, and simple routines with which they could amuse theirschoolmates. Maraini, at ten years old, was having none of Shattuck'sauto-pilot shtick.

"I already know all that,"the boy said, and Shattuck would later recall being struck by Maraini'speculiar focus. The boy didn't smile. He wasn't there to horse around. No,Shattuck said, this was a kid who was looking for the real thing, the best keptsecrets and latest wrinkles. Shattuck, of course, had a long list of customershe had first encountered as children who later went on to distinguished careersin magic. A couple of them became minor legends, at least among othermagicians. But he'd never had a kid as young as Maraini come through the doorso clearly determined to break through every wall and build new, and higher,walls of his own.

Shattuck sold Maraini his first doves,then eventually let him through doors he'd opened for fewer than a dozencustomers in his decades in business. The last time, the last door, Shattuckhad immediately regretted. Maraini, who was by this time twelve years old andwas already capable of performing the acts of men who had made a good livingoff magic and were now in the twilight of their careers, seemed utterlyunimpressed, and had instinctively grasped the illusion from the set-up to theexecution. At this point Shattuck pointed Maraini in the direction of anotherretired magician in Newark, a legendary eccentric who was rumored to havedevoted the last decade to attempting something that had never beenaccomplished.

More than that no one had been able todiscover or to coerce the old man to disclose. This man's name was CabbottSandor - the Great Sandor - and Maraini was said to have served a brief butfruitful apprenticeship with him. Sandor's memories of the boy - recorded whenMaraini's career was still in its relative infancy - jibed almost exactly withShattuck's. Against his parents' wishes, Maraini dropped out of high school atsixteen, and is said to have undertaken a long pilgrimage in Europe at aroundthis same time. In Paris, in London, in Prague and Munich, in Madrid and asmall village in Portugal, there were legendary magicians, most of them old,who recalled his visits and his impatient interrogations. He reportedlyperformed his act - excellent, highly skilled, but still relativelyconventional - in public places and local theaters and nightclubs whenever hecould persuade someone to give him an opening set, usually preceding some singer,comedian, or cabaret performance.

He traveled for varying lengths of timewith itinerant circuses in Spain, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Maraini wasstill at this time a teenager, and no one who encountered him during thisperiod recalls much about the boy beyond his severity and what someone oncedescribed as his "unhappy devotion to magic." He apparently had noclose friends, no romantic relationships, and seemed to subsist on littlebeyond water. There are some who claim that Maraini developed a pernicious drughabit during this time in Europe, but there has been no evidence to supportthat claim.

A grainy photograph of him appeared ina cheap but influential magic newsletter in the early 1970s. The photo showed atall, unsmiling, virtually emaciated young man staring into the camera with anexpression that simultaneously conveyed boredom and malice. The headline abovethe brief article that accompanied this photograph read: "A potentiallegend, or a legend of potential?" The article documented Maraini'spilgrimages to the shops and homes of legendary and obscure magicians all overEurope. Around this same time Maraini stopped performing entirely, but hecontinued to travel and visit magicians, all of whom were said to be impressedwith his intense curiosity and restlessness. Maraini, despite scant evidencethat would support such claims, was persistently suspected of hatchingsomething that would prove earthshaking in the world of magic.

Then, in 1975, another brief article -this one bearing Maraini's byline - appeared in an influential magicpublication. It was unclear where exactly Maraini was at the time - India orAfrica, people surmised - but he claimed in the magazine that he had beentraveling with a "merchant of cobras," that he had assembled acollection of living scorpions, and that this merchant's company, he hoped,would facilitate the "procurement of an elephant or some even morespectacular beast."

The article also included this strangequote: "I've spent the last fifteen years looking for magic, and what Ihave found is an endless series of cheap puppet shows performed in cemeteriesoverrun with plastic flowers and slack-jawed zombies. Make no mistake: magic asyou've known it is dead. A new magic will only be found in the oldest, mostdisreputable form of magic: miracles. That, then, is where I'm turning all myattention. Upward."

After this rare, uncharacteristic, andutterly inexplicable public pronouncement, Maraini was not heard from for overtwo years.

Years later reports would be piecedtogether regarding Maraini's activities and whereabouts during the two years heseemed to disappear entirely from the radar. Many of the sources of thesereports were unreliable at best, or from notoriously disreputable sources atworst. There is no doubt, however, that he spent at least several weeks with anold, internationally known magician in Singapore. This man was a German ex-patwho had settled in Singapore in the early sixties, and he was regarded in themagic community as something of a crackpot, a man who had for the last thirtyyears refused to even acknowledge a magic community, or to claim membership orfraternity in anything that, in his own words, "continued to propagate thesame old transparent frauds and patently bogus gee-whizzers that had reducedmagicians the world over to a bunch of slick practitioners of the usualhocus-pocus hokum."

The man, whose name was Einer Schulz,professed that his one remaining hopeless goal in the time remaining to him wasto obliterate every deck of cards on the planet. During his last known stint asa performing magician in Europe, Schulz was doing an act in which his handswere bound and he worked exclusively with his feet. It is also claimed thattoday's risk-taking, extreme marathon stunts of confinement, isolation, anddeprivation had their origins in the mind of Schulz, who somewhat prescientlysaw that the future of magic, its next frontier, was not properly magic, butsuffering.

At any rate, Schulz, who was asfrequently despised as he was grudgingly admired by serious magicians andhistorians of magic, accepted Maraini as a visitor. The old man died beforeMaraini made his big splash, but he did recount some details of the youngermagician's visit in a journal that surfaced after his death. In one entry hewrote that "the young man is strange, and may be crazy. Who am I to say?He's clearly looking for something, another dimension that I myself have notyet been able to conclusively conclude exists."

Elsewhere he seems perplexed withMaraini's obsession with obtaining an elephant.

"I told him, of course, thatHoudini had already, in New York in 1918, disappeared an elephant on stage atthe Hippodrome," wrote Schulz. "An illusion Houdini learned or stolefrom Charles Merritt, the Yorkshire alcoholic hypnotist and illusionist who had performed a similar stuntwith a donkey. The fellow, who is almost alarmingly gaunt, brushed this offwith disgust and the sputtering indignation that seems to be his primary modeof communication. 'That,' he said, 'was nothing but a cheap box-and-mirrortrick, and an even cheaper stunt that fooled virtually no one. I want to reallydisappear an elephant, in an open space with no props or sets. I want theelephant to be gone.'

"After pondering this for somemoments, during which the young man appeared to be festering with frustration,I ventured that - if I was understanding him correctly - what he proposedseemed like an impossibility, emphasizing that this was a word I had used andentertained rarely, and only with reluctance. Clearly angry, Maraini stalkedaway from me, and later spent part of the afternoon locked in a box withscorpions and cobras, an experience that late that evening he pronounced'pointless. Boring for me, boring and likely traumatic for the creatures, andsurely boring, however repellent, for any audience.'

"Several days later he sold hiscollection of cobras and scorpions, which I was led to believe he had hauledall over the world, to a man even I find unsettling who runs an animal marketin a slum."

Schulz's last entry regarding Maraini'sstay was perhaps enlightening: "To be a truly great and singular artist, aman must demonstrate some of the pathology of the criminal, and young Marainiclearly has all of the tell-tale signs. There is really no telling what the manmight do, which makes him both tragic and enviable. All the same, I can't helpfeeling that I've heard the last of him."

Schulz's journals were dated Sept.1976, and the man was dead by the end of the year, killed in mysteriouscircumstances by the husband of a palm reader. It is unclear where Maraini'stravels took him next, but reports from those who supposedly encountered him atvarious points in his long journey - and these dispatches came from suchdisparate and far-flung locales that it is difficult to know what to believe -increasingly took on a starry-eyed, almost mystical tone. After his visit toSchulz there are no more accounts of Maraini practicing -at least publicly-anything that might have been construed as magic. Questions have also beenraised regarding how his travels were financed, but much of the speculation -drug peddling, gun trafficking, begging - can likely be dismissed as idlerumors.

Then, in August of 1978, anadvertisement appeared in several magic publications, placed by an apparentpromoter no one had ever heard of, announcing Maraini's return to New York.

"It is Foolish to Promise SomethingThat Has Never Been Seen Before, as there is both Precious Little and PlentyThat Has Never Been Seen Before, Depending on Your Awareness and the Paucity ofYour Experience and Imagination," the announcement read. "But As IWish to Speak in a Debased Language You can Understand, and also Because I Meanthe Phrase Literally, I intend to reveal to Interested Parties Something ThatHas Never Been Seen Before, and which I feel confident will Never Be Repeated.Free to the Public."

There was no other information beyond adate, a time, and a place: Central Park, the Great Lawn, September 7th, fivep.m. This announcement occasioned a great deal of curiosity, among magicaficionados, certainly, but as Maraini had by this time become a legendarymystery, if nothing else, the story began to be pieced together and reported bythe media. The New York Times ran a sketchy and - in all likelihood - largelyapocryphal profile that made the man seem like a full-blown modern myth.

There was absolutely no indication ofwhat the man might do, and evenspeculation seemed pointless. The last anyone in New York had seen of Marainihe had been a precociously gifted teenager who had mastered nothing beyond what might be called the basicrepertoire. Everyone, of course, recalled his almost alarming seriousness, andhis vague singularity of purpose and obvious ambition. But as a successfulolder magician, who had crossed paths with Maraini during the years before heembarked on his odyssey, told the reporter from the Times, "He was a kid, and he was verygood, but he had zero presentation skills, nothing in the way of patter, and,frankly, he was doing stuff that hundreds of other magicians in New York coulddo with more flair."

The Times article also included a fewquotes from Maraini's father - something of a Holy Grail for Marainiobsessives, as the family had been unyieldingin their refusal to speak about their son and brother; they had, in fact, beenentirely silent and invisible throughout Maraini's absence.

The crowd at Sharpovsky's magic shop inNew Jersey had vague memories of both the mother and the father occasionallyaccompanying their son on his early trips to the store, but no one could recalltheir names. Over the years various attempts had been made to call everyMaraini in the New York and New Jersey phone books, but none of the peoplecontacted had ever heard of the magician. This part of the mystery was put torest by the profile in the Times.

"My son's given name is DarioDeCarava," his father said. "I have no idea where it came from, butfrom the time he got interested in magic - and he was just a boy - he startedreferring to himself exclusively as Maraini."

It turned out that no one in the familyhad had any sort of contact with Maraini since early in his Europeanpilgrimage. As for what his son might have in store for the curious comeSeptember 7th, the father said, "Your guess is as good as mine. In fact,your guess is probably better than mine. He was a mystery from the time helearned to speak."

Early on the morning of September 7th alarge crowd began to gather on the Great Lawn. It was a perfect autumn day ofthe sort New York is famous for. There was a considerable presence of New Yorkpolice officers, many of them on horseback. A large canvas tent was erected inthe middle of the lawn, surrounded by several large trucks. The word made itsway through the magic contingent - many members of which had traveled from farafield - that the set-up had occurred in the dead of night, and all thenecessary permits and paperwork had been secured.

No one had yet seen Maraini, or seemedto have any idea when he might have arrived in the city, or from where. Laterpolice estimates claimed that the eventual crowd gathered on the Great Lawn wasin the neighborhood of 5000, although I would personally guess that it was muchcloser to 10,000. A series of barriers had been erected around the tent,creating an open space that was perhaps fifty yards in circumference. Atexactly five p.m. a flap was pulled back from the tent and Maraini emerged - orat least it was assumed this was Maraini. No one was really in any essentialway capable of recognizing him. The man who walked out into the clearing toaddress the crowd was tall, a bit stooped, and as thin as advertised. His hairwas long and disheveled, and he was wearing a faded blue tee-shirt, bell bottomjeans, and sandals, which he immediatelyremoved and tossed back in the directionof the tent.

He appeared to squint out at the crowd,shook his head - almost sadly, it seemed - and stepped hesitantly to themicrophone, where he stood unmoving and unspeaking for several long moments.The crowd was remarkably silent. Eventually the flaps of the tent were rolledback and several people emerged leading a giraffe, which crept forward withlurching, tentative steps until it came to rest behind Maraini.

"This is an African giraffe,"Maraini said, finally addressing his audience. "It has undertaken a longand arduous journey to be here today, and before this day is over it will havetraveled an even longer and more amazing journey."

The handlers released their reins andstepped back toward the tent. The giraffe lowered its head briefly and thenraised it again and stood perfectly still.

"This giraffe is here in NewYork," Maraini said. "Surely as alien and unsettling a place as ithas ever found itself."

Maraini's voice was utterly withoutinflection. He did not smile or move from the microphone.

"Like so many in the city itcannot begin to imagine what it is doing here, and also like so many in thismerciless city, it would dearly love to be somewhere else, anywhere else."

At this point Maraini removed themicrophone from the stand and turned to face the giraffe. He appeared to bestaring into the giraffe's eyes, and the giraffe, unmoving except for ripplesthat ran up and down its long legs and steady waves that rolled across thevelvet of its ribcage, returned Maraini's gaze.

"I cannot begin to express mygratitude to you, my patient friend," Maraini said. "But I thank youfor everyone here. And now you are excused."

With that Maraini turned back towardthe crowd and the giraffe instantaneously disappeared. A gasp went through thecrowd, followed by a swelling murmur, and then a burst of wild applause.Maraini raised his hands and beckoned for silence. He now seemed to beglowering.

"There is nothing to cheerabout," he said. "It is a disgraceful, an unpardonable, thing to makea giraffe disappear. Is it not, however, a wondrous thing when a giraffe appears,anywhere in the world, even here in Central Park?"

Maraini closed his eyes, clasped hishands together as if he were praying, and then once again turned his back tothe crowd. He repeated the series of gestures. The crowd was almost completelysilent, poised in a rare moment of communal breathlessness. The giraffe did notreappear, and by this point it was clear that something had gone wrong. Anumber of people emerged from the tent and appeared to be both conferring withMaraini and consoling him. Everyone stood around for what seemed a very longtime, the noise of the crowd growing by the moment. Maraini paced arounddistractedly in front of the tent for fifteen or twenty minutes. He was clearlydistraught, and several times shook off assistants who approached him with theapparent intent of offering comfort or advice. After perhaps 45 minutes passedMaraini approached the microphone.

"Something has gone wrong,"he said. "In this world, you will surely have noticed, something alwaysgoes wrong."

And then he turned away and disappearedback into the tent. The crowd milled around for a bit longer and then began todisperse. Some speculated that they had just witnessed a hoax, an elaboratepublicity stunt. Others believed that they had been witnesses to a crime. Stillothers, myself included, had no idea what to think. That night's televisionnews gave a good deal of coverage to the story. Maraini, it was said, was notavailable for comment.

Then, near the end of the newscast, theanchors broke from a story they were reporting to announce that Maraini hadallegedly killed himself with a gunshot wound to the head in a Brooklynwarehouse. Unidentified police sources on the scene had provided a preliminaryidentification of the deceased, and official confirmation came later in theevening.

The next day we learned that Marainihad left instructions that he was to be buried in a pauper's cemetery on HartIsland. There would be no service. The burial occurred several days later, andthere were witnesses, including the grave diggers, Maraini's family, and a fewmembers of his traveling party. There was also a report from the mortician whoprepared the body for burial.

The morning after Maraini was interred,the entire city was abuzz with the news that a giraffe had appeared, grazing onthe Great Lawn of Central Park. Suspicions being immediately aroused, and basedon a tip from what police called a reliable source, a request was filed for theexhumation of Maraini's grave, despite objections from his family. A party,including city officials, a few journalists, and Maraini's parents, made thetrip to Hart Island. News reports described a grim affair. The disintermenttook place in a cold, torrential downpour, and the gravediggers had difficultylocating the coffin and then extricating it. The grave had filled with water,creating a sucking mudhole.

When the casket was eventually hoistedfrom the hole in the ground it was removed to a storage shed for inspection,pried open, and discovered to be empty.

Two Little Stories About Religious Paranoia

2012-01-22T23:24:00.000-06:00

The other night I dreamt I was in a boat floatingin thick fog, talking to God.

Look, He says to me, I'm just hoping to catch a fewfish. I didn't come down here to listen to you bitch.

I wouldn't think you'd need to fish, I said.

Very few people in this world need to fish, Hesaid. But it just so happens I like to fish. I'm a sportsman, and though, yes,I could technically cheat --at this as well as at anything else I damn wellplease-- that's never been my style. I don't much go in for flashy stuff andintervention. The fish don't know who's on the other end of the line, andthat's the way I like it. The truth is that if they did know, it would only make it all the moredifficult for me to catch them. Do you think for one minute that if those fishdown there knew I was in this boat they would eagerly impale themselves on myhook just to make me happy? I can assure you they would not. Unless and until somebody wants or needs somethingvirtually all of creation runs from me. Oh sure, there are nuts --there arealways nuts-- but I think you know what I mean. You're all fish to me--understand, of course, that I'm now speaking metaphorically, but that's theway I've always thought of you-- and when I go fishing it's virtually alwaysbad news for somebody. And I'm terribly sorry, my friend, but today thatsomebody is you.

And with that God pushed me out of the boat.

An Unfortunate Agreement

One night Ruckert dreamt that he had died and wasstanding in a long line outside the gates of Heaven. Some functionary wasmaking his way along the queue with a clipboard, directing queries to theprospective entrants.

“Will there be dogs in Heaven?” Ruckert inquired ofthe man.

“Yes,” the man said, “but unfortunately not yourdog. As you might recall, he killed a number of rabbits.”

The man offered Ruckert the option of spendingeternity in hell with his dog, an offer that Ruckert accepted withouthesitation, at which point he awoke in a cold sweat.

Despite the best and most rational counsel of hisclosest friends and therapist, Ruckert could not be dissuaded from his conviction that this dream representedsome sort of binding agreement.

From The Annals Of Exploration

2012-01-20T02:41:00.000-06:00

I recall reading somewhere about a party of Britishadventurers who were mucking about in some primitive, forsaken place. This was, if I'm not mistaken, sometime relatively early in the 19th century. According to a handful of sketchyjournals they left behind they'd had an arduous expedition and had lost several members of their party toviolence and various mysterious maladies.

Much of the time they spent navigating anunpredictable river and plodding through thick brush and rough, rocky terrain.I don't quite remember what they were looking for, but I'm certain it can besafely surmised that it was more or less something they hadn't seen before.Like many such explorers I'm supposing they were bored with domesticity andcivilization, and hoped that hardshipand peril would make them men again.

They were also --once again, like many suchcharacters-- blunderers, utterly ill-prepared and incompetent, certain thattheir firearms and education (they weremostly well-to-do graduates of Oxford, I believe, with a handful ofhardscrabble human mules to do their dirty work) made them superior to thevague task at hand.

Almost needless to say, they disappeared, as is sooften the case with such foolhardy explorers. Many years later a party ofanthropologists and botanists stumbled across a jungle clearing in that stillinhospitable part of the world, a clearing where they discovered a neatlyarranged collection of bleached skulls seemingly growing from the earth likejack-o-lanterns made of bone. Additional investigation revealed that the bodiesbelonging to these skulls had in fact been buried vertically, and presumablyalive, up to their necks.

When these pathetic souls were excavated it was discovered that they were stillwearing their tattered clothing, and one of their number was yet clutching inwhat was left of his right hand a scrap of moldering cloth on which wasscrawled in fading script the words: "We have had the misfortune ofencountering a party of white men."

The Mountain

2012-01-16T01:08:00.000-06:00

The mountain told the crow he was lonely.

"If you would use your wings to fly away, even if only for a short time, you would surely not feel so lonely," the crow said.

"But I don't have wings," the mountain said. "I cannot fly away. And even if I could fly away, I could not do so. Where I am is what I am."

"Nonsense," the crow said, and lifted off and soared away across the valley.

The mountain was not a majestic specimen. It was, in fact, a humble mountain, covered with trees almost all the way to its highest point and surrounded by other mountains from which it was virtually indistinguishable. There was a good deal of mountain competition for a hundred miles in every direction. To the north of the lonely, humble mountain there was a range of truly majestic mountains, rock-faced and snow-capped, that were said to be visible from the smaller mountains on all sides.

The lonely mountain could not see these majestic mountains. He was severely myopic and knew of the majestic mountains only from descriptions he had heard from the birds, and from the occasional comments of admiration he heard from the rare hikers who climbed through the trees --'climbed' was perhaps not wholly accurate; people could walk at a leisurely pace to the top of the lonely, humble mountain-- to stand or sit for a moment at the small cluster of rocks that constituted its modest summit. No one who ever came to the lonely, humble mountain ever addressed a word to him. No one had ever asked his permission to cut down his trees, to build fires from his wood, or to fish in his brooks. For hundreds of years he had been conversant with no one but the occasional bird. Some of them, from their perspective high up in the sky, could at least see that he was there, distinct; could see that though he was covered with trees and bushes and flowers and rocks, and that though there were springs and brooks and all manner of animals living on him, he was the mountain, the village in which all these other things resided.

After the mountain had made his confession to the crow other birds began to visit and hector him with the same advice: "Fly away! Fly away!"

The crow must have gossiped that the mountain was lonely. The crow was loud, and loose lipped, and the mountain knew that he never should have confided in him. All that summer the birds came flitting and swooping and soaring in from the north, south, east, and west. "Tsk-tsk, lonely," they would cry. "Tsk-tsk, lonely. Fly away! Fly away!"

Most of the birds the mountain had ever known were foolish. Only the owls were wise, and they seldom deigned to talk to him. He had lived longer than all the foolish birds combined, and he had heard them coming and going for hundreds of years. Of course they were not lonely. They were not anchored to the earth and nearly blind. They built nests and had children and traveled great distances and visited other mountains and forests and lands. The mountain had heard their stories, and once upon a time they had thrilled him.

One day near the end of the summer, on an afternoon when the mountain could once again sense the changing of the seasons and could feel the planet churning beneath him, a hawk paid him a visit.

"I hear you are lonely," the hawk said.

"It is true, yes," the mountain said. "I am lonely. It is lonely to be an old mountain."

"Why do you not fly away?" the hawk asked.

The mountain sighed. "Because I do not have wings," he said. "It would be impossible for me to fly away. And where I am is what I am."

The hawk seemed to consider this for a moment.

"But of course you have wings," he said. "I have seen them. I have been snatching mice from the feathers of your wings for years. And what you are you will be wherever you go."

"Nonsense," the mountain said. "I am a mountain, and if I were to leave I would cease to be a mountain."

"Your problem, old Mr. Mountain," the hawk said, "is that you are stubborn and blind. It is no wonder you are lonely." And with that the hawk hurled itself into the air and was carried away on the wind.

Autumn crept over the mountain and darkness came early and the nights grew longer and colder. Soon the snow would begin to fall and the mountain would be silent and more alone than ever. Winters were hard on the old mountain. They nibbled away at him year by year, and when spring once again came around there would be new cracks and less of him than there had been the year before.

Increasingly, when the first snow came the old mountain would close his eyes and sleep fitfully until he heard the first tentative arrival of the birds and the running of the brooks carrying away the last of the melting snow. One evening in late autumn he was already dreaming of that day when he was startled awake by the sound of migrating geese, crossing the sky above him in great numbers.

As he listened to their exuberant, long familiar traveling songs, the old mountain felt something moving within him, a rustle that built rapidly to a roar --the crashing of trees and rocks, thunderous, terrifying, a noise that gradually subsided and was replaced by what sounded like nothing so much as a huge, rhythmic heart beating furiously and almost weightlessly within him. And then the startled old mountain suddenly felt himself rising in a swirling blizzard of dirt and pebbles and dead leaves.

With dreaming wonder, the mountain watched the earth gradually recede as he climbed higher and higher into the clear night sky, alternately gliding and gyring, carried up and away --or so it did indeed seem-- by a giant pair of dusty wings. And when he cast one last look backwards and downwards he saw that the mountain that had been for so many years home to his lonely heart was still there, reposed in the moonlight and waiting for the arrival of another long winter.

My Memories Of Tchaikovsky

2012-01-14T01:32:00.000-06:00

It's no secret that people of great achievement areoften abject curiosities and spectacular failures as human beings, and this wascertainly true of Tchaikovsky, who lived in my hometown when I was growing up.

I can't truly claim that it was my privilege toknow the man, or even that to know him would have been, in fact, any kind ofprivilege at all. (My understanding is that this was decidedly not the case.)But I certainly remember the old man, and recall seeing his stooped andwretched specter stumbling along the sidewalks of my neighborhood.

People around town knew Tchaikovsky, of course, orcertainly were aware of his strange presence. Few, however, apparently realized that he was writing music. Most folks remember him as a stunningly bad amateurpainter whose crude oils of birds --robins, almost exclusively-- were enteredin the art show at the county fair each summer.

Somewhere I have a snapshot of the garish tattoo ofa naked clown bleeding from his eyes that Tchaikovsky had etched into one ofhis forearms. I can't recall how I came by this photograph, to be honest withyou, but it remains among my most prized possessions, and countless scholarshave tried to buy it from me over the years.

There was always a great deal of speculation thatTchaikovsky was consumptive, or infected with venereal disease. There did,certainly, appear to be something wrong with him. There were clearly healthissues of one sort or another, most obviously a painful-looking skin condition.He also had dodgy hygiene, and always seemed to be in need of a new pair ofshoes.

Late in his life Tchaikovsky wore a beat-to-shitpair of purple moon boots, no matter the season. This was after moon boots hadlong since gone out of fashion, and I suppose he picked them up on one of hisregular visits to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store, where he was also said(this was in the newspaper after his death) to be an indiscriminate hoarder of"potboilers and paperback westerns."

Every afternoon he would emerge from his rentedroom at the Ace Hotel over on the east side by the railroad yard, and he andFriedrich Engels, another Ace resident and local curiosity, would stumble around the sidewalks of downtown engaged in heatedconversation that often resulted in minor dust-ups and spitting matches. Kidsused to regularly throw rocks at them.

