drmstream[writing]

“A good pho­to­graph is one that com­mu­ni­cates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed per­son for hav­ing seen it; it is in one word, effective.”

Irv­ing Penn

Irv­ing Penn reminds us that there’s a com­mon thread in the expe­ri­ence of beauty, whether it’s organic or inert, whether it’s tamed or wild, whether it’s famil­iar or strange.  Penn’s vision pre­sented the essence of beauty as some­thing stark and sep­a­rate, almost fore­bod­ing but insis­tently attracting.

See some exam­ples here  or see what images the Inter­net throws up to you here.

To put it even more bluntly: whereas one would have expected that a cri­sis of lit­er­acy would have called for a greater appre­ci­a­tion of the mul­ti­plic­ity of func­tions that lan­guage per­forms, the fore­most of which is the abil­ity to code and transcode expe­ri­ence and to pro­vide cul­tural direc­tions for its inter­pre­ta­tion, han­dling and elab­o­ra­tion, one finds a fur­ther instru­men­tal­iza­tion of lan­guage, where the lat­ter is shat­tered into a mul­ti­plic­ity of autonomous, unre­lated lan­guages, with the com­pe­tence to be acquired restricted to just one of them.

The Cul­ture of Lit­er­acy, Wlad Godzich

We speak and we speak and we speak.

We talk of our jobs. We talk of peo­ple who make us feel frus­trated. We talk of our indig­na­tion at per­ceived slights. We talk of our excite­ment at a beau­ti­fully struck kick on the soc­cer pitch. We talk of our rude desire for a stranger pass­ing by. 

We talk about what we have heard from oth­ers. We talk about the way an insult makes us want to strike out. We talk about the way an angry word makes us want to slink away.

We talk about the way that two cells won’t tie out in a spread­sheet that our boss is mak­ing us fin­ish too soon. We talk about fudg­ing num­bers to make the out­come look better.

We talk about how bad peo­ple need to be for­given, about how cir­cum­stances make it impos­si­ble do what we said we would do, about what stu­pid things our adult chil­dren have done and how we never get to see them, about how we are feel­ing impa­tient with things that we’ve tol­er­ated before, about how we would have been some­thing else if our part­ners hadn’t made us give up our dreams, how we don’t like the way old peo­ple smell in the gro­cery line, about how we’ve had a tin­gling feel­ing in our right arm that ends up some­place in our chest, but our insur­ance won’t cover a visit, so we’re wait­ing until the new year to make an appointment.

We talk about how things are being done to us. We talk about how rag­heads and tow­el­heads and dot­heads and believ­ers and unbe­liev­ers and sin­ners and the inso­lent want to do things that shouldn’t be allowed in a coun­try like ours.

When we write down the things we talk about, we write from the left to the right, we go from the top of the page to the bot­tom, we pick from 24 let­ters to make our words, we use peri­ods to sig­nal full stops. We write down what we talk about and we real­ize that we don’t have a fuck­ing clue what we really mean, and nei­ther does any­one else. But we feel it. Man, we feel it.

You bet­ter feel it too.

Last week a man was killed in a car crash in Uganda.

He was a pastor.

He was also one of the most mean-spirited and vicious peo­ple I have ever encoun­tered in my life. He made me ques­tion what Evil was.

His death has prompted an out­pour­ing of sor­row from peo­ple touched by his min­istry and those he had encoun­tered along his life. He leaves behind a wife and three daugh­ters, a pas­toral mis­sion of renew­ing and cel­e­brat­ing mar­riage and the indeli­ble imprint in my mem­ory of his defi­ant pock­marked face as I car­ried my win­ter jacket out of my dor­mi­tory room to remove the stench of urine, soda and the rot­ting bird car­cass that he had left in its pocket.

We were in eighth grade. It was the sec­ond semes­ter of our first year at an exclu­sive boys’ board­ing school in New Eng­land. We were the youngest boys. The school was run by the Bene­dic­tine Order, a group of catholic priests and pro­fes­sors who lived monas­tic lives of prayer, con­tem­pla­tion and good works.

