Okay, here goes. I’ve been diddling my way into another attempt at a longer go of writing, and today have decided, (largely by the courage of company – Tocksin has also begun posting portions of a novelistic go) to post a few rudimentary fragments. Up until yesterday the working title was simply FICTION. I’ve written 3-5 chapters over the past month or two and in seeking an orientation for the work certain symbols and recurrences have led to an inquiry. “Write about what you want to know” Lance Olsen says, and I can see I’m searching after something in these words. The epigraphs that shoot me on are the following…
“Reality is the motif”
-Wallace Stevens-
“The universe was the glue that held him together”
-Jonathan Lethem-
“I only care about fiction that raises the question of what fiction is…”
-R. M. Berry-
“The line is only a shadow cast by one (memory or fiction) over the other (fiction or memory). Once I place memory into language, memory becomes a rumor that makes room for uncertainty. Memory slips into fiction but then fiction becomes memory once again in an/other way…It is difficult to separate fiction from memory, which is different from separating truth from lying.”
What exactly is it about the arbitrary changing of numbers, parceling of time, divisions and subdivisions of existent moments, that prompts and wriggles us to consider change – feel obligated or massaged toward it – dream of it? I can say that in all my dizzying thoughts about it – how society and culture (Petrie-dish like) inundate and stimulate individuated personal alterations – I cannot figure out why crossword-puzzle-like taxonomies and designations of life-fragments labeled by stick-systems of reference, mathematical calculations and so forth stimulate (simulate?) desires, wishes, regrets, metamorphic movements in the human gang…
Be that as it may, today is the first day of the first month of the year containing 0-1-2-3 (my wife comments what a delightful play that must be for numerologists), and while my beloved is out signing up at the Y and beginning self-care with new devotion, I am denuding my desk, dusting and polishing its surface, taking revised stock of the pounds of books that weight its surface, reorganizing, selecting, making hard choices about what is necessary for me TODAY with some forward thinking. The numbers have changed. The game must be different, no?
In the process, I open a drawer I apparently haven’t for a very long time, coming across a miniature moleskine notebook, first entry dated January 2003! A decade ago, how interesting! I leaf through…and here are some of the things that capture my attention:
a quote from my son Aidan (he would have been 5 at the time) on being unable to remember something: “it’s in my brain, I just can’t find the right aisle.”
and Steinbeck: “its inhabitants, as the man once said, ‘whore, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said ‘saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”
Cixous: “it is this hunger for flesh and for tears, our appetite for living, that, at the tip of forsaken fingers, makes a pencil grow.”
Handke: “in any case, I experienced moments of extreme speechlessness and needed to formulate them – the motive that has led men to write from time immemorial.”
“Books should not flatter our sense of self. They should investigate it. I read another person in order to get better at interrogating my own unexamined narrative” – Richard Powers
The last entry reads like this…”We used to always pick models or icons we wanted to be like: have what they had, whole persona and possessions – WHO would I want to be? … When does it hit you that you only want to be you with some other life?”
Wonder where I was…a kind of number-flipping query…
For this is how we come to woods – they come to us. Ancient are the lineages and deep the roots of almost every wood we encounter. Your woods, my child, though freely belonging to anyone, are also and quite absolutely, your own. You see, we come to learn our woods through time and play, experiment and work. Those woods you train yourself with, that you fondle and prune and water and grow – those woods will change right along with you. With time and your own adjustments, growth and adaptations to all within and around you – these woods will shape those changes in you and you will select, alter and use each of your woods in your very own specific and particularized manner…in every moment, experience, and time.
It may not be long before one of us departs with The Leavings, and with such a season you may seek out woodless spaces for a while. There is nothing wrong with leaving woods behind for a time. You will invariably find yourself among thickets of woods you do not recognize, are unfamiliar, or being used in ways you had not imagined. Remember, my dear one – this world is large and uncontained – we cannot master it – it is crowded and flush with persons and woods. Incessantly they are changing, every moment – the woods and their peoples, and the peoples’ selection and uses of woods. Many will offer you groves unwanted, wealds of woods you do not know, clumsy lumber for your yearning purpose.
Remember to breathe and look far, my dear, take your time and search their roots. Nearly any wood can be partially known from its seed taking root and its clamorous growth. Woods are formed of winds and waters, weathers and disparate soils – they are bound to have unique characteristics and histories, varieties and sources – learning these will help you find your way among them. While hardly a simple task – its effort carries its own worth.
Then you may come to feel comfort in whatever woods construct the bosk where you are – they can speak to you, and you with them – becoming another precious person of the wood.