I can also tell you that Tchaikovsky rolled his owncigarettes (Drum), and spent a great deal of time drinking coffee and bangingaway at the Cannonball Run pinball machine at a local pizza parlor. He was oncearrested for shoplifting a porno mag from Nemitz’s (I can remember my fathersitting at the dinner table and chuckling over the Daily Herald’s description of the stolen merchandise as “agentlemen’s magazine of undetermined value.”).

Whenever we'd see him out and about, my motherwould always say, "That poor man doesn't know whether he's coming orgoing."

"I could help him out with that," myfather would say. "He's going."

The old mutterer had one sister still in town, butshe was said to find him repellent, and more than once sought a restrainingorder against him on the grounds that he creeped her out –that, at least, wasmy mother’s version, which she had received secondhand from a courthouse clerkwho was part of a group my mother belonged to that made quilts (with Bible versespinned to them) for Africans.

Tchaikovsky occasionally played chess at the publiclibrary with the conductor of the high school orchestra, and somehow managed totalk this man into performing some of his compositions at the annual springorchestra concert. Nothing much was made of his music at the time, however, andwhen Tchaikovsky died he was largely friendless and wholly uncelebrated.

Even to this day there are people in my oldhometown who will insist that the music now attributed to Tchaikovsky was, infact, composed by some other person, or persons.

Repeated attempts to raisemoney to erect a statue in his honor outside the library have beenunsuccessful.

The International Repository Of Regrets

2012-01-09T02:25:00.003-06:00

Since he lost his job as an aviation mechanic inthe late 1980s, Riggs has been a clerk at the International Repository ofRegrets. He hasn't had a good night's sleep in almost ten years.

The Repository, housed in a World War Two-era traindepot, is a vast place of bad light and spooky, institutional acoustics. Evenin the middle of the night --especially in the middle of the night-- it isalways crowded, and the mood there is generally sour and joyless. The crowd ispolyglottal, often dizzyingly so.

Some of the people who stand in the long lines aredead, shuffling in place in stepped-down shoes, often clutching photographs –orentire albums of photographs-- to their breasts. Many of the waiting have grownhoarse from a lifetime of rehearsing and fine-tuning their regrets. For themost part, they throw their cigarette butts and the wrappers from the vendingmachines on the scarred concrete floor.

The International Repository of Regrets is nowlittle but a purely bureaucratic facility, and offers nothing in the way ofdispensation, absolution, or second chances. Even as a repository it has longsince surrendered any claims of utility.

These days, whatever regrets are unburdened thereare merely scribbled haphazardly in the margins of ancient, crowded ledgers,wherever there is room. All attempts at maintaining accurate chronologicalrecords have been abandoned.

They will soon enough run out of room entirely, atwhich point the clerks in their teller's cages will be forced to simply sit andlisten, reduced to the role of secular priests, mostly disinterested andconcerned not at all with salvation or even compassion.

By now, Riggs had pretty much heard it all before, fromthe truly criminal to the almost unpardonably banal.

Even so, these latter confessions were the thingsthat continued to haunt him, revealing as they did the cumulative, lingeringdamage that could result from even the smallest childhood disappointments. Forinstance, there was, in the wee hours of one long night, the old woman who hadstood in line for days to tell Riggs of the heartbreak she had suffered owingto the fact that allergies had made it impossible for her to ever hug a dog. Orthe younger man, deceased by the time he made his way to Riggs’ window, who wasgrief stricken over his lifelong inability to throw a baseball to his father'ssatisfaction.

Riggs had also encountered individuals --there hadbeen at least a dozen-- whose chief regret in life was one particularly badhaircut.

And so, so many people had stood before Riggsand poured out their regret over elaborately planned surprise parties that hadbeen disastrous or poorly attended.

Most distressingly and unsurprisingly, love--faithless love, tragic love, and love gone wrong, gone cold, or gonemissing-- continued to be the reason the overwhelming majority of the brokenand beleaguered clientele made the difficult pilgrimage to the InternationalRepository of Regrets. Day after day and night after night Riggs listened tothese stories. Unlike some of the other, older clerks, he was incapable of notlistening. Sometimes he found himself jotting notes on scraps of paper hecarried in his pockets for just this purpose. Personal note taking was strictlyforbidden, and the regrets that were offered up at the Repository were neversupposed to leave the facility.

Yet Riggs did take these notes. He took them downand he took them home, and he would spend some time studying and mulling themeach day at the end of his shift. And then he would put them away in a box hekept under his bed, a box in which he had for 32 years kept a collection of notesand faded greeting cards –old birthday, anniversary, and Valentine cards—thatwere all addressed to him and signed in the same unmistakable hand.

And every day Riggs went to work and kept hisvigil, even as he was slowly, slowly, slowly losing hope that eventually thefamiliar, beautiful, and sad face he had been waiting for allthose years was one evening going to appear before him, and offer up the words thatwould set him free.

From An Obituary In The Forest Lake Times: Perpetuating One More Old, Cruel Stereotype

2012-01-04T03:13:00.000-06:00

...You will be like a man compelled tospend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so thatfuture seafarers shall know he once existed.
--Schopenhauer, “On Ethics.”

This was the life of the small townspinster librarian: a clock that clanged on the half hour every day for over 50years. The city's siren swelling in the streets each afternoon at exactly 12o'clock, and again to signal the ten p.m. curfew --as if people couldn't telltime or didn't have clocks to do it for them. A dysfunctional milkman,desperate, facing extinction, and the butt of a thousand old jokes, sweatinghis hard sell door-to-door. A moldering Main Street full of nothing but emptystorefronts and dreams that began to fade the moment they took bloom. A few drearytaverns she had never visited, but whose clientele and climate she could wellimagine, given her unfortunate familiarity with the squalid habits of somany of her fellow townspeople. A dozen rusty grain elevators and a scar ofragged railroad tracks that passed for industry, and a rusty water towerthat served as a local landmark and should have had some sort of pointedapology painted across its facade.

The librarian had always felt as if thewhole town was beneath her, almost literally so. She would never make housewith a bumbling local; this determination had been hardwired in herheart back in her schoolgirl days. She would look with nothing but scorn uponthe flock of poor bachelors who gathered each afternoon and evening in thelibrary's front parlor, making stammering conversation and rustling through thecollection of inferior magazines and newspapers.

The local weekly wasn'tworth the nearly transparent paper it was printed on, and wasproduced by end-of-the-road or entry-level journalists playing at the saddestsort of dead-end reportage: school board meetings, piddling zoningcontroversies, wedding and anniversary announcements, school lunch menus,senior citizen center craft sales, high school football, and obituaries. Therehad always been plenty of obituaries--the local funeral home was thenewest building in town, and was illuminated like a casino all through thenight-- but anymore even the number of dead people was diminishing by the day.

Every night the spinsterlibrarian carried home thick novels, read herself to sleep, and regretted everything other than the fact that she had been taught to read.

One day late in her life she would havethe realization that her father was to be the only true gentleman she would ever meet,and the only man who would ever hold her in his arms.

Before she’d even reached fifty she hadmade arrangements to be buried in Boston, a place she had never so much asvisited. This was the only wish she ever publicly expressed, as well as theonly wish she was ever granted.

A Catalog of Simple Wishes For The New Year

2011-12-30T03:20:00.001-06:00

To enter each day expectant, and bowdown to my dog with gratitude.

To leap and blow bubbles andreach instinctively for every bright, raging color in the crayon box.

To creep like an ecstatic cat burglarthrough every day and fling myself at the world.

To want more.

To whoop and bellow and grip the grasswith my toes.

To look forward, and lunge.

To stomp through the calendar, oblivious,and to kill no clock that I don’t intend to eat with genuine relish.

To sense the planet moving beneath myfeet, and to understand that that motionrepresents both a state of urgency and an obligation.

To laugh until I cry uncle.

To want more.

To emerge from every dark place upright,unharmed, and blinking in the sunlight.

To imagine entire new constellations ofplanets, vast galaxies teeming with possibility.

To create a world of my own that allowsme to live comfortably in the world I did not create.

To surround myself with the things Ihave saved from a lifetime of excavation and exploration, every one of which isa personal version of Proust’s madeleine.

To keep playing Twister with words untilI find the right way to say the things I want and need to say.

To have pure, idiot wonder and faith inthe limitless miracles of my body.

To want more.

To trust fully the things on which I candepend.

To be more dependable to the people onwhom I depend.

To harbor none but exaggerated fears andthe smallest of dissolving terrors.

To be hungry for nothing but somethingto eat.

To be forever trusting in the arms ofmercy.

To get up when I fall.

To stand and run and never crawlagain.

To recognize that I have been blessedbeyond measure, and to accept my blessings as the expected, everyday miraclesthat they are.

To give thanks, nonetheless.

To want more.

To keep my heart open.

To listen.

To talk to strangers.

To stop what I’m doing –wherever I am—andtake a good look around.

To reach out, to raise my voice.

To change my mind.

To know that I’ve done what I could.

To know that I want to do still more.

To settle down at the end of the day withgood music and my inventory of pleasures and memories.

To give myself away until I’m empty andexhausted and left with nothing but the last radiant embers of satisfactionand contentment.

To believe that if this is it, it wasnot just enough, but more than enough.

To sleep and --not merely perchance-- todream.

To have sweet dreams.

To want more.

To get up and try it all again.

Watching The Dailies From A Railroad Trestle In Vermont

2011-12-28T01:49:00.000-06:00

A creeping reel of film
stretched across the valley
between the shrouded hills,
a pastoral interlude before things
get lively and it heads through
town, the river both the film itself
and the screen on which it is projected.

Watching at dusk from the theater
of the trestle, the town huddled
on the banks shimmers across the screen.
The streetlamps, the slashing lights of
cars on the river road, the lights
in the windows of the hulking old
buildings, the steam from the paper mill.

Or at high noon, color and light
and evident shapes and motion,
floating clouds and a bright,
shattered sun transmuted time and
again in a quaking hall of mirrors.
Yet another dream shot for the ancient
cinematographer, the supreme panoramist.

He likes to keep his show rolling,
and loaded with literal sub-texts,
hidden backstories and tragic plot lines
stashed in the memory of moving water
and the murk beneath the surface.
A shame you can’t rewind the film
a hundred or even five hundred years.

If you wanted to, though, you could follow
its languid story all the way to its closing credits,
to the moon-tossed archives of the sea,
repository of a million dreams etched on
living water. This day will be there
soon, dissolving into fragments and,
finally, particles of pure and living light.

Sometimes, far out at sea, the ocean
will still screen jumbled festivals of the
old films it has acquired, and sailors
will be struck mute with wonder, forever
changed by they things they have seen.

A Gift That Sets The Stars Free

2011-12-21T11:17:00.000-06:00

One night long ago in a once-upon-a-time worldthere was a little lost dog in a faraway forest. The dog was alone and hungry,and it was a bitter winter. The dog was settling into the den he had burrowedfor himself in the snow around the roots of a tree, and as he curled up in thedarkness he heard the distant shimmer of bells and, a moment later, voicescarrying in the cold night air, a great many voices joined in some happy song.The dog had never known anyone to pass through the faraway forest, not once inhis lost time in that lonely place had he heard voices like these, or thebeautiful and wondrous stamping of bells.

The little dog crept to the edge of his den andsniffed, peering, in the direction of the music. A moment later, light from themany torches of the travelers swept creeping shadows into the clearing outsidethe den, then chased completely the darkness before them and became full, hissing light. The dog watchedin wonder as the brightly clad travelers –laughing and singing—paraded intoview, enveloped in a moving cloud of steam and smoke.

There were tiny acrobats and a tall, thin fellowtoddling on stilts and several laughing jugglers. There were five shy horsespulling bright clattering wagons, and interspersed amongst the parade weredozens of chattering clowns. At the very end of this colorful parade, laggingalmost outside the very last of the torchlight, there was a small, limpingclown, leading an old and slow donkey. As the dog crept from his hiding place,the happy songs and jangling bells of the travelers were already fading awayinto the distance and the darkness of the faraway forest.

The dog trotted along after the parade and soonfound himself beside the limping clown and the old donkey. When finally thesad-faced clown became aware of the dog’s presence, a look of surprise andhappiness came over his face and he let out a cry that startled the little dog.The clown crouched in the snow alongside the donkey and clapped his hands andcalled out, and when the dog came into the clown’s arms the little clown beganto laugh and the small, laughing clown held the dog in his arms, rocking himgently and murmuring.

The clown –murmuring and giggling happily all thewhile—carried the dog in his arms as they brought up the rear of the noisy andcolorful and clanking parade.

They traveled that night until the torches had allburned down to darkness, and then they stopped and set up their camp along a frozenriver. It had grown cold, and the travelers bundled together under theirblankets beside roaring fires, with the horses and the donkey huddled stampingand steaming just outside the circle of jugglers, acrobats, and clowns.

The clown had swaddled the lost dog in an old woolblanket, and he held the dog in his arms and rocked him as the others toldstories and laughed and gradually drifted into silence and sleep.

The clown’s name was Munch, or so he was known tohis fellow travelers, and now he whispered to the dog in his arms, “I shall callyou Beauteous Munch.” Together they sat up until the bonfire had faded toembers, and together they saw a sky above them where there were millions uponmillions of bright stars. The clown sang quiet songs and interrupted himself atone point to say, “Look, Beauteous Munch, there goes a shooting star! Sweet dreams, my little wish.”

And that night, as he lay curled up beneath theblankets with the little clown, Beauteous Munch was warm and slept withoutshivering for the first time since the long ago day when he had first foundhimself lost in the faraway forest.

There hadbeen a time when Beauteous Munch was a puppy living contentedly with hismother and his brothers and sisters in a wooden box in a small town. One day a manand woman had come to take him away to live with them in their house. They wereloud and unhappy people, and try as he might Beauteous Munch could not makethem any less unhappy. The old man was impatient with Beauteous Munch andshouted at him often.

All day Beauteous Munch would sit at the windowstaring out at the children playing in the street and passing by his house.Then one day when the nights were beginning to get cold, the man put BeauteousMunch outside. It was raining very hard, and cry as he might and scratch at thedoor as he did, Beauteous Munch could not get the old man or woman to open thedoor for him so he could come in out of the rain. Beauteous Munch sat on thesteps of the house for a long time that night, until he saw the lamp in thefront room extinguished and it was dark up and down the street and the rain wasbeginning to turn to snow. That was the night Beauteous Munch wandered away andeventually found himself lost in the faraway forest.

That first night away from his home Beauteous Munchtried to sleep, but he was wet and cold and lonely. He missed his long agoonce-upon-a-time life. He peered up through the big, wet snowflakes that werecart-wheeling out of the sky and he found a star there barely twinkling, alittle star that looked lost and distant and alone. And as Beauteous Munchclosed his eyes he wished upon that lost and distant star, wished thatsomewhere there was another wish lost and longing for a dog, and that attachedto that wish was someone special with quiet magic in his hands and a soft voiceand a smile that could wag a dog’s tail.

That samenight, far away from the faraway forest, Munch the clown was bundled up ina blanket next to his donkey, listening to the laughter and the songs of histraveling companions. He was stout and not as graceful as the others, nor asskilled. Even as a clown his only real role was to lead the donkey and thehorses around the ring, and to assist some of the performers with their stunts.He could not sing, and because he spoke with a slight stutter he was thequietest of the troupe, and tended to settle by himself into the background,talking quietly with the donkey and the horses.

The little clown looked up into the sky and wishedupon a distant star; he closed his eyes and showed his crooked teeth to themoon and offered only the simplest and most humble of wishes: Please, he whispered, Something Nice. Something happy. A small, happy thing.

And so itwas that on the first night he spent with Beauteous Munch, the little clown sawthe beautiful shooting star tumble all the way down the sky and he thought tohimself, So that is what happens when twowishes collide with one another: Anold star is freed from the heavens and falls into a distant sea where itbecomes a thousand bright and glimmering fishes. A wish come true is a giftthat sets the stars free.

And that isthe story of how Beauteous Munch came to live with Munch the clown. Togetherthey learned many tremendous and difficult tricks; the little clown taughtBeauteous Munch to ride on the olddonkey’s back and walk across a rope and leap through the tiniest of hoops, andall the signs the performers took around and posted in the towns and villagesnow said “BEAUTEOUS MUNCH –WONDERFUL SHOW DOG!” He was very popular indeed, andpeople would come from far and wide to see the amazing clown and hisastonishing dog.

On clear nights, as Beauteous Munch and his friendthe clown tuckled up and drifted off to sleep, they would stare into the skyabove them and watch with drowsy wonder as star after star tumbled through thedarkness and somewhere, they knew, a wish had come true.

Fall On Your Knees

2011-12-18T01:14:00.000-06:00

It was a quiet horse, the color of gray corduroy, or those elephant slabsof damp clay wrapped in cellophane. They delivered the horse to the pasture outback of my trailer, and it had taken four men to coax her from the truck. Shedidn’t kick or fuss, but simply refused to budge. I’d paid 100 dollars for thehorse to save it from being put down. My old girlfriend had a pathologicalweakness for downtrodden animals of all kinds.

One of the delivery fellows keptreferring to the horse as ‘daft,’ which I thought was an unusual word choicefor a young man who couldn’t have been more than 25 years of age. I didn’tthink the horse was daft, at any rate, just depressed. She tended to stand inone place out in the pasture, with her head down, and I very seldom saw hereat.

I’d never in my life spent Christmas alone. Theday before Christmas Eve I’d driven into the nearest decent-sized city, acollege town of maybe 70,000 people, just under a half hour’s drive from mytrailer. The city was crowded with last minute shoppers from the small townsthat were clustered in the long valleys throughout the mountains. I’d stoppedat some cheap steak chain for lunch, and later splurged on a bunch of new CDsfor myself and nearly fifty bucks worth of treats for my dog. Heavy snow wasfalling even as I made my way back out of town, and by the time I pulled intothe half-mile gravel road that led to my trailer visibility had been reduced tonext to nothing.

I stumbled through the blowing snowto the door of the trailer. My dog, a mongrel so strained as to look exotic,was waiting for me in a state of pitched agitation, and I opened the door andwatched the dog disappear into the whiteout beyond the trailer.

That night I drank enough to feelgenuinely sorry for myself, and almost managed to talk myself into flying outthe next day to spend Christmas with my sister’s family in Colorado.

The next morning, Christmas Eve, Iwoke up on the couch, as hungover as I’d been in years.The trailer wascompletely drifted in, and the wind was still tossing snow around and obscuringthe range down the valley to the north. I’d left every light on in the trailer.The only radio station I could pick up in the valley was wheedling withChristmas carols, the signal drifting in and out –some choir somewhere, with abig echo effect that suggested a live feed from a cathedral. I was determined to drink down someAlka-Seltzer and go back to bed, but I realized with a start that my dog wasstill someplace out in the storm. It was rare that I would allow the dog to spendthe night outside in any weather.

I went to the door and called outinto the blowing snow. There was no response, and I still could not even makeout the gray horse in the pasture less than 100 yards away. I pulled on a pairof boots, parka, mittens, and a hat with earflaps, and ventured out into thedrifts. My truck was almost completely buried. I tried to call out into thesnow for the dog, but my voice was swallowed in the swirling wind. Wading knee-and sometimes hip-deep through the drifts I made my way around the side of thetrailer and managed somehow to locate one of the fence posts from the horsepasture. I couldn’t see much, or far, but there was no sign of either the dogor the horse.

I crawled back into bed, bundledmyself in blankets, and tried to take a nap. My head was throbbing, and as Ilay there I kept imagining that I heard the dog barking somewhere out in thestorm. I actually got up and went to the door twice, but there was no sign ofthe dog and no sound other than the howling of the wind. Even as I sleptfitfully I was aware of my heart pinging in my chest like a sonar in anabandoned submarine.

I’d traveled so far from the personI had once been that the people I’d allowed myself to be close to, as well asthose to whom I was conjoined by blood, had become mostly uncomfortablestrangers to me. I had drifted out of touch. I had no axe togrind, no extravagant grievance or baggage, and it now seemed sad and even a bitshameful to think that my mother did not even know where I was now living orhow to get in touch with me. I hadn’t spoken with her in over ten months. Whenmy girlfriend had grown tired of the west and had moved back to Boston –it hadbeen almost two years—I’d given up the apartment in Bozeman and taken thetrailer in the valley. I was supposed to be finishing a set of illustrationsfor a children’s book, but hadn’t made any progress in weeks.

I’d been traveling further intoloneliness and its odd, romanticized solace and pleasures. My girlfriend hadbeen in possession of a more polished set of social instincts. She’d been anEnglish professor at a local college, and liked to host small gatherings,enjoyed going out for dinner and shopping. Left to my own devices I seldom didanything that might be considered social. I had made few real friends in theyears I’d been living in the west, and still hadn’t even bothered to have the trailerwired for a telephone. The dog was a perfect companion: a good listener, anenforcer of routine and a reasonable order in each day. It was also patient,even-tempered, and eager to please –absolutely companionable. That Man’s BestFriend business really was not overstating, not in this instance. It wasunconscionable that I’d allowed myself to get so drunk that I’d left the dogoutside in a raging blizzard all night. The poor animal could have strayedmiles in search of shelter by this time.

The odd thing about the wholeaffair was that I’d seldom even gone into town without taking the dog along. I’dbeen made careless by melancholy and drink, and I would chew myself up foreverwith grief if anything had happened to him. As I lay there driftingmiserably along the blurriest edges of sleep and hangover, I imagined beinghounded to the end of my days by the ghost of that dog. In the two precedingyears the only real highlights of the holiday season had been the long walks downthe valley we had taken together on Christmas Eve.

I finally bundled myself up againand ventured out in what was left of the afternoon daylight to look for thedog. The storm had apparently lifted or moved on; I could see the last of theclouds departing down the valley. The odd and alarming new development was thatnot only was my dog missing, but there was no sign of the gray horse anywherein the pasture. The sky had cleared to the point that I could see the entiretyof the horse’s fenced enclosure, and the horse was nowhere to be seen. Iwaddled along the drifts that were built up along the fence line and inspectedthe gate. It was not only firmly latched, but drifted completely shut. I walked the length of the road to mytrailer, all the way out to where it intersected the main gravel road that ledout to the state highway. I saw no evidence of any traffic whatsoever, noanimal or vehicle tracks other than those from my own truck the previousevening, and even those were mostly obscured.

I managed to get the truck startedand backed out to the turnaround. Fromthere the four-wheel drive got me through the drifted snow out to the gravelcounty road, which was in pretty good shape. From there to the blacktop state highway, a distance of just under twomiles, I saw no signs of either the dog or the horse. Once I hit the stop signat the highway I decided to make another trip into town. I had no idea what Iexpected to accomplish there on Christmas Eve; it was almost five o’clock andalready getting dark. The highway had been plowed and road conditions werefine. There were still Christmas carols looping on the radio station, and Imade up my mind to attend Christmas Eve services at some church in town. I hadn’tbeen in a church in a half dozen years, at least, but I had fond memories ofthe holiday services from my childhood, and felt very much like a man who neededsomehow to be forgiven. If God was ever going to grab me, I’d never felt sosusceptible.

In town I found a phone book andtried to call the local animal shelter, but got the answering machine and adeadpan voice wishing me a merry Christmas and encouraging me to neuter my dog.I walked around downtown checking telephone poles and bulletin boards where Ithought I might find notices of lost and found animals, but turned up nothingthat fit the description of my dog. In the empty Greyhound station I picked upa copy of the local newspaper and found an advertisement for Christmas Eveservices at area churches. There was a six o’clock service at a big Lutheranchurch right in town, so I left my truck on the street and went off in searchof the place.

The service was packed withfamilies, and there were dozens of scrubbed and squirming children. I had atough time staying awake through some of the readings and much of the sermon,but I nonetheless felt somehow better for having gone. My heart felt lighterand heavier at the same time, a strangely emotional state that I have alwaysassociated with the holidays. As I walked back to my truck I was greeted warmlyby at least a half dozen strangers. I remembered my late father coming in froma last-minute errand on Christmas eve long ago; the old man was rosy-cheeked,half in the bag, and happy as a clam. He was a man who loved special occasions,and as he came in with his arms loaded with shopping bags he had bellowed, “Thewhole damn town is lousy with Christmas spirit!”

All the way out to the trailer Itried to repair the years in my mind, to line up memories and freeze them in aplace where there had still seemed to be so much time, all the time that hadsince carried me past dark off-ramps, dimly-lit intersections, and all theforks where I had chosen –or, unconsciously, not chosen—the direction that hadled me to this road along which I was now driving. I’d basically always leteach day shove me wherever it wanted, and when it stopped shoving I stayed put.I missed the old man, a guy who’d been a shover, a dictator in the best and mostintoxicating way; he’d always gone his own way and dragged others along whowere helpless to resist him, right to the end. After he died my mother hadadmitted that she’d been little more than one more of his tag-alongs. “He toldme he was going to marry me,” she said, “and I believed him.”

Back at the trailer I stood out inthe middle of the drifted-in driveway and called out to the dog. The sky had been blown entirely clear ofclouds. I stood and watched a jet make its way right through Orion’s belt inthe east. It was already close to nine o’clock, and I went back into thetrailer, mixed myself a glass of eggnog, and managed to nod off on the couchfor a time. At some point I was awakened by what I thought were bells. I sat upin the dark and listened. All was silent, and then I heard voices. I pulled onmy boots and stepped outside the trailer. It was a gorgeous night. I could seethe Christmas lights twinkling from my neighbor’s yard across the valley. Thetrees at the farthest edge of my fence line seemed to be nested with glowingcorposants. I walked around the trailer and there, a hundred yards away in thepasture, was my dog, sitting attentively before the gray horse.