The Boy who would grow up to be a Pas­tor was from Morn­ing­side Heights in New York. He was a schol­ar­ship stu­dent. I was a fac­ulty brat, the son of an Eng­lish teacher. I was a schol­ar­ship student.

The Boy who had become a Pas­tor tar­geted me as an easy mark that he could taunt and bully.  I didn’t know how to defend myself.

I ran, hid, evaded, eluded, mis­di­rected, equiv­o­cated, denied, delayed, deceived, detered, deflected, per­se­ver­ated.  I watched the pack from a dis­tance as they prowled through the lower cam­pus search­ing for me.   The Boy who would become a Pas­tor prowled at the front, ges­tur­ing and point­ing, his chest pushed out and his face twisted into a con­trived grin.

He was mis­shapen and per­verse in his phys­i­cal aspect. When he stripped naked in the shower, we saw his sunken chest and thick shoul­ders, the rolls of his waist hang­ing over a crooked penis and stringy thighs.  He over­came those imped­i­ments.  He was cun­ning and  unfor­giv­ing, impe­ri­ous and cer­tain. He was mean.  He was vain.

One boy in our class didn’t have the skills to slip by the mob. He was fair skinned and slight. He was still young when he came to the school. He liked to build model air­planes. He brought a few. He spent time work­ing on new ones in the evening. He kept the fin­ished planes on the top shelf of his cubby.

Think­ing back now, I can imag­ine how excited he must have been to bring his prizes to school. He’d have had an idea — encour­aged by the mate­ri­als the school sent us in the months before we started — that he’d find a club to do his projects with, or that he could start a club himself.

That first semes­ter hadn’t been in ses­sion more than a month when I saw the model planes come fly­ing out of the sec­ond floor win­dow and crash to bits on the asphalt road below. I could hear the Boy who became a Pas­tor taunt­ing, “Do they fly? Let’s see them fly.” After all the planes had been thrown out the win­dow,  the feral crowd growled and the boy screamed and whim­pered. The other boys began to clap and cheer. The whim­per­ing changed to cries of pain and panic. They came march­ing out the front door of the dorm. The boy was sus­pended on a broom stick threaded through his under­wear. The seat was wedged deep into his naked but­tocks.  He was in agony. They marched off down the road. I slunk away in the other direc­tion. I couldn’t under­stand what I had seen. The Boy who would become a Pas­tor was at the cen­ter of the group, one of the ringleaders.

The boy they had wedgied with­drew from school the next week. He had been broken.

By the time the Boy who would become a Pas­tor had uri­nated on my win­ter jacket, poured soda all along the lin­ing and put a dead bird in the pocket, I’d been forced to acknowl­edge my own kind of withdrawal.

The sum­mer before start­ing my first year at the school, I’d been swept away by my imag­i­na­tion.  My fam­ily had moved to the school the year before from our home in a swampy sec­tion of south­ern Mass­a­chus­setts, a down-trodden part of New Eng­land that was blinded to its long his­tory by the mean require­ments of cob­bling together a liv­ing.  It didn’t mat­ter that Miles Stan­dish had bought Mass­a­chu­setts from Chief Mas­sas­oit in the back yard of the town doctor’s farm.  It mat­tered that the only jobs around were in the prison where the Boston Stran­gler was locked up, that the dairy farms couldn’t keep in busi­ness, that the cran­berry sea­son was too short, that the small man­u­fac­tur­ers couldn’t stay com­pet­i­tive and that too many boys were going off to South­east Asia and com­ing back wrapped the bril­liant red, white and blues of the Amer­i­can flag.  The peo­ple took on the qual­ity of the land, its stubby trees, sandy soil, deep, murky swamps, grav­elly stream beds, long shal­low ponds.