You have so much to offer us, as the forests of woods do you – all the many woodlands spread throughout our homelands, neighborhoods, countrysides and world – many, yes, loved child, many woodlands yet to be invented, discovered or known – and you, sweet forested one, growing now among them, taking roots, assembling branches and leaf piles and canopies, or ships with broad docks and high towers, realms and copses, barrels and fires and beds – as you learn to love and use your woods, multiply and form them – oh what wonders await us all!
Take your roots, then, gather seeds, use your woods – let them grow and shape you – plant, sprout and remake them! All woods you engage are yours while you are in them! So live, darling wonder, live and learn and create! Staying open to woods – testing and investing and proclaiming them! Even logging them for records or constructions, be certain to renew, and create!
and the final product of the little gifted notebook from my lovely daughter, sussing me through these holidays
At any given moment, these are the only woods we have. We do what we can with them, my dear, always many and diverse. Yet just a tiny little forest in the vastness. Some of our woods are soft and mulchy while some are brittle and sharp. There’ll be splinters and cracks, switches and boughs. But used together, in ways appropriate to their kind, they’ll be useful. Like don’t use kindling-wood so support the house. I know you often think, being small, that you don’t always have the woods you need. That others more skilled at building, the polishers and craftspersons, or the armory whittlers have advantages and types of wood beyond your resources. I’ve heard you cry that your stand of woods is lacking meat or certain fruits, you haven’t the wealth of many rings and nuanced etchings. That when you rope the trunks, the roots are shallow and fail the weight you beg them carry.
Rearrange, my dear, and be patient. Keep trying the woods that you have. I’ve seen a woodsman create with 100 what many cannot in a jungle. We must seek and study our world, evince all its ins and its outs. Which of our woods will comfort, which we can hone for attacks. What parts need handled carefully and preserved, that they might grow fuller and larger with age, ‘til they form a bridge toward where you need to go.
It is greatly advisable to journey and trade. Take with you fresh seeds and young branches. Try never to sever your roots, but graft and train, splice and mend, understand what will fertilize.
Your woods are an active place and a venture, requiring tenacious tending. Climb, my child, but test your footing, not every sapling will hold. You can succeed and will, should you choose to partake with the People of Woods. It only takes time and practice – adapting and adaptation – the bud and the tendril, the log and the trunk. Recite and remind and then jumble.
Above all, my daughter, please play. Pick-up sticks, wooden boats and chutes and ladders. Kites and slingshots, barrels and monkeys, apples to apples. Now is the time to throw peaches and chew the walnuts’ rind, bowl crabapples, smoke the reed and sniff the pine. Some whips will leave seams you’ll never forget, some falls may even break a limb, but you will grow and know, know and grow, until you, like the tree, flourish and bloom, strip and stand bare, proud and enduring, withstanding both wind and the wave, strikes and blows, the cold and the dark, all from your stock of woods and what’s possible.
Whoever dreamt a log could roll on rivers, or bend into a wheel? Who knew they’d form enormous arks – large enough to save our world? The handing of a tiny reed embossed with cursive love, sharpened to a blade, signs set to warn of danger, posts to fort a home. My love, impossible does not apply with your woods – all that we know is unknown where the woods come into play.
Experiment, invent, babble the brook or construct a staying dam. Use our woods, love and care for them, ignite your passion, rub them together toward sparks, thatch, nest, spear. The woods are waiting – and these are yours.
Here is page 4 of the Notebook from my daughter, which was a loose piece of notebook paper inserted into the stapled set. Here is what’s become of it thusfar:
Page 4
and the typewritten text
4
In Which Is Inserted a Loose Leaf
Becoming aware of the change. My little one, as we let (or made) our woods carry us far, we discovered beings everywhere – and all using woods. Having named our woods and defining ourselves by their usage – we had thought ourselves the only ones – the People of the Woods – and were surprised and astonished at the purposes others would put them to, at the sounds they were able to emit, at their shapes. Even the structures they built could seem odd, and their burning came from strange fires.
Everywhere we ventured we found the woods relating to life. Its giving and taking. Beings used them for weapons and tools, they used them for shelter and warmth. As our knowledge of woods grew enormous – the kinds and environments, uses and names – the Mysteries of the Trees began to grow.
