An Ineluctable Modality is a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo's 2013 Challenge where the goal was to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. This year, I wrote a novel-in-blog-posts: you can read the previous chapter, here.
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I am living in my uncle's house; it is I who live here, now. When I first moved here, I thought my life would be regulated by the comings and goings of the tides as the seasons and their changing would regulate everything else on a grander scale. But being far enough inland, even if only four miles as the crow drives down several roads winding to the end of Cape Edmund, I am not so aware of the sea from the house, neither visible nor audible but a presence that, on some days, I can smell more than feel. Yet, driving into the village, I still find a comfort in its constant ever-changing sameness. It is the tide of years, instead, I sense, this search of lost time.
My father was born here as was his father; his father-before-him was four years old when he moved into the house his father had built. This was after the Civil War, in the woods below Mount Agamemnon. It is a long history, this legacy, of which I feel so far detached that even my neighbors cannot believe I'm related to Old Father Hemon who died over forty years ago.
It may be the house Adam Kadmon grew up in but he could not wait to leave it when he was a youngster, going off to college and never coming back, at least to live. He returned for his first extended visit shortly after he had married and I was a baby still carried in my mother's arms. A later visit, when I was almost five, was more successful, less cautious and a little less cool in the ways prodigal sons' returns are not always welcome, according to what my mother told me, years later.
It was the first visit I remember, seeing the old house, its white clapboard sides and black shutters looming up as we drove through the woods, with the two old people standing in the doorway waiting for us.
"Those," my mother said somewhat icily, "are your grandparents, so you'd better behave."
Father Hemon was an old, gnarly gray-haired man though he was, if I figure it correctly, only in his early-sixties, only slightly younger than I am now. He stood aside and let us through the door as if inspecting us and finding me, especially, wanting. In the vestibule stood a slightly younger, barely less gnarly version of him – my Uncle Junior – who, after nodding curtly at my father, turned and walked wordlessly into the kitchen.
The stairs, broad and steep and a challenge for my small legs, seemed to climb to heaven for all I could tell. We had steps in our house, of course, but this was a staircase: Father Hemon announced I would be sleeping in the back parlor.
Later, when my father was growing old and tired himself, he began to talk a little more about the house he grew up in. They were not pleasant memories and he detested the winters.
"I did not like going back there to visit and I doubt my dad would've missed seeing us. You know, Junior and I hardly spoke even before Dad died."
The funeral was the last time all of us visited the Homestead. I was in grad school at the time but I could still imagine Father Hemon ascending the steps into Heaven and wondered if St. Peter viewed him and found him as wanting as he'd found me.
The front parlor – what most of us would consider the living room, today – was not the large, spacious room we normally think of and was used mostly for more formal occasions, primarily on Sunday. My father remembered seeing his grandfather, Grampa Khronos, laid out here, the body lying on a makeshift bier in the center of the room. The furniture had been pushed to the sides and flowers in vases crowded everywhere there was space. Dad was probably 8, then, and Grampa Khronos was probably only in his late-60s when he died.
The family, dressed in their stiff and unrelenting Sunday best, stood and watched, prayed and sang hymns for what seemed like hours over the old man's casket. His widow, Grandma Ananke, her twin sister, Aunt Tyche sat beside it, weeping, and around them stood Father Hemon and his family and Aunt Moira with hers.
Their pictures, what few of them existed, remained hanging on the walls of the parlor until Uncle Junior took them down not long after Father Hemon died. Most of them he stored in a box in the attic which I was able to find when it came my turn to enter the house. I'd also found one of Khronos' father as a wounded soldier barely alive when he arrived home from some place called Gettysburg. But he must have recovered well enough: Grampa Khronos would be what might be called a Civil War Baby Boomer. The one of Great-Aunt Moira, Hemon's ill-fated sister, was taken by the fireplace: poor woman, she went crazy one winter and fell from the roof, as I remember the story.
Even today, it is an uncomfortable room, dark between the sombre if faded paint (it might originally have been a deep red), a cross between a museum and a mausoleum. Sometimes, late at night, I'd have the feeling Grampa Khronos' casket was still there. It was the room for history and hallowed as it was, their names mean little to me. I rarely enter the room except when some rare visitor is curious about the photographs.
The dining room was the focal point of the family, where generations gathered for their daily meals regardless of tides, irrespective of the seasons, always returning to this one, small confluence of space and time. My dad complained how, if the way to a man's heart were through his stomach, the lengthy prayers before each meal surely proved his parents were convinced it was also the path into the kingdom.
The table 'round which they sat was, supposedly, original to the house, brought in when Grampa Khronos found himself in a new home. It was supposedly made by an uncle of the Union Ancestor, Khronos' father, the Civil War veteran Great-Grandpa Logos, which means it could have been made in the 1840s. It was sturdy and withstood the constant use of young children grown old, with nicks and scratches in various places but mostly well preserved by layers of tablecloths the family wives had used, hoping to protect its soul.
"Sit him down at this end, Adam," my grandmother had suggested when we visited. Things had become more cordial by the time I was 10 and instead of sleeping in the family room, I had my own room upstairs since Junior had moved away. My grandparents probably were aware of the Empty Nest only because the tension had subsided somewhat.
We passed around bowls filled with mashed potatoes and plates piled high with fried chicken. The vegetables were drowned in milk sauce, boiled beyond perdition – small wonder my dad hated vegetables – but for dessert, a deep-dish pie made with apples or raspberries from the backyard. It seemed a logical reward for the penance of grace.
A room upstairs has changed purpose more than any other in the house's history. It was not the smallest bedroom but it had been designed for the youngest children and was called the Nursery regardless of the occupant's age. At some point, with all the children gone, Father Hemon in his later years converted it into a library where he kept his books on religion and theology (he was not, according to Dad, big on science or fiction).
At some point Uncle Junior gave most of these books to some local libraries and book stores, preferring empty shelves to the remnants of his father's faith. It did not take me long to fill them up again with my books on music and my collections of scores and recordings. Getting the piano up here was a trial in itself.
Father Hemon's spirit must be spinning in the ether at this sacrilege: where he used to contemplate his God, I sat and composed music – or tried to. If I pray at all, this is where I would pray the most, to God or Muse.
Veni, creator spiritus, but visits are few and far between. Bowls of milk might appease the cats long before any passing Muse, I'm afraid.
The kitchen is the warm heart of the house and these days, living here alone, it is probably the place where I most likely sit to read the newspaper and check the mail (both in a fairly perfunctory fashion) or sit with the rare visitor over coffee or, for me, more likely tea. There is a small, oblong table, enough to seat three, the way I have it positioned against the one window. It is where Mother Hemon had a standing countertop, the precursor of the suburban kitchen island, and where she could prepare much of the food she fed her family while looking out across the yard toward the unseen sea.
The original oven has long been replaced by something more modern and electric – unheard in the days of Khronos and Ananke. My grandmother baked bread here every morning and simmered hearty stews in winter or cut fresh salads from garden greens on the summer's hottest days. I do not remember what they did for a refrigerator before my first visit there, or when they added the convenience of electricity.
Aside from the old photographs, what existed before I was here to experience myself didn't seem to exist – or matter. Sol Lipsitt, at your service. But there's a picture in an old album Junior had failed to hide adequately showing a severe-looking woman in a cap with a rather frightened young woman who could have been her daughter or a servant.
I am guessing the woman in the cap, judging from other photos in the parlor, is my great-grandmother Ananke. I am not so sure the girl is Moira but I could see how she would become a family legend not because of her cooking.
The western side of the house is the most open to the sky and gets the afternoon sun on the best days, a problem with a house surrounded by the woods and bounded by porches casting many of the windows into shade. It does, naturally, keep the house cooler in the summer and cuts back on the winter winds, so complaining about it is a moot point, given the options.
I don't recall what this room on the ground floor was called, with its large bay window facing the west and perhaps one most open to the sun. Father Hemon called it the parlor as if we could distinguish the small-case parlor from the upper-case Parlor used on Sundays.
Today, I think of it as the den, another suburban allusion to our prehistoric past (though "man-cave" should be banished from our vocabulary). Warm and sunny, cozy in fact, it has the most comfortable chairs, the couch (not the same one I used to sleep on as a child) looking out across the porch toward the long-hidden sea.