When my father came home and told us we were mov­ing to the place by the bay where the hori­zon ran long, the sun­sets were bril­liant, the wind blew fresh and steady, and the monks ren­dered their loy­alty to God through the ven­er­a­tion of books and arts and learn­ing, I felt like I was being dropped into a world I had only read about.  When it came time to enter the school for my first year, I believed with all my heart that I was being ini­ti­ated into a spe­cial Order.

To pre­pare, I went with my par­ents to buy new cloth­ing.  We had the list from the school:  dress shirts, cor­duroys, flan­nel pants, blue blaz­ers with the school shield, ties, dress pants.  This was the uni­form of casual priv­i­lege, the cloth­ing that sig­nalled you were a mem­ber of the order, cloth­ing that I’d only seen the LL Bean or in the pro­mo­tional lit­er­a­ture of the bet­ter schools.

We spent more than we could afford on the cloth­ing, more than we’d ever spent on my cloth­ing before.  The win­ter coat was a spe­cial allowance.  I had seen the boys at the school wear­ing them the win­ter before: bulky parkas with fur around the hood and a long zip­per that cre­ated a fun­nel around your face when it was fully drawn.  The parka had spe­cial pock­ets, diag­o­nal lines above the square pock­ets on the front, and small pock­ets on the outer arms and inner lining.

The first day of school I dressed in my new clothes and went off to my ori­en­ta­tion.  When I sat with my new class­mates, I under­stood that I was dif­fer­ent in ways that I couldn’t com­pre­hend.  The clothes told the story:  we all looked the same at a glance, but closer scrutiny revealed the syn­thetic fibers in my blazer, the rough cut of the seam on my flan­nel pants, the glue used to bind the uppers and soles of my shoes.

The Boy who would become a Pas­tor was dressed as rudely as me.  He under­stood what it meant to be wear­ing your entire closet, to be fak­ing your way into the club.  But where I pulled back in fear I would be found out, he forced his way for­ward.  He would show every­one how to strike out at weak­ness, that power was the true fab­ric of the group’s nature, not the weave of the clothes.

When the Boy who would become a Pas­tor destroyed my win­ter coat, he knew that he was destroy­ing the last hope I had of being one of the group.  I came in the next week with a coat that I had found at the Army-Navy Sur­plus store for a few dol­lars, an over­sized, weather-beaten parka rated for sub-zero tem­per­a­tures.  It was dis­tinc­tive and an admis­sion that I was an imposter.

We spent five years together at the school.  We never became friends.  We tol­er­ated each other grudg­ingly.  When I went to New York to col­lege, we bumped into each other occa­sion­ally in Morn­ing­side Heights.  There was no affec­tion.  Then we lost touch.

A few years ago, I found him on Face­book.  He’d moved out west and become a Pas­tor.  He had a church.  He was an advo­cate for the sanc­tity of mar­riage.  He had thick­ened.  The pock­marks on his face were darker.  His shoul­ders were heavy and his hands like slabs of meat.  His wife was shorter than him, squarer, and in their pho­tos he would lay his arm across her shoul­der like a yoke.  Some of the pho­tos showed him preach­ing, his bar­rel chest swelled with force, his hand point­ing into the air in an excla­ma­tion of authority.

The pho­tos left me cold.

I ques­tioned my rejec­tion of his moral author­ity.  He had been mean to me as a young boy when we had both been put in an alien place — why couldn’t he have found peace by open­ing his heart to God?

I could not believe that because I don’t believe that we change.  I am the man that the boy I was would become.  My essence — the way that I see the world, the way that I expe­ri­ence other peo­ple, the things that make my heart swell, that make me go cold inside — is no dif­fer­ent today than 40 years ago.

The changes that we expe­ri­ence as we move from our youth to old age are the adap­ta­tions we make to get the things that we want.  None of us want to be out­casts.  None of us want to be afraid.  We learn, as we grow, how to mit­i­gate our impulses in order to be able to achieve the things that we want.