In places they were pulped to a gum and let dry, then marked with a rock or hot iron. Other places they were chopped into boards and large planes and smeared with designs from animal blood. It came to seem the whole world was made of beings and woods, each defining themselves by particular use. Battles were waged over woods, clans and families splitting apart, even lovers argued over true uses of woods – what they purposed, how they worked, why they mattered, which ones, what was proper to do with your woods. Little one, woods came into conflict, everywhere. People fought over which woods were best, or which had more power or weight, which cores were pure and which garbage, what woods should serve for what.
We wanted our woods to do everything. To solve and evolve, to stand and retain. But our woods continued to change as we lived them. Some grew smooth and slipped from our hands. Some hardened like rock and got to heavy to carry. Some simply crumbled to dust. As their variety grew, so our experiences – we encountered moments when we could not find the woods that we needed. It distressed us and we cast about in clumsy silences and jerky motions. We grew hungry for new woods that were different. We began to play with the roots and the seeds, combining and grafting or trying new soils.
In times like these, there was speech of The Leavings, of infinite limits of life. The old among us would point out the woods where we no longer dwelt or visited, had let rot or decay, and would question our strange new graftings. The woods were always changing, dear child, there are always new things to learn.
It is time, then, to speak of these Leavings…draw near…it is our custom to address them in whispers and cold…
the Notebook as it is filled as of now, can be read here:
Holidays have a way of obstructing and crowding out creative time for me. Oh we find ways to express and produce – Holly’s making candles with all sorts of found objects downstairs as I type this, paper snowflakes, new stories and pictures from the children, new compositions sounding throughout the house, but for the snail’s pace of reading/writing processing/producing I prefer…well… I often find the compounding of anxiety-inducing public spaces and family gatherings, people and lights and jangling music and cheer, busying trips and spendings and time limits to all but obliterate my ability to bring anything out of the scraps. Last Saturday, my daughter Ida, who is forever cabbaging papers, pens, markers and tape anywhere she can find them, metamorphosing them into handmade notebooks, letters, scripts and stories to read and share with her lucky family and friends, handed me the following with the message: “this is for you.” So today, amid projects and budgets and organizings and so forth…when I was just about to write off the next two weeks for personal creativity…I grabbed this and took it to my desk…
…and so it begins…
In case you can’t read my mumbling handwriting – here is a typed copy: (have to click a couple of times for some reason?!)
Assembling for the task, we began. Each in our strengths conspiring. Tristan executed calculations which were pinpoint. Ida concocted the sounds and the language we could use, boxing up the requisite books and emotions. We counted on mama for the overall surround, a global view of the society – espousing natural characteristics and roles. Oliver modeled the world and placed it on a bucket. Everything was ready – needing only performative passion – a unified desire. We waited for Aidan, lugging the chains that would keep us on course, to hold back entropy’s risk. Leaving me to chronicle this family’s brave new world.
I’m stumbling about in a vast field of corn or wheat (mostly stubble) – for the requisite difficulty I want to say stalks of maize – but most likely it is wheat (author living in Kansas), though the sharp starkness of the dying shoots suggest otherwise. There may be snow, it’s that bleak. I’m lugging, perhaps draggling (yes – dragging a straggling weight – I do that) a shovel – nothing unusual about the tool except that it feels abnormally heavy and the iron parts are particularly cold (reminding me of the processings of my brain). A book is open on my lap (I’m sitting in an airport) to ward off any attempts at conversation and indicate a desire to be left alone, so I might continue my dreaming. I’m using the shovel to dig for my dad. Like – to find him. The field is a veritable landscape, not a “quarter” or even thousands of acres, but more like a steppe – some foreboding Russian prairie-plain – but clearly cultivated and almost fallow, or otherwise undone.
So I’m trudging through, eyeing the horizon, searching for some limiter, some possible landmarks that could clue me or direct me toward a where to dig. Every once in awhile I stoop or coil and plunge the blade into the cloddy frozen soil, strung up in tares and straw and grasses. I guess I’m expecting a thunk or an explosion of stars or something, because I never dig for long in one place, and soon pull up and move along. How do I know that he’s here? It’s as if something told me so. A sensation a helluva lot like intuition, or premonition. It’s a thankless task, I’ll tell you that, with the approaching holidays and stuck like this waiting on delayed Winter flights. What hope is there for me? It is already dusk and the field’s enormous. I’m alone, you know. Out here trying to find my father. Trying to find my way.