This is where I think most about my family and friends, long past now, where the music of memory can be heard the strongest, memories that have little to do with this house. Of these memories, I often find myself asking forgiveness for any way in which I might have trespassed on our friendships. Sometimes, the room is not so cozy as I'd wish.
It is a large house for one person, though I could understand why, in generations past, the idea of building additions had seemed so attractive. Our Union Ancestor, Great-grandfather Logos and his long-suffering wife, Bereshith, may have contemplated a small family when they built this house on the hill, but Grampa Khronos had other ideas with four children who were required to fit into two bedrooms while his sister-in-law, Tyche, as luck would have it, occupied the third.
Bedrooms, of course, were off limits to guests and a closed door was a warning to children that required respect. While Father Hemon may have railed against the sin of fornication to impress his sons into a righteous life, the noises my father heard from behind that particular closed door on a Saturday night could not possibly be associated with the temptation of lust.
That Adam Kadmon and Junior were forced to share a room, while their sister had her own and Grampa Khronos was confined to the other (for lack of a suitable, more lockable attic), no doubt contributed to their life-long animosities, Junior being the older by a decade.
If there were ghosts in these rooms, I was not tempted to consider them or their travails until I heard unverifiable sounds in the night. Wood creaked and rafters rattled in the winds where not all storms were necessarily Nature's handiwork.
The back porch was the solace of the house, its periphery and something of a crown, as I recalled it. When I was a child, much of my visits was spent sitting on the porch, reading or thinking (whatever a child that age had to think about, but I was told I was a very thoughtful child which alarmed Mother Hemon considerably).
Now, fifty years later, I still spend much of my summer sitting on this porch, reading or thinking (whatever it is an old man has to think about: what would Mother Hemon say, now, I wonder?).
With humanity behind me and Nature and the sea before me, it is this proximity to the world beyond the world that grants me comfort.
Father Hemon, I would think, deliver me from evil: protect me from myself, as well. Amen, dico vobis.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
Friday, November 08, 2013
Thursday, November 07, 2013
An Ineluctable Modality: Chapter 7
An Ineluctable Modality is a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo's 2013 Challenge where the goal was to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. This year, I wrote a novel-in-blog-posts: you can read the previous chapter, here.
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The library was quiet again (I suspect it usually is) – I mean, not busy. The kids were in school and the weather, though mild, was only overcast, not yet dreary enough to drive people in to seek a more intellectual shelter than going shopping or finding lunch at their preferred diner, though the impending rain might change that, soon. The young man behind the check-out desk was clearly not the Joyce possibly Diotimopoulos that Henry mentioned to me at dinner last night. I looked around but could see no one who might be, either. I dropped off my book at the desk, tapping it with approval and said something banal about how I'd enjoyed it and would recommend it. He looked at it with a smile and pushed a slip of paper toward me – I thought it might be a receipt – which told me how I could leave a review on their patrons' blog if I cared to.
I pocketed the slip of paper with an indifferent smile and wandered off to the new releases shelf to see what I might have overlooked. Apparently, after a few fruitless minutes skimming the spines, nothing. At least, nothing that interested me. Perhaps I would go look for other books by Alice McDermott, having enjoyed her most recent: what was the one title, Charming Billy? I always liked the idea of immersing myself in an author or composer, especially reading things chronologically, getting a sense of style and development, how the artist grows. It was something I, as an artist, had difficulty doing.
But though it was inspiring, gathering this experience vicariously from other artists through their works, I'm afraid I never found an answer that would help me. And reading those critics who guided me through their works was not often helpful. Eventually, I preferred reading about the artist's life rather than the artist's work, drawing my own conclusions from what I read rather than being told what someone else thought – "thought through my eyes... the limit of the diaphane" – sinking under the weight of systematic details that often ignored what for lack of a proper term I called "important things."
Like a composer dwelling on how the audience will respond to this chord, this note, I could imagine a writer – Henry, at his desk, his back to the window, now – sweating it out over the right word and turn of phrase. It must be difficult enough to write one novel but the hardest thing must be to write a second. That is, assuming you got the first one published.
There was a book on the shelf I found purely by accident, heading toward McDermott – a Russian author (another ex-patriot) writing in Paris. I'd been enthusiastic about Andrei Makine's first novel, Dreams of my Russian Summers, less so about a subsequent one I'd read. This one, more recent, I'd not seen before and figured it was slender enough not to occupy myself for too long a time. I sat down to page through it, make up my mind. Music of a Life – certainly a title that interested me. (He's one of the greatest living writers – see? It says so, right here.)
I saw movement over by the circulation desk and automatically looked up. I had not noticed the door nearby, no doubt the librarian's office. Was it unmarked? That seemed rather sacrilegious in a library. The young man at the desk opened the door and stuck his head in briefly and a moment later, a woman I could describe mostly as handsome but average-looking stepped out.
This was probably the woman Henry had mentioned with a significant lack of any further detail: he wasn't even sure of her name – why had he mentioned her? Was he letting me know he found her attractive, that he, like many of the older men here, might find it worth his while stopping in to check out the newspapers and gaze upon her unrequitedly?
She checked something, nodded, took her glasses off and looked quickly around the library. Not so much that she was looking for someone; perhaps just checking her domain – not that busy, she might think and sigh.
The diner, on the other hand, was quite busy. I decided to treat myself to lunch, a luxury if I would've paid for my own dinner last night (which in a sense I had, listening to Henry for an hour). Now that the weather was getting colder, I decided I should go out for lunch or dinner a couple times a week, mindful of budget and diet – see? I appeared in public – just to get out of the house. I must have spent half the summer sitting on my porch and the fresh air had proven wonderfully stimulating.
Not that I minded staying home, but there comes a time when a change of view became a necessity. One can knock around in even the most comfortable surroundings only so long before one gets restless. I suppose that was why Ulysses had to set out again, stuck at home after years of wandering: pleasant but only for so long.
Not that I could see myself, at my age – I snorted at myself when I said that to myself – running off in search of the Pylons of Hercules or whatever he'd called them. Where would I go and more importantly, these days, how would I finance that? But most of all, what was the point?
It would not be wise going on such an adventure alone – even Ulysses, hero that he was, had a crew. I could imagine Henry and I taking a road trip and killing each other within a space of a few days.
I had decided not to take out Makine's book, saving it for later or maybe waiting till I'd come back again to spend a peaceful hour reading it in a sunny alcove, there. The woman at the desk I assumed was Joyce the Librarian picked up the copy of Someone and asked the young man a question. In turn, he nodded toward me as I walked past as if he were saying to her, "he's the one who'd returned it – said he liked it."
In turn, I nodded back toward them, imagining she might stop me to ask what I had I liked about it. Then I would stop and talk to her about it and say, "I'm just going out for lunch, if you'd care to discuss it over some coffee?"
But she didn't say anything, merely nodded back and smiled as she put the book down and turned back into her office. Perhaps, seeing who'd read it, she changed her mind and was no longer interested. Maybe she thought, "curious, a man like that reading a book like that."
She was neither formidable nor accessible, from this momentary encounter, nor could I see myself going back to sit and wait to catch a glimpse of her. The carp had lost the day.
Lunch at the Crab and Crumpet was perfunctory, the waitress – I should call them servers, now ("they also serve who stand and wait" described her natural propensity) – was clearly uninterested in engaging in anything beyond a one- or two-syllable response. She gave the impression I should be eating at the counter (where there was no room) rather than taking up a table for two, since I was waiting for no one to join me (if two people sat here, she'd get twice the tip). She wore her apron over a community college t-shirt where I hoped she wasn't an English major: she would have enough problems in the world as it was.
Having failed to impress the librarian I was worth a conversation and then being rebuffed by a girl who could barely hold her pad and pencil, I decided to revert to my normal unsociable self and eat my meal in silence. Again, I saw no one but then again I gave up looking around to notice if there was anyone to see.
If that was Ms. Diotimopoulos as logic suggested, though she didn't strike me as Greek (perhaps she had married into the family), I wondered what Henry saw in her that made him bring her to my attention. Maybe, sly dogsbody that he occasionally tried to be, he was setting me up since I couldn't see him howling at the moon over her.