I knew the Boy who would become a Pas­tor.  He wanted power.  He wanted con­trol.  He wanted atten­tion.  He wanted author­ity.  And  he would use the weak­nesses in oth­ers to jus­tify to achieve those ends, regard­less of the pain it caused.

The Pas­tor who led his min­istry of mar­riage was that same boy.  I could not believe that he had changed.

As I read the memo­ri­als to his life posted by his fol­low­ers on Face­book, I felt the impulse to add the per­spec­tive of my own experience.

Then I read a mes­sage to her dead father from one of his daughters.

“Thank you Daddy for lov­ing me so much and always car­ing the best for me. Thank you for rais­ing me in such a Godly atmos­phere and thank you do much for always push­ing me to do my best. I love you so much Daddy. Thank you for the life I got to spend with you. No one could ever ask for any­one bet­ter to be in their life. You were truly a bless­ing to have as a father.

Although I wish I could have had more time with you, I real­ize it is/was all part of God’s plan, just like can­cer and the heal­ing of cancer.

You are the one and only man I have ever looked up to in my life and you are my Super Hero Daddy, no one could ever match up to the legacy you left here with us.

You are my favorite and I LOVE YOU SO MUCH DADDY! Thank you for the time we spent together.”

My own mem­o­ries were mak­ing me unchar­i­ta­ble.  A fam­ily has been mor­tally injured.  Chil­dren have lost their father.  A com­mu­nity has lost its center.

I typed his name into Google to see whether there was more infor­ma­tion about how he had died.

On the first page of results a news story from six years ago came up.  It had been pub­lished in an alter­na­tive news­pa­per.  It told the story of an anti-homosexual event that had been orga­nized by the Boy who would become a Pas­tor.  The reporter describes the peo­ple who came to the micro­phone dur­ing the event to repu­di­ate the sins of the unpure.

The Boy who would become a Pas­tor exco­ri­ates the state as  polit­i­cal body that cares so lit­tle about its peo­ple that it would actu­ally pro­vide incen­tives for them to engage in soul-murdering sin.

When the Pas­tor died in that car crash in Uganda, he died with com­plete con­fi­dence in the right­ness of what he had done in his life.  Noth­ing had changed.  He had found another scape­goat, another group that he could focus people’s fear and anger on, and within that fear and anger he could find his own place of power.  He had no com­punc­tion.  His right was his due.  The weak had brought their own pain upon themselves.

What I had wit­nessed was a young boy per­fect­ing the skills that would define him as a grown man.

The words of St. Augus­tine came to mind:

All the per­ver­si­ties of all errors, all sects, preach­ing deviant morals and ungod­li­ness, have had as their authors men of great bril­liance. They weren’t the brain-children of any sort of men, they were started by men of the sharpest intelligence.

I can mourn then, not my own lin­ger­ing injury, not the loss his chil­dren suf­fer, not the early death of an influ­en­tial man.  I can mourn the waste of a pow­er­ful nature, even as I admit it likely never would have changed,  because the Boy who would become a Pas­tor believed he had found redemp­tion, and that in redemp­tion oth­ers would have to be left behind to be punished.

A pho­to­graph can make some­thing mun­dane appear unique and dis­tinc­tive. The ren­dered image metas­ta­sizes into some­thing alto­gether different.

One of my favorite exam­ples is street pho­tog­ra­phy. A tal­ented pho­tog­ra­pher can take a can­did photo of two women at a street cor­ner, star­ing jaun­tily at the cam­era. If we encoun­tered these women in every­day life we wouldn’t give them a sec­ond glance. But frozen in the frame, they imprint some­thing of their energy on us.

The pho­to­graph above, by an anony­mous pho­tog­ra­pher for the Smith­son­ian, accom­plishes some­thing even more profound.

To under­stand the con­text of the photo, think for a moment of Mid­way Island. It har­bors one of the world’s largest pop­u­la­tions of alba­trosses. The birds mass together and are nearly indis­tin­guish­able. They are loud, crass, stubborn.