Afterword
Ever since I’ve been nearly-adult, or as long as I distinctly remember thinking about things like this – like death or family or meaning – I’ve wished I knew my father. In college I thought it might be a matter of vocabulary – that we didn’t possess the correct vehicle for exchanging emotion and memories and hopes – so I studied America’s westward movement (the paths of our ancestry), studied land management and read farmer-writers like Wendell Berry and William Kloefkorn, Larry Woiwode, William Stafford, Robert Bly and ilk. Trying to forge a connection now that sports and God had run their course, for me. As my own children arrived I turned to movements like Men and the Water of Life, the Iron John sort of thing – searching what is my heritage – of gender, of blood – what the hell does “manly”(ness) mean beyond observation and nurture? Now with sons. Hunting for metaphors or language that might serve as derricks plumbing wells – that might draw out my father and myself and somehow blend us together. Poem after poem, story by letter asking intimacy. Sometimes I’d gain the courage for a lunch or an outing to interrogate him directly about how he felt about things and what were his stories. I gifted my mother and he with a book of great questions and a blank notebook so they might fill out their inner-info when they felt like it, “for their grandchildren,” I’d said, “for posterity.” Simply wanting to know. As far as I know, it’s still empty.
Why is it so hard for fathers and sons? How many of us wish we really knew – our parents from the inside out? Believe that somehow knowing more than their strategies of being would offer us a clearer, fuller sense of ourselves? Unburden. Invite. Be near. As my father and I both age, I find myself anticipating his stages – frustrations, weariness and increasing losses. I find myself encountering bewilderments I saw him endure, and still I constantly wonder what he would say – if he said – not regarding politics or basketball or weather or cars, but about me. About him. About being a father and a man, a husband and a laborer, a person, a friend. About humor and music and art, about culture and meaning. He studied much and has lived long, lost so many, traveled and loved and he’s beautiful. As with my sons – toward whom I try to be so open and true – the conundrum of unknowing and uncertainty related to those closest to us is a mystery that hurts. The above piece is one of a life of installments. A kind of cry.
Why is it that what requires an army is always represented by one tiny little man? Or that incremental power leaves aside the human – “horsepower” – cannon?
Insurmountable odds left to a roll of the dice.
I used to not have patience for this game, the long slow proposition of loss dotted by occasional accidents of “victory.” Ever outnumbered on defense, I get it now. I’m 42 years old. The dice roll all day, and as the sides increase the odds go down and the stakes are higher.
Why even bother to play? It’s a question we ask regularly. Such a commitment of time, of energy, attention. So much spent twiddling thumbs or enduring loss or unwanted wins.
The world is enormous, and yet miniature, even to Legos.
You and me and you, my sons, miniscule players in a massive machine of rules we did not invent.
There must be a reason we play. I don’t believe we want to defeat one another. But the commitment. The attention and energy, the time. I’m pretty certain we want those things.
So we risk. Join in, gathering around what becomes a battlefield from a motivation of love, of loneliness, collaborations and deceits, treaties made and broken, a collective misplaced on a board.
I am telling you a simple story. A simple story of simple things and full of details. I will be telling it the rest of my life.
Details.
detail – Anselm Kiefer
tree bark
age and character
Take time.
It takes time to develop the details, these simple stories. Bear with me.
This year I stopped smoking. I began “vaping” e-cigarettes on Father’s Day, a reciprocal gift from my family, ostensibly FOR my family: my health – their comfort and security.
I had thought of my habit as an addiction and pleasure – it’s satisfactions including (but not limited to) the occupation of my body and sense so my mind might generate more freely – an item in the hand and oral fixative, the beautiful tedium of packing and rolling, the scents of tobaccos and sweet crackling of flame to thin paper, the distinctive clink of a Zippo. And there was the intake – that onrush of Other-air against the back of the throat, the lung’s recognition that breath is substantial – has meaning and purpose. A matter of routine, comfort, psychophysiology and control. Among other things. Fine insofar as it goes. Pieces of detail. Replacement sufficed.
Last week I contracted a version of the flu [please be patient – the process goes roughly as follows: details accumulate but require time to coalesce and organize toward a meaning – our lives as cabinets of curiosities]. Out of character for me – this was the real deal – an incapacitating sick. Associated with it was the scent and flavor, the electric verve of the nicotine-drop-oils that crackle and pop when my ecig works its vaporous magic. Compounding the problem (if illness is a “problem” per se – perhaps more appropriately “discomfort”) – my comfort no good to me.
In early October, due to an oversight in my timing (hang on – gather ingredients, let them simmer and stew, the feast is ahead), I depleted my store of these essential oils without backup, amidst a time of unusual stress. As a stop-gap measure and to avoid hurt or offense (a grouchiness and malaise isolating those around me) I purchased a package of “all-natural” tobacco cigarettes to get me by until my liquids were refilled. The cigarette had changed – no, it was I who now found it insufficient and distasteful – acrid and smelly – inconvenient and inferior to my system. So I squirreled them away – in case of emergency.