It's not that she wasn't my type, whatever that meant (and I had no idea what kind of woman was Henry's type – or man, for that matter): she was a handsome woman, as I first thought – probably nothing she'd find complimentary – but average (alas, not a compliment).
Driving home in the rain that had come up rather suddenly, I wondered what my "type" was, if I had any or had ever thought about it. Years ago, a friend was surprised that I was marrying Madeleine whom he didn't think was "my type," at least compared to the few girls in my life I'd ever considered dating. Perhaps, over time, my type conformed to Madeleine.
Since I'd moved to Maine – as my son had said, "There goes the nation" – I'd not exactly thrown myself into the dating scene, not necessarily out of any respect for Madeleine's memory but simply because I wasn't interested. I had grown used to my solitary life and thought it would be a mistake to think of sharing it with someone who could not match what Madeleine and I, type or no type, had shared.
Sybil was, I had to admit, something of an aberration, fitting into no particular type past or present beyond being a friend with whom something had become "easy" to fall into, but I didn't feel we were attracted to each other and both, afterward, acknowledged it had been a mistake. When I heard the phone ring as I walked into the house, assuming it would be her, I wondered how much of a mistake.
Putting away my coat, I was surprised to hear my son's voice straining from the machine. He was somewhere noisy – busy, was my guess – and fortunately I got to the phone before he hung up.
"Hi, Stephen," I said, trying to sound less breathless than I was, "I just walked in the door. Where are you?"
"I'm at LAX, getting ready to fly up to Seattle on business for a few days," he said, "how are you? I was afraid I might interrupt you, if you're writing."
We only talked a few times a year and it was often strained at that – Christmas, our birthdays, the anniversary of Madeleine's death which caught him particularly hard because he hadn't been in touch a lot before she became ill and everything had happened so fast, then.
"No, it's fine. What's up?" as if he wouldn't have called without a reason. I wondered if something would happen to me, would he see the irony he hadn't learned from his mother's death? But I let it go.
"Look, I'm going to be... – can you hear me alright? It's awfully noisy, here, maybe I should call you back."
"No, it's fine – you're here, now, so talk." I tried sounding jovial without being too excited to hear from him.
"Well, I've got to be in New York before Thanksgiving and I thought... if you don't have any plans for the holiday, I could drop by and see you: it's been a while."
Three years and five months ago, the only time he'd been to see me since I moved here.
"No, I don't have any plans." I didn't want to say I was planning on spending it alone because that would sound just too pathetic.
"So when would you and Leopold be getting in? I could meet you in Boston, I guess...?"
"Uh, no," he hesitated. "Leo's got other plans, a trip with some friends – from work, actually."
"Well, sure, there's plenty of room here. You and Leo are always welcome."
"Great, dad. Um, look, I'll call you later, after I get back from this trip. Take care."
And he hung up.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
= = = = = = =
The library was quiet again (I suspect it usually is) – I mean, not busy. The kids were in school and the weather, though mild, was only overcast, not yet dreary enough to drive people in to seek a more intellectual shelter than going shopping or finding lunch at their preferred diner, though the impending rain might change that, soon. The young man behind the check-out desk was clearly not the Joyce possibly Diotimopoulos that Henry mentioned to me at dinner last night. I looked around but could see no one who might be, either. I dropped off my book at the desk, tapping it with approval and said something banal about how I'd enjoyed it and would recommend it. He looked at it with a smile and pushed a slip of paper toward me – I thought it might be a receipt – which told me how I could leave a review on their patrons' blog if I cared to.
I pocketed the slip of paper with an indifferent smile and wandered off to the new releases shelf to see what I might have overlooked. Apparently, after a few fruitless minutes skimming the spines, nothing. At least, nothing that interested me. Perhaps I would go look for other books by Alice McDermott, having enjoyed her most recent: what was the one title, Charming Billy? I always liked the idea of immersing myself in an author or composer, especially reading things chronologically, getting a sense of style and development, how the artist grows. It was something I, as an artist, had difficulty doing.
But though it was inspiring, gathering this experience vicariously from other artists through their works, I'm afraid I never found an answer that would help me. And reading those critics who guided me through their works was not often helpful. Eventually, I preferred reading about the artist's life rather than the artist's work, drawing my own conclusions from what I read rather than being told what someone else thought – "thought through my eyes... the limit of the diaphane" – sinking under the weight of systematic details that often ignored what for lack of a proper term I called "important things."
Like a composer dwelling on how the audience will respond to this chord, this note, I could imagine a writer – Henry, at his desk, his back to the window, now – sweating it out over the right word and turn of phrase. It must be difficult enough to write one novel but the hardest thing must be to write a second. That is, assuming you got the first one published.
There was a book on the shelf I found purely by accident, heading toward McDermott – a Russian author (another ex-patriot) writing in Paris. I'd been enthusiastic about Andrei Makine's first novel, Dreams of my Russian Summers, less so about a subsequent one I'd read. This one, more recent, I'd not seen before and figured it was slender enough not to occupy myself for too long a time. I sat down to page through it, make up my mind. Music of a Life – certainly a title that interested me. (He's one of the greatest living writers – see? It says so, right here.)
I saw movement over by the circulation desk and automatically looked up. I had not noticed the door nearby, no doubt the librarian's office. Was it unmarked? That seemed rather sacrilegious in a library. The young man at the desk opened the door and stuck his head in briefly and a moment later, a woman I could describe mostly as handsome but average-looking stepped out.
This was probably the woman Henry had mentioned with a significant lack of any further detail: he wasn't even sure of her name – why had he mentioned her? Was he letting me know he found her attractive, that he, like many of the older men here, might find it worth his while stopping in to check out the newspapers and gaze upon her unrequitedly?
She checked something, nodded, took her glasses off and looked quickly around the library. Not so much that she was looking for someone; perhaps just checking her domain – not that busy, she might think and sigh.
The diner, on the other hand, was quite busy. I decided to treat myself to lunch, a luxury if I would've paid for my own dinner last night (which in a sense I had, listening to Henry for an hour). Now that the weather was getting colder, I decided I should go out for lunch or dinner a couple times a week, mindful of budget and diet – see? I appeared in public – just to get out of the house. I must have spent half the summer sitting on my porch and the fresh air had proven wonderfully stimulating.
Not that I minded staying home, but there comes a time when a change of view became a necessity. One can knock around in even the most comfortable surroundings only so long before one gets restless. I suppose that was why Ulysses had to set out again, stuck at home after years of wandering: pleasant but only for so long.
Not that I could see myself, at my age – I snorted at myself when I said that to myself – running off in search of the Pylons of Hercules or whatever he'd called them. Where would I go and more importantly, these days, how would I finance that? But most of all, what was the point?
It would not be wise going on such an adventure alone – even Ulysses, hero that he was, had a crew. I could imagine Henry and I taking a road trip and killing each other within a space of a few days.
I had decided not to take out Makine's book, saving it for later or maybe waiting till I'd come back again to spend a peaceful hour reading it in a sunny alcove, there. The woman at the desk I assumed was Joyce the Librarian picked up the copy of Someone and asked the young man a question. In turn, he nodded toward me as I walked past as if he were saying to her, "he's the one who'd returned it – said he liked it."
In turn, I nodded back toward them, imagining she might stop me to ask what I had I liked about it. Then I would stop and talk to her about it and say, "I'm just going out for lunch, if you'd care to discuss it over some coffee?"
But she didn't say anything, merely nodded back and smiled as she put the book down and turned back into her office. Perhaps, seeing who'd read it, she changed her mind and was no longer interested. Maybe she thought, "curious, a man like that reading a book like that."
She was neither formidable nor accessible, from this momentary encounter, nor could I see myself going back to sit and wait to catch a glimpse of her. The carp had lost the day.
Lunch at the Crab and Crumpet was perfunctory, the waitress – I should call them servers, now ("they also serve who stand and wait" described her natural propensity) – was clearly uninterested in engaging in anything beyond a one- or two-syllable response. She gave the impression I should be eating at the counter (where there was no room) rather than taking up a table for two, since I was waiting for no one to join me (if two people sat here, she'd get twice the tip). She wore her apron over a community college t-shirt where I hoped she wasn't an English major: she would have enough problems in the world as it was.