In this por­trait, the pho­tog­ra­pher has cap­tured a tran­scen­dent and uni­ver­sal image, del­i­cately described in muted tones, an iconic por­trait of moth­er­hood. The com­po­si­tion is rem­i­nis­cent of a sec­tion of a Renais­sance paint­ing, but the lines swoop like a study by Brecht.

I find my eye drawn again and again to the photo. I feel some­how rev­er­ent. I try to imag­ine what the arc of the day was like, how many rolls the pho­tog­ra­pher shot. I won­der whether he had been look­ing for this shot, a bird in its nest, or if this was serendip­i­tous, a quick snap that turned out right. I imag­ine how flat and harsh the light was.

All of my spec­u­la­tion is an attempt to pro­tract the sin­gu­lar emo­tion the photo elic­its: a calm con­fi­dence that every­thing will work out for the lit­tle bird grow­ing in that egg, that its mother is there, watch­ing out, inde­fati­ga­ble and stalwart.

William Blake’s New­ton (1795), colour print with pen & ink and watercolour

Recently, I was talk­ing with a math­e­mati­cian. He was ani­mated as he talked about the beauty of math, the thrill of tak­ing an axiomatic sys­tem and using its prin­ci­ples to build a bridge to a solu­tion for what appears to be a wholly unre­lated prob­lem. The excite­ment in his man­ner was infec­tious and deep.

He became grave. The future of math­e­mat­ics is “soul­less,” he said.

That word was rich with impli­ca­tion: of his world view, of the way that math can touch the human heart, of what he searches for in life.

He is an unas­sum­ing look­ing man, much like you would expect a math­e­mati­cian to be. He is slight, bald, and has thick glasses. He’s pros­per­ous; his exper­tise in math gave him a suc­cess­ful career in finance. In any moment, though, you have to check whether he is truly present or not.

The lan­guage of math, his abil­ity to apply the axioms of his prac­tice to visu­al­ize the absolute abstrac­tion of no-space, of the there-that-is-not-there, lets him drift into a state that accom­mo­dates few peo­ple.  His wife, a tall, ener­getic blonde, will carry him off at those moments, a fer­til­ity god­dess car­ry­ing off the straw husk of a pow­er­ful but dor­mant totem.

Why “soul­less?” I ask.

He talked about the absolute power of com­put­ing sys­tems, the abil­ity to process data on a scale and at a rate beyond any­thing mankind has ever imag­ined. These pow­ers exist today.

“Every prob­lem is going to be answered,” he said. “Every sin­gle one.”

The  solu­tions will ter­mi­nate the unan­swer­able ques­tions, extin­guish the imag­i­na­tion, end the search for the solu­tion to the insoluble.

“Won’t there be a renais­sance of ask­ing ques­tions?” I offer.

He doesn’t seem sure of that.

I don’t tell him that I write, that the prac­tice of cre­at­ing has taught me that our great­est  delu­sion is the con­vic­tion that there are answers, that the best sto­ries have an end, that the bright­est among us are able to see solu­tions oth­ers can not see.

Beauty is in the under­stand­ing that every­thing can change in any instant, but in each instant that we are present, every­thing is com­plete and at rest.

We sat quietly.

He focused on my face.

“The ones who are lucky are the ones who ask their own ques­tions, not the ones who spend time answer­ing other people’s ques­tions,” he said.

“Like William Blake,” I said.

Then we fell silent again.

… All these moments in the individual’s life, when the uni­ver­sal laws of human fate break in upon the pur­poses, expec­ta­tions, and opin­ions of the per­sonal con­scious­ness, are sta­tions along the road of the indi­vid­u­a­tion process. This process is, in effect, the spon­ta­neous real­iza­tion of the whole man. The ego con­scious per­son­al­ity is only a part of the whole man, and its life does not yet rep­re­sent his total life. The more he is merely “I,” the more he splits him­self off from the col­lec­tive man, of whom he is also a part, and may even find him­self in oppo­si­tion to him. But since every­thing liv­ing strives for whole­ness, the inevitable one-sidedness of our con­scious life is con­tin­u­ally being cor­rected and com­pen­sated by the uni­ver­sal human being in us, whose goal is the ulti­mate inte­gra­tion of con­scious and uncon­scious, or bet­ter, the assim­i­la­tion of the ego to a wider personality… .