The horse was standing perhapsthree feet from the dog, and her big headwas hanging directly above the dog’s, and their joint breathing had created a surreal little pocket of steam in which they seemed frozen. It wasan absolutely clear night, eerily quiet. The horse appeared to be conversingwith the dog, and as I approached the fence I swore I heard the words –clear asthey could possibly be: “And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not, for behold, Ibring you good tidings of great joy.’” The dog emitted what sounded like a hoarse, incredulous chuckle. Fromacross the valley I heard once again the ringing of bells. Stars were stretchedout above me, precise, detailed constellations, the clear, dusty clutter of theMilky Way. I was astonished to see fireworks bloom suddenly above the valley inthe distance, and was inexplicably moved to see the dog and the horse raisetheir heads in unison to marvel at the display.

I let out a belly laugh thatsnapped out into the cold air and was quickly swallowed up, and at that precisemoment my dog turned and saw me. As he came bounding in my direction I fell tomy knees in the snow, opened my arms wide, and braced for the impact.

Your Lives In My Tiny Little Hands

2011-12-13T03:09:00.000-06:00

This one guy, every couple weeks it's these amazingplaces you can't even believe, mountains, usually, and he's standing in water or strung upon a cliff and hanging from ropes. He'll bring in ten or twenty rolls of filmat a time, and it's gotten so that I look forward to seeing him come throughthe door. You see the whole world, is how my boss put it when he was trainingme in. This job is a privilege, he'd say. These people are trusting us withtheir most private moments.

I've always been one of those guys who isn't muchfor going places --going places, actually, doesn't bother me; it's the beingthere that I have a problem with. But it is interesting for me to see theseother places and to imagine, you know, my own versions of the stories thesepictures might be trying to tell. One time this guy brought in a roll of film and itwas nothing but pictures of dead cows --seven dead cows sprawled around in thedirt. There wasn't a single person in any of the photos, just the dead cows,and somebody had taken pink paint and outlined their bodies in the dirt, justlike they'd been murdered in the movies.

Of course you get the pictures ofwomen in bathing suits, and people on the toilet --I've seen hundreds ofthose-- and occasionally actual bare breasts or even some full frontal, although we're not supposedto develop anything that's "too far over the line," as my boss says.But I have to admit that in five years we've never refused to process a singleroll of film that I'm aware of.

My own family never took photographs. I don't thinkI ever saw a camera in either of my parents' hands. These people would comearound at school to take photos of the students and I remember bringing home alittle packet of those every year but I'm not even sure what my mother would dowith them. They didn't go up on the refrigerator like they did at other kids'houses, I know that much. My mother didn't put anything on the refrigerator.

I'm sure people would be horrified to think that welook through their photos, but they must know. It's human nature, my boss says.I think one thing that happens so often is that people will find an old roll offilm still in a camera or laying around the house somewhere --in a kitchendrawer or in the glove compartment of their car-- and they'll have completelyforgotten what's on there and curiosity gets the best of them so they bringthem in to be developed. They bring them in because they want to know, and I thinkthat's when you get some surprises.

People always ask, what's the strangest thingyou've ever seen looking at all these photos day after day? And, to be honestwith you, that's not an easy question to answer. I've seen so many strange andI guess disturbing things mixed in with the birthday parties and the picnicsand parades. More than one person with a gun in their mouth. A dead dog laidout on a kitchen table with a flower in its teeth. This one guy we called theSign Man, who would take photographs of himself holding hand-lettered signsthat said things like, "Tammi, I am not a part of your experimentanymore," or "I am sick and tired of being taken apart by robots." Unsurprisingly, the Sign Man eventually turned in a rollof film with a photo of himself with a gun in his mouth.

I have seen so many babies being born that it is nolonger even mysterious or interesting to me. I have seen a hundred families or more standing in front ofMount Rushmore or shaking Mickey Mouse's hand. Young couples in formal wear, ofcourse, getting ready to go to a dance or get married. Little children crouchednext to their beds with folded hands, saying their prayers. People in coffinsand carnival rides and tombstones. Christmas trees, obviously, and kids sitting on Santa's lap. Lots of people in Halloween costumes. One I do remember in particular was a picture of a cross-eyed little kid with a snail creeping up his tongue.

People also take a lot of pictures of food, colorphotos of turkeys and hams and Jello. You see everything, really, pretty much anythingyou could imagine.

Personally, I like the stuff in the margins, themistakes and unintentional shots that show what goes on outside the world ofwhat people think of as a picture. I like to study the people who are juststanding in the background, looking puzzled and unaware. I couldn't tell you,really, what staring into those pictures makes me feel. Captured, I suppose, the way I feel when I stand far enough outside myself sometimes that Ican see how small I am.

I always thought of photos as little trigger-finger wishes, I guess. You know, people press that button and they hope that something will come out that looks like how they want to remember the world and the time they spent living in it and trying to create moments that looked like pictures. Something they can look at and say, "See, here it was. What a grand life we had." Or maybe even, in some of the sadder cases, they want evidence that the nightmares and heartaches they endured were demonstrably real.

So often when people pick up their photographs they can't wait to see if they got what they wanted, and they'll stand right there at the counter and shuffle through them. I'm prepared to swear that the vast majority of these people look clearly disappointed. I've concluded that it must be hard to take a true picture, or at least a picture that captures what you thought --and hoped-- you'd seen, experienced, felt, or looked like or at in that one paralyzed instant. I suppose that's one reason why I've never felt inclined to even try. I'll think I'm seeing the world sometimes, and fear that a photograph would only confirm that I have never done anything but look at the wrong things or in the wrong places.

It's sad when people wish, my mother always said.She'd say, You pray that when you get to a ripe old age you can look back andcount the number of really sad days on one hand. Maybe that's why she didn'tlike photos around, because they were like reminders of all the things that never quitemanaged to turn out the way she had hoped or planned.

Next Year All Our Troubles Will Be Out Of Sight

2011-12-10T20:04:00.000-06:00

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

--James Joyce, "The Dead."

Sleep, lucky world.
A star is born.
No, sorry: A child.
The star was just an announcement
to this little light lost.

I would follow a star

like that if it was

the dead of night

and I was alone with a bunch

of shivering sheep.

Even, I suppose,

if I was a wise man

on some sort of inexplicable

no-girls-allowed walkabout

in the desert.

I think it was a desert.

I imagine it was.

I'm sure it felt like one.

Trust me, though,

beneath these ribs lurks

the heart of a true believer

with a big, booming drum

and a feather in his cap.

I'll believe anything if it can

make me feel like something

other than a disposable

razor or a pink, quivering

grub nestled in shavings.

For God's sake, people,

there is not one thing you

could ever say that would

convince me that I am not

the proud father of a dog.

From The Christmas Attic: The Scandal of Richard Kunkel's Pageant

2011-12-07T01:19:00.001-06:00

A lot of folks around town thought there was something special about Richard Kunkel. Big things had been expected of the poor fellow since he was a lad. Certainly no one believed such a fine, bright boy would stick around a jerkwater village like ours for the rest of his life.

Many assumed Kunkel would join the military as had his father, and would rise quickly through the ranks and distinguish himself --and make our town proud-- through some act of heroism. Others thought certain he would become a professional singer. He had such a fine voice, and was always getting up to sing at parties, supper clubs, and special occasions around town. He knew all the songs from the Broadway shows.

As for myself, well, I taught the boy in school, and I thought certain Kunkel would find his place in the political arena. He was the shining star of our debate team, and had such a sharp, quick mind and a keen interest in all the big ideas. I always pictured him smiling and waving from the back of a train, on his way to Washington and waving goodbye to that little town of ours forever.

But, no, sir. It turns out our Richard Kunkel didn't have the ambition God gave a field mouse, and he never went anywhere. Turned down a scholarship to an excellent university out east to stick around and become one of those local "characters" every community seems to harbor against its will.

The fellow couldn't seem to hold a position to save his soul, and it was the death of his dear mother. It really was. After a time rumors began to circulate that Kunkel had a fondness for liquor and spent a good deal of time fleecing the old priests at St. Andrew's at the card table. He never married, and he did seem to spend an inordinate amount of time at the Parish house. Heaven only knows what those fellows were up to over there, but they were known to be a group of beaten men who'd been sent to our community as some sort of punishment.

Still, at least on the surface, Richard Kunkel never did stop being the same friendly, outgoing, and curious fellow that the town had known as a boy. Always had a warm greeting and a kind word. He never amounted to a hill of beans, though, which saddened me. I liked to see our bright young people go out into the world to make something of themselves.

Then one year Richard Kunkel did an unusual and entirely unsuspected thing, a rather scandalous thing in our little scheme of things. Kunkel recruited some children from the church youth group and mounted a Christmas pageant from a play he had apparently written himself and based on some of the questionable stories regarding Saint Nicholas of Myra. In actuality this play had absolutely nothing to do with Christmas and focused on the legend of St. Nicholas's resurrection of three boys --Timothy, Mark, and John-- after they had allegedly been slaughtered, pickled, and sold as meat during a fourth-century famine.

This peculiar incident was described by Kunkel --and most clumsily enacted by his troupe of amateur players-- in obsessive and grotesque detail, complete with much shrieking, writhing, and the liberal spilling of false blood.

This inappropriate production was staged as a prelude to a chili dinner in the church basement --an annual event in the community-- and needless to say whatever point Kunkel was trying to make was entirely lost on the horrified spectators, many of whom were people with young children of their own who had come expecting some celebration of the season.

Kunkel --playing a filthy and half-dressed pawnbroker (St. Nicholas being the patron saint of this profession, or so Kunkel explained in the copiously annotated program notes)-- narrated the play with a disturbing and frequently incoherent zeal. Speculation that Kunkel might have been inebriated was fueled by the fact that his character was swilling from a large bottle of whiskey throughout the production.

A necessary prop, Kunkel later tried to explain, but there were few believers and the damage was done.

The entire cast did reappear on stage at the end, holding hands, to warble through a version of "O Holy Night," but most of them were covered with fake blood, and it was a bit too little, too late.

People should recognize the effect one untoward incident can have on a man's reputation in a small town. I'm not saying local scuttlebutt is always fair and square, but after Richard Kunkel's little lark at the church dinner people's attitudes about him changed. He'd been a bit of a disappointment to that point, to be sure, but this was something else entirely. Richard Kunkel went from a boy of failed promise to the sort of mystery nobody really wanted around. It's sad, but that's the way of the world.

I'm not necessarily going to suggest there was a connection, but Richard Kunkel's mother didn't make it through the winter following the Christmas debacle at St. Andrew's. She died at St. Mark's nursing home in early March. At her funeral the consensus was that her heart had just finally given out.

Kunkel kept a remarkably low profile in the aftermath of his disgrace, and then quietly left town a year or so later after being charged with stealing books from the library. I've heard through the gravevine that these days he's been working at an animal shelter over in Rochester, living with a group of retired priests, and in declining health.

Shaking The Shadows

2011-12-03T03:02:00.000-06:00

The dogs had been put to bed. That was Nico's job now, the big boy, even though he had just turned six years old. There were three dogs left, old hounds that had belonged to his grandfather, and they slept in an old shed lined with hay out back.

Nico's grandfather had died on Halloween, sitting in the front room in his reclining chair with a book about flowers open on his lap and a rubber Frankenstein mask over his head.

His grandfather had stayed behind to hand out candy while Nico, his younger sister, and his mother went trick or treating in the neighborhood. When they had returned home the old man --who had loved God and science in equal measure, and who had given Nico a revolving globe of the moon that was his most prized possession-- was unresponsive, and Nico and his sister were sent to their rooms.

From his bedroom window Nico had watched as an ambulance pulled up their long driveway, its spinning lights carving up the darkness and splashing off the windows of neighboring homes. Nico saw small groups of costumed children and huddled adults gathered in yards and standing out along the road by the mailbox. It was a long time after the cart was wheeled out to the driveway, loaded, and driven away --the ambulance's lights no longer flashing-- before Nico's mother came to his room. She had changed into a robe and slippers, and sat down at Nico's little desk and absentmindedly spun his moon globe with her long index finger.

She told Nico that his grandfather had died. Peacefully, she said. He was mad about you, she said. You were the apple of his eye. Nico did not say anything. His imagination was whirling in a hundred directions, just as it did when he was excited, confused, or frightened. His mother eventually got up, kissed him on the top of the head, and said, "You're a big boy," which pleased him in some way he didn't understand.

The next day, despite the coming and going of many people, the house seemed almost unbearably silent. The visitors tended to congregate in the kitchen, talking in hushed tones to Nico's mother. Each time Nico would creep down to the kitchen there would be more plastic- and foil-wrapped plates and casseroles lining the counter. Later, after everyone had finally gone, his mother had Nico move all the food to the back porch, which was unheated. And there it sat.

His grandfather's funeral, which was held several days later, was the first that Nico had ever attended, and he had sat through it in a sort of trance, not understanding a word that was said. Even when people were clearly talking about his grandfather Nico didn't recognize the man they were talking about.

That night, alone in his room, he sat at his desk in the almost dark, the only illumination provided by the moonlight through his window and his little night light. His fingers explored every inch of the beautifully contoured and cratered surface of his moon globe. He imagined his grandfather up there now, wandering with a pack of his dead dogs and looking for frogs or salamanders. Surely, Nico thought, some of those who went to heaven were allowed to visit the moon. It must be so close.

But now it was late. It was Christmas Eve, and the moon in the sky looked like an abandoned boat in a big, dark sea filled with bobbing stars. The dogs had been put to bed, and Nico had sat with them for a time, stroking their bellies and finding something comforting that he did not yet recognize as trust in their eyes.

Afterwards he trudged back to the house through the snow, lunging occasionally in an attempt to either lose himself in his shadow --to merge with it-- or to shake free of it. He couldn't do either. On the back porch the plates and casseroles, still untouched, were exactly where he had left them almost two months earlier.

His mother was at the kitchen table, sitting as she so often did at night, smoking a cigarette and staring at a piece of paper on which most of what she had written had been crossed out. She was wearing her robe and slippers, and as Nico passed by she reached for his hand and brushed it briefly against her cheek.

Nico's sister was in bed, and he changed into his pajamas. As he was brushing his teeth in the only bathroom in the house, which was located between his mother's bedroom and the room where his grandfather had lived after he came to stay with them when Nico was very young, Nico heard his mother's voice from the front room. It was his mother's angry voice, which he had not heard often over the last two years.

The toothbrush still in his mouth, Nico moved to the doorway between the bathroom hall and the front room, which was dark. As he craned his head around the corner he could see his mother in the front entry, blocking the half open front door and shouting. She was shouting at Santa Claus, who was standing on the front step, his glasses fogged over and puffs of his breath swirling in the porch light.

"You must be out of your mind," Nico's mother said. "The kids are asleep and there's no way I'm letting you in this house." And with that she slammed the door.

As he usually did when confronted with something troubling or inexplicable, Nico sat at his bedroom window for a long time that night, his moon cradled in his arms, thinking until he ceased to think and began to imagine. It wasn't hard to do.

And the next morning, when he came down the stairs to discover that Santa Claus had indeed arrived after all, he was able to dismiss the previous night as nothing but a dream.

Hold Out Hope: An Old Pep Talk

2011-11-30T01:53:00.000-06:00

There, there child. Come now. Every day can't be brass bands and beef steaks and roses.

Give me your hand. Let me hold it and trace with my fingers its rivers and roads and rivulets and cul-de-sacs.

Hold out hope, like a gift, an offering. Give it to me, or to others. Don't hold it so close. Just put it where it can be reached.

Tell me what you're going through, what's going on in that head of yours.

Lift up your head and let me see your eyes.

The mysteries don't scare me anymore. Someone once said that all silence is the recognition of a mystery, but I don't believe that anymore and I'm not sure I ever did. I think silence is many things (a sort of reading room or academy of mysteries, maybe), and many of them fine, but I don't think it's a recognition of a mystery. That's much too general. You might recognize a mystery in the loudest room or the most crowded street or in the face of a passing stranger or the furtive smile of someone you love.

When you do recognize a mystery, though --when you really recognize a mystery-- I believe you're compelled to address it, to try to speak its name and describe its features, to give it a face so that you will recognize and remember it until the end of your days. Because it's no small thing, the recognition of a mystery, even though it happens all the time and we may not even be properly aware of it. Still, I believe such recognition calls for some banging of pots and pans, some fireworks, some exultant noise.

Yes is not, of course, an obligation. It is a choice and the embrace of a privilege, and not everyone has even one honest yes in them. Some people are damaged and can manage only the sidestep, the Hollywood kiss, and the awkward embrace. Such people are only too unhappy, however unconsciously, to persist in the tragic human error of mistaking halfhearted attention and respiration and mere movement for some form of sufficient affirmation or commitment, and to mistake this false form of sufficient affirmation and commitment for genuine attention, engagement, and affection.

Joy is unmistakable, and cannot be faked. God knows, though, the world --and people--try to simulate it and manufacture it. More and more this ersatz version is what the world tries to sell us.

There, there child. Come now. Lift up your head and let me see your eyes. You aren't one of these people. You were born with a a capacity for real joy and a yes plumbed snugly behind your ribs. If your yes sometimes feels heavy and silent and still in your chest that is only because it is still looking for a bell tower in the world. Wait. Be patient. You'll one day again find a bright and worthy place to hang your heaviness, and when it starts to sway --and the clapper of your joy begins to swing in rhythm with it-- your bell will at last be heard, even if initially by only one other. And it will be answered, it will be joined.

Have you ever heard a bell ringing in a little valley town? It's a lovely sound, but there is something mournful about it as well. But two bells, or all the bells in the valley ringing together at once? That is something else entirely. That is the music the human heart was designed to make. That is the definition of a joyful noise.

Wait for that.

The World Will Sound Like John Coltrane's "Alabama"

2011-11-28T00:29:00.001-06:00

Most of the time I'm guessing.
I have heard the world sound like Charles Mingus.
I have seen buildings burn.
One summer everywhere I went
I saw houses on fire.
I always stop whatever I'm doing
to watch something burn.
This strikes me as a sacred obligation.

For thousands of years --I don't know,
maybe it wasn't thousands of years--
we wanted and worshiped fire
and now we pay people to fight it.
Always an elemental battle,
but fire wins even when it is defeated.
Maybe there is nothing we should think
harder about than a house or building
that has been consumed by fire in the
dead of winter, extinguished with hoses,
and the next day transformed
into a desolate palace of ice.

Difficult to decide, looking upon
such a scene, whether the world
will end in fire or ice, and since they are
equally devastating and beautiful it hardly
seems to matter. I know, though, that
I have looked into both, and seen the
obliteration of time, including mine.

In the spring the building will be
gone and there will be just a dirt
lot and at dusk the world will sound
like John Coltrane's "Alabama"
and the fire will once again
be quietly biding its time.

Nothing in nature waits
so patiently to be born
and then grows up to be
a warrior so quickly
and so unexpectedly.

(The photo above is copyright Chuck Holliday of The Laconia Citizen. I stumbled across it years ago, and have had it on my desktop ever since.)

Nice Day For That Sort Of Thing

2011-11-23T12:10:00.001-06:00

I couldn't sleep last night, so early this morning I took my dog out for a walk through the early morning streets of my neighborhood. Over near the Pump N Munch we encountered an older fellow who was also taking a stroll.

The man looked both professorial and a bit shabby. He walked like a slow-motion speed skater --big, splayed-leg strides, slightly hunched, his hands clasped behind his back.

"Got to stay loose and keep the juices jangling," he said. "Nice day for that sort of thing."

I remarked that the only previous usage I'd ever heard of the phrase "keep the juices jangling" came from Satchel Paige.

"Of course, of course," the man said, nodding his head emphatically.

I hadn't seen this man around the neighborhood before. He sounded like a man who sat beside God's bed and read Him stories to help Him sleep. I've honestly never heard such a voice, and would use the word "mellifluous" to describe it if that word didn't remind me of an entirely bogus high school English teacher with a ponytail. Now this, the man said, reaching down to scratch my dog's ears, is a fellow who has clearly done the Lord's work. His magnificent skull and the wonders it contains are purest perfection.

We chatted for quite some time, and every sentence he uttered seemed like a bright ribbon embroidered with words and slowly unfurling from his mouth and drifting away on the wind. I don't, unfortunately, remember much else he said, so dazzled was I by his voice, but every word seemed beautifully shaped and carefully chosen.

I didn't want to leave him. I should have invited him to my home and asked him to speak into a tape recorder, to intone a message of love and thanksgiving to my friends and family, something I could hide away for them to find after I am dead.

I did, though, eventually go on my plodding way. And I thought: wouldn't it be nice to have even a few of that man's lovely sentences in a jar of formaldehyde on my bedstand? Even now I am thinking about that idea, that image of those words floating beside me, undulating slowly like a school of languid, lullabying, glow-in-the-dark fish and keeping me company through the night.

That This Is This

2011-11-18T15:36:00.001-06:00

The puzzle of texture, pattern, and repetition. Theidiot wonder prompted by even the most prosaic mosaic or randomly occurringstain. Prompts, responses, and resolute silences from the interior continent.Sounds of no clear origin. Desires of no clear etc.

Desires. Desire.

The incomprehensibility of all transmission,whether of blood, belief, truth, or information.

The magic of a phonograph record, compact disc, orphotograph.

The process of ruin and deterioration. Erosion, thereal deal and the metaphor.

The slow dazzle of contentment.

The planet's tantrums and stoic productions.

The involuntary heresies of the hobbled heart.

The helpless disgrace of despair.

The missing things, the absence of, etc.

The tragedy of memory and forgetting.

The fact that even a telescope can't really find tomorrow, thateven a microscope can't make sense of yesterday.

The blood-muddling transformations, defeats, andecstasies possible in a single moment.

The strange human resistance to the merelypractical.

The drab compromises and uneasy pacts.

The irresistible persuasion of percussion.

The takeaway prerogative of fate.

The way that water moves, travels, falls, settles,or sits still.

Some agreed upon sense in the second hand, that wepretend to recognize or understand time.

That we choose to believe this is all real.

That we choose to believe.

That some of us don't recognize that before we can know something we have to believe it.

That we reach out.

That we hold out hope.

That we pull away.

That we fall.

That we get back up.

That we go on.

That by tomorrow every single one of us might begone forever, and in a hundred years the sound of our laughter, the touch ofour hands, and the stories we paid for with our lives will be forgotten byevery breathing thing still living.

That this is where we are: Here.

That this is who we are: Who?

That this is what we want: What?

That this is what we have: Now.

E...T...C.

Drowning Season

2011-11-10T02:27:00.000-06:00

This was without question the lousiest job I ever had.

We were dealing with the worst flooding in over a hundred years, on ranch land that was flat as fuck and had just endured one of the snowiest winters on record. We worried about flooding every spring, and did everything we could to minimize the damage.

The problem was that we had two rivers coming together in the county --one of the sons of bitches making a dogleg right where it ran up against the other one-- and all manner of feeder streams and creeks. Every year it seemed like there was no telling how things were going to shake down or where all that water was going to end up, but this time it was clear we were in uncharted territory.

I was 22 years old and didn't know shit about how moving water worked, and the truth was I hadn't been anywhere or seen much of anything yet, but I knew for damn sure I'd never seen anything like this. I'd started working in high school for a rancher, the father of a girl I'd been dating since we were sophomores.

In this particular instance there'd been some sort of serious miscalculation, and the place where they stashed close to 300 cattle turned out to be exactly the wrong place. I never understood quite how it went wrong, or why, but it was a major fuck-up, and we needed to get every one of those cattle to the other side of a swollen, rapidly cresting river in a hurry.

This had all come up in a hurry, and in the early hours of the morning, and because we had so many guys working damage control elsewhere --and it was a huge ranch-- we went out in the dead of night with fewer than a dozen members of the crew. The water had already overrun the banks on the side of the river where the cattle were huddled, so horses were useless, or at least too risky.

We had two guys in motorboats, and another couple guys in a motorized raft, and they were over there battling the rushing water and trying to herd the cattle into the main channel of the river. Six of the more experienced hands were on horseback on the other shore, doing their damnedest to get a rope on anything they could and coax the cattle across and get them moving to drier ground once they'd struggled out of the water.

When the cattle were in the river, though, they were pretty much on their own. And once the guys in the boats had gotten some of them moving into the river, most of the others were pretty quick to follow. It's the way the animals were, the way they naturally reacted, and I don't imagine most of them had ever been harassed by boats.

It was raining like hell, and absolute chaos. I was the young guy, and I still didn't know much about either cows or horses. It turned out I never would. At any rate, they stationed me well up the bank on the safer shore, standing under a tarp with a video camera on a tripod. I was supposed to keep tabs --and a tally-- on the cows that didn't make it, the cows that were swept away or drowned.

I'd never seen a cow drown before, but by my count I saw 37 drown that day, and I'm sure I'll never again see anything like it. The damn things swam with just their heads extending above the rushing water, their eyes wide with obvious terror. They were just following the mass of bodies in front of them. And then one of those heads would go under, usually for just an instant, but that was all it took. I learned pretty quickly to be on the lookout for those instants, because almost immediately after their heads went under they would flip completely upside down in the river --their legs would actually bob above the surface for a moment-- and then they would either sink like a stone or get rolled away on the current.

After awhile that's all I could see; I was no longer even really aware of all the cattle that were thrashing in a panic up the muddy banks not thirty yards from where I stood. I was just locked in on the ones that weren't going to make it. Sometimes I watched them with the naked eye; other times I found myself taking refuge behind the camera's viewfinder.

This was years ago now, and I'm no longer working at the ranch, but it seems like every time it rains hard, and every spring when the rivers start to rise, I wake up from nightmares of drowning cattle, and all I see are those eyes, and then they're gone.

Perhaps I Should Be Reading Other Sorts Of Books

2011-11-02T02:22:00.000-05:00

I honestly thought I had broken my heart. Really, it had hit me so hard and the pain had lingered for so long that I was convinced that something was literally injured inside of me. It felt like someone had beaten me with a baseball bat.