Having failed to impress the librarian I was worth a conversation and then being rebuffed by a girl who could barely hold her pad and pencil, I decided to revert to my normal unsociable self and eat my meal in silence. Again, I saw no one but then again I gave up looking around to notice if there was anyone to see.
If that was Ms. Diotimopoulos as logic suggested, though she didn't strike me as Greek (perhaps she had married into the family), I wondered what Henry saw in her that made him bring her to my attention. Maybe, sly dogsbody that he occasionally tried to be, he was setting me up since I couldn't see him howling at the moon over her.
It's not that she wasn't my type, whatever that meant (and I had no idea what kind of woman was Henry's type – or man, for that matter): she was a handsome woman, as I first thought – probably nothing she'd find complimentary – but average (alas, not a compliment).
Driving home in the rain that had come up rather suddenly, I wondered what my "type" was, if I had any or had ever thought about it. Years ago, a friend was surprised that I was marrying Madeleine whom he didn't think was "my type," at least compared to the few girls in my life I'd ever considered dating. Perhaps, over time, my type conformed to Madeleine.
Since I'd moved to Maine – as my son had said, "There goes the nation" – I'd not exactly thrown myself into the dating scene, not necessarily out of any respect for Madeleine's memory but simply because I wasn't interested. I had grown used to my solitary life and thought it would be a mistake to think of sharing it with someone who could not match what Madeleine and I, type or no type, had shared.
Sybil was, I had to admit, something of an aberration, fitting into no particular type past or present beyond being a friend with whom something had become "easy" to fall into, but I didn't feel we were attracted to each other and both, afterward, acknowledged it had been a mistake. When I heard the phone ring as I walked into the house, assuming it would be her, I wondered how much of a mistake.
Putting away my coat, I was surprised to hear my son's voice straining from the machine. He was somewhere noisy – busy, was my guess – and fortunately I got to the phone before he hung up.
"Hi, Stephen," I said, trying to sound less breathless than I was, "I just walked in the door. Where are you?"
"I'm at LAX, getting ready to fly up to Seattle on business for a few days," he said, "how are you? I was afraid I might interrupt you, if you're writing."
We only talked a few times a year and it was often strained at that – Christmas, our birthdays, the anniversary of Madeleine's death which caught him particularly hard because he hadn't been in touch a lot before she became ill and everything had happened so fast, then.
"No, it's fine. What's up?" as if he wouldn't have called without a reason. I wondered if something would happen to me, would he see the irony he hadn't learned from his mother's death? But I let it go.
"Look, I'm going to be... – can you hear me alright? It's awfully noisy, here, maybe I should call you back."
"No, it's fine – you're here, now, so talk." I tried sounding jovial without being too excited to hear from him.
"Well, I've got to be in New York before Thanksgiving and I thought... if you don't have any plans for the holiday, I could drop by and see you: it's been a while."
Three years and five months ago, the only time he'd been to see me since I moved here.
"No, I don't have any plans." I didn't want to say I was planning on spending it alone because that would sound just too pathetic.
"So when would you and Leopold be getting in? I could meet you in Boston, I guess...?"
"Uh, no," he hesitated. "Leo's got other plans, a trip with some friends – from work, actually."
"Well, sure, there's plenty of room here. You and Leo are always welcome."
"Great, dad. Um, look, I'll call you later, after I get back from this trip. Take care."
And he hung up.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
Wednesday, November 06, 2013
An Ineluctable Modality: Chapter 6
An Ineluctable Modality is a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo's 2013 Challenge where the goal was to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. This year, I wrote a novel-in-blog-posts: you can read the previous chapter, here.
= = = = = = =
"Ah, maestro di color che sanno," he chirped, greeting me as I entered the restaurant. We had agreed to meet for dinner when he called me last night and had decided Shakespeare's Company was a mutually acceptable spot. Now that Cape Edmund was less populated by the summer traffic, the place was more bearable. Henry motioned me to join him.
"Herr Doktor Liebhaber," I bowed solemnly before I sat down across from him in our usual booth. We always preferred a place toward the back of the main room. Plus we both liked the waitress, Sylvia, who was always kind to old men.
Henry had called me out of boredom, tired of locking himself away and doing nothing but writing. He felt the need to get out of the house and thought perhaps I wouldn't mind being his excuse, if he agreed to pay.
"That gives me the right to ask, then," he said before hanging up, "that we do not discuss my novel."
I had hoped to hear how it was going – was he on schedule; was it going well; did he find it more of a challenge than he thought? – but he would not want to discuss this either, not just a matter of jinxing the process by telling me its story or what ideas he had to expand the plot.
No doubt, he'd be doing some covert reconnaissance during dinner, either through questions he'd ask or topics he'd suggest, perhaps even the way he'd observe me or other people in the restaurant. He ordered the kidney pie.
Maybe I was one of his characters and he needed to refresh himself with how I would react to a given situation. Or perhaps it was Sylvia who was his object of observation. Was there a scene set in a restaurant and he needed ambiance to fill out the dialogue? Maybe he needed something to spark a new direction and hoped something would happen that might inspire him.
I half expected him to be sitting there with a pen and tablet taking notes, jotting things down as thoughts crossed his mind: maybe not the things themselves but tangents they suggested.
"I've been sitting in port so long," he said, complaining neither of his usual back pain nor a headache, "I need to have the barnacles scraped off. Staring out my window, staring at the field stretching down to the sea like a... like a..." But he stopped abruptly.
"Ah," I said, perusing the menu but knowing what I wanted. "Cabin fever not what it used to be? What is Semele standing in the meadow for?"
Henry was, if nothing else, feeling his age and for once began to look it, if only because his sour mood and morbid boredom affected his usual vibrancy: subdued was a word that came to me, seeing him somewhat shrunken in the dimness that passed for atmosphere. I suspected he was playing at one of his characters and now wondered how I, an antagonist, might react. The plot quickens.
Tearing off a piece from one of the breadsticks, he wanted to know if I thought of myself – since neither one of us are natives, here – as an ex-patriot or an exile, since Maine, it is said, is the only foreign country in the United States.
"Exiled from what?" The soup was served. I could see being a New Englander living in New York City the way Americans flocked to Paris in the '20s, making an argument for an ex-pat, but pleasant though it was, here, it was hardly a place to draw intellectual or artistic fervor except as a means of escape.
"I was thinking in the sense of one who left willingly and lives here nicely, making the best of it." Another tear at a breadstick. "As opposed to being dour, unrepentant, like one sentenced to a remote outpost on the edge of civilization."
If anything, it was the sense this was a remote outpost on the edge of civilization which kept me from integrating myself into the community. If society hadn't exiled me to this place, perhaps I did it to myself to punish me for my wife's death, for having had a heart attack, for agreeing it was time to retire.
“Take the library, for instance,” he said, waving the remains of his breadstick.
I didn't often go to the library, I admitted, because I preferred to buy my own books, the ones I'd be interested in: how could a library "in a place like this" have what I was interested in?
Or was it that it is a small-town library? I wasn't paying attention to what Henry kept nattering on about as I considered this for a split-second of time, but if I was not comfortable living in a big city – a summer in Manhattan had been enough to prove that – why was I not comfortable living in a small town, in fact a place outside a village outside a small town but not too far from a bigger town which the locals viewed as the closest thing to a Big City?
It was pleasant to walk into, this library, browse over the new arrivals, mostly the latest, more popular titles – though I did find Alice McDermott's new Someone and snatched it up (enjoying it immensely: honestly, I highly recommend it).
There were enough people there to warrant keeping it going, I'd say, young people at the computers, old people poring over the newspapers, a few with their laptops looking like they're doing some research – who knows, perhaps writing their own 50,000-word novels, hoping for inspiration ad osmosis.
It was not a large place, Langley's library, but it had a quiet charm, the small-town hominess of a place where the community gathered: all they needed was a coffee shop, though cappuccino should not be on the menu. It was a place where I could imagine wandering into on a cold day to sit down and read. Surely, I could find something here to occupy an hour's time?
No one would bother talking to me but I would say, yes, I was out in public. People would see me and I would see them. Perhaps, gradually, we might come to accept each other.