–Carl Gus­tav Jung. “On The Nature Of Dreams”

We believe that we can know “I.”

We won­der at the mean­ing of “We.”

But when you make Art, when you write or draw or play or sing, you are forced beyond the “I.”

The energy that fuels cre­ation is out­side of the bound­aries of “I.”

You know that because when you come back from the place where you have made things, you will feel uncer­tain, shaky, ten­ta­tive, as if you don’t really fit in to your whole Self, as if the Cre­ative Self changed your con­tours and volume.

It did.

Mak­ing Art put you into the essence of “We.”

Cre­at­ing is the path to individuation.

The ques­tion you have to answer is whether you hold your­self away or throw your­self in; whether you ignore the con­se­quences of fail­ing and insist that the joy is from try­ing; whether you keep mov­ing when you feel your­self slow­ing down.

Here is a parable:

A woman pushes a gro­cery cart up a steep side­walk.  The wind is cold and harsh.  At the first cor­ner, she meets a soli­tary child.  The child says, “You have to give me some­thing to eat or I am going to starve.”  The woman gives the child a loaf of bread.  At the sec­ond cor­ner, she meets an old man who reeks of liquor.  The old man says, “I am des­per­ately in need of a drink.”  She give him a bot­tle of Ken­tucky whiskey.”  At the third cor­ner, she meets a woman who looks just like her.  The woman says, “I am freez­ing cold and fright­ened.  I need some­thing to make me warm.”  She gives the woman her coat.

When she arrives at her home she is tired and bit­terly cold.  She can not hold the key to her door in her fin­gers.  It drops to the side of the stoop into the bushes.  She digs in the bushes but can not find it.  After a time, she sits on the stoop and hugs her­self tightly against the wind.

The child, the old drunk and the woman stand at the bot­tom of the stoop.  “We can’t help you,” they say.  “But if you were able to help us, you can help yourself.”

After a moment the woman takes the gro­cery cart and throws it through the glass door.

When nature wreaks destruc­tion, ele­ment con­fronts element.

In the after­math, the residue lingers and hard­ens. Burnt wood defies decay. Ash wafts in the air.

The insis­tence of fresh growth encum­bers the raw skele­tons with igno­rant radiance.

When man wreaks destruc­tion, fear begets fear.

His heart seeks out a hard shell, his hands crave indus­try, his mind erects a kin­dred shel­ter of defi­ance and denial.

Pris­on­era of a desire to imag­ine for­ever in every moment, he too eas­ily loses the beauty of how what is now projects to perfection.

So when we remem­ber, we must remem­ber with respect. We can not let false sor­row besmirch the honor of lives lived, because we must always pre­pare our heart for the grand­est con­tra­dic­tion of our life: What makes us mat­ter most is that we can mat­ter not at all.

This must be the week that small presses, indie jour­nals and agents plow through their in-boxes. I’ve got­ten a slew of rejec­tions this week — no inter­ests on a short novel I’ve been send­ing around, no thanks you’s on a cou­ple of sto­ries that are cir­cu­lat­ing and flat out nopes on an essay I had a notion to write.

Most of the notes are form let­ters. I get that — these are busy peo­ple and they see a lot of stuff. A cou­ple were per­sonal notes. One edi­tor sug­gested that I try to draw out more reli­gious under­tones in a story. This was a place where I’d paid a $10 read­ing fee for an accel­er­ated turn­around on the sub­mis­sion. I can’t be sure if the per­sonal response was a busi­ness strat­egy intended to keep me sub­mit­ting for pay, or whether there was sin­cere inter­est in the story and my writ­ing, but since I didn’t agree with the entire reli­gious sub­text I’m stu­diously ignor­ing the suggestion.