After a couple months the pain still hadn't gone away, so I went to see a doctor.

I tried to show him where it hurt --right where my ribs ended above my abdomen on the left side-- and when he probed the spot with his fingers it hurt so acutely that I let out an instinctive yelp.

What happened? he asked.

I read this book, I said.

The doctor raised his eyebrows and waited for some additional explanation.

I shrugged. It was by some South African writer, I said, and it felt like something broke inside me.

Did anything else happen around the time you read this book? he asked. Any falls? Any unusually strenuous activities?

I shook my head. I'm not a man who engages in strenuous activities. I hadn't yet begun to fall. There had just been the book.

Oddly, the doctor asked if I had wept while reading this book. I admitted I had.

Was it a particularly wrenching cry? he asked.

I said that it was not; it was a quiet cry.

When exactly did you first notice the pain? he asked.

The instant I closed the book, I said.

Did you close it forcefully? the doctor asked.

I replied that I could not recall having done so.

The doctor, I could see, plainly thought that I was crazy, but was nonetheless intent on doing his job as diligently as possible. He listened to my breathing with a stethoscope and thumped my back, which elicited more yelps.

May I ask, he said, what this book was about?

I don't really know, I said. I guess it was about a lonely, broken man and dying dogs.

Sounds cheery, the doctor said. Perhaps you should be reading other sorts of books.

He backed away and tucked his stethoscope into the pocket of his white jacket. I'm afraid, he said, that this sounds possibly pyschosomatic, but just to err on the side of caution let's send you down for some x-rays.

Later, after I had returned from the laboratory and was sitting again in the doctor's office, he bustled in, clipped two sheets of film to a light box above his desk, and said, I'm afraid we're missing something from your story. You have two broken ribs, and one of them is a pretty thorough job. A man doesn't break two ribs like this and have no recollection of how he came to do so.

He tapped his pen on his desk and stared at me in silence.

Honest to God, I said, I read a fucking book.

Off Season: Oh, Mercy, Mercy Me

2011-10-29T01:28:00.000-05:00

When Ryerson pulled his Impala up to the gates of the cemetery it was after midnight. Theplace was locked up tight, and swirling snow and fog were blowing in off thelake.

Itwas a huge cemetery right in the middle of the city, a beautiful place for whatit was, large and well-kept and overlooking the water. Ryerson remembered standingat the grave during the service and staring out across all those headstones atthe sailboats that were gliding around out on the lake.

Thathad been late June, the week before the Fourth of July. It had been hot and clammy, andhe'd felt badly hungover and queasy in one of his brother's old suits. Ryerson hadthought hard and couldn't remember the last time he'd worn a suit.

Therewas a small gathering of people at the cemetery that day, and he had feltembarrassed and angered by the turnout. He was also puzzled by the fact that hedidn't recognize a majority of the people, including a woman with two younggirls. Probably, Ryerson assumed, the girls had been classmates of his daughter.

Thelock on the cemetery gates was one of those security boxes with push buttons.There must have been some code. The walls on either side of the gate were high,and made of stone. He put the white stuffed bear he was holding in his arms ontop of the Impala and tried to scrub the vomit from the front of his nylonparka with fistfuls of snow.

Ryerson returned to the car, turned off the lights, and sat there for a momentfinishing a can of beer and listening to Ray Price.

Then,in a burst of inspiration that rose up from out of his mind's muddle, he easedthe Impala up against the cemetery gate. Holding the bear in one hand, hemanaged to climb up onto the hood of the car. He tossed the bear over the gateand proceeded to scramble his way to the top, where there were sharp iron pointsthat dug into his flesh. As Ryerson attempted to feel his way down the backside ofthe gate he lost his grip and fell halfway down to the pavement.

Thecemetery was covered with deep snow. After tromping around for a time in whathe thought was the general area he managed to locate the gravesite. His ex-wife’s parents had paid for the marker, and its plainnessstruck Ryerson as horribly inadequate.

Hebrushed the snow from the stone so he could see the terrible arithmetic and then stood there for a few moments until he realized that he didn'thave anything to say. He propped the white bear up against a cement container of plastic flowers next to the marker andturned away.

Whenhe reached the path and took one last backwards glance, the bear had already beenentirely obscured by the fog and swirling snow.

After Ryerson left the cemetery he drove around for a couple hours, drinking the last of his beer and listening to music. The city seemed both abandoned and paralyzed. He eventually pulled off in a used car lot on Lake Street and sat there thinking for a time and then --unthinking, really-- shut off the ignition, stumbled out into the snow, and fished around in the trunk.

Just east of the freeway he found a Middle Eastern market that was still open. The place was empty with the exception of the two guys who were working; one guy was stocking shelves, the other was behind the counter.

Ryerson paced off a couple laps of the store before approaching the counter, where he removed his handgun from the pocket of his parka. He just stood there with the unloaded gun pointed at the ceiling, and there was a moment of awkward silence as he tried to remember how such things were done.

"Be a nice guy and empty the register and put the money in a bag," he finally said.

"What is this?" the counter guy said.

"A cry for help," Ryerson said.

The man bent slightly, his hands disappearing for an instant under the counter. When he stood back up he also had a gun, and he raised it --slowly and calmly, the store's video cameras would reveal-- and shot Ryerson squarely in the chest.

Unattributed Tribulation

2011-10-26T12:11:00.006-05:00

From a series of journals recently acquired at an estate sale, and purporting --near as I can tell-- to be the notes for A Choir of Lions: The Untold War. Encompassing Nature, Metamorphosis, Static Coding, and Leisure a Thousand Times Interrupted by Disquiet in Its Myriad Disguises. Complete with Visual Explanations and Appendices on Traveling with Your Pet, Superior Fishing, and Unconventional English, as well as a Comprehensive Glossary for Pool Hustlers, Informed Digressions on Silent Film, Pharmacological Improvisation, the History of Imaginative Astronomy, and Diverse Other Subjects --"A Book, by McGill."

A trio of girls on a canoe adventure [sic]?

With what dissimulation I went to work!

Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we? We are in an empire of laws, not of men, but to the best of my knowledge no one has yet to arrive at a satisfactory answer to that first question.

Where is the star of disaster I wished upon?

Every day is the Fourth of July to the slave of shooting stars.

Pull down the evening bars and shoo the flock away.

--But, sir, there is no flock....

Cronus is now well past his prime, but his appetites remain undiminished!

I do not believe there is a means of "infallibly discovering the heart of man."

Not even the heart of the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation?

No. A thousand times no.

Etaoin Shrdlu. Poco Tiempo!

The charm of the show to me is that no one pretends to understand even in a remote degree.

Not matter, but mind. Not things, but men.

Ourselves we worship, and have no son.

The orchestra has arrived. Stop your dancing.

I'm getting ahead of my story.

We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out.

Look, ma, no hands.

[See: Ferdinand LeMothe, pool shark]

I knew what I was doing. I have no regrets and under the same circumstances I would do it again.

Any gum, chum?

All the influences were lined up waiting for me like wolves. I was born, and they were there to devour me.

NO CHAOS DAMN IT!

How much trouble one scoundrel with an abacus and a telephone can cause.

Come sweet hope from they divine retreat come...

The silence of a purple star lights up a falling sky.

Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country is doing to you.

...the number and complexity of the objects he already knows have absorbed all his strength so that any further progress must be impossible.

But words plainly force and overrule the understanding and throw all into confusion...

Chub.

So many illustrious villains!

We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity for the sake of easy transport.

This seems to me a very feeble wow.

A father's no shield for his child.

Invisible fence: YES!

Well, bright boy, why don't you say something?

I GIVE YOU THE MAUSOLEUM OF ALL HOPE AND DESIRE!

The ditch is nearer.

Escanaba. The Hiawatha Motel. Dog-friendly Christians.

A Man Who Wins The Dog Lottery Is A Lucky Man

2011-10-23T02:29:00.000-05:00

Four years ago today a sickly, seven-month-old stray who had already spent three stints in his short life as a ward of the Humane Society took a chance on me.

He was severely malnourished, underweight, riddled with parasites, and missing a tooth. He was not an ideal candidate for adoption, I was told; he had been labeled a loud and destructive dog, an habitual runaway, and virtually untrainable.

I was blind to these accusations. I had been making regular trips to the shelter in the hopes of finding another Siberian Husky that might fill the hole left by my beloved Willis two months earlier, but from the instant I saw Wendell (that would become his name), standing at calm attention and intently watching me bounce a ball that left every other dog in the place either indifferent or in a frenzy, I knew that he was the one.

There was, however, a hold on him. He had just been picked up yet again, a street dog and a scavenger; he was also in very poor health, and his suitability for a "conventional adoption scenario" was being evaluated.

I visited him three straight days during this probationary period, and --other than the fact that he had clearly never been on a leash-- he was always attentive, affectionate, and a perfect gentleman. I also never heard him make a peep. When I mentioned this fact to the staff I was told that he was, without question, a barker, and one of the noisier dogs presently in the shelter's care.

I'm not entirely sure why (other than that first connection, which was probably enough), but after three days I took him home to share my life. It took less than 24 hours for me to realize that I had, once again, won the dog lottery.

Wendell has now been with me through thick (lots of thick) and thin (lots of thin). He has traveled all over the U.S. and Canada with me. For many months we were in the woods of Vermont and I never had a leash on him. Whenever I can get away with it, I allow him off leash, and he never strays far from my side. He has never barked in the house, has never destroyed a single one of my possessions, let alone any of his own toys or those he inherited from his predecessor. He never had to be house trained.

He has never disappointed me. Never. Not once. And he has endured with patience --and, sometimes, almost eerie attention-- my countless lonely late night monologues, stories, filibusters, lamentations, riddles, and bursts of random madness. I have read to him from Aristotle and Wittgenstein and countless other authors who were breaking my brain and making me feel stupid. People he had loved and depended on have disappeared from his life without a trace, but I have not disappeared from his life, and for long stretches during our time together I have desired very little other than to not disappear from his life.

Wendell has kept me going during times when I otherwise did not much feel like I wanted to keep going.

He is now a healthy, happy, adventurous, and astonishingly athletic dog. I haven't yet met anybody who appears to have any clear idea what sort of dog he is --almost everyone seems to have a different guess as to his jumble of breeds-- but I have never had any doubt that he is a guide dog, a service dog, and a first-rate companion dog. And at the bottom of every day --we both live on Hong Kong time-- I tuck him into his Garden of Sweet Dreamers and promise him that I will do everything in my power to be worthy of such a tremendous blessing and responsibility.

He still gets nervous on a certain type of concrete floor, and I have concluded that such cold, slippery surfaces must remind him of his days as a shelter inmate. He is, though, always lovely to me, and he inspires waves of almost unbearable tenderness every single day. Watching him run never fails to make me happy, and watching him sleep never fails to calm me.

I've honestly never known another breathing thing with such a lust for life.

Dozens of times a day I scratch him or hold him and say nothing but, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," or "Good boy, good boy, such a good boy." Time after time I assure him that we are together as long as we breathe, and longer if there's any sort of decent place beyond this one.

And every single night before I turn out the lights I tell him, without fail, "Sweet dreams, my beautiful boy, my precious pride and joy. Tomorrow we'll try like hell to make some new magic."

If this all seems utterly daft, so be it. I am blessed to have a dog, and if I did not have a dog --if I did not have this dog-- I would be a sad excuse for a human being.

The Mongoose Vs. The Cobra

2011-10-20T02:48:00.000-05:00

Every month or so I sit down and watch the Ma Lin/Wang Hao Gold Medal table tennis match from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

A couple years ago I paid $25 on eBay for a poor DVD bootleg of this match.

At the time of the Beijing Olympics I was entirely ignorant about table tennis, and had watched the competition with two questions foremost in my mind: "What sort of person devotes their life to table tennis?" And: "Where do these fellows get their flamboyant smocks and how can I build a collection of my own?"

To say that the Ma Lin/Wang Hao match changed my life is probably something of an overstatement, but I nonetheless can't deny that I harbor an unshakable and inexplicable obsession with this particular DVD.

I usually fast forward to the moment when, late in game one, Ma Lin takes a few steps back from the table and, smirking, fans himself dramatically with his paddle. At this point --in a match that was at the time heavily touted as "The Mongoose vs. The Cobra," the two monsters of the Chinese table tennis machine-- Ma, the older and more conservatively dressed of the two combatants, has game point on his paddle.

Wang, however, stages a couple of furious and inspired rallies, manages to battle back to 10-9, and Ma grimaces and takes a towel break.

The table looks impossibly small. It's almost as if they are playing table tennis on an air hockey table.

Towel break over, one of the television announcers observes that Wang, who with his foppishly highlighted pompadour and patterned gaudy brocaded gold-on-black smock looks like a Hong Kong action movie idol, "is definitely swimming against the tide now." There is no question that Ma has been playing with surgical precision, and he quickly finishes off game one with an 11-9 victory.

In game two, Wang again falls behind before mounting another stirring comeback. His rally falls short, however, when Ma crushes a vicious back-corner cross-spin return to finish off the stylish and feisty youngster. Ma, we are told, is the possessor of "the strongest and most feared forehand on the planet."

Wang, finally getting into a groove with his signature Reverse Penhold Backhand, breezes to an 11-6 victory in game three, and the commentators note that the world's number one ranked player (and the sport's most flamboyant and bankable star) appears to be getting stronger as the match goes on. In game four he jumps out to a comfortable early lead only to choke it away down the stretch with flubbed shot after flubbed shot. As Ma eases into cruise control and pounces on his opponent's every mistake you can see in Wang's body language that he has lost his poise and is mentally tired. There is an almost cavalier insolence to the way he plays out the rest of the game, which Ma ultimately wins comfortably to take a three games-to-one lead.

By game five it looks like Wang has thrown in the towel, yet after Ma takes a 7-2 lead Wang makes one more aggressive and tactical charge and pulls to within 10-7. Ma, the consummate old pro, takes a strategic timeout, which effectively ices his younger opponent. As Ma clearly stalls and engages in a bit of dramatic grandstanding you can see that Wang is visibly rattled, and even seething. He mutters to himself, and paces like a panther. He shakes his hair violently, scowls, and appears to strum a few air guitar chords on his paddle. Upon resumption of the action, Wang manages one more brief rally before eventually falling 11-9 and surrendering the Gold Medal to Ma.

The commentary throughout the match is consistently wonderful and educational --we learn, for instance, that Chinese table tennis stars are inordinately pampered, are often notorious divas, and routinely have much publicized dalliances with pop stars, models, and actresses-- but there is one moment during the closing points of that final game that I find myself returning to again and again: "This would definitely be a disappointment for Wang," one of the commentators says, "but his place in Chinese table tennis is secure. The 24-year-old star is already a controversial legend in his native country, and last year he won a million-dollar casino match against Zhang Yan, an older star who was disgraced in table tennis's first doping scandal. Late in the decisive game of the match --which Wang won with ease-- he purportedly used a barber's mirror as a paddle, and paused between each point to admire himself in the mirror and make adjustments to his hair. Grandstanding, certainly, and some might say bush league, but, hey, he's still young and has brought a lot of energy to the sport." At which point the other commentator interjects, "In his defense we should probably point out that Wang comes from a long line of barbers, and he has often claimed that he played his first games with a barber's mirror."

Like Listening To A House Full Of Music Breathe

2011-10-12T01:52:00.000-05:00

I once had a job driving harps to market.

For a thousand miles across the Great Plains the wind blew through the open slats of the truck and the harps jostled in their trusses and keened mercilessly. By the time I pulled into the market stalls in Chicago some of them were still humming, but it was nothing like their highway music.

If I live for another hundred years I won't forget that sound.

There was no demand for harps anymore, and every one of those poor sons of bitches was destined for slaughter or salvage. You might think you've heard some piteous sounds in your life, but you haven't heard anything until you've heard a harp being slaughtered. It seemed like the dying just went on forever. It was like listening to a house full of music burn.

That was a desperate time in my life. I needed the money, but after three trips I couldn't take it anymore. When I'd unloaded my last bunch of harps in Chicago I started talking. I wrote letters to the editors of local papers. I made phone calls. With the help of my daughter I started a Facebook page to call attention to the plight of the doomed harps. A young couple in Aberdeen started a shelter, but in six months they only managed to find homes for three of the harps, two of which showed up almost immediately on eBay and went unsold. One of those was eventually found busted up in a truckstop dumpster near Rapid City.

When the shelter couple lost their lease I agreed to foot the bill for a couple storage units at a place just outside of town, and with the help of a few friends I hauled all the remaining harps out there and packed them in so tight they could barely breathe. There was no light or heat in those units, and it was the dead of winter. The thought of it kept me up nights.

Then, just as spring was finally breaking out in earnest, I got an email from a woman in the western part of the state. She said she had a big family spread and was willing to set aside a parcel of land for a harp sanctuary.

In early May I rented a truck --the same sort of truck I used to drive back and forth to Chicago-- and loaded the harps. On the trip out there I got to hear their old highway music one more time, but I swear it sounded different headed west. Lighter, I think.

The woman had recruited a lively group of volunteers to help us move the harps out into the range. After we got them all situated --there were 61 total-- we walked silently back across all that open space; behind us we could already hear the harps beginning to breathe again.

By the time we got back to the woman's ranch house, dusk was settling. It was a warm night, but a gentle breeze was blowing and the harps had begun to really sing.

We all just stood there in the driveway and listened until there was nothing but the darkness and the music of those harps moving on the wind. Pretty much everyone agreed it was the most beautiful goddamn thing they'd ever heard.

Night Comes Down: Night Falls

2011-10-10T03:50:00.000-05:00

Somenights you'd sit there tracking moonlight across the floor, or studying thegarage roof next door as if it were a radar screen. Your mind on a very lowflame, a few tired words alternately see-sawing in the silence or surfacingthrough the waves of static. You'd sit there barely conscious, but the momentyou'd try to climb into bed and close your eyes the whole chorus would conveneagain with a vengeance. The woozy carnival of hypnagogia. Channel surfing longbefore the advent of cable television and remote control. So random,stuttering, and relentless was your consciousness in those hours that you wouldmake an exercise of trying to isolate a particular fragment, and then attemptto concentrate your mind on the fragment's origin, trying to trace it back, ifpossible, to its original source. Sometimes it would be a line from a book or atelevision commercial, other times it might be something you'd overheard inschool, or a snippet from a song or a random conversation. You would findyourself obsessing about an outrageous pair of shoes you had seen weeks earlier on a completestranger in a grocery store.

Ultimately,towards dawn, you were always left with nothing but the barely-beating heart ofthe sleeping world. The ceaseless surf of even the smallest quiet town. Thefurnace. The pining of the clock. The world on the back burner, as close asthe modern world comes to stasis: You were left with only you and what remained of the night, the retreating darkness, shadows receding on the walls, the cruelpinch of exhaustion, the terrible reality that you were going to have tosleepwalk through another lost day. Whatwas that they were saying about what?

Eventually,every night you would reach a point where you could not fall asleep but youcould nonetheless not be truly awake. You were reduced to fumbling around,grasping, in a dense and hazy subterranean no man's land, lost in the gauzy,impressionistic foothills of sleep. You would take a walk to try to resuscitateyour sanity, to get clear thoughts moving again in your head. You moved in slowmotion through a woozy, muslin-filtered border country, imagination andhallucination bleeding into reality. You heard what sounded like chanting. Youheard the clanking of dog tags. You heard the distant tolling of a clock, anda burst of faint music sucked from a car window somewhere out in the town. Youheard a baby crying, then someone laughing, retching, congested laughter. Youheard a radio playing in a junkyard. You heard what sounded like a piano. Youheard wind chimes twisting in a backyard somewhere. You heard the barking of adog, answered by another, in the next block. You thought of the men acrosstown, in the slaughterhouse, exhausted on their feet in the slippery dead mess,blood bubbled everywhere, the tangy reek of animals being broken down intomeat. Some teacher would send you there from time to time to stand at the mouthof the tunnel that took the tired men to and from the slaughterhouse and out totheir cars and trucks in the parking lot. You would stand there in the last ofthe darkness with a little collection can for UNICEF, and you would shake yourcan at the blood-soaked, broken-knuckled zombies as they plodded past,blank-faced and clutching their empty lunch pails, moving almost unconsciousinto the bruised light that was just then creeping into the eastern sky.

Somehow, though, you escaped and you got saved, and now Albert Ayler takes you across catwalks inyour imagination, down fire escapes, and right out into a landscape that is bothhallucination and reality, into a city that feels utterly paralyzed yet purrs the whole night through; through emptystreets, past other half-dreaming houses where there are still signs of the half-life of the sleepless, glum lamplight and the blue wobble of TVscreens in dark windows. You wander along a river humming with idlingindustry and the great under-throb of the city at three a.m., the sprawl of shadows, the litter and moonlight and longing and the great hold-out behind andbeneath every heartbreak; the silence violated in myriad and mysterious ways and the compromised darkness;the way light launches little sneak attacks and cameo appearances even while acity sleeps, all the creeping, sleepless things, and still that doomedsaxophone rising like a prayer somewhere in the night you can never entirelybanish from your muddled brain, a wish at least, a promise, an apology, astirring monologue, a beautiful loose thing traveling like a breathing kitefrom a small puddle of light cradling a park bench or an abandoned mattress.

The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Me When I Start Wondering About The Longest Utterance Ever Produced By A Parrot

2011-10-06T18:17:00.003-05:00

Psittalinguistics: The Science of Talking Birds. This Being a Brief History of That Subject Along With Diverse Examples from the Archives of the Bergen Institute of Cultural Parrotology. (Third Revision of a Work in Progress.) Dedicated With Gratitude to Robert Burton.

Aparrot, it has been alleged, was responsible for planting many of the moreheinous perversions in the head of Tiberius, the most depraved of the Caesars, this after the bird had had read aloud to him (by a sociopathic dwarftutor in the Caesar's employ) from an early and particularly pernicious primerin lechery. (See: A. Towson Dandridge, A Psychological Portrait of the Tyrants of Antiquity, Stanhopeand Adelman, Manchester. 1949.)

Wealso learn, in Dr. Renata Steenblom's Unnatural Nature (University ofWinnipeg, 1963), of a parrot that was allegedly capable of divining --anddivulging at inopportune moments-- the innermost secrets of its mistress,including sexual fantasies of a shockingly explicit nature. The bird wasnotorious for regaling unsuspecting visitors with a tortuous impression of thepoor woman's whinnying orgasm.

Accordingto Fr. Xavier Empson's Curiosities of Catholicism and Marvels of Mariolotry(Eternal Image Press, Skokie, Illinois. 1957), there was, once upon a time, aparrot belonging to a tavern owner in a small village in Italy, and this birdwas renowned for its ability to recite the Rosary (in Latin) in its entirety.One day, Empson recounts, the bird solemnly proclaimed, "It is the will ofGod, and I am but His humble servant," and promptly fell over dead.

Fromthe pages of the children's magazine, Highlights,we learn of an unassuming insurance adjustor and confirmedbachelor in Dallas, Texas who purchased a blue-fronted parrot which, upon beinginstalled in the man's home, was discovered to have committed a number of Faron Young songs to memory. The bird was capable of singing these songs intheir entirety, and in a passable impersonation of the country legend's voice.

The annals of parrotology are full of similar wonders, fromthe ancient world to the modern. In a little known short story by the Russianwriter, Gogol, a bird is called upon to testify in a court of law as a materialwitness to its master's infidelity.

Thereis an obscure novel, Lucifer's Bird, by a Depression-era Georgiawriter by the name of Ernest Winter, which featured a talking parrot that wasbelieved to be possessed by Satan. The bird's sinister commands andinsinuations lead a God-fearing local deacon to engage in acts of depravitythat shake a small southern town to its core. William Faulkner reportedlyattempted a screenplay of this novel for Charles Laughton, but there isapparently no surviving evidence of this aborted project.

Inthe days before teleprompters, one often heard stories of Catskill comedians intheir dotage who resorted to being fed their lines by parrots, which wereperched on stage in full view of the audience. One such bird, Ezra, was said to besuch a quick-witted master of improvisation that in time it became an actualand valued partner to the comedian Dickie Knickers. Before it eventually passed away fromadvanced years (the bird survived the old comedian by more than a decade), theparrot had established itself as a successful solo act --if something of anovelty-- in its own right.

The early blues musician Ishman Bracey is another performer who was alleged tohave used a parrot as a prompt, often, some accounts allege, after Bracey hadbecome so inebriated that he could no longer remember the words to his songs.

Therewas a minor dust-up in academia in the 1950s when a man named J. RichardStevens published portions of his doctoral dissertation in a then reputablescholarly journal. Stevens' thesis, which was immediately and loudlydiscredited, was that a number of Emily Dickinson's poems had been almostliteral transcriptions of the utterances of her beloved parrot, Desdemona.

Inthe early days of television, talking birds were often used to providevoiceover narration for cartoons, largely in an attempt to cut costs andcircumvent union restrictions. The practice apparently continues --albeitsomewhat clandestinely-- to this day, most prominently in the dubbing of low-budget animated films from Asia.

The debate over animal cognition, featuring Dr. Irene Pepperberg's famous gray parrot, Alex: DrPepperberg's pioneering studies with Alex proved conclusively that theprevailing and pejorative notion of a "bird brain," is grounded inignorance. Many birds --parrots most particularly-- have very large brainsindeed, and possess a cognitive sophistication that is as wondrous as it islittle understood. Dr. Pepperberg's work with Alex is almost as important andinfluential as the better-known work on animal communication and referentialspeech that has been conducted on the great apes.

Alex's obituary from the New York Times.

TheYellow Naped parrot, the most virtuosic and versatile of the Amazonian talkingparrots, can often master an impressive vocabulary of upwards of eight hundredwords, and is also capable of singing, dancing, whistling, and doing uncannyimpersonations of animals and household appliances.