Ulysses, he was asking me about, how Dante's version died because he wanted to have experiences. Returning from Troy, his story had a happy ending only because Homer had to stop somewhere.
"But The Iliad is not the story of the Trojan War, only how its end came about." I thought of our own long, unending wars in the Middle East.
"And The Odyssey is only about one Greek's homecoming, ultimately. Dante takes him further, past the Pylons of Hercules."
Adventure was his goal and being confined to a flame with a rival co-sinner, his contrapazzo.
"That's the trouble with experience. One must close ones eyes or lose it. It is always changing on us – however can we hold on to it?"
"The way we hold on to music," I said. "Music is time; the visible is space, that's all."
And with that, he fell silent. "Have you met the new librarian?"
"No," I said, "what about her?"
"Name's Joyce something – Greek, I think. Diotimopoulos? Yes, something like that."
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
= = = = = = =
"Ah, maestro di color che sanno," he chirped, greeting me as I entered the restaurant. We had agreed to meet for dinner when he called me last night and had decided Shakespeare's Company was a mutually acceptable spot. Now that Cape Edmund was less populated by the summer traffic, the place was more bearable. Henry motioned me to join him.
"Herr Doktor Liebhaber," I bowed solemnly before I sat down across from him in our usual booth. We always preferred a place toward the back of the main room. Plus we both liked the waitress, Sylvia, who was always kind to old men.
Henry had called me out of boredom, tired of locking himself away and doing nothing but writing. He felt the need to get out of the house and thought perhaps I wouldn't mind being his excuse, if he agreed to pay.
"That gives me the right to ask, then," he said before hanging up, "that we do not discuss my novel."
I had hoped to hear how it was going – was he on schedule; was it going well; did he find it more of a challenge than he thought? – but he would not want to discuss this either, not just a matter of jinxing the process by telling me its story or what ideas he had to expand the plot.
No doubt, he'd be doing some covert reconnaissance during dinner, either through questions he'd ask or topics he'd suggest, perhaps even the way he'd observe me or other people in the restaurant. He ordered the kidney pie.
Maybe I was one of his characters and he needed to refresh himself with how I would react to a given situation. Or perhaps it was Sylvia who was his object of observation. Was there a scene set in a restaurant and he needed ambiance to fill out the dialogue? Maybe he needed something to spark a new direction and hoped something would happen that might inspire him.
I half expected him to be sitting there with a pen and tablet taking notes, jotting things down as thoughts crossed his mind: maybe not the things themselves but tangents they suggested.
"I've been sitting in port so long," he said, complaining neither of his usual back pain nor a headache, "I need to have the barnacles scraped off. Staring out my window, staring at the field stretching down to the sea like a... like a..." But he stopped abruptly.
"Ah," I said, perusing the menu but knowing what I wanted. "Cabin fever not what it used to be? What is Semele standing in the meadow for?"
Henry was, if nothing else, feeling his age and for once began to look it, if only because his sour mood and morbid boredom affected his usual vibrancy: subdued was a word that came to me, seeing him somewhat shrunken in the dimness that passed for atmosphere. I suspected he was playing at one of his characters and now wondered how I, an antagonist, might react. The plot quickens.
Tearing off a piece from one of the breadsticks, he wanted to know if I thought of myself – since neither one of us are natives, here – as an ex-patriot or an exile, since Maine, it is said, is the only foreign country in the United States.
"Exiled from what?" The soup was served. I could see being a New Englander living in New York City the way Americans flocked to Paris in the '20s, making an argument for an ex-pat, but pleasant though it was, here, it was hardly a place to draw intellectual or artistic fervor except as a means of escape.
"I was thinking in the sense of one who left willingly and lives here nicely, making the best of it." Another tear at a breadstick. "As opposed to being dour, unrepentant, like one sentenced to a remote outpost on the edge of civilization."
If anything, it was the sense this was a remote outpost on the edge of civilization which kept me from integrating myself into the community. If society hadn't exiled me to this place, perhaps I did it to myself to punish me for my wife's death, for having had a heart attack, for agreeing it was time to retire.
“Take the library, for instance,” he said, waving the remains of his breadstick.
I didn't often go to the library, I admitted, because I preferred to buy my own books, the ones I'd be interested in: how could a library "in a place like this" have what I was interested in?
Or was it that it is a small-town library? I wasn't paying attention to what Henry kept nattering on about as I considered this for a split-second of time, but if I was not comfortable living in a big city – a summer in Manhattan had been enough to prove that – why was I not comfortable living in a small town, in fact a place outside a village outside a small town but not too far from a bigger town which the locals viewed as the closest thing to a Big City?
It was pleasant to walk into, this library, browse over the new arrivals, mostly the latest, more popular titles – though I did find Alice McDermott's new Someone and snatched it up (enjoying it immensely: honestly, I highly recommend it).
There were enough people there to warrant keeping it going, I'd say, young people at the computers, old people poring over the newspapers, a few with their laptops looking like they're doing some research – who knows, perhaps writing their own 50,000-word novels, hoping for inspiration ad osmosis.
It was not a large place, Langley's library, but it had a quiet charm, the small-town hominess of a place where the community gathered: all they needed was a coffee shop, though cappuccino should not be on the menu. It was a place where I could imagine wandering into on a cold day to sit down and read. Surely, I could find something here to occupy an hour's time?
No one would bother talking to me but I would say, yes, I was out in public. People would see me and I would see them. Perhaps, gradually, we might come to accept each other.
Ulysses, he was asking me about, how Dante's version died because he wanted to have experiences. Returning from Troy, his story had a happy ending only because Homer had to stop somewhere.
"But The Iliad is not the story of the Trojan War, only how its end came about." I thought of our own long, unending wars in the Middle East.
"And The Odyssey is only about one Greek's homecoming, ultimately. Dante takes him further, past the Pylons of Hercules."
Adventure was his goal and being confined to a flame with a rival co-sinner, his contrapazzo.
"That's the trouble with experience. One must close ones eyes or lose it. It is always changing on us – however can we hold on to it?"
"The way we hold on to music," I said. "Music is time; the visible is space, that's all."
And with that, he fell silent. "Have you met the new librarian?"
"No," I said, "what about her?"
"Name's Joyce something – Greek, I think. Diotimopoulos? Yes, something like that."
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
An Ineluctable Modality: Chapter 5
An Ineluctable Modality is a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo's 2013 Challenge where the goal was to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. This year, I wrote a novel-in-blog-posts: you can read the previous chapter, here.
= = = = = = =
This morning, didn't I hear the goddess singing of Achilles' rage that he will never, ever be able to catch the damn tortoise? He gets closer to the goal, as we all do, but the goal is always moving one step further away and therefore (penultimately) unattainable. Oh, Zeno, you sly old dogsbody, I must logically infer what an ingenious paradox you are! Natural speed aside, someone might argue Achilles, a hero having a longer stride than your average turtle, should quickly overtake the tortoise, being a mere tortoise, thus winning handily if even by no more than the hare's bad breath.
As applied to the real world, isn't this what happens when you replace experience with the driest generic abstractions? Ideas, such as they are, are sterile, incapable of accounting for the potential of the particular. In this, all things, ineluctably speaking, are both equal and unequal.
I hear the cry spinning outward over the wind, singing through the trees (oh, we shall come rejoicing), spinning like an ever-extending umbilical cord that weaves its way past swerve of shore to riverrun, past the present and onwards into the future, Omphale's spinning wheel forever spilling out the threads of fate woven by norns and sisters three, woven into the time on which we must learn to tread not so lightly.
Omphalos, centered, Delphic in our midst, this cry I hear, the wolf's cry, the baby's cry, the long umbilicatory chord resonating in the very belly of the world, this rage set in a silver sea.
Achilles' petulance (despite Apollo's pestilence) is a sorry state of an affair as Agamemnon and he, the great warrior-turned-heel, fought like spoiled brats over the possession of their slave girls, spoils of war, in these jeux d'enfants terribles before the walls of Troy. In the end, I half expected Briseis to run off with the tortoise or be led to safety far away on its back.
And yet Achilles could not catch him despite his speed. No wonder he was enraged.