Rejec­tion is the name of the game. There’s a mar­ket­place out there, there’s a cre­ative imag­i­na­tion in your head, and there’s the rel­a­tive excel­lence of your craft, so it’s a stroke of good for­tune when all three line up to pro­vide you with an out­let and an audience.

What’s struck me about this cycle of rejec­tions is what it’s show­ing me about the engi­neer­ing of my cre­ative foundation.

It’s shaky.

My inter­nal voice reg­is­ters each of the rejec­tions and mut­ters some­thing like, “See. What did you expect?” Then the lit­tle con­duit that my imag­i­na­tion flows through gets choked.

The ink stops flowing.

I love that image for cre­ativ­ity — ink flow­ing from a pen. It’s mag­i­cal: a tube of liq­uid encased in a hard shell, drawn out through a nar­row point by grav­ity and energy, absorbed by paper and trans­formed by some inex­plic­a­ble mys­tery into an image that lives in places that can’t ever be found…my imag­i­na­tion, yours.

So when my lit­tle voice mut­ters “See?” and turns away from those rejec­tion let­ters, it unleashes a spell that clots the ink, clogs the work­ings of the pen.

I’m not going to bore you with every­thing that hap­pens as a result. I won’t tell you how my heart sinks when I read some­thing that uses a word in a great way. Or how I type a few dozen words of the story I’m work­ing on and feel phys­i­cal dis­gust. Or how I try to fig­ure out why I ever thought that the story would be inter­est­ing. Or how fast the excited feel­ing of a new idea is extin­guished when I start writ­ing it down.

I just wanted to write a true thing that came to an end.

That’s the only way to break the magic spell, quell the mut­ter­ing voice, shore up the shaky foun­da­tion and unclog the clot­ted pen.

This is where I am:

An old man dying from can­cer, but still vital and bemused by the inten­sity of life, is walk­ing on a dark path that runs behind an old house down the hill to the run­down apart­ment build­ing he lives in.

The lit­tle patch of woods is the byprod­uct of a geo­log­i­cal quirk. Mil­len­ni­ums ago, a glac­ier took a left turn here and sloughed off big hunks of pre­his­toric rock and wore them to the unfath­omably fine grains of sand that sifted through the swamps that had once sat where the town is now. The rend in the stone face was left behind, and the dirt that set­tled in its cracked side made a lit­tle nest for stub­born trees.

His name is Old Jon. He’s just watched his oncol­o­gist run over a dog in the rain. He’s just left a young woman who’s going through chemother­apy at the same time. She has ovar­ian can­cer. She’s in ter­ri­ble pain. His wife Alice is at home, not wait­ing for him now, but always wait­ing for the end that has been promised but hasn’t come.

Old Jon is walk­ing by the place where peo­ple throw old things that won’t rot, like bro­ken freez­ers and loose pipe and baby mat­tresses. In the heap is an old stove that he put there 20 years ago, when his son grad­u­ated from col­lege, some­thing that Old Jon couldn’t imag­ine and didn’t under­stand but felt proud of. That was his only son and he died later, before Old Jon was ready.

I’m there with Old Jon, right at the start of the story, and I’m see­ing the heap of trash and the dim light of the build­ings through the wood. I’m hear­ing the rain on the leaves and the gears of the buses grind­ing as they go up the hill by the ceme­tery. I feel the ache in his bones, the pain that floats out­side his head, the gen­eral dis­taste, the tired­ness and the urgency. I see all of the mem­o­ries come float­ing up from the trash heap like spir­its on a gloomy midsummer’s eve.

We are trapped there, Old Jon and I. Life is immense and never-ending. We’re adrift. The feel­ing can’t be expressed. He’s in the midst of his entire life; he feels every­thing that he ever felt, but noth­ing feels real.

The story might never get told. I can’t break the spell.