DoubleYellow Head parrots have long been recognized as accomplished opera singers,with extraordinary range. They are among the more excitable and motor-mouthedof talking birds. (See: Robert T.Nicolai, Caruso in a Cage: The Incredible True Story ofSergei, the World's Most Famous Singing Parrot, Bristol House, 1983.)

Budgerigarshave been known to have vocabularies in excess of one thousand words. One suchparrot, Victor, purportedly demonstrated that birds are capable of engaging inactual conversation, and was alleged to be an influential teacher and mentor tomany other birds. Victor, according to its owner, presided over a de factoacademy for talking birds, and a lexicon of the parrot's impressive vocabulary,along with an archive of its recordings, can be found on the Internet.

N'Kisi,a New York parrot with an almost 600-word vocabulary and psychic abilities, ispurportedly capable of reading the thoughts of visitors.

See also:Bruce Thomas Boehner's Parrot Culture: Our 2500 Year Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird.

Therehave been innumerable documented cases of talking parrots thwarting robberies, as well as engaging in espionage.

Pretty much unrelated, but I want one: Nothing talks louder than a bird pistol, even if, strictly speaking, it does not utter a word.

Bryce Hunt, a PhD student at New York University, is compiling an exhaustive, annotated collection of talking bird samples and other recorded utterances in popular music, with an emphasis on hip hop. Hunt has been promising for six months to send me a copy of his findings to date, but I have yet to receive this research. I can attest, however, that in December of last year --in the young man's Brooklyn apartment-- I reviewed a sample introduction to Hunt's thesis and found its scholarship impressive.

Other literary examples:

Eudora Welty's, The Shoe Bird

Excerpt from John Skelton's 16th century poem, "Speke Parrot,"

Flaubert's "Un Coeur Simple." (See also: Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot)

Somewhere in the works of Balzac (and I have thus far been unable to find the source of this story, although I maintain a clear memory of it nonetheless) there is a parrot that recites "The Lord's Prayer."

There is also, of course, the foul-mouthed parrot in Errol Stanley Garner's, The Case of the Perjured Parrot.

More recently: Joe Coomer's The Loop, which features a home invasion by an elderly parrot given to cryptic utterances.

“In the seventh century, Shui Shi Tu Jing published the Book of Hydraulic Elegancies. Indeed, one continually finds descriptions of such technological wonders as mechanical flying doves, dancing apes, and talking parrots in the literatures of Islamic nations, India, China, and Greece. In fourteenth century Florence, it was none other than Filippo Brunelleschi who designed a mechanical stage to bring Paradise to life.”

--Oliver Grau, "History of Telepresence: Automata, Illusion, and Rejecting the Body."

“This defect or imperfection that stands in the way of man's communicating with animals, why isn't it as much our fault as theirs? For we don't understand them any more than they understand us.”
--Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

“Yet the animals are not incapable of being taught also in our way. Blackbirds, ravens, magpies, and parrots we teach to speak; and that facility with which we see them rendering their voice and breath so supple and manageable for us, to form and constrain it to a certain number of letters and syllables, testifies that they have an inward power of reason which makes them so teachable and determined to learn.”

--Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

“This story of the magpie, for which we have Plutarch himself as sponsor, is strange. She was in a barber's shop in Rome, and did wonders in imitating with her voice all that she heard. One day it happened that certain trumpeters stopped and blew a long time in front of this shop. After that and all the next day here was this magpie pensive, mute, and melancholy, at which everyone marveled, and thought that the sound of the trumpets had stunned and deafened her, and that her voice had been snuffed out together with her hearing. But they found in the end that it was a profound study and a withdrawal within herself, while her mind was practicing and preparing her voice to represent the sound of these trumpets; so that the first voice she used was that one, expressing perfectly their runs, pitches, and variations; and for this new acquirement she abandoned and scorned all she had learned to say before."

--Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

“An old Danish shipowner sat and thought of his young days and of how he had, when he was sixteen years old, spent a night in a brothel in Singapore. He had come in there with the sailors of his father's ship, and he had sat and talked with an old Chinese woman. When she heard that he was a native of a distant country she brought out an old parrot, that belonged to her. Long, long ago, she told him, the parrot had been given to her by a highborn English lover of her youth. The boy thought that the bird must then be a hundred years old. It could say various sentences in the languages of the world, picked up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the house. But one phrase the old China-woman's lover had taught it before he sent it to her, and that she did not understand, neither had any visitor ever been able to tell her what it meant. So now for many years she had given up asking. But if the boy came from far away perhaps it was his language, and he could interpret the phrase to her.

"The boy had been deeply, strangely moved at the suggestion. When he looked at the parrot, and thought that he might hear Danish from that terrible beak, he very nearly ran out of the house. He stayed on only to do the old Chinese woman a service. But when she made the parrot speak its sentence, it turned out to be classic Greek. The bird spoke its words very slowly, and the boy knew enough Greek to recognize it; it was a verse from Sappho:

"The moon has sunk and the Pleiads,

And midnight is gone,

And the hours are passing, passing,

And I lie alone.

"The old woman, when he translated the lines to her, smacked her lips and rolled her small slanting eyes. She asked him to say it again, and nodded her head.”

--Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

The Hill Pilgrims

2011-10-05T02:46:00.000-05:00

Manyyears ago, shortly after my arrival in this place, I discovered a hill in the middle ofthe city. This hill had long been a sanctuary for moonstruck teenagers, and the rocks and trees were painted and carved with the optimistic and elementary arithmetic of young love; there were charming addition equations to be found up and down the hill.

Anold man who'd allegedly once traveled the world would ride his bicycle eachevening to the park at the foot of the hill. The old man was in search ofaluminum cans, and he would gradually make his way to a swinging bridge that hung above the stream that wound its way through the park at the bottom of a bluff. From this bridge he would sing Schubert's lieder in a striking baritone.

Atdusk a procession of local teenagers would climb through the brush to makeclumsy love to the old man's songs. This ritual had been a local tradition for two generations, dating back to the first days when the old man --then, ofcourse, a much younger man-- had returned to the town from many years oftraveling and hardship. The truth, though, was that no one really knew anythingabout the hill singer, or understood a word of his songs.

Over the years the town changed a great deal from those early days. It hadgrown much larger, and was now a place of immense loneliness andinstitutionalized trepidation. People came to the town from all over the worldto suffer; the place had become an international capital of anxiety, of waitingand fretting and fear that was mulled over and expressed in myriadlanguages. All of this suffering, anxiety, waiting, fretting, and fear was relatedto the mysteries of the human body and its frequently malign secrets.

Thesepilgrims brought with them dark and troubling questions, and were entered intoa vast lottery for answers, for which they might wait weeks, months, or years,often with little or no satisfaction. The Agency that administered the lotteryhad become a gargantuan bureaucracy that was plagued by inefficiency andindifference. The Agency was also alleged to be as corrupt as it was massive.The pilgrims often paid exorbitant sums simply to enter their names in thelottery, this despite the fact that it had now been many years since anyonecould recall the Agency handing down anything even remotely resembling asatisfactory answer.

The squalid rooming houses and motels that had sprung up around the Agency'svast headquarters were overcrowded with desperate souls. This desperation intime led some of the pilgrims --many of them quite aged-- to venture to thehill in the middle of the town, where they, like the legion of local teenagers,would crawl through the brush and make love to the old man's songs.

Wordquickly spread that these passionate excursions had an oddly consoling andsalubrious effect, and soon more and more of the lottery entrants began to makethe trek up the hill, and the woods and bushes were crowded each night withtrysting pilgrims, their cries of equal parts anguish and passion rising likean animal chorus that lent additional poignancy to the old man's songs.

Theold man, however, could not live forever, and one evening the procession ofpilgrims and teenagers arrived to find only silence on the hill. For weeks agradually diminishing number of the amorous and desperate continued to make thehopeful journey, but the old man did not return.

Whether or not it was a coincidence remains a matter of conjecture around town(many of the older residents never heard the hill singer, and to them heremains more myth than reality), but shortly after the old man's disappearancethe exodus of pilgrims began, a trickle at first, and then a massive retreat. Ifthere were to be no answers, then at least there should have been the comfort of musicand unexpected passion. The rooming houses and motels were largely shuttered,and the town fell on hard times. And then, less than a year later, the Agencyheadquarters were destroyed in a massive fire of suspicious origin.

Thoseof us who remain --and there are fewer of us by the month-- find ourselvesliving in a city of ghosts and ruins, and the hill in the middle of town is nowa neglected and seldom visited reminder of our shameful past, littered with aluminumcans, moldering condoms, hastily discarded items of clothing, and rocks paintedwith the most abject obscenities.

Irecently noticed this bit of graffiti scrawled on one of the sheets of desecratedplywood that has been nailed over the old Agency entrance: “Here even thebutterflies are slightly stooped, walk with a limp, and are going nowhere.”

Spruced Up And Saved From Oblivion: Your Man For Fun In Rapidan's Fifty Greatest Country And Western Songs Of All Time!

2011-09-27T15:57:00.000-05:00

1) The Critters, Mr. Dieingly Sad

Onthe surface a simple little song with a borrowed melody (from Paul Williams, noless), The Critters' masterpiece takes a turn down a very dark road aboutmid-song, and the next minute-and-a-half is a pure, harrowing cage match withSatan. No surprise: Satan wins, and before he's done with Mr. Dieingly Sadthere's broken glass, a shotgun blast, and blood all over the walls.

2) Three Dog Night, One

HankWilliams' entire catalog boiled down to three minutes of existential longing.When the pedal steel starts raining tears after the last chorus you'll feellike you've never been in love, never felt the sun on your teeth, and never hada haircut you didn't regret.

3) Jim Stafford, Swamp Witch

Stafford'sgot something of a bum reputation as a novelty act, but 'Swamp Witch' ought toconvince anyone who cares that the man has a hole in his dark soul that youcould drive a Mack truck through. When I heard Jim sing this song at his theaterin Branson I had shivers running up and down my spine, and some of the oldbuffet vultures around me were actually crying out in terror.

4) Charlie Rich, There Won't Be Anymore

This,in a nutshell, is what country music is really all about: a man makes a short,hopeless, declarative statement, and then sings it like he believes it.

5) Cat Stevens, Banapple Gas

Notwhat it sounds like or seems, neither of which I --or you-- could define. Thatsaid, it's something mighty special all the same. But, you ask, is it reallycountry? You're damn right it is.

6) Red Sovine, Teddy Bear

Sure,it's kind of corny: a little Teddy Bear gets abandoned in the woods, gets lost,is harassed by predators, gets hit by a pick-up, and finally finds happiness inthe arms of a little girl. Yet in that little girl's willingness to overlookthe bear's mangled limbs and missing eye there's a tidy and useful lesson forall of us. If this song doesn't get the tears flowing, you need to see atherapist to help you understand all the damage your parents did to you.

7) Terry Bradshaw, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

Makeno mistake: Bradshaw was a great quarterback, and he's entertaining enoughplaying an unhinged whack-job on TV. But as this peerless interpretation shows,he's an even better country singer, and in Hank Williams' classic Bradshawfound an outlet for all the repressed feelings a professional athlete inAmerica isn't allowed to express in public.

8) Sheena Easton, Morning Train

Aclassic song of abandonment made even more unforgettable by the reliablepresence of the Jordanaires and the sizzling fiddle break provided by VassarClements. Also features an uncredited Leon Russell on piano.

9) Steve Miller Band, Abracadabra

'Abracadabra'shows that Miller obviously spent some time studying what Gram Parsons was upto, and there's a languid quality to the arrangement that would make this songright at home tacked onto the end of 'Sweetheart of the Rodeo.' Country --androck and roll, for that matter-- is full of singers pining for some sort ofmagical remedy for lost love and broken hearts, but few of them get their hopessquashed so completely as Miller does here.

10) Oak Ridge Boys, Wasn't That A Party

Itsure as Sam Hell was. 'Nuff said!

11) John Anderson, Swingin'

Noroadhouse jukebox would be complete without a copy of this alternate lifestyle classic, a rare country song with lyrics as racy and erudite as anything in John Updike's randiest novels. You want toget a bar full of drunk fat folks dancin' and hollerin' along to the recordplayer? Just punch up Anderson's deathless key-party stomp --mission accomplished!

12) John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, Tender Years

Abeautiful version of 'Tender Years' that actually, miraculously, manages towring more emotion out of the song than George Jones ever could. BeforeHollywood stole his soul, Cafferty was a great, hugely underrated singer, andthis may be his masterpiece.

13) The Tijuana Brass, The Lonely Bull

Country songs are full of people who have gotten drunk, cried in their beer, andslept in their clothes, yet in a genre steeped in all manner of lonely funk,fog, and fractured hearts, nobody ever got it so right as the Tijuana Brass. Ihope like hell the boys in Calexico get down on their hands and knees everynight and thank their version of God for Herb Alpert.

14) Dean Martin, Houston

Thereare scads of great versions of this song, but Martin's is the only one you needto own --unless, of course, you need confirmation of how great it really is.

15) Gilbert O'Sullivan, Alone Again (Naturally)

Sadderthan a sack full of nothin', and if you've been drinking I'd strongly recommendyou lock the gun cabinet before you drop the needle on the turntable.

16) Eric Carmen, All By Myself

Ibid.

17) Gary Wright, Dream Weaver

Justhow completely fucking great is 'Dream Weaver'? You know the answer to thatquestion as well as I do, so let's just move right along.

18) Randy Vanwarmer, Just When I Needed You Most

I'lladmit this one has a bit of personal history behind it, but it still has thepower to tear out my spleen and tattoo 'Oh, Fuck' on my buttocks every time Ilisten to it.

19) Victor Lundberg, An Open Letter To My Teenage Son

Raw,honest, unflinching, and powerful as a shot of monkey serum. If you're a parent--and I'm not-- I suspect it'll make a mess of you in a hurry and then make youa better man (or woman). Sort of like 'Blind Man in the Bleachers,' onlydifferent. No blind man, no bleachers, but the same desperate attempt tocommunicate something vaguely important.

20) Blues Image, Ride Captain Ride

Thisone might have ranked higher if the pale Marty McGraw cover version hadn'tpoisoned my memories of the original just a bit. Still, no road trip would becomplete without it.

21) Ray Stevens, The Streak

Ok,so maybe this one falls under the 'Guilty Pleasure' category, but sometimeswhen I'm listening to music I just want to laugh, clap my hands, and singalong.

22) ZZ Top,Tush

Anelegy, a prayer, a shout of praise, a cry in the darkness, a yelp of unabashedlust --how can one song be so many things? I don't know, but 'Tush' proves itcan.

23) Sammy Hagar, Winner Takes All

Obscuregem from the soundtrack to an equally obscure Canadian Western starring MerlinOlsen, Susan Dey, and Herve Villechaize. Hagar takes an old chestnut and makesit all his own (with help from Mark Knopfler).

24) Will to Power, Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird medley

It'sthe craziest idea in the world, and it shouldn't work, and it shouldn't becountry, but I'll be damned if it doesn't and it isn't.

25) The Sweet, Fox On The Run

Timelesssong of a Nashville dream gone bust, complete with some of the most vivid busstation imagery in all of country music. You feel for this young girl as shefalls into the clutches of a 'talent scout' and ends up snorting coke andstarring in $500 porn movies. And you cheer for her (sort of) as she finds God.

26) Billy Idol, Hot In The City

Thesong that launched a million line dances still holds up pretty damn well, allthings considered. All I know is that when I tossed it on the stereo at a partyrecently my guests erupted in a boot-scooting frenzy right there in my livingroom.

27) The Nashville Teens, Tobacco Road

Whosays there's not a place for doo-wop in country music? Not me, not when it'ssteeped in the dust of gravel roads that go nowhere and the longing of smalltown teenagers everywhere. This one might be hard to find, but it's worth the journey.

28) Hank Locklin, Please Help Me, I'm Falling

Sexaddiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, and codependency --it's all righthere, years before Betty Ford ever crash landed at Hazelden. It's all righthere, and it's all good in the way that only country music can make bad thingsgood.

29) Styx,Miss America

There'sso much going on in this song that I don't know where to begin. Taken on itsown --and with the unstated I tacked onto the beginning-- it could be a lazydeclaration of disillusionment. Add a question mark and you have a politicalstatement lurking in a tossed-off query. But however you care to interpretStyx's dense, metaphorical rip through the American Dream, it all adds up to apure, timeless classic of country music --and for once that's country in thebroadest sense. Meaning: the place where all of us live.

30) Johnny Horton, The Battle of New Orleans

Anepic of American heroism, and the sort of song that gets stuck in your head anddrives you absolutely batshit fucking crazy. What 'Battle of New Orleans'demonstrates is that some things are worth fighting for, and some things thatare worth fighting for are worth singing about. Also, implicit in this song, asin so much of the great country music I love: Don't fuck with America. Bonuspoints for rhyming 'beans' with 'New Orleans.'

31) Tom Jones, Green, Green Grass of Home

Nolist of the greatest country songs of all time would be complete without acontribution from the virile Welshman, who proved that a hirsute wanker couldbelt out an American classic with all the style and emotional nuance of aNashville pro.

32) Pat Benatar, Hell is for Children

Inone of country music's finest examples of method acting --or maybe, God helpher, she wasn't acting-- Benatar wrings every ounce of pain out of thissuccinct and wrenching portrait of rural poverty and child abuse. 'Hell is forChildren' is a rare example of a country song that dares to tackle socialissues without resorting to trailer trash cliches and self pity.

33) Spandau Ballet, True

Tremendoussong that touches on country's timeless themes of fidelity, infidelity, and thebroken hearts that result when tortured souls venture down to the dark end ofthe street.

34) Curtis Mayfield, If There's A Hell Below We're All Going To Go

Mayfield'sforays into country deserve to be placed next to Ray Charles's 'Modern Soundsin Country and Western Music' on your shelf, but chances are you --and millionsof other people-- never even heard them. Here he tosses salvation out thewindow and wages a wrestling match with sin in which we're all losers. This isa record the Louvin Brothers might have recorded, and if they ever update thesplendid 'Goodbye Babylon' set Mayfield deserves a place on the roster.

35) Tommy James and the Shondells, I Think We're Alone Now

Oneman, one woman, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and a long night of lovin', TommyJames style. Dim the lights, and cue up a little Ed Ames or Ray Price.

36) Neil Sedaka, The Diary

Thisone seems so obvious at first listen, but listen again: Sedaka's predicament(he finds his faithless lover's diary) is a familiar one, but what he does withthis discovery is satisfying and surprising beyond belief. You'll find yourselfthinking: I wish I'd thought of that.

37) Jay Ferguson, Thunder Island

Whata wonderful metaphor. I think it was John Donne who said 'No man is an island,'and Jay Ferguson might be inclined to agree. A man and a woman, however, nowthat's a different story, and Ferguson's artful exploration of the pure,tempestuous oblivion of sex is country music's Song of Solomon.

38) REO Speedwagon, Keep the Fire Burning

Whenit feels like love is slipping away, Speedwagon's 'Keep the Fire Burning' isthe perfect lover's plea that'll remind you both of what's at stake and whyit's worth fighting for. A nice antidote to D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and one of OwenBradley's most sumptuous productions.

39) Fats Domino, Jambalaya

Itshould be apparent by now that I'm bending over backwards here to avoid theobvious choices, but I'd emphasize that this isn't purely a perverse attempt tobe contrary. I love Hank Williams as much as the next guy, but his music is nowso familiar that it's become like the wallpaper in this room, and more oftenthan not when I get a hankering for Hank I turn to one of his countless interpretersfor a fresh spin on the master's music. Domino's take on 'Jambalaya' is aboutas fresh as it gets.

40) Carol Douglas, Doctor's Orders

It'snot often a doctor dispenses practical advice of the sort Ann Landers routinelydishes out, but Carol Douglas had a damn good doctor, and the advice he gaveher would have proved useful (and would still prove useful) to country's legionof unhappy women: get rid of that man. Of course such advice sounds a bit likecommon sense when the man in question has infected you with syphilis.

41) Terry Jacks, Put the Bone In.

Theflipside to the smash 'Seasons in the Sun' is a classic of country cooking(Jacks is ostensibly talking about a pork and beans recipe), with a filthyinsinuation that takes it over the top.

42) The Alan Parson Project, Eye in the Sky

Theanthem for all those paranoid peckerwoods holed up in the mountains out west,as well as the anti-government tax-dodging zealots all over the country.Despite the fact that 'Eye in the Sky' was allegedly found in the car thatTimothy McVeigh was driving when he was arrested, it's still a powerful songthat taps into some of the anger and distrust that is lurking out there incountry's heartland, and as such is a nice counterpoint to the jingoism of LeeGreenwood et al.

43) Cream, White Room

Aclear-eyed account of the aftermath of a debauched night on the town that endsin a detox cell. In the sorrow of the hungover protagonist, a man who has leteverything slip away, you can hear the echoes of everyone from Hank Williams toGeorge Jones.

44) Foreigner, Dirty White Boy

Whitetrash exploitation songs don't come any more unsavory than this one, the sadtale of a backwoods Don Juan who makes his reputation deflowering virgins andcuckolding husbands. Despite the obvious relish with which Foreigner serves upthe nasty details, there's a morality play at work here, and justice isultimately served. Marty Robbins for people who don't know who the hell MartyRobbins is.

45) Thompson Twins, King For A Day

Anothertale of a roadhouse Lothario who comes into a boodle of cash (an inheritance ofsome sort, I think, although the song is vague on this point) and lives high onthe hog for a day. This is essentially the old story of money burning a hole ina man's pocket, and though you know exactly what's coming --the guy squandersevery last dime on liquor, women, and riverboat casino slots-- it's a hugelyentertaining yarn all the same. Almost sounds like something Hank Jr. mighthave coughed up in his prime.

46) Jody Reynolds, Endless Sleep

Easilythe best of the tributes to Hank Williams that flooded the country market afterhis death. Its timelessness is a product of its ability to tap into theanguished fuck-up's ancient longing for peace and serenity. It almost makes youwish you were dead, and that's as high a tribute to a great country song asanything I can think of.

47) Rick Astley, Cry For Help

Astley'sone great, defining song, and one of the finest things to come out of Nashvillein the last 20 years. It's exactly what it says, and more. As pitiless andpitiful a performance as anything in the dense catalog of blues, soul, andcountry. Unfortunately no one heard Astley's cry, or realized how raw and realit really was, and he'll be remembered --if he's remembered at all-- as onemore great talent who died too young.

48) Melanie, Brand New Key

Greatoff-kilter take on the theme of a woman who's had enough of a philanderinglover. Beyond the central metaphor (a revelation that will open up a whole newworld for the protagonist), there's an entertaining tale in which the womanchanges the locks on the house while her soon-to-be ex is out drinking andcarousing with his pals. The locksmith, of course, is more than willing toparticipate in the woman's liberation, and what ensues --Melanie is cleverenough to make you use your imagination a bit-- is straight out of PenthouseForum.

49) Foghat,Stone Blue

Afat slab of the bluest country you'll ever hear, delivered with typicalbutt-kicking whump by the titans from Fenniman, Mississippi. The recordindustry, and its attempts to remake them in the mold of Alabama, ultimatelywrecked Foghat, but before the weasels got their hands on them they were one ofthe most volatile live acts in all of country.

50) Consumer Rapport, Ease On Down The Road

Countrymusic has always been full of songs about people leaving things behind--lovers,families, dead-end jobs, jerkwater towns. Sometimes these characters areleaving to pursue a dream elsewhere; often they're just getting the hell out oftown. It's a liberation theme that has resonated with countless people trappedin lives of quiet desperation, and it's certainly not unique to country. It'sinteresting to note, however, that 'Ease On Down The Road' beat 'Born to Run'to the charts by five months, and it's a more stoic, laidback version ofSpringsteen's anxious, revved-up classic. The guys in Consumer Rapport don'tknow where they're going, and they don't much care, just as long as it'ssomewhere else.

Nothing At All Like A Bruce Springsteen Song

2011-09-25T19:46:00.002-05:00

Do you remember that time you threw your heart from the window of aspeeding car?

Was it burning?

No, not thattime. It was just heavy, a sodden wad of plumbed meat. It felt like a waterballoon coated with grease. It couldn't have weighed more than a softball, andit bounced once on the shoulder of the highway and skipped off into the ditch.Some kid who was out fucking around found it the next day, put it in a plasticgrocery sack, and took it to school for show-and-tell. An alarmed teacherconfiscated your heart and hauled it to the principal's office.

The principalwas a wattled walrus of a man, and he called the county sheriff, who came down,took one peek in that plastic sack, and had a pretty damn good idea what he waslooking at, even as he wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

Within24 hours posters started appearing on telephone poles around town, which is howyou eventually got your heart back, although at the time you weren't so sureyou even wanted it back.

Rememberthat dinky town?What a strange place. What a strange time in our lives that was. The town wasso small that it didn't have a newspaper or radio station, and the closest citythat had either was almost forty miles away and had been pretending for half acentury that the little town didn't exist.

The town had aserious inferiority complex going back almost a hundred years, and things hadgotten so bad that there was a vocal cult of locals that was convinced theywere living in the hallucination of a senile god. Somebody had made a trip to abig city in the north some years earlier and had returned with a state road mapon which the town was nowhere to be found, further convincing many people thatthey, their families, pets, cars, homes, neighborhoods, and entire communitydid not, in fact, exist.

A dwindlinggroup of optimists formed the Existence Party and ran a full slate ofcandidates for local offices. Every one of them was soundly defeated. Yet stillthe town carried on as best it could; the residents dutifully paid theirproperty taxes, sent their children to school, maintained their homes andlawns, and --for the most part, anyway-- obeyed local laws.

High schoolgraduation became known as Vanishing. Almost without exception graduates fledtown immediately with whatever memories they had left, never to return. You couldn't for the life of you figure out how they escaped. Newcomers, even relative newcomers --anybody, really, who had not lived thereall their lives-- tended to suffer from gradually worsening memory problems,particularly regarding how they'd come to live in the town in the first place.