Emergency! (well, hardly, but still): slowly recovering from flu, sore and exhausted, wife away on a ten-day journey to faraway climes, two naughty puppies causing trouble, and tending and taxiing four active, hungry children, one of them herself quite ill – at day two without nicotine (happy pill / support / community / God / alcohol / touch / solitude / nature / music / food – whatever one’s personal representation/manifestation of “comfort” might be)…details…
while my daughter lay napping, the others at school, in a moment of relative quiet…I ferreted out one of those “Natural American Cigarettes,” by now all dried up and crispy, months opened and old, and slipped out to the porch…
Voila!
Except not, really.
Not a sudden revelation – but an accumulation of details taking particular shape.
Not an enlightenment – but light swollen and fractured to specific degrees.
Not momentous insight – but a lens crafted and ground, melted and curved to a singular clarity.
Bic schicks. A flame. A crackle. I inhale. Nothing special to the taste, nothing tremendous for throat or lung. Just a smoky draft of air – as from the belchings of a campfire in the mountains, or a compound conflagration of a family reunion bonfire in the late of night (but it isn’t!) when the kids are down and the adults unwind (but I’m not)…
A detail I’d overlooked about smoking (amassed over more than two decades – stay with me now) was precisely that. Looking things over. Smoking drove me outside and it stopped me. For the length of a cancer stick’s burn in this anti-smoking campaign of a culture, I would be isolated from friends and family, house or home, commerce or eatery, and would be situated somewhere where all there was to do was look over and listen. My hands and mouth, neck and torso occupied – eyes and ears thus freed, for a few minutes, to simply wander and attend. Caught by details.
Like these:
a Jetstream, held in a pale sky, contrasted by solid starkly swaying Winter branches, juxtaposed with the sturdy steel of a streetlight. And the dirtying yellow of late Autumn’s surprise bloomings held in some final tangled stubborn greens among deceasing leaves and grasses. Cracking boards, peeling paints and muted hues of dust in sunlight’s shadows – a vibrant puppy, warm and dark – our lives – amassing details – collating and collecting.
[Cigarettes are unnecessary for this] (a mere detail).
When my wife/partner/spouse/friend/coworking companion and lover is away, a part of me gets excited – when the children are busy with school or their moms – it portends to offer me a kind of working solitude – a something I’m forever whining about – idealizing, anticipating, “requiring,” in its absence. A chance to be temporally isolated with my brain, my body, and language – to think (ostensibly) without limit, read or write to my little heart’s content, to create or conspire with no active consciousnesses to account for but mine – no schedules to sync, no dinners to heed, the only limitations my own (and those sweet blasted puppies – a significant detail!), but still: abnormally free to dig and delve, explore and enjoinder, experiment and invoke reveries without feeling selfish…
but, the details, amassed in this way, exposed something quite different…
Jetstream, streetlamp, sky and tree. Angle of roof, discolored paint, fragmenting light – the nature of materials.
I’m at a loss for what to search or explore, discover, uncover…from what vantage point or perspective? Me? – in relation to – Me? Set out from an entire illusive fabrication? An emptiness without basis?
A point as a map is a nowhere unless there’s something surrounding. Unless there’s another point…somewhere. Me pushing through (the details profess) is a movement nowhere, without reference to something or someone outside, different, Other.
My wife is my primary referent (and “wife” is too small, as grand as it is). My person, my artist, my human. The being attached to me – not really mine at all, but for her purposings toward me. Our children, our puppies, our things. Habitat. “Econiche.” World. What I “relate” to equals me, enables me, crafts me into someONE, someWHERE, doing someTHINGS…which otherwise would NOT be…
Co-dependence? Inter-dependence? I like IN. IN-dependence – in depending, attaching, choosing and evaluating ourselves in our Others – we ARE.
Jetstream, streetlamp, color and line
background, foreground, texture, time
space and matter, energy, form
Details.
The details accrue and accrue, and with time…combine, reformulate, convene – which can feel new and curious and true, but simply go on gathering more, detailing to no end, as they relate, interact, recombine – can feel revelatory, enlightening, even profound – perhaps they all are – but they all are and ongoing…
amass and revise, amass and renew, accumulation and attention, awareness and incremental adjustments of relation…
Without Life in Relation (both the active reality, and the her that makes, with me, an us), I have little where or whom to set out from or toward
All my Words are Silent 