The gods, appealed to by Thetis, Achilles' nymphic mother, acted no better than their mortal counterparts. We think the leaders in the Greeks' camp are petty, but what of the domestic spat between Zeus and Hera that find their ramifications in the tragical outcome of the war with Troy?
Was all this merely because some proud and horny boy needed to be avenged his stolen slave? (Or Menelaus, his wife?)
To Achilles, revenge for his humiliation at Agamemnon's hands, having the slave-girl prize taken from him, is more important than their political responsibility, their honor as Greeks united against a foe, the personal interests placed before their obligations to their people and their soldiers. Such childishness. Om, phalos, in favilla.
Yet these are the models by whom we mortals are supposed to guide ourselves, these gods and their heroes. The Iliad is not, as I always thought as a shallow youth, a great and epic tale of war: it is about a nation's shame and the decay that leads from it.
It is, by law, Election Day across the land, this first Tuesday of November, but in the course of human events it is not a very exciting year for elections. I had assumed we had elected a President as a result of last year's election but you would hardly notice it following another of those infamous stalemates that cost us $24 billion so the Tea Party could prove they did not have the clout to "de-fund Obamacare" despite the fact a majority of people had elected a President as if Health Care had been a referendum on the ballot.
It was also disappointing to see this President fail to lead in this instance whether out of the bitter intransigence of the opposition or his own incapacity beyond waiting for the conservatives to cave in under public pressure. Since the Tea Party hadn't learned a lesson from past events, let's hope the electorate doesn't forget the lesson they taught Newt Gingrich and similar-minded Republicans in the mid-1990s.
A friend of mine argued that people on both sides of the political spectacle should not be called "idiots" – morons was the word I think I used – because in reality they are evil and should be called out as such. Stupidity, she thought, was too kind and forgiving a word to describe them adequately and more or less made excuses for their behavior that she found unacceptable.
To me, the real evil is in the power behind the elected officials, the corporations and the Svengali Brothers, for instance, who are buying the candidates for their own personal political and economic gain. The idiots, our legislators, are out in front, dancing before the temple to the tune the Men behind the Curtain play for them. (You put your right foot in...)
History is the story told by the victors, boiled down into lists of kings and wars upon which many young students waste hours of memorization. History gives us only a summation of the headlines, if we remember that much: we miss, our eyes closed by whatever means we close them, the details, the causes, the connections, the possibilities of alternatives, the thread umbilical that ties us all together.
But as Patrick Lagrange wrote, quoted (fictionally) in Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." The thoughts and inspirations we attribute to the backdrop of historical development are perhaps no more fictional than those reminiscences by people who claimed to have been witnesses, having heard, through their third cousin's barber's uncle's neighbor down the street, what in fact had been said behind closed doors.
It is how we find our voice, define our culture, explain our past, ignore our shame. It is how we close our eyes to hear the unspoken words that speak to us of who we have become regardless of who we were. It is the visible made invisible, forgotten, covered up with layers of loyalty and the silence of the ages.
It is how a man's virtu became a woman's virtue which men, now well-sported bullies and great spoiled boys, defend with what they call their honor and which modern medicine explains as perhaps abnormally high levels of testosterone.
We are told it is our sacred right and duty to vote on Election Day though not every election will yield the stuff of history. This is, everyone says, a "slow" year, one of those uneventful years in which no president, no governor in our state, not even a mayor in our town or other elected official will be called upon to be judged by the community for the quality of the mud that has been slung in his opponent's direction. They are estimating a turn-out of perhaps 15% of the registered voters today and I yawn to think I will expend the energy to go and cast my vote.
There are five statewide bond issues that need to be decided – whether to approve (or not) fixed amounts of money to maintain or repair or perhaps expand our schools, our roads, our preparedness in emergencies for the National Guard.
Who would say no to that but yet who will tell us where that money will be coming from? Our elected officials who will dance to the tune from behind the curtain?
The solitude of an afternoon: having done my civic duty, I was with one exception the only person in the high school gym not working the polling place. Aside from giving my name, signing the roster and marking my ballot, it was nearly a silent pantomime aside from the gentle undercurrent of conversation between the poll-workers amusing themselves during a slow hour, wondering if they had any more chowder left in the kitchen, I assumed, not really paying attention. Nothing momentous on our ballot, unlike Portland which got to decide whether or not to permit the recreational use of marijuana. (I wonder how that will fly? As Maine goes, so goes the nation, and all that.)
I looked down the row of tables, scanned across the gym to where they'd set up what passed for booths, saw no one I knew, no one I felt I needed to talk to, say hello to. I was here to vote, not socialize, and others seemed to respect that. It might have been different had I recognized any of my neighbors but then most of them think I'm an odd bird and would probably do no more than nod in my direction.
A quiet few minutes, then I was back on the road, stopping at the store near The Corners for a fresh onion I'd forgotten when I was out yesterday. Soon I would be among the hibernians on the hillside, holed up for the winter, at least for the worst of it. I went out as little as possible once it got too cold. A matter of choice. I let the beard grow – it seemed to make sense, fitting my mood – but one of these days, I would probably choose not to shave it off, come springtime. Then what would I do to symbolize the defeat of the sun?
The phases of nature rolled on inevitably, as one election day followed another. Something about history and the imperfections of memory made me smile as I drove up my road, trying to remember what it was like last year, going home after voting for President Obama and feeling quite proud, if frustrated, to do so.
I tried recalling other presidential elections I had voted in, how far back I might have gone. 1972 was the first one, feeling afterward I'd thrown my vote away against the Nixon Juggernaut but the collective memory forgets that though Nixon won almost all the states and districts, it had not been a landslide everywhere. And besides, a few years later, he made a different kind of history, didn't he?
Bond issues always bring out the image of money growing on trees and that we, as the Richest Nation on the Earth, must come to terms such trees now are becoming endangered. I wish I had a few in my backyard.
Had I harvested enough before the wind blew everything off down the mountainside, enough to get me and the cats through another winter?
A mild day, again, but not so summer-like I couldn't believe it was already cold-hearted November. And it hasn't gotten that cold yet – a few chilly nights, enough wind to make me realize how many pine trees there are in these woods I know. Transitions happen sometimes overnight – the melting of the gingko's leaves – but normally it was a slow process that suddenly one realized had happened: there it was.
This is a time of subtraction, when Nature eliminates what has long been visible to reveal what we hadn't noticed before, the overlooked beneath the obvious. Rather than the colors of the leaves, now, we noticed the shape of bare branches, the shading of the bark.
It is the silent companion to my solitude that walks with me along the road, leaves crunching underfoot and twigs breaking, one who doesn't mind my long silences. I look ahead and scan around me, noticing little things anew.
Thoreau, I believe it was, wrote somewhere how most people overlook the lichen which, to them, means little except to the lichenist. It depends on our perspectives, I guess.
People who look at the sky – not like the one today, momentarily overcast and grim – and who think of clouds as a constantly changing exhibition, miss seeing the sky when they think that cloud – that one, there – looks like a cow (this, Magritte tells us, is not a pipe).
But who has seen a cow looking at the sky? They have other things to think about (if think is the right word, there). Do they tell each other the tale of Achilles the Bull when we are not looking?
It is a nice day and I am feeling energetic after exercising my civic right. Rather than head home, I consider walking further up the hill toward Mount Agamemnon.
Perhaps I can see the sea this afternoon and think of sounds far off that echo from the days of Troy.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
= = = = = = =
This morning, didn't I hear the goddess singing of Achilles' rage that he will never, ever be able to catch the damn tortoise? He gets closer to the goal, as we all do, but the goal is always moving one step further away and therefore (penultimately) unattainable. Oh, Zeno, you sly old dogsbody, I must logically infer what an ingenious paradox you are! Natural speed aside, someone might argue Achilles, a hero having a longer stride than your average turtle, should quickly overtake the tortoise, being a mere tortoise, thus winning handily if even by no more than the hare's bad breath.
As applied to the real world, isn't this what happens when you replace experience with the driest generic abstractions? Ideas, such as they are, are sterile, incapable of accounting for the potential of the particular. In this, all things, ineluctably speaking, are both equal and unequal.