You weredefinitely in this camp. When I first met you you no longer had the foggiestidea what you were doing in that place or why you had moved there. You insistedit was the most boring place you'd ever been, and you had the odd feeling thatyou were being held hostage. More and more often you felt like you were lostthe instant you left your house. Often enough, in fact, you were lost even whenyou were in your house.

The streets ofthe town had become a sort of labyrinth to you, and you often found yourselfunwittingly driving in circles, sometimes for hours at a time.The streets all seemed to either dead end or circle back on themselves.

Sometimes atnight you would park at one of these dead ends and shine your car lights outinto the seemingly endless scrub brush beyond the city limits. You said youwould see dark shapes moving around out there, and the occasional flash ofyellow or red eyes captured in your headlights. Coyotes, you thought, orperhaps even wolves.

Itwas the sense ofcaptivity, the boredom, and the torment of your eroding memory that led you tothrow your heart from the window of the speeding car. A woman had been driving,but you couldn't remember her name or what she looked like. You retained avague memory of being tormented by the woman's incessant chatter.

The day youretrieved your heart from the sheriff's office, as you drove home with theplastic bag rattling on the passenger seat, you realized that your eyesight wasrapidly fading. By the time you got home you were almost completely blind andhad a difficult time finding your way into the house.

You rememberedthat much, at least for a few days. Your house, you said, was dark, and youcould barely make out the various familiar shapes in your kitchen. You couldhear the hum of the refrigerator. You felt with your hands and located thecounter next to the sink, and there you deposited your heart in its grocerysack.

You were sotired, uncommonly tired was the phrase you used, and you suspected that youmight be dying. How long, you wondered, could a man live without a heart? And how long had it been since you flung itfrom the window of the speeding car? You reallyhad no idea. There was, however, very little doubt about this much: you werenow almost completely blind. You were disconsolate. Words were beginning tobreak apart in your head; they had been slowing way down for quite some time,but now they were truly starting to disintegrate. There was a moment in whichyou said you were seized with a powerful longing to hear Louis Armstrong. A fewsnippets of a tune jerked momentarily between your ears and then just asquickly evaporated.

At some pointyou fell into a deep sleep, perhaps even a coma. When you regained consciousnessyou were still sitting at your kitchen table, and you said you could hear yourheart stirring in the plastic sack. Rattling, initially, and then jerkingaround.

When I found youyou had your heart in your hands, cradled like a rabbit.

Do you remember therest? Do you remember how we escaped together, and how, even slumped againstthe passenger window and blind and barely conscious, you mumbled that ourgetaway in the dead of night was "just like a Bruce Springsteensong"?

Do you rememberhow I cut up your heart with a steak knife and fed it back to you one bite at atime?

Can you rememberthat, baby?

I hope one day soon you'll remember everything, and never again forget what happened next.

No Flowers, Please

2011-09-19T16:18:00.001-05:00

Gogi? I remember saying. Is that your realname?

She said something to me, something impertinent I'msure, that was lost in the whirring of the blender.

Grasshopper? She said a moment later, offering me athick green drink in a jelly jar.

I swear, I said, I could drink these all night.

I do, she said.

Later, she put a record on her turntable and said,my mother used to sleep with this guy who's playing tenor. She used to followShelly Manne around, and I'm sure she slept with pretty much everybody in hisband. She spent half of her life chasing after musicians, until she got too oldand worn out. Then she started tending bar in this law-and-order dive, and allshe ever dated were old cops. The last twenty years of her life she dated onecop after another. The same guys who used to make life so miserable for her oldmusician friends. They treated her like shit, the fat bastards. Funny, isn'tit?

She went back to the kitchen and fired up theblender again, and when she returned she settled back in on the couch and said,my mother had this big, fat scrapbook full of signed photos and I.O.U.s fromjazz musicians, most of them written on cocktail napkins or scraps ofplacemats. It was like a who's who of jazz musicians, seriously. Those spongesfucked her and drank up all her money and then dumped what was left of her forthe old cops to pick over. I wish I still had that scrapbook. I wonder whathappened to it? I'll bet something like that would be worth a lot of money.

She got up and put another record on the stereo.I'm sure my mother screwed this guy too, she said. I remember him coming aroundand crashing on our couch in his underwear. He was an A-number-one creep. Creepcentral. Bad complexion, bad teeth, nothing really to recommend him other thana decent wardrobe and the fact that he could play music. I guess that wasenough for my mother. Me, I've always hated musicians. Every one I've ever metwas a bum who never even pretended to be a decent human being unless he was ona stage somewhere, and that was just so they could get some woman like mymother to sleep with them and buy them drinks. Don't get the wrong idea, I lovemusic; I just hate musicians, and don't even try to tell me that's not possibleor I'll claw your eyes out.

I'm sure it's possible, I said. I don't have adoubt in the world it's possible.

Oh, Jesus, she said. Don't kiss my ass like that.It's so unbecoming.

I had some fine times with Gogi. We laughed a lot.She really did drink grasshoppers every night, and she had one hell of a recordcollection. She also had a lot of nice clothes. She hated crowds, I alsoremember that. I lost track of her when I moved in the early eighties, whichwasn't unexpected; I should warn you, she'd told me when I stopped by her placeto say goodbye, I don't keep in touch, so this really is adieu.

I found her obituary online a few weeks back, in aPhoenix newspaper. She died in 2002, at the age of 52, which meant that she wasolder than I thought, but still not nearly old enough. The obituary didn't sayhow she died, or, rather, of what. She wasn't survived by a husband or anychildren, which didn't surprise me, of course. Just a brother in Boston, Ithink. No flowers, please, the obit said, and suggested memorials to the HumaneSociety. I keep telling myself that one of these days I'll get around tosending a check.

Late Summer Rerun: Lord Knows, Child

2011-09-14T02:56:00.000-05:00

One day Ella's grandmother took her to the county fair, something which Ella looked forward to all year long.

Her grandmother wouldn't go on any of the rides, not even the Ferris Wheel, but Ella didn't mind going by herself. If her grandmother had allowed her to, Ella would have gone on every ride --the big, swirling, spinning rides, the fast and high and upside-down rides-- over and over again. She liked to be high above the world, like an astronaut when he could still see the lights and the rooftops and the trees and the tiny people going about their lives, before he moved into the dark part of space.

Ella wanted to be James Bond, only a girl, but if she couldn't be James Bond her second choice was to become an astronaut or a race car driver. She would always like to wear beautiful clothes, though, whatever she did, and she would have to be able to put flower stickers and spangly things on her astronaut suit. When her mother moved away she had left behind boxes of fashion magazines in her old bedroom, along with a collection of James Bond novels that had belonged to Ella's father before he was buried in the cemetery of soldiers. These magazines and books were the main things Ella liked to look at and read.

At any rate, the one day Ella knew she would always remember at the county fair was different from every other day she had spent at the county fair, all of which had been wonderful in their own way. But on that particular day Ella had seen a man --a man wearing a suit very similar to those worn by astronauts or race car drivers-- fired from a cannon and carried high above the bright lights of the Ferris Wheel, beyond which was a waiting net.

Ella asked her grandmother why a man would be fired from a cannon, and her grandmother had said, "Lord knows, child, I suppose he just likes the way it feels."

Later, after they had seen the Human Cannonball, Ella and her grandmother had walked through the county historical museum and the Indian museum and the fish building. The last building Ella's grandmother always liked to look around in was the arts and crafts building, and that afternoon there was an old man sitting at a table and making tiny ships inside of glass bottles.

Ella had never seen anything like it, and she studied the finished projects that were on display with a combination of wonder and confusion. They were beautiful little ships, remarkably intricate, and Ella couldn't understand why they were in the bottles or how they had gotten there. At the moment Ella and her grandmother happened by, the old man was just beginning to build another ship in a bottle, and it was too early to tell exactly how he intended to do it.

Still, it was the question of why that troubled Ella, and she stared at the old man for a moment --he was peering through a large, mounted magnifying glass-- and then she just came out and said what was on her mind. "Why would you put a ship inside a bottle?" she asked.

The man raised his head and seemed to give the matter serious thought. And then he smiled at Ella --it was, she thought, an unmistakably happy smile that she would never forget-- and said, "And what do you think you are, young lady, right this moment, but a ship inside a bottle?"

"But how does the ship get out of the bottle?" Ella asked.

"I do believe," the man said, "that in no time at all you're going to figure that out."

Contemplating My Possible Worthlessness And Immortality

2011-09-12T01:32:00.001-05:00

I am worth no money, but I must be worth something. What is not worth money?

I will start with a process of elimination.

If time is indeed money, then I can reasonably conclude that I am not worth time. I can also conclude that I am not worth the price of admission, since "the price of admission" implies a "price," and a "price" implies a cost, and the very idea of "the price of admission" implies some exchange of money.

Just as assuredly can I conclude that I am not worth my weight in gold, as gold is a universal standard of monetary value.

Is there, then, anything at all that I could be worth, given that the concept of worth is now inextricably tied to value, and value to some price tag? A price tag is, of course, the amount one is expected to pay for an item, and the amount one is expected to pay for something is generally agreed to be a monetary consideration.

Given such logic, I must reluctantly conclude that I am worth nothing, and if in fact I am worth nothing then I must turn my considerations, or ruminations, to the subject of nothing and its properties.

And there I find an inadvertent affirmation, or at least some small cause for hope: If, as I have heard said, "Nothing matters," then I might reasonably conclude that I matter.

What, though, does it mean to matter? Could I not reduce the question of my nothingness to something along the lines of "What is the matter?" Meaning here the matter, or mattering, of my personal nothing.

I am thinking here, and feel like I must now go backwards a bit, as something else has occurred to me as I typed the previous paragraphs regarding my possible status as a mattering being.

Another curious thing I have sometimes heard said is, "The best things in life are free." Free obviously meaning here "of no cost" or "requiring no exchange of money." Another possible bit of encouragement, this; since I am worth no money, I must then be some sort of "best thing" as well as free, and "free" is a word, surely, with many positive connotations, including unfettered or in a state of liberation. Yet I now think of the phrase, "There ain't no free," which, if there is truth in it, would once again consign me to a state of non-existence.

This consignment would seem to receive additional support from the following consideration: If I am not worth time, and time is --as people are fond of saying-- of the essence, then I cannot possibly be of the essence, and must therefore conclude that I am non-essential, which clearly contradicts the idea that I matter.

Perhaps you will at this point understand my confusion on this and many other pressing questions.

Again, though, I must look for a silver lining, for surely a man cannot long live without some hope of a silver lining, even if he has absolutely no fucking idea what "a silver lining" might mean in this or any other context. Be that as it may: If time is, as is frequently alleged, fleeting, and time is money, and I am not worth money, then I cannot possibly be fleeting, and so might possibly be immortal.

Perhaps, though, that is not a true silver lining, for surely immortality is an expensive proposition --one can only imagine how much it might cost to live forever-- and thus immortality would therefore be yet another luxury that I cannot afford, as well as, come to think of it, a rather dreary aspiration.

From The Vanishing Dump: Unbroken Promise

2011-09-04T01:02:00.000-05:00

Disappointed in love and broken
at forty she married a small town
in Ohio
it made no brash promises whispered nothing
sweeter in her ear than good morning
good afternoon good evening good night
my dear
good night my darling
good night my dear
in the morning
I'll still be here.

Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us": The Facebook Update (Redux)

2011-08-29T05:17:00.001-05:00

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Friending and attending, we lay waste our powers:
Few of these friends are actually ours;
We have commodified friendship, a sordid boon!
The Cybernaut that turns her back on the moon;
The silence that is howling at all hours,
Our virtual marches on indifferent powers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
We seldom move --Great God! I'd rather be
A Luddite suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, sitting on this distressed settee,
Have glimpses that were less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
If only on my giant flat screen TV.

'Invictus: After The Boys Of Summer Are Gone,' By William and Donald Henley

2011-08-27T15:51:00.002-05:00

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

Nobody's on the road.
Nobody's on the beach.
The sun goes down alone.
The summer's out of reach.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Out on the road today
I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.
A voice inside my head said don't look back,
You can never look back.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

I thought I knew what love was.
What did I know? Those
Days are gone forever.
I should just let them go.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

And I can tell you, my
Love for you will still be strong,
after the boys of
Summer have gone.

Remarks Prepared For The Inaugural Launch Of The Mississippi Megalops: Cadmus, The Great Blooming Void, And The Last Performance Of A Celebrated Castrato

2011-08-20T23:45:00.020-05:00

In 1929, fringe historian Rolston Geary wrote in his obscure masterpiece, Utsaht Ushipi ("River of Rats"): "The Mississippi of the latter half of the 19th century was an agent of profound and dubious change, a sort of liquid conveyor belt that ceaselessly carried all manner of vice, decadence, debased culture, and quackery north from places where such commodities had been hatched in a hothouse of guile and gullibility."

As the history I wish to recount today commences, our nation was just beginning its long recovery from the Civil War; it had been barely two months since General Robert E. Lee had presented the Confederacy's surrender at Appomattox. With the tenuous peace, the Mississippi River was a throbbing superhighway running up and down the heart of the country, and all manner of humanity was making its way north and west in search of a new start or simply returning home.

St. Louis was a bustling staging ground for refugees and pilgrims fleeing the ravages of the war. At the same time the northern reaches of the river had been a relatively placid refuge during the war years, and its populace had been for the most part distant spectators throughout the conflict, even as tens of thousands of Union soldiers had trained at Fort Snelling and fought at Gettysburg and other pivotal battles of the war.

In early May of 1865, the McKinley Morganfield, a steamboat making its maiden voyage, embarked from St. Louis bound for St. Paul. Among the passengers on the boat was a consumptive castrato from Italy, Marcello Salvatorri. Salvatorri was at the time one of a handful of surviving castrati in Europe --along with the legendary Alessandro Moreschi, Domenico Mustafa, and Girolamo Velvutti-- and was well past his prime. Once, though, he had been known as "The Angel of Perugia" and had been a minor celebrity in Europe, where in 18th century Italy one could still routinely find signs outside the offices of doctors bearing the words, Qui Si Castrano Ragazzi --"Here boys are castrated."

For at least a decade, however, Salvatorri's increasingly rare performances had been primarily spectacles of mere curiosity and even pity. A review of one of his last European performances had referred to his voice as "a ruin, the feeble skreeing of a doomed animal."

Salvatorri's trip to America --billed as the "The Grand Tour of a Celebrated Castrato"-- was sponsored by a utopian community on the outskirts of a disreputable hamlet then called Cadmus, which had been thrown up downstream from St. Paul in the early years of the Civil War.

Cadmus was home to an adjunct military garrison to nearby Fort Snelling, as well as a trading post, a collection of motley merchants, the hovels of river men, a handful of unruly saloons, a busy boat landing, and --on its eastern fringe-- the Reverend Hosiah Hungwell's visionary encampment, The Great Blooming Void. The Great Blooming Void was characterized by the relative youth of its members, and espoused a mish mash of spiritual, philosophical, and psychological notions that incorporated the most attenuated tenets of both romanticism and the Enlightenment. Hungwell's acolytes were an eccentric and eclectic group; some were attracted by the promise of naturism and free love, others by the group's avowed pacifism and the Reverend's queer brand of futurism; still others by the opportunities for artistic expression and philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Hungwell had invented a "Dream Cradle," and his adherents utilized several different variants of this invention to stimulate dreams and visions. Hungwell was said to spend upwards of 16 hours a day in his own, specially customized Cradle, and he emerged from one such session with a vision of creating a new renaissance of castrati in America, which he called "a species of pure artists and laborers, keepers of mankind's purest dreams." This vision became the Reverend's latest pet obsession, and he began to make plans to bring a castrato from Europe to perform at the Great Blooming Void's annual "Summer of Love" festival, with the goal of raising public awareness and support for his campaign.

Through eastern connections Hungwell managed to find his man, and to arrange his passage from Europe.

That spring, though, the village of Cadmus was dealing with an unprecedented infestation of rats. In late March the river had washed tens of thousands of rats downstream, and scores of these sodden vermin had managed to scramble ashore at the Cadmus boat landing and lay siege to the already squalid community.

One local diarist of the period wrote that "one cannot walk the streets unmolested by the creatures. It is not uncommon to encounter them in packs of several hundred, and they are aggressive and will swarm anything that sits still for too long."

There was not, alas, yet a printed organ for news in Cadmus, but one can find several brief dispatches from the St. Paul Sentinel's archives that make mention of the rat problem in Cadmus and fret about growing concerns that the capital city might itself be overrun as well.

In the first week of May, the Cadmus garrison commander, Erling Pike, in consultation with Governor Alexander Ramsey, took the unusual step of offering a bounty on rats; the bursar at the garrison was authorized to pay two cents for every dead rat. A giant pyre was built on the banks of the river, and for at least two weeks, according to the garrison's logbooks, there was a steady procession along the road to the fort, as residents hauled dead rats by the bag and barrow full. Once the bounty was paid, the rats were added to the pyre.

Rat catching mania had taken hold of Cadmus, and drunken, cudgel-wielding vermin vigilantes roamed the streets at all hours of the day and night, clubbing and stomping rats. Local urchins were, as might be imagined, also zealous participants in the slaughter of the rats.

A man named Gustave Moeller, a trapper and fisherman, lived in a heavily secured camp on the western edge of Cadmus, on a little hill overlooking the village. He did not consider himself foolhardy enough to join in the local rat frenzy. He did, though, regard himself as nothing if not an opportunist, and he captured a number of rats in live traps and constructed several large, hooded enclosures in which he systematically began to breed the creatures.

Also aboard the McKinley Morganfield as it began its maiden voyage out of St. Louis was Dr. Gabriel Kaplan, a graduate of the Harvard School of Dentistry, who was making his way west in search of adventure and dental emergencies. Kaplan was an inebriate and a hothead. He had lasted just six months in a Washington dental practice before fleeing that city after shooting a man over an ill-advised horse trade.

By most accounts, Kaplan was a thoroughly incompetent dentist, but in those days even a competent dentist needed to be prepared to defend himself. The tools and techniques of the trade were unsophisticated at best, and unhappy patients, who were often the victims of incredible and horrific incidents of malpractice, frequently resorted to violent acts of retribution.

Doc Holliday, the famed dentist, gambler, and gunslinger, was not an anomalous representative of his trade. On the frontier, it has been alleged, dentists routinely killed more men than federal marshals.

Meanwhile, the broke-down European gelding, Salvatorri, had been further debilitated by the long and arduous journey from Europe to St. Louis, and his condition aboard the Morganfield worsened.

A physician in St. Louis had pronounced the castrato in very poor health, and opined that further travels were likely ill-advised. Nonetheless, the promoter who was accompanying him, a man from Boston by the name of Erich Blount, was determined to get his charge to Cadmus, and so Salvatorri was hauled aboard the steamship by crew members.

Less than a day into the journey Salvatorri developed a terrible toothache. The dentist, Gabriel Kaplan, who had spent his time aboard the boat playing cards and drinking to excess, was summoned. He refused to see the castrato until he was paid up front for his services. A disagreement ensued between the incompetent dentist and the unscrupulous promoter. Despite the promoter's claims (surely exaggerated) of the suffering patient's wide celebrity, Kaplan had no interest in providing pro bono services for Salvatorri. In fact, Kaplan argued, Blount’s claims were all the more reason he should be paid an inflated fee for services rendered.

Kaplan purportedly brandished his gun, placed the barrel squarely in the greasy middle of the promoter's forehead, and demanded payment. By this means, payment was secured, after which Kaplan proceeded to ply the diminished castrato with large quantities of whiskey and then remove the offending tooth and two others for good measure.

As the McKinley Morganfield steamed north toward Cadmus, Gustave Moeller's rat-breeding operation was exploding, and he began to make as many as five trips a day to the garrison, leading a horse-drawn wagon heaped with rats, many of them no more than a week or two old.

These visits immediately aroused suspicion; no one had seen Moeller in Cadmus proper recently, or could recall witnessing his participation in the public revels surrounding the wholesale slaughter of rats. There had also been, by the time Moeller began making his regular trips to the garrison, a marked and widely noted decrease in the local rat population. The rats, in fact, had become quite scarce, and the flow of bounty hunters to the garrison had slowed to a trickle.

Moeller was making a very good living off of his operation; indeed, after only three weeks he had already received more money from the allotted bounty funds than all of the other rat catchers combined.

A meeting was convened at the garrison, and someone eventually broached the previously unthinkable: was it possible this odd fellow was actually running some sort of rat production out of his fortified camp? A delegation of soldiers was to be dispatched on a mission of discovery the following morning.

Moeller, however, had had for several days the sense that the jig was up. He had managed to stockpile a snug boodle of cash, and had long been planning to join the steady exodus of settlers headed west. No one seems to be quite certain what became of Moeller, but the details of the mission of discovery are noted in terse detail in the garrison's surviving logbooks: the next morning the delegation arrived at Moeller's compound to find the man gone. Worse yet, he had performed the dastardly deed of liberating his rats, and the soldiers were confronted by the ghastly spectacle of what appeared to be tens of thousands of rats, moving like a great river of vermin down the hill toward Cadmus.

The height of this new infestation occurred at almost precisely the same moment that the McKinley Morganfield was docking at the Cadmus landing. It was universally agreed that what was forever after known as "The Moeller Scourge" far exceeded the previous rat crisis. It was now decided that the bounty was clearly insufficient for addressing the problem. Furthermore, the ensuing public disorder was taxing a force of already beleaguered soldiers. This garrison served as a sort of invisible adjunct to nearby Fort Snelling. It was staffed mostly with older soldiers and assorted riff-raff that hadn't passed muster or been regarded as battle worthy. These men were responsible for little more than preserving some modicum of peace in Cadmus and the other outlier communities that had sprung up around the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. They were widely regarded as failures at even this, and their combination of indolence and indifference had cemented the reputation of Cadmus and other similar towns as rogue bastions that were as unruly as anyplace in the American west of the same period.

One of the remaining ranking commanders was an old man of a scientific bent. He recalled seeing the patent for an obscure invention from the factory of Eli Whitney. This contraption was a rat mower, and this officer, Fergus Something or Another, felt certain he could draw up and supervise the construction of something close enough to Whitney's design to be effective.

Working virtually around the clock with the company engineers and blacksmiths, Fergus Something or Another was confident he could produce a testable prototype in less than a week's time.

Cadmus, meanwhile, was awash in rats. The seriously ill castrato, Salvatorri, had been hauled ashore aboard a gurney and ferried through the river of rats to The Great Blooming Void encampment just east of the village. He had arrived in such dire condition --Gabriel Kaplan's butchery had led to an infection, not uncommon even in the most minor dental procedures of the time-- that he was immediately installed in the infirmary.

The gelding's afflictions were by this time so many, and his mental state so deranged, that Reverend Hungwell feared he would lose his prize specimen before he'd even had a chance to hear him sing a note. Salvatorri was feverish, delusional, hacking, and barely able to breathe through his monstrously swollen mouth and nose.

The date of his advertised performance was less than two weeks away.

Among the more curious members of The Great Blooming Void was a great, naked oaf who had come to the community from a respectable family in St. Louis. This young man was Bartlett Hearn, who had been christened Kraj Majales --"The King of May"-- by Rev. Hungwell. Hearn was a simpleton, "touched" in the parlance of the day, and from a very early age he had proved himself incapable of keeping his clothes on. After repeated incidents in school and the community, he had been pronounced a public nuisance and his father had sent him north to Hungwell, with the hope that The Great Blooming Void might at the very least provide his wayward son with some spiritual or moral grounding.

Bartlett Hearn was not yet 20 years old when he reached the utopian outpost near St. Paul. He was already said to be a strapping lad, larger, in fact, than anyone else in Cadmus. His simple, open personality and instinctive naturism immediately endeared him to Hungwell.

The huge and perpetually naked Majales took a keen interest in the debilitated eunuch, and the touched lad from St. Louis proved to be an instinctive, compassionate, and capable nurse.

Under the care of Majales, who was assisted in his ministrations by the infirmary staff and Hungwell himself, the castrato from Perugia rallied valiantly, and in one week's time he was able to stand and, with the support of the naked May King, take brief strolls.

A splendid start to summer in Cadmus --it was now early June-- no doubt proved salubrious to Salvatorri's spirits and health. A handful of the community's residents were Italians, and so were able to converse with the castrato and serve as translators for Majales and Hungwell. Though his health was improving by the day, Hungwell continued to fret about the voice of his visitor. Salvatorri spoke in a halting, raspy chirp that often confounded even his translators. Time and again he was asked if was able to sing, and each time he would shake his head sadly and insist that it was impossible.

"Impossible" was not a word that had any currency in the Reverend's worldview; its use, in fact, was expressly forbidden in the Great Blooming Void's covenant. Hungwell had Salvatorri administered a round-the-clock series of potions, elixirs, teas, lozenges, hot towels, steam treatments, and vigorous throat massages. He was also subjected to regular, intense sessions with the community's widely celebrated mesmerist.

Through it all, the King of May remained Salvatorri's constant companion.

As all this was going on, the rat population, fueled by the rising temperatures and rapidly emerging vegetation, was exploding unabated, and the rats had begun to show up at The Great Blooming Void compound in increasing numbers. The denizens of the commune were morally and constitutionally ill-equipped to deal with an infestation of rats. They were both peaceable folks and cowards, and as such were terrified of the rats and disinclined to kill them. It was almost as if Gustave Moeller's rats sensed they had found a sanctuary from the looming specter of the rat mower.

Reverend Hungwell was, of course, bedeviled and infuriated by the rat invasion, coming as it did less than one week from the announced Summer of Love festival and the performance of his celebrated European castrato. Invitations had been extended to many notables in the capital city, and Hungwell was determined that the festival would go off as planned.

He ordered all those members of The Great Blooming Void who were not engaged in nursing Salvatorri to participate in a rat round-up. The initial plan was to use brooms to drive the vermin into far-flung corners of the compound, where they could be swept into gunny sacks and crates, and relocated to a stretch of wilderness further east. This, of course, was simpleminded folly. The rats were too numerous, brazen, and fleet, and the gentle folk of The Great Blooming Void were too timorous.

Reports, meanwhile, arrived announcing that the rats had found their way into the community's food stores and --even worse news to Hungwell-- had breached the infirmary and were frightening the castrato.

What allegedly transpired next seems, frankly, to be little more than a fanciful bit of revisionist history or a trope from the purview of folklore. One of the more mysterious and eccentric members of The Great Blooming Void community was an androgynous dandy who called himself The Future Man. The Future Man, who would later relocate to New York and make a name for himself in social circles there, was a stoic enigma even to the other Great Blooming Voidians.

This character (who was widely regarded by many to be a member of the fairer sex) is said to have emerged from his tent at the height of the chaos. Wearing his trademark black cape and hat, and striding in leather boots with four-inch heels, he waded right into the frenzy of swarming rats, clapping his hands, stamping his feet rhythmically, and blowing a tin whistle. Here was a Pied Piper of Hamelin scenario, with the exception that in this instance the rats did not follow The Future Man out of the encampment, but rather fled before him, streaming in an almost orderly procession toward the gates.

In this fashion the mysterious rat herder worked methodically for several hours while the other stunned residents of the community looked on with startled amazement. It is said that Kraj Majales even led Marcello Salvatorri from his bed in the infirmary so that the castrato could witness the spectacle.

The fleeing rats headed up the road toward Cadmus, a route that took them directly past the garrison, outside of which Fergus Something or Another and a small group of soldiers and engineers were doing some last minute tinkering on the rat mower. As time constraints and access to materials had made it impossible to equip the rat mower with steam power, Fergus Something or Another had designed the contraption with two facing sideboard seats, each equipped with three sets of pedals. Six men would thus provide the power to turn the threshing blades, while a seventh man would steer the mower from a higher perch in back.

Seeing the river of rats moving down the road toward them, and seeing in this river of rats an opportunity to be seized, a garrison commander gave the order to attack. Eager volunteers sprang aboard the mower and pedaled furiously in the direction of the onslaught. On each pass through the swarming tide, the rat mower was proving to be devastatingly effective. The creatures were being mulched in huge numbers, and those that managed to escape the whirring blades were being stomped and clubbed by the crowd of soldiers and other spectators that had gathered to watch the spectacle. The river of rats became a river of blood.

A large contingent from The Great Blooming Void had assembled outside the compound to witness what was to them a thoroughly horrific tableau. Included in this contingent was the now emaciated castrato, who was perched on the shoulders of the May King.

And there, as he stared at the almost inconceivable barbarism that was unfolding before his eyes, the castrato found his voice. He began to emit a series of almost coloratura squeaks and screams, which the Reverend Hungwell described in his diaries as "glorious, pure, a bit ragged and ruined by time and trial, yet what damage there was in the eunuch's voice was but evidence of the great sacrifices art must make in the pursuit of beauty."

Seized with ecstasy by an occurrence he considered a miracle that had surely been hatched in his Dream Cradle, Hungwell shooed his flock away from the carnage that was still unfolding, got them safely back inside The Great Blooming Void compound, and shut fast the gates. Addressing his adherents before they dispersed, he said, "We have witnessed a terrible atrocity, and seen evidence of man's boundless capacity for savagery. Yet in the midst of such a wrenching and diabolical spectacle we have been given a sure sign that the way of The Great Blooming Void is the right way, and humanity's best hope."

That night Hungwell and Kraj Majales sat at the bedside of the exhausted castrato into the early hours of the morning. Salvatorri was said to be once again deranged, and sweating profusely, but, while holding the hand of his naked and most faithful attendant, the King of May, he suddenly began to sing a version of "Ave Maria," his voice rising as he found his way into a tune he had performed hundreds of times before. People all over the camp were startled by the unreal sounds coming from the infirmary, and many made their way from their beds to stand outside and listen. Salvatorri's voice was a shell of its former glory, but Hungwell remembered it as "the sound of a long shattered peace being gradually, with each intake of breath, restored. It was almost as if we were hearing a man who was turning away from time itself and striding confidently, if full of sorrow, into the loving embrace of his Lord."

Salvatorri lapsed into unconsciousness shortly after his only American performance, and he was pronounced dead just as the June sun began its first incursion on The Great Blooming Void.

Inspired by the events of that long day and night, Reverend Hungwell and The Great Blooming Void formed The Rio de Ratones Poetry Society, and this group, which was to have a minor influence on American poetry of the post-war period, devoted itself to preserving the memory of the tragic Salvatorri and advocating for what Hungwell had called "great sacrifices in the name of art." The Rio de Ratones Poetry Society is little remembered today, but its motto, "To a new age of gods and monsters!" was appropriated by director James Whale for his 1935 horror classic, "The Bride of Frankenstein."

By 1880, Reverend Hungwell was dead and The Great Blooming Void had been driven from its property by the state of Minnesota, its residents dispersed to far-flung places. Hungwell's diaries, along with a handful of other accounts from the time, including the Cadmus garrison logbooks, survive in the Minnesota Historical Society's archives. The village of Cadmus burned to the ground in 1888.

The modest grave of the tragic Salvatorri –believed to be the only European castrato buried in American soil—can be found in the Pine Bend cemetery along the Minnesota River in Rosemount, just across highway 52 from the infernal sprawl of the notorious Koch refinery.

The photograph above, which shows a Dream Cradle in use at The Great Blooming Void, was taken by Oscar Gustav Rejlander.

(NOTE: I would be remiss in not acknowledging my indebtedness to John S. Beckmann's splendid "On Castration in the Name of Art" for a good deal of information on the life of Marcello Salvatorri, the decline of the castrati in the late 19th century, and a few stolen phrases.)

My Back Pages: D.W.Z. (July 15, 1933-August 14, 2002)

2011-08-14T13:00:00.005-05:00

Those days were an iron wagon loaded with rocks that we dragged through muddy fields with our teeth.

You were a magnificent burning boat that would not sink.

We were as prepared as anyone could be who was facing a long night like that. We had, at any rate, been preparing for it for decades. There had been tests --test after test, many of them grueling and sprung on us almost completely unawares-- and drills and close calls and false alarms.

We were all familiar --achingly familiar-- with that urgent walk through the darkness and humidity of nights just like that one, from which we'd finally emerge, perpetually stunned and blinking, into those long hallways of brutal light and blinding white walls, into the maze of that place, a maze that seemed constantly to be shifting and expanding and spiraling ever higher.

On nights like that, that building, that complex, would feel as vast and silent as a library in the worst and most inscrutable sort of nightmare, yet there were reminders everywhere of what the place was up to and how crowded it was with battered pilgrims in all manner of distress.

It was always astonishing to me how a place so full of suffering could be so hushed. The rising and falling of helicopters was a dull thrumming that you felt mostly in your feet. The hallways were zealously lacquered to such a sheen that you'd find yourself almost tip-toeing like a cat burglar to avoid the squeak of rubber or the clatter of heels.

Sometimes, like that night, that morning, it felt like a holy place. There were saints everywhere, plaster mostly, with disturbingly abject or imploring looks on their faces. The image of Jesus strung up on the cross repeated itself again and again; again and again you encountered the grief of Mary.

Most of the sufferers, hidden away behind white doors with whispering pneumatic releases, were in the hands of the most reprehensibly competent sort of unbelievers.

That night, that morning, you were somewhere in that maze, wired and plumbed like a man who was going to be electrocuted and saved in the same instant.

We knew when we once again retraced our steps that morning that this time we would not be coming back for you. We knew that you were ready –even if we were not—for a long journey, a journey for which you would require no shoes, no wallet or driver's license, no comb, razor, or shaving cream, none of the things, in fact, that we would carry away with us in plastic bags.

You and I had driven across the country together, east and west, and across Canada. We once drove a thousand miles with an eight-track of Lou Reed's The Blue Mask stuck in the deck and endlessly looping, and the entire time I waited for a protest from you that never came. We'd sat in the bleachers at spring training ballparks. You were always so happy, so eager, so utterly prepared to be amazed.

Now that's a pretty swing.

That is one beautiful bird.

Isn't that something?

We stood together one night on a dark beach in Florida, where astronauts had recently been blown from the sky. We saw the lights of boats in the distance, trolling still for wreckage. You shook your head and said, "It's hard to even imagine," but you were already a marked man, and the way you said it I could tell that it wasn't, in fact, so hard for you to imagine at all.

If you could see me now --and I like to think that you can-- you'd know that I've already lost so much of what you gave me.

And you'd know --I know you know-- that I'm going to get it all back.

I hope that your voyage, wherever it has taken you and whatever it has entailed, has been as eventful and full of wonder as the life you lived, and that the muffled clanging of that battered bell you lugged around, rattling behind your ribcage all those years, is now just a receding memory. I like to imagine you've seen some astonishing things, and that you are living now in some version of one of the old comfortable stories that you believed in so passionately.

It gives me pleasure to think that you are at peace, and even greater pleasure to know that you lived, so fiercely, so gently, and that you were mine and ours, and that I belong to you still, and always.

By the time you were my age you had four children and a literally broken heart.

You did what you could.

You taught wonder.

I used to sense you coiled like a discus hurler behind every one of my best intentions.

Your blood was the blood that called me back to this world each time I crawled away disgusted.

Yours were the words of forgiveness I was always surprised to find crouched at the back of my tongue. The tenderness, unexpected, that seized me when I was in the presence of suffering or helplessness, that also was you feeling through me.

My biggest dreams were yours.

You pointed out the stars, and taught me to appreciate the gorgeous example of upholstery that is a baseball mitt. The short trigger, the hatred of condescension, the intolerance of cruelty, your compassion and affection for the little guy and the underdog, all those things you gave me.

You could not, unfortunately, give me your unbridled optimism, your undying faith in human goodness, your stiff upper lip, or your genuine willingness to just let the world be the world.

But your capacity for love, your sense of loyalty, your appreciation for a good road trip, the easy way you laughed, and your eagerness to play the fool --What can I say? I am your boy.

You showed me again and again how to live.

So often lately I've sat up in the middle of the night, half expecting you to knock on my door.

Twilight: Now That My Ladder's Gone

2011-07-21T15:20:00.003-05:00

When he finally cut the tree swing down he was 89 years old. Before undertaking the task he spent an hour or so at his kitchen table trying to figure out how long it had hung there.

Close to 60 years, he figured. He hadn't replaced the rope or wooden seat in at least 25 years. It was dangerous, or so the city told him.

The swing hung from a huge maple tree that dominated the corner lot adjoining the house he had lived in since 1946. That full lot was worth a great deal of money, and he was taxed on it, but it had provided a buffer of sorts and had also served as a playground for several generations of neighborhood kids.

The neighborhood had gotten a good deal fancier in recent decades; a lot of the old pre- and postwar homes had been torn down to make way for bigger, more modern houses that he tended to regard as monstrosities. The new people in the neighborhood were often zealots about property values. They didn't like the airport noise. They didn't like the traffic, and had succeeded in getting speed bumps put in up and down the street. He had also gotten a fair amount of grief about the upkeep of his house and yard, and the lot in particular had been an ongoing bone of contention. He didn't spend much time out there and it had gotten a bit overgrown, which was just fine with him. The people from the city, though, had several times ordered him to clean it up, and were now threatening to do it themselves and send him the bill.

Two of his four children --all of whom had sailed into summer gloamings on that swing-- were now dead, as was his wife of 51 years.

Long after his children had grown up and moved out into the world --none of them had stuck around, and he had not raised them to do so-- other neighborhood kids had continued to use his lot for games of Kick the Can, Dodgeball, or catch. Inevitably, they would get around to swinging. All of this pleased him.

There was a long stretch where the neighborhood got old, just as he had. For almost a decade his block seemed to be home to no children at all. Recently, however, with the influx of young couples, the kids had come back, and his yard --and the swing in particular-- was a temptation. He'd recently seen a couple of young teenagers swinging out there in the darkness on one of the first truly lovely summer evenings. He'd sat on his back porch and listened. They were obviously good kids, trying out romance. He'd seen it dozens of times.

The swing didn't sound right, though; he heard sounds that were unfamiliar and worrisome: a steady whining from the ropes and a metronomic creak from the branch to which the swing was attached. It sounded like it was finally fixing to go, and that night he fretted that someone would get hurt.

The next day he went out in the afternoon --it was hot, and threatening rain-- and cut the swing down. He hoped the gesture wouldn't be interpreted as mean spirited, and wished he could explain to someone that it was one of the most painful and regrettable things he'd ever done. As he disassembled his extension ladder, a process that took a great deal of time and effort, it occurred to him that he would likely never have occasion to use the thing again. His whole life he'd been secretly pleased by his absolute lack of hesitation when ascending a ladder.

Last Dance

2011-07-04T03:31:00.005-05:00

I used to see this handsome, elderly couple around my neighborhood. They took walks together, often holding hands, and it always struck me as strange that they both had their own earbuds.

Then one evening my dog Wendell and I arrived at the stoplight on Lyndale and 43rd as they were waiting to cross. I noticed that both of their sets of earbuds were connected to the single iPod the man held in his right hand, and upon closer inspection I saw that they had a nifty jack of some sort that made this possible.

I was curious, so I gestured to the iPod and asked where they had purchased the headphone jack. The man had to remove the bud from one ear and ask me to repeat the question.

"Oh, this," he said, and held up the jack with its dangling cords so I could take a closer look. "Pretty slick, huh? It's from Radio Shack."

By this time the woman had removed her earbuds as well. She also expressed the opinion, in virtually the same words, that the gizmo was pretty slick. They seemed flattered by my curiosity, so I asked them what they were listening to. The man examined the iPod closely. "Ella Fitzgerald is playing right now," he said. "We just have our favorites on there."

"Oldies," the woman said, and laughed.

"Yes," the man said. "Serious oldies. Our son gave us this for Christmas a couple years ago and put the music on there for us."

"Neither of us, of course, has absolutely any idea how the thing works," the woman said. "But it's like a tiny jukebox. We only have...what, honey? How many songs are on there?"

The man again scrutinized the iPod. "Eighty-nine songs," he said. "More than enough. We usually hear ten or so when we go for our walks."

"They're all good songs," the woman said. "And it's set up so they play in a random order and you don't hear the same songs over and over."

"Sometimes you do," the man said. "It can be fickle. But, yes, the songs are all pretty sturdy. We've been hearing them most of our lives, so I guess if we were going to get sick of them we would have by now."

"No, they're all good songs," the woman again insisted. "Perfect for walking. We were talking about the fall colors yesterday and then, just like that, 'Autumn Leaves' popped up."

"Jo Stafford," the man said.

"Yes, that's right." They were both grinning, and the woman had a wonderful habit of poking her husband in the ribs with her right index finger whenever she said something.

"You should have one," the woman said, and gestured to my own iPod.

I shrugged. "I guess I'd have to find a partner in crime," I said.

"Never hurts to be prepared," the man said.

This was last fall, and we bumped into each other quite a few times after that and always greeted each other like old friends.

Then we had a long, hard winter, and I didn't see them around on any of my abbreviated walks with my dog.

The last couple weeks I've seen the man walking alone on a couple occasions, but always at a distance that for some shameful reason I felt grateful for.

Earlier this evening we ran into each other less than two blocks from our original meeting place. I greeted the man --awkwardly, I'm sure-- at a stop sign, and he said, "Well, hello. We meet again." His smile was unspeakably sad.

He reached down to address my dog and give him a scratch. When he stood back up he was wearing his best stoic mask. "I lost my wife in February," he said.

It was like a punch I was expecting, and I managed to tell him how sorry I was and how lovely it was that I had had a chance to meet his wife. He patted me on the shoulder and said, "Well, it was very quick. I'll always be grateful for that. And 47 years is a damn good run."

This, as you might imagine, was an exceedingly awkward and painful encounter, and neither of us could seem to find any more words. He was headed south on Bryant and I was continuing west toward the lake.

"It was awfully good to see you," I said. "And, again, I'm so sorry."

He thanked me, and then, just as we were preparing to part ways, he fished his iPod from his pocket and held it out to me. He had that same wrenching smile on his face. The dangling headphone jack was still plugged in and one socket, of course, was now empty.

"I still expect to round a corner and see her coming toward me down the block," he said, and looked away.

We both stood there in silence for what seemed like an unbearable length of time.

He finally patted me on the shoulder again. "Take care of yourself," he said. "I hope you find a perfect partner in crime."

"I'll keep looking," I said.

And then my dog and I made our way slowly along, through swarm after swarm of happy congregants gathered around backyard barbecue grills, on picnic blankets at the park, or just strolling in laughing packs at the lake. It would be pointless to deny that it was a lovely day.

Fantasy, Fantasy, Fantasy: One More Once Upon A Time

2011-05-29T03:52:00.005-05:00

One year when I was young there was for a very brief time a girl who lived alone with her mother in a trailer at the edge of town. They were recent arrivals.

The girl was a loner at school, and held herself close, a new kid trying to be hard enough to survive. She had started attending classes after the Christmas break, and it was a terrible age to get thrown into the middle of a small town school.

One night I was walking out along the railroad tracks, as I often did after my family had eaten dinner and everyone else was settling in to stare at the television. It was early summer. School would be out in a week. As I was kicking rocks down the tracks I encountered this girl along the creek, at the edge of a field of prairie grasses that were just starting to green. She was catching fireflies and grasshoppers.

I watched her for a time from the railroad trestle, fascinated by her stillness, and then by the grace with which she would suddenly pounce. I walked down the bank below the trestle and approached her in the gloaming. If she was at all startled to see me there, she never let on. We had never so much as exchanged a word in school. She glanced at me briefly and then turned away and pounced once again into the grass.

When she came back up she looked me right in the eyes and said, "Do you remember your first memory?"

I thought this was an interesting question. I was 14 years old and it had never occurred to me before. "I think it was teething," I said. "I just remember being miserable and rubbing my gums with my knuckles and my mom put something on my gums with a Q-Tip and it felt so good and I slept."

"Wow," she said. "That seems like a really early memory. How old were you?"

I shrugged. "It doesn't seem like that long ago, really."

"I guess not," she said, and then held up her Mason jar, clutched in both hands, right to my face. "These," she said. "That's what I remember. Sitting at my bedroom window at night and listening to the strange sounds in the fields and seeing the fireflies floating in the darkness. I thought it was a dream." She studied the jar and then smiled. "Maybe it was a dream. Maybe it is. But I love this dream."

I asked her what she was going to do with her jar.

"I can show you," she said. "But I won't show you unless you tell me your full name and promise not to be a creep about anything."

I told her my name and said I would try not to be a creep about anything.

"I guess that's good enough," she said. "If it's weird, though, that's your problem."

We walked along the creek together, back toward the lights of town. The yard light outside her trailer was the first light in the distance. It was a double-wide trailer, and was one of those trailers that had fake shutters and siding and was trying hard to look like a real house. There were also flower boxes, I remember that. There was no car in the driveway. I asked where her mother was.

"She works the night shift at Tyson's," she said. "Chickens are wrecking her hands."

The girl led me into the dark trailer, and down a short, narrow hallway to her bedroom.

"I'm not trying anything," she said, "but we can't have any lights."

I stood at the doorway of her bedroom until I felt her hand gently push me between my shoulders and heard her voice behind me: "Go on in. I'm not going to kill you."

I went in and shut the door. She told me to sit on the bed. I sat on the bed. Light from outside crept in through the curtains on the window. The curtains had an embroidered heart in the middle, and inside the heart a girl and a boy were facing each other and bowing at the waist, awkwardly, leaning their heads in for a kiss. The real girl noticed me studying the curtains, laughed, and glided over to the window.

"Loves me," she said, and then pulled the curtains apart. Just like that the girl and the boy were separated, the heart divided, the kiss interrupted. "Loves me not. My mom found those at a garage sale and thought they were funny."

She turned away from the window and crouched next to a doll house in the corner. "My grandfather made this doll house for me for Christmas one year," she said. "But I've never put any dolls in there. It would just seem too sad. They would be trapped, and I would feel stupid trying to pretend they were alive."

I watched as she lowered the jar through the open side of the doll house roof. She removed the lid and shook the contents loose, and then, in one lunging motion, sat down next to me on the bed, the empty jar cradled in her hands.

"Just wait," she said. "And be very quiet."

Nothing seemed to happen for several moments, but then I saw the first firefly flicker in the living room of the doll house, and then another, and another in an upstairs bedroom. Pretty soon they started to float lazily out the windows and up through the roof and into the air around us, spark after spark flaring in the dark bedroom of the girl whose name I still did not know. And then, slowly, the grasshoppers started up their washboard chorus.

I looked at the girl. She was bent over, the jar gripped now between her knees; her eyes were darting around and watching the fireflies and she had a look of pure joy on her face. It was almost like I wasn't there.

I won't go into the complicated reasons why, but improbable as it may sound --and be-- it was 30 years before I had another encounter with that girl and eventually learned her name. In the intervening years I came to understand that this world tends to traffic in complications and improbabilities both wondrous and cruel, but even now, when I see the woman that girl became, and remember the girl that woman once was, I feel like I am once again 14 years old and breathless and trapped in one magical moment of a past that seemed to promise nothing but enchantment and dreams.

No Imagination Was Stretched In The Course Of This Production

2011-05-25T03:29:00.007-05:00

I need a reason to do things. I need a reason to do this. I do not presently have a reason do either things or this.

I would like to apologize to a lot of people for my recent lock down and lockout. I really do love the people I would like to apologize to, and do not understand my behavior any more than anyone else does, presuming anyone has even tried to understand my behavior, and I would ask that you please not waste a single moment trying to understand my behavior.

Life should be easy. Or at least that's what I've been told by one of the wisest people on the planet. That I haven't found it particularly easy is entirely my problem.

I am hiding in plain sight, which was always, by the way, what I surmised Osama bin Laden was up to. In what I'm going to foolishly call "today's world," there is no place where it is easier to simply disappear than in the middle of a big city. Unlike Osama bin Laden, though, my final days are not being played out as just another notorious, hunted celebrity cultivating invisibility in a multi-million-dollar mansion. Mine is a relatively modest, if impossibly cluttered, hideout, and of absolutely no interest to Navy Seals, or even my neighbors (other than on those increasingly frequent occasions when they make it known that they wish I would take in my mail).

I often have reason to ask myself what it is I think I am disappearing into, and the only satisfactory answer I can come up with is "this," by which I mean a wider and more general, unsatisfactory, and ever darker this than this particular unsatisfactory this.

I'm not sure if the emphases is required in both those instances of this, but I'm going to choose to err on the side of the emphatic. At any rate, it's not a considerably wider this, not by any stretch of the imagination. The imagination, I'm afraid, has been stretched as far as it can be stretched, yet it is now no larger than a bath rug. There has unquestionably been alarming shrinkage, which would mean that "not by any stretch of the imagination" would be, at least in this instance, an entirely accurate phrase.

There has been no stretching of the imagination.

I have come to believe quite strongly that a man should save his words, even as I continue to squander several thousand of them a day.

For what should the words be saved?

(Shrugs). I guess for when they might find themselves necessary.

But surely 'this,' if I'm understanding you correctly, would not be an instance of "when they might find themselves necessary."

Perhaps not, but in the middle of a wholly unnecessary sentence the words might suddenly, as if by magic, find themselves necessary. That is one of the great puzzles of composition.

A puzzle is it?

Well, there may well be a better word that did not immediately come to mind when I attempted to describe what I called "the great puzzle of composition." I might even call it a mystery or a challenge; seldom, however, would I anymore refer to it as a pleasure. I also might not (speaking here in the "by and large" sense) even call it --it being this-- composition. Others have already played with the idea of "decomposition" but that, like much else, seems unspeakably tired to me. I have no further use for mere games, even when all that is left seems like nothing but a mere game whose rules I have never learned to understand.

This is about words, but also about something else I don't wish to try to put my finger on right now: history and personal experience have taught us that everything and nothing is irreplaceable. Particularly when there is so little left that you want and so much that you miss one moment, and so little left that you miss and so much that you want the next.

I. I. I. I. I. I. I.

The idiot thing we call "progress" is an eclipse, permanent and permuting. It makes it impossible to breathe in or properly inhabit the past, and handicapping the future in such darkness is handicapping in the most literal sense. There's only now, as the poets and mystics and other hare-brained basket cases are so fond of reminding us, but you can't even see what might be happening in that mysterious and impossible place when it's always so fucking dark.

That's a garbage metaphor, I know, but I mean something like it all the same. And an eclipse is just really, really boring after a while.

As you were, but not as were you.

Without The Rest

2011-05-16T03:31:00.004-05:00

I would lie to you if I could...

If silence is revealing,
what does it reveal?
The little that is left,
that is outside, that is
the world? No two silences,
you suppose, are alike,
beyond every silence
there is always something
you think it's fair to call sound.

Does that mean it's not silence,
that nothing is? To be honest,
you don't care. People who use
the word destiny are seldom
to be trusted, just as people
who write books are
seldom to be trusted.

You found a pair of wings on the sidewalk
today, wings utterly abstracted
--or subtracted-- and perfectly preserved.
Everything that would constitute the rest
was gone, and without the rest,
of course, a pair of wings is useless.
They were built for the sky.

You might expect a crime scene
to be messy, but this was as neat
as a crime scene could be, really.
Whatever had deemed the wings
useless had taken the time to eat
or make off with everything else.

That the criminal had left the best part
as evidence almost seemed like a
taunt, an insult to the most stubborn
dreams and metaphors of the human
imagination. Isn't that what the true
criminal does, though? Says Let's see
where what's left will get you? Destroys
the heart and head and says Good luck
getting your dreams aloft now,
destroyed bird, sad little man.
Look at the sky and the
trees and the moon and feel
nothing but hobbled longing.