I hear the cry spinning outward over the wind, singing through the trees (oh, we shall come rejoicing), spinning like an ever-extending umbilical cord that weaves its way past swerve of shore to riverrun, past the present and onwards into the future, Omphale's spinning wheel forever spilling out the threads of fate woven by norns and sisters three, woven into the time on which we must learn to tread not so lightly.
Omphalos, centered, Delphic in our midst, this cry I hear, the wolf's cry, the baby's cry, the long umbilicatory chord resonating in the very belly of the world, this rage set in a silver sea.
Achilles' petulance (despite Apollo's pestilence) is a sorry state of an affair as Agamemnon and he, the great warrior-turned-heel, fought like spoiled brats over the possession of their slave girls, spoils of war, in these jeux d'enfants terribles before the walls of Troy. In the end, I half expected Briseis to run off with the tortoise or be led to safety far away on its back.
And yet Achilles could not catch him despite his speed. No wonder he was enraged.
The gods, appealed to by Thetis, Achilles' nymphic mother, acted no better than their mortal counterparts. We think the leaders in the Greeks' camp are petty, but what of the domestic spat between Zeus and Hera that find their ramifications in the tragical outcome of the war with Troy?
Was all this merely because some proud and horny boy needed to be avenged his stolen slave? (Or Menelaus, his wife?)
To Achilles, revenge for his humiliation at Agamemnon's hands, having the slave-girl prize taken from him, is more important than their political responsibility, their honor as Greeks united against a foe, the personal interests placed before their obligations to their people and their soldiers. Such childishness. Om, phalos, in favilla.
Yet these are the models by whom we mortals are supposed to guide ourselves, these gods and their heroes. The Iliad is not, as I always thought as a shallow youth, a great and epic tale of war: it is about a nation's shame and the decay that leads from it.
It is, by law, Election Day across the land, this first Tuesday of November, but in the course of human events it is not a very exciting year for elections. I had assumed we had elected a President as a result of last year's election but you would hardly notice it following another of those infamous stalemates that cost us $24 billion so the Tea Party could prove they did not have the clout to "de-fund Obamacare" despite the fact a majority of people had elected a President as if Health Care had been a referendum on the ballot.
It was also disappointing to see this President fail to lead in this instance whether out of the bitter intransigence of the opposition or his own incapacity beyond waiting for the conservatives to cave in under public pressure. Since the Tea Party hadn't learned a lesson from past events, let's hope the electorate doesn't forget the lesson they taught Newt Gingrich and similar-minded Republicans in the mid-1990s.
A friend of mine argued that people on both sides of the political spectacle should not be called "idiots" – morons was the word I think I used – because in reality they are evil and should be called out as such. Stupidity, she thought, was too kind and forgiving a word to describe them adequately and more or less made excuses for their behavior that she found unacceptable.
To me, the real evil is in the power behind the elected officials, the corporations and the Svengali Brothers, for instance, who are buying the candidates for their own personal political and economic gain. The idiots, our legislators, are out in front, dancing before the temple to the tune the Men behind the Curtain play for them. (You put your right foot in...)
History is the story told by the victors, boiled down into lists of kings and wars upon which many young students waste hours of memorization. History gives us only a summation of the headlines, if we remember that much: we miss, our eyes closed by whatever means we close them, the details, the causes, the connections, the possibilities of alternatives, the thread umbilical that ties us all together.
But as Patrick Lagrange wrote, quoted (fictionally) in Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." The thoughts and inspirations we attribute to the backdrop of historical development are perhaps no more fictional than those reminiscences by people who claimed to have been witnesses, having heard, through their third cousin's barber's uncle's neighbor down the street, what in fact had been said behind closed doors.
It is how we find our voice, define our culture, explain our past, ignore our shame. It is how we close our eyes to hear the unspoken words that speak to us of who we have become regardless of who we were. It is the visible made invisible, forgotten, covered up with layers of loyalty and the silence of the ages.
It is how a man's virtu became a woman's virtue which men, now well-sported bullies and great spoiled boys, defend with what they call their honor and which modern medicine explains as perhaps abnormally high levels of testosterone.
We are told it is our sacred right and duty to vote on Election Day though not every election will yield the stuff of history. This is, everyone says, a "slow" year, one of those uneventful years in which no president, no governor in our state, not even a mayor in our town or other elected official will be called upon to be judged by the community for the quality of the mud that has been slung in his opponent's direction. They are estimating a turn-out of perhaps 15% of the registered voters today and I yawn to think I will expend the energy to go and cast my vote.
There are five statewide bond issues that need to be decided – whether to approve (or not) fixed amounts of money to maintain or repair or perhaps expand our schools, our roads, our preparedness in emergencies for the National Guard.
Who would say no to that but yet who will tell us where that money will be coming from? Our elected officials who will dance to the tune from behind the curtain?
The solitude of an afternoon: having done my civic duty, I was with one exception the only person in the high school gym not working the polling place. Aside from giving my name, signing the roster and marking my ballot, it was nearly a silent pantomime aside from the gentle undercurrent of conversation between the poll-workers amusing themselves during a slow hour, wondering if they had any more chowder left in the kitchen, I assumed, not really paying attention. Nothing momentous on our ballot, unlike Portland which got to decide whether or not to permit the recreational use of marijuana. (I wonder how that will fly? As Maine goes, so goes the nation, and all that.)
I looked down the row of tables, scanned across the gym to where they'd set up what passed for booths, saw no one I knew, no one I felt I needed to talk to, say hello to. I was here to vote, not socialize, and others seemed to respect that. It might have been different had I recognized any of my neighbors but then most of them think I'm an odd bird and would probably do no more than nod in my direction.
A quiet few minutes, then I was back on the road, stopping at the store near The Corners for a fresh onion I'd forgotten when I was out yesterday. Soon I would be among the hibernians on the hillside, holed up for the winter, at least for the worst of it. I went out as little as possible once it got too cold. A matter of choice. I let the beard grow – it seemed to make sense, fitting my mood – but one of these days, I would probably choose not to shave it off, come springtime. Then what would I do to symbolize the defeat of the sun?
The phases of nature rolled on inevitably, as one election day followed another. Something about history and the imperfections of memory made me smile as I drove up my road, trying to remember what it was like last year, going home after voting for President Obama and feeling quite proud, if frustrated, to do so.
I tried recalling other presidential elections I had voted in, how far back I might have gone. 1972 was the first one, feeling afterward I'd thrown my vote away against the Nixon Juggernaut but the collective memory forgets that though Nixon won almost all the states and districts, it had not been a landslide everywhere. And besides, a few years later, he made a different kind of history, didn't he?
Bond issues always bring out the image of money growing on trees and that we, as the Richest Nation on the Earth, must come to terms such trees now are becoming endangered. I wish I had a few in my backyard.
Had I harvested enough before the wind blew everything off down the mountainside, enough to get me and the cats through another winter?
A mild day, again, but not so summer-like I couldn't believe it was already cold-hearted November. And it hasn't gotten that cold yet – a few chilly nights, enough wind to make me realize how many pine trees there are in these woods I know. Transitions happen sometimes overnight – the melting of the gingko's leaves – but normally it was a slow process that suddenly one realized had happened: there it was.
This is a time of subtraction, when Nature eliminates what has long been visible to reveal what we hadn't noticed before, the overlooked beneath the obvious. Rather than the colors of the leaves, now, we noticed the shape of bare branches, the shading of the bark.
It is the silent companion to my solitude that walks with me along the road, leaves crunching underfoot and twigs breaking, one who doesn't mind my long silences. I look ahead and scan around me, noticing little things anew.
Thoreau, I believe it was, wrote somewhere how most people overlook the lichen which, to them, means little except to the lichenist. It depends on our perspectives, I guess.
People who look at the sky – not like the one today, momentarily overcast and grim – and who think of clouds as a constantly changing exhibition, miss seeing the sky when they think that cloud – that one, there – looks like a cow (this, Magritte tells us, is not a pipe).
But who has seen a cow looking at the sky? They have other things to think about (if think is the right word, there). Do they tell each other the tale of Achilles the Bull when we are not looking?
It is a nice day and I am feeling energetic after exercising my civic right. Rather than head home, I consider walking further up the hill toward Mount Agamemnon.