If you think it is distressing
to awaken from a dream of flying
to discover that you have no wings,
imagine how it must feel to awaken
from such a dream to discover
a pair of bloodied wings tucked
under your pillow and rustling
like something that still has
dim memories of flight.

You live now on the floor of the world,
and the sky is so distant, and gray.
You get used to it, but you still
can't stop dreaming of flying away,
even as you sense that you are
never again going to find anything
to do with those wings, even as
night falls, and keeps on falling,
and outside your windows the air is
ceaselessly stirred by the frantic
beating of black wings, huge
and dusty and terrifying, the usual
wee hours massing of the bleak birds
biding their time, but unquestionably
anxious to finally pick you clean.

The Devil In The Wetsuit And Steel-Toed Boots

2011-05-13T03:41:00.003-05:00

In the movie I'm making with my dog --"Satan and the Sacred Bone"-- the Devil wears steel-toed boots and a wetsuit. His horns have been cut off, so that he can try to disguise himself as a normal man going about the world, but if you look closely you can still see the nubs where they used to be.

The Devil wears a wetsuit because he's kind of a Poseidon sort of devil, and the portal to Hell is located at the bottom of a deep, dark lake. Since we don't have much of a special effects budget and I wanted the Devil to be able to make dramatic entrances, I came up with the idea of having him emerge from a lake in the moonlight. There happens to be a lake near my home. I think it's going to work out slick.

The first guy I got to play the Devil looked too fat in the wetsuit. He wasn't a particularly fat guy in real life, but a wetsuit is unforgiving in that regard, and I thought it was important that the Devil be lean.

The second guy was really good in rehearsals, but after four days he started to have reservations. He said it was because he was a Born Again Christian, which may or may not have been true. He smoked a lot of pot for a Born Again Christian.

So, anyway, we're already on our third Devil. This one has appeared in a Car Soup commercial and also as Tevya in a local community college production of "Fiddler on the Roof." He's been lobbying hard for the Devil to have a love interest, and feels strongly that there should be at least one scene where his character gets to (as he put it) "do his old lady like a dog." He argued that this would be a subtle bit of symbolism or metaphor or some such nonsense. Though I'm pretty sure the motivation behind all of this business is purely selfish --I have serious doubts about whether this fellow has even slept with a woman-- he continues to insist that the Devil needs to be portrayed as "insatiably horny" in order to demonstrate his power, virility, and otherworldly appetites.

Since I'm not keen on trying to find a fourth Devil, I put an ad on Craigslist, but have thus far received only two replies, both from clearly underage girls with questionable motives. Nonetheless, the third Devil liked the looks of both of these candidates and suggested I immediately take them on --one as the Devil's paramour, the other as an understudy and potential body double. Afraid as I was of losing yet another Devil, I was even more wary of being caught up in some sort of sting operation and so thanked the young women for their time and assured the third Devil that I would continue to pursue other options.

Anyway, weather permitting, we are slated to film our first scenes tomorrow. The premise of "Satan and the Sacred Bone" is that the Devil has risen from the deep, dark lake in the moonlight and is stalking my dog through the Enchanted Dog Forest. The Devil is trying to capture my dog --and in the process steal his soul-- because my dog is a High Priest in the Brotherhood of the Sacred Bone, a holy order of dogs devoted to preserving the history and rituals of a bone that is alleged to be a surviving relic from the sacrificial altar of Abraham.

The Devil believes my dog knows where the Sacred Bone is being kept, and he intends to pry this information out of him at any and all cost.

At some point in its long odyssey through history and time, it is said, the Sacred Bone was once in the possession of John the Baptist. Then, for several hundred years, it was displayed in a monastery in France, and used in the annual Blessing of the Animals. Like so many other precious relics and works of art, the Sacred Bone disappeared during the Nazi invasion of France.

For almost three decades the Sacred Bone was presumed destroyed or lost forever, until a Dutch newspaper reported, in 1976, that a rich and unscrupulous art collector and breeder of dachshunds in Austria had the bone in his possession. Through diplomatic and legal channels this collector was eventually persuaded to turn the Sacred Bone over to authorities in Geneva, where an international tribunal attempted to sort through claims from a host of nations seeking title to the bone. It was generally believed that the Sacred Bone was most likely going to end up in Jerusalem, but a group of armed and well-trained commandos of mysterious affiliation broke into the Swiss compound where the relic was being held, made off with the Sacred Bone, and left behind a long and rambling note detailing plans to return the object to its "rightful custodians," the Brotherhood of the Sacred Bone, a loosely knit secret society made up entirely of dogs.

In the intervening years, information regarding the Brotherhood and the whereabouts of the Sacred Bone has been exceedingly hard to come by, but it is rumored that the Sacred Bone is possessed of extraordinary protective and healing spiritual powers, and is thus of keen interest to the Devil.

That's the backstory of "Satan and the Sacred Bone." I've persuaded my neighbor, Lonnie, who has a rich baritone and has done a few radio advertisements for a local bank, to provide a voice-over narrative of this saga as the opening scene unfolds. We've already recorded it (I encouraged him to try his best to muster a James Mason impersonation), and I think it sounds fabulous. Chilling, really.

I'm still trying to raise enough cash to finish this project --I've already invested more than $250 of my own money (actually money borrowed from my sister)-- and am encouraging people who might be willing to help out to chip in over at Kickstarter. Anyone who gives more than $10 gets a speaking part in the film. So far we've raised $48, but there's still a long way to go.

I'll try to keep you posted here, so stay tuned.

My iPod died today, by the way, and a "For Lease" sign went up at the Odd Fellows Hall over in St. Paul, so I'm feeling even more super bummed out than usual. Also I ate a jar of salsa for dinner. Just FYI.

Exuviae: What I've Got

2011-05-10T02:39:00.003-05:00

I went for a walk in a large cemetery near my house today and saw a tombstone that broke my heart. At this point it's just the smashing of atoms, but the smashing of atoms is still a form of breakage.

On the tombstone there was a color photograph of a woman somehow etched or embossed right in the middle of all the cold, hard facts. I instantly recognized this woman as a regular customer at my old used bookstore, and recalled her as an impressive reader.

She always came into the store smelling like woodsmoke and hay, and often had bits of hay tangled in her unruly blonde hair. In the winter she wore a beat-up black Carhartt jacket that was covered with dog hair. She would park her red pickup truck right outside the store, and there were usually two dogs peering out of the truck. They weren't the sort of dogs that made a fuss; you could tell they were used to sitting around and waiting.

I once told the woman that she was welcome to bring the dogs into the store.

"Oh, no," she said. "You'd regret that. They're unruly, and one of them has an appetite for books that I haven't been able to break him of. That's pretty much why you never get any of your books back."

I could never tell if she was shy or just stoic, but she wasn't much for conversation. I did eventually learn that she trained and boarded horses somewhere out near Lakeville, which meant that she made quite a trek to my store a couple times a week. I assumed she must have had other business in the city, but I was nonetheless always grateful to see her.

As I said, her reading habits were impressive. Prodigious, really, and she would buy some seriously challenging stuff. Musil's The Man Without Qualities, is one title I remember. She'd buy things like that, but she also had an appetite for true crime paperbacks. Lots of serial killer stuff. In the years I spent in that store she was easily one of the most interesting and mysterious customers.

Anyway, it was jarring to stumble across her grave, and I stood there for quite some time looking at her photo and remembering her. I was surprised by how many specific titles I could recall selling to her: Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I hadn't yet read; Nabokov's Ada and Pnin; a fat collection of Icelandic Sagas; Lydia Davis's Break It Down; an account of the Lobster Boy's murder that I had overpriced because I didn't really want to sell it.

I eventually found myself addressing her portrait.

"Hello," I said. "Do you remember me? I used to sell you books. You were one hell of a reader. What happened to you? What happened to your dogs? I used to sometimes imagine one of them eating The Man Without Qualities and it always made me happy."

She had died on August 9, 2009. She would have been one year younger than I am.

At the bottom of the tombstone, in ornate cursive, were the words, "Forever in Bluejeans."

That, I think, was the part that really got the atom smasher roaring.

In An Abandoned Airport, Waiting For A Flight To A Country That No Longer Exists

2011-05-05T03:23:00.008-05:00

(Last two photos of my fine boy Wendell and me courtesy of Carrie Elizabeth Thompson)

The grip is mute and merciless.

Every night about this time my dog gets this look, and what the look unquestionably says is, "What's going on, fella? What are you up to here?"

Because he knows, he senses, that something is definitely up. We have crossed far into the something-is-definitely-up stage here. "Up," of course, being in this instance something of an ironic usage.

Que sera sera.

Once you have let them cinch you up and put the battery cables on your head, once you allow them to convulse you and then wheel you out lock-jawed and choking and struggling, terrified, to zero in on anything that might qualify as a memory, even a bad one, once you reach that point I guess all bets are off. Who knows what you've lost forever? You can't even be sure who you were before that moment, but eventually you start seeing puzzling shadows on the wall, and weird, out-of-focus snapshots that seem to be projected upside down on the back of your skull and which may or may not be scenes from what used to be your life, and you don't want to talk about those troubling images because they seem like hallucinations and there is no way you could describe them or the cold, terrifying, and hopeless way they make you feel.

Take that.

Donegal would always say, So, this is the world, is it? And for even a sorry fool like you Christ carried his cross. A far-fetched business all around, but there you have it, lad, and what are you going to do with such a marvelous bit of information as that?

I didn't know. I still don't know.

I did, however, talk with my dog for 45 minutes about Easter and what it purportedly means to the world and how some of the central components of its narrative have crept into our own shared rituals and the things we want to believe. I want very much for my dog to believe in angels, so I have tried to believe in them as well.

The next day I took my dog to the veterinarian to make sure everything was in order. It was a cold, gray morning, very early by my standards, and during the time I was in the office two old dogs were brought in to be euthanized, which shook me greatly. In the first instance an older man came in alone, announced to the woman at the counter, "I have a dog in the car that needs to be put to sleep," retreated for a moment, and returned with a large dog in his arms. The man was alone, and expressionless. He might have been dropping off his car to have his tires rotated.

Surely, I thought, he could not possibly be as cold hearted as he seemed. He and the dog were ushered into a back room, the door was closed, and I never saw either the man or dog again.

A few minutes later a party of four --an elderly couple and a younger couple, perhaps in their thirties-- brought in a dog that looked like it could have been a litter mate of the previous dog. The younger of the two men had this dog in his arms. The dog was alert and appeared perfectly contented. I did not overhear the exchange at the counter, but all four of these people were clearly grief stricken and huddled together the way humans always huddle together whenever something unbearable is happening or about to happen. Unless, of course, they don't have anyone to huddle together with, and then they huddle alone. Only the man with the dog in his arms was not weeping. The older man appeared to be the most distraught of the group, and was trembling so badly that he asked the older woman --his wife, presumably-- to sign some papers. Shortly thereafter they were ushered into a room in the back.

I'll admit it: I found myself reaching for a box of tissue and trying to press tears back into my eyes.

When one of the young attendants finally called out my dog's name I had to resist the urge to flee. The woman gave Wendell a pat and asked his age. "He is almost three," I said.

"Oh!" she said. "Still just a puppy!"

This was an obvious bit of strained optimism on a bleak morning, but I was grateful for it all the same. Surely the woman had looked at my dog's files and seen that he was actually almost nine years old, but --bless her heart-- she never let on.

That's mostly a lie. Pretty much everything was. I mean, seriously, pretty much everything.

Did you ever read that one book when you were a kid? I could never believe that a train was capable of positive thinking.

I used to be like that determined train in the book, though. I used to really be wild about things. All sorts of things. I could barely contain my wildness. Not so much anymore.

Here's the sort of thing I'll find myself thinking these days, God help me: Somebody really has to take some photos of me naked before I'm dead. What sort of man has such thoughts? A lonely man. A man who feels he is dying and wants desperately, once and for all, to stand naked before the world? I put the question mark there because it really is a sort of question, or at least a guess, which is a sort of question impersonating an answer. There is also, of course, the purely corroborative motive: some concrete proof that I have a body, that the man I see in the mirror exists, that I am not, in fact, invisible.

Too late, though.

I carried all those fucking rocks and planted a garden and then I abandoned it.

My Back Pages: A Defense Of A Washington Scoundrel

2011-04-08T23:02:00.001-05:00

Everything requires careful consideration if one is to understand it. In ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather hazy about it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all over each page are the words: 'virtue' and 'morality.' Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words --'eat people.'

--Lu Hsun, "Diary of a Madman"

One of the unusual features of Hangzhou of that period (the Song Dynasty) is that there were establishments that served human flesh. That of woman, old men, young girls, and children was served in separate dishes, since each had its own distinctive taste. The food in general was referred to as 'two-legged mutton.'

--Alasdair Clarke, The Heart of the Dragon

None of the tribes of West Africa eat human flesh, but the interior tribes eat any corpse regardless of the cause of death. Families hesitate to eat their own dead, but they sell or exchange them for the dead of other families.

--William Graham Sumner, Folkways

It is not my intention to stand before you today and attempt to deny that my client did, in fact, cook children and eat them. The preponderance of evidence on this point is clear and overwhelming, and though the prosecution has chosen --for what I would maintain are purely the purposes of pandering to public outrage-- to emphasize the cooking and eating of children, it should be noted that my client has also acknowledged that he cooked and ate many others as well --many, many others, as you have heard.

He has cooked and eaten adults --primarily the elderly, the poor, and the infirm-- as well as children, many of them, as the evidence has shown, also poor and infirm. And while I cannot defend my client's actions, I will nonetheless attempt to show that, offensive as his behavior may well be, and perhaps rightfully should be, to modern sensibilities, it was not, in fact, all that long ago that the appetite for human flesh was common in many parts of the world.

Indeed, there are reports from the field of anthropology that indicate that this practice is still being carried out in some parts of the globe even today.

As such I would maintain that my client's behavior is an atavistic kink, if you will, and purely genetic; you have heard testimony that the practice of the cooking and eating of children was a long tradition in my client's family. For many generations his otherwise respectable --and respected-- family has largely subsisted on human flesh.

That said, we make no excuses in pleading for leniency. My client takes full responsibility for behavior that doubtless strikes many of you as wholly reprehensible, yet given his status as a duly elected official and his otherwise exemplary conduct --he has raised three productive children of his own that he did not cook and eat, and who do not themselves cook and eat children-- and his years of devoted political service to his country, I would ask that, in considering his sentence today, you recognize his potential for full reform.

It is my belief that a moderate prison term, during which my client would be subjected to a strenuous program of dietary reeducation, is in society's best interest, and will ensure that he is eventually and successfully reintroduced in full standing to the human community, where his leadership skills and proven, winning charisma may once again be utilized for the benefit of his many wealthy constituents.

Regarding The Photograph That The Young Woman Did Not Want The Blind Rabbit To See

2011-04-04T22:17:00.009-05:00

The blind rabbit, of course, had never seen the photograph that so disturbed the young woman who stopped by twice a week to read to him.

The young woman refused to describe the photograph, and said repeatedly that she wished she had never mentioned the subject. She said, "If I were to describe the photograph to you, you might have the idea that you have seen the world, but this photograph is not the world. This photograph is not at all what life looks like."

The blind rabbit asked the young woman to describe for him a photograph that depicted what life did look like, a photograph that would look like the world.

The young woman thought about this request and then asked the rabbit to tell her what he imagined when he thought about the world.

"The world is what I smell and what I hear," the rabbit said. The young woman asked if, based on the things he smelled and the things he heard and the words she read to him, he had any notions that might correspond to a visual conception of the world.

"You are asking me if I see?" the rabbit said.

"Yes," the young woman said. "I guess that I am."

"I cannot be certain," the rabbit said. "I know only that I feel things, that the smells and sounds affect me as feelings."

The young woman asked if these feelings could be described in a way she might understand; as happy or sad, for instance. The rabbit said that, yes, he believed this to be true, although he tended to think of what he felt as either "good feelings" or "bad feelings."

"What sounds or smells like a bad feeling?" the young woman asked.

"Noise that I do not understand is a bad feeling," the rabbit said. "Or smells that ask unfamiliar questions."

"Well," the young woman said. "The photograph in question is most certainly a bad feeling. The questions it asks are not necessarily unfamiliar, but they have no answers."

"And that is not the world?" the rabbit said.

"It is not what life looks like," the young woman said. She asked the blind rabbit what good feelings smelled and sounded like.

The blind rabbit sniffed the air and pondered for a moment. "Like the good day," he said. "Like the things that give me pleasure and that I can trust and depend on. The warm and soft things, the tenderness underfoot and the tender things that come to me as smells and sounds and caresses of one sort or another. The things from which I need not run or hide. The sound of your voice reading Don Quixote. The music of your amusement, which I do not understand but which is nonetheless like a sound from the trees on a morning when all the sounds and smells are bright and there is promise afoot in the world."

"That is what a photograph of life would look like," the young woman said. "You would take such a photograph, and keep it forever, because it captured something in the world that you wished to always remember."

The blind rabbit paused again, and then said, "I'm not so sure about that. Surely without some permanent evidence or memories of the bad feelings I would unwittingly find myself in situations of great peril. I must respectfully argue that the photograph of which you refuse to speak serves some purpose in the world, and therefore depicts in some way the world whose purpose it serves."

"Surely no one needs a photograph to remind them of the existence of ugliness and evil," the young woman said.

The rabbit shrugged. He did not wish to argue with the young woman. "Perhaps you are right," he said. "But I feel I must point out that you are neither blind, nor a rabbit. And I am quite certain that I would not long survive without all of the photographs."

Helpful

2011-03-27T12:38:00.001-05:00

Too many different kinds of cheese and things
just get too confusing, which things often
are. You would like to purchase a single
   scrub pad
but they only seem to be available
in bundles of a dozen or more
and you know that you will not use
a dozen scrub pads in what is left
   of this lifetime.

If you ran, say, a summer camp
or a prison, or maybe if you were
   a profligate breeder
utterly cowed by the most obscure
pronouncements of scripture
you might have use for a cask of
pork and beans or a package
of toilet paper large enough
to possibly float you to safety
in the event of a ship wreck.

You certainly don't need forty AA batteries
or a bag of jerked meat that could feed
a party of lost explorers for a significant period
   of lostness.
No, what you want is a single
scrub pad to clean your single
frying pan, but you don't need it
   that bad.

The old fellow at the entrance
is wearing a gold paper crown
that has the word HELPFUL
inscribed on it in some sort of mock
medieval font, and as you leave
empty-handed he offers
what almost seems like a genuine smile,
claps his hands enthusiastically,
and says, "I hope you found
what you were looking for!"
Which, of course, you have not
even as you suddenly sense that
   you have.

Conductors of the Moving World

2011-03-20T21:41:00.011-05:00

The Making of CONDUCTORS OF THE MOVING WORLD from Little Brown Mushroom on Vimeo.

For more info, or to order the book, go here.

Here's the math on the edition, with thanks to Steve Sturdevant (and Andy), Kurt Froehlich, Rial Cone, and Stephen Davis for taking a crack at crunching the numbers: Based on the total number of original photos, and the random selection of one photo each from 17 columns of three stacks of prints, plus the 17 slots in each volume and the purely serendipitous sequencing, the number of possible editions of Conductors of the Moving World is “45,933,532,441,368,219,648,000. That is: 45 Sextillion, 933 Quintillion, 532 Quadrillion, 441 Trillion, 368 Billion, 219 Million, 648 Thousand. Or, in more poetic terms, roughly the number of grains of sand upon the earth.” (The quote is from Andy.)

Or, in purely personal terms, somewhere in the same ballpark as the odds of running into a beloved ghost on a corner of Bryant Park moments before entering The International Center of Photography, where Inspector Ota took his first tentative steps as a reincarnated man.

This is a really mysterious, lovely, and lovingly assembled book, and my contributions are the least of its charms. Many, many thanks to Alec Soth, Hans Seeger, Carrie Thompson, and Charlie B. Ward --a sort of Caucasian version of A Tribe Called Quest-- for working so hard on a truly mad project.

If you should decide to order the book, cross your fingers that you get the astronaut, or at least the manhole, bikini shot, or World Trade Center towers. I'll be happy to send anyone who requests one a specially packaged collection of the 110 lines of text --strange little aphorisms and koans inspired by, among other things, Zen, the history of traffic control, Walter Benjamin, and P.D. Eastman's Go, Dog, Go!-- that didn't make it into the final version. Or perhaps I'll just post them here at some point.

You There: A Prayer In A Dark Time

2011-03-15T00:31:00.004-05:00

Our job is to understand and to care, and most of us have failed miserably.

The everything we cannot understand we are asked to accept, and at this, also, we have failed miserably.

Most of us, though, have gotten pretty good at going on, and for this most modest of achievements we are rewarded with what?

Laughter, I suppose. A sensitivity that can sometimes almost convince us we are human and have souls worth saving. The occasional flight outside of ourselves that allows us a glimpse --however brief-- of exactly where we are and what we have been given, which is the one thing we can ever truly call our own: our lives in this world, exactly as the world is, which is too often heartbreaking and fragile but which can nonetheless also be incomprehensibly fascinating and beautiful.

So, You then: Big Thing. Great Eraser. Compulsive builder and eccentric architect. Demolition expert. Thresher. Conjurer. Custodian of bursting and broken hearts and Choreographer of confrontations with mirrors and painful truths. Master of disappearance and deterioration. You with your largess with lilacs and your wondrous palette of greens. Lord of the turtles and obsessive molder of birds and beetles. Dog maestro. Prodigal prototype. Soul pincher. Star sower. Shatterer. Lamp lighter. Candle Snuffer. Trickster. Slumberer. Sourpuss. Soft-hearted old fool. Mutterer. Madman. Misery maker. Terrifying Immensity. Merciful One.

You, who so often in your boredom or wrath seem to study your majestic creation like an indifferent chess move: I'm crying uncle, right here and right now. Come on, Alleged Something, show a little tenderness. Go easy on us. If you have some perhaps understandable grudge, let it go and forgive us.

Forgive us all the great and usual sins. We can be beautiful, but so can we be stunned and stupefied into unaccountable and unpardonable ugliness. We know this. We know that some of us are fools, and dangerous, but there are many who try very hard to combat such destructive assholes. Please don't make it any harder than it already is. Please don't be a vengeful dick.

We know that we are bumbling failures, too often cold hearted, but we also know that we can still be miraculous and compassionate, and the best of us are out there proving that every minute of every day. So, come on, forgive us. Most of us want desperately to be here.

We understand your takeaway prerogative and, frankly, we've seen enough of it lately. You've shown that you can crush us, that we can be crushed, that we can crush each other (and do), but I'm asking you to please raise up off us and let us try once more to prove ourselves worthy of the grace and the magic we've been given, and the redemption we've supposedly been promised.

And if you must turn away, if you've truly had enough, then turn, and let us live. We can take care of each other, and should. And will.

Insomnia: A Dispatch From The Foothills Of Sleep

2011-03-09T04:51:00.002-06:00

From somewhere he heard a few hesitant notes from a piano. Perhaps it was coming from the back room, but it sounded even more distant. It was the sound of a piano stretched to the point where it could almost not have been a piano he was hearing. It could have been an audio hallucination. There was no pattern, just a random pinging at the high end of the keyboard. Silence, then a burst of four or five notes.

He went through the front room and into a hallway that was carved through permanent shadow. The whole place had been sealed up tight for weeks and most of the furniture had been removed. The curtains were all tightly drawn, and only a stray strand of fuzzed light snuck in from outside, crepuscular and loaded with slow cruising dust.

There was still blood on the kitchen floor, a substantial quantity of it, dried to the darkest edges of maroon and become almost chalk, or tempera powder. It had splashed up onto the cupboards and across the refrigerator door.

From the kitchen he could see out into the backyard, where there was a familiar and now abandoned doghouse. When he wandered out there he found the piano: a rusted set of wind chimes swaying almost imperceptibly from a clothesline pole.

He didn't stay long.

At the edge of town there were the ruins of an ancient fortress, perched right at the edge of the ocean on a hill. The ramparts and parapet were all more or less in place, thrown up around a cluster of terraces, each of them situated at a different height and connected by a series of damp tunnels and stone steps and the occasional wooden ladder. Above it all at the southernmost end overlooking the water was the largest terrace, now completely exposed to the sky and the stars.

He made his way through the tight lanes of the town to this fortress, and through the labyrinths of the fortress to the terrace above the ocean. He'd been there many times. It was a wonderful place for silence. Whatever sound made the journey up there was oddly transformed. The voices from the little tavern at the bottom of the hill sounded as if they were rising from a very deep well.

The whine of an unseen boat in the darkness lulled him almost to sleep. He saw blazing cruise ships creeping along the distant horizon, and heard what sounded like one loud laugh carry from far out at sea. Exhausted and splayed on his back, he watched as one star after another tumbled down the sky and crashed into the ocean.

After a time he walked back to his room at the only inn still open in town.

He was very tired from his long journey and retired early, only to be immediately seized by an episode of what felt like intense seasickness. Words and images were pitching around in his head and it was as if he were aboard a flooded boat or rolling raft. This went on for several hours. He went to the basement at one point and retrieved a plastic pail that he placed next to the bed and vomited into during the night. Recalling that he had a bottle of motion sickness tablets in his travel bag, he staggered to the sink and swallowed several of the pills.

The medication did not, however, quell his seasickness, and he suffered through terrifying hallucinations of violent storms and hurricanes and even sea serpents. Again and again in the midst of these visions he would find himself tossed from a boat into the endless, roiling darkness of the sea.

He thrashed and thrashed until he felt himself sinking into a deeper and darker place. As he sank he was dimly aware of daylight slowly developing on the walls of the room.

The coroner's report listed the official cause of death as drowning.