Perhaps I can see the sea this afternoon and think of sounds far off that echo from the days of Troy.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
Monday, November 04, 2013
An Ineluctable Modality: Chapter 4
An Ineluctable Modality is a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo's 2013 Challenge where the goal was to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. This year, I wrote a novel-in-blog-posts: you can read the previous chapter, here.
= = = = = = =
There are few leaves left on the trees around the house, now. This morning, it was bitter cold with a low in the mid-20s after a few days of teasing warmth. Perhaps ten days ago, a group of gingko trees downhill from the yard had lost their leaves overnight, the ground covered with a deep layer of butter-yellow. Now, all that's left were a few hearty oaks and some beeches. Usually, it makes me sad, watching this happen. I hardly need to brood on mortality when I'm trying to write.
The phone rang, not for the first time today, but I had just settled down in my study to try thrashing out a new composition which was more reluctant than usual to take form. Over the past few years, I have composed less and less and it becomes more difficult to get a piece started, even more of a challenge to keep it going and nearly impossible to get past the half-way point before it dies a slow death.
I tell friends I am not composing, have lost interest in it which is not the same thing: it seems more embarrassing to say I'm composing (or thinking about composing) almost all the time – it's just I never finish anything. It sounds less depressing to say I'm no longer composing.
There had already been some phone calls this morning, a few wrong numbers or telemarketers – hang-ups mostly – plus the last ditch effort of a local politician trying to get out the vote for tomorrow's election. Even though my answering machine is in the kitchen and my study upstairs at the other end of the house, hearing my message going out is disruption enough even for a hang-up.
I think of turning it down so that I can't hear it, then apologize later if I actually do get a message that a friend had called. "Sorry, I must've just stepped out of the house then" becomes a less realistic excuse as the weather gets colder.
I'd already spent an hour staring at a sheet of paper, noodling a few bits at the piano with nothing happening, so when the phone rang, the temptation was to ignore it, promising myself I'd call her back when I no longer felt like working, once the thought that something was finally beginning to take shape might yield some results.
But what had been slow to get started usually came to an abrupt end anyway, so there's really no point in trying to start it up again. It would be different if I decided to take a break, go out for a walk, or just sit and stare out a window. That's usually productive, like meditation: clears the mind so other thoughts are freed up. A conversation, no matter how enjoyable, is like clutter that blocks the flow.
People don't seem to understand this, how the creative mind works – at least how mine does. I cannot, like a pianist practicing a new piece, just pick up where I'd left off. Plus it's always hard to tell if there's a problem with her. Her tone is always anxious.
I know I'd feel awful if I just ignored her and there was a problem. She's a friend, after all. I always answer her calls with "Sybil, hi – what's the matter?"
Something is always the matter with Sybil but it's more likely something I can't help her with. Even when I first met her, she was in full crisis mode over something – I've forgotten what, now – as usual more in need of advice than anything I could do to help. It might be easier if she were stranded somewhere and needed a lift or something was broken that I could fix.
Invariably, I either spend my time listening like I'm her therapist (one time when I asked her how that made her feel, she didn't find it amusing) or trying to give her advice that most people would have thought was obvious.
The problem with giving advice to friends is if they don't want to hear it, they will ignore you and think less of you for it, or agree that's just what they need to do, confirmation of their own thoughts, but then you know full well they're not going to follow through with it.
In Sybil's case, most of these dilemmas in her life stem from the relationships she has or would like to have. It is never anything easy like trying to find a good plumber.
There are friends in the past with whom I could talk shop or who understood my interests. There were also friends – like Sybil – who have no idea what it is I do (if I know, myself, half the time) and with whom I had little in common.
Most of what people like to talk about is what interests them which are not, generally, at least these days outside the academic community, things I find deeply compelling.
There is something to be said for small talk – you can't always be discussing the major philosophical topics of our lives – but it's called "small" for a reason.
Talking about classical music or Russian literature won't hold the interests of those who'd rather discuss the weekend's football games or the latest movies.
When I was young, my conversation was usually idealistic, idea-based, either seeking to impress my older colleagues or learn something from them, what they thought about issues or how they handled themselves, life-lessons I could apply, things that were not taught in school nor one would imagine observing (at this point) in ones parents. I don't think Sybil had ever had this opportunity.
She'd always been moving from one job to another, a series of full-time "temporary" positions that last a year or two before she gets bored or fired and needs to move on, sometimes to a new town. The only consistency in her friends was their constant change.
Later, I found my conversations with friends had turned more practical, especially as I moved outside my circle of immediate colleagues. We talked about problems at work, dealing with abrasive personalities, feeling hampered by the system, whichever system seemed to be controlling us.
Sybil thrived in a world of conspiracies where everyone was out to do unto others before the others did unto them. She and her friends were always the victim, never the problem.
We talk about what we experienced and what has changed over the years. Now that I'm retired, there is little I experience worth talking about to a friend who is younger and still working.
Sybil, dealing with a new job where she's already found herself on the outside, talks of little else.
I sigh, already resigning myself to being unable to help her and in the process put an end to my work for the day. I must make an effort not to sound resentful but yet I want her to know that she interrupted me. There are some people who could call me and I think would never be an interruption but whenever she calls, it is always an intrusion.
If I asked a friend for advice what I should do about someone like this, they would ask me (if not "how does that make you feel?"), "why not just tell her not to call you? Set boundaries. Do you need this friendship?"
Picking up the phone, interrupting the anxiety of her incoming message, vaguely worded but emotionally voiced, I find myself saying "Hi, Sybil – what's the problem today?"
She doesn't get it.
"Oh, I'm glad you're home," she says, her anxiety immediately dissipating. It's as if my presence has immediately calmed her.
Though I've yet to succumb to a modern cell phone, at least my "land-line" is cordless and I can walk around the house while we talk. If nothing else, she is a good form of exercise.
"You wouldn't believe what that bitch was saying about me behind my back, yesterday."
("Yes," I thought, "and how are you? Did you have a good weekend? No?")
It is the end of the work-day for me, now, my creativity shot. There's no point trying to write any more, so I put the papers away and turn out the light.
Listening to her complaint, I walk into my living room and pace back and forth in front of the windows, looking at the sun reflecting against the bare branches of trees that, two weeks ago, had been brilliant with golds and reds.
A cat sleeps on the couch, looking contented, and I realize I'm envious.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
= = = = = = =
There are few leaves left on the trees around the house, now. This morning, it was bitter cold with a low in the mid-20s after a few days of teasing warmth. Perhaps ten days ago, a group of gingko trees downhill from the yard had lost their leaves overnight, the ground covered with a deep layer of butter-yellow. Now, all that's left were a few hearty oaks and some beeches. Usually, it makes me sad, watching this happen. I hardly need to brood on mortality when I'm trying to write.
The phone rang, not for the first time today, but I had just settled down in my study to try thrashing out a new composition which was more reluctant than usual to take form. Over the past few years, I have composed less and less and it becomes more difficult to get a piece started, even more of a challenge to keep it going and nearly impossible to get past the half-way point before it dies a slow death.
I tell friends I am not composing, have lost interest in it which is not the same thing: it seems more embarrassing to say I'm composing (or thinking about composing) almost all the time – it's just I never finish anything. It sounds less depressing to say I'm no longer composing.
There had already been some phone calls this morning, a few wrong numbers or telemarketers – hang-ups mostly – plus the last ditch effort of a local politician trying to get out the vote for tomorrow's election. Even though my answering machine is in the kitchen and my study upstairs at the other end of the house, hearing my message going out is disruption enough even for a hang-up.
I think of turning it down so that I can't hear it, then apologize later if I actually do get a message that a friend had called. "Sorry, I must've just stepped out of the house then" becomes a less realistic excuse as the weather gets colder.
I'd already spent an hour staring at a sheet of paper, noodling a few bits at the piano with nothing happening, so when the phone rang, the temptation was to ignore it, promising myself I'd call her back when I no longer felt like working, once the thought that something was finally beginning to take shape might yield some results.
But what had been slow to get started usually came to an abrupt end anyway, so there's really no point in trying to start it up again. It would be different if I decided to take a break, go out for a walk, or just sit and stare out a window. That's usually productive, like meditation: clears the mind so other thoughts are freed up. A conversation, no matter how enjoyable, is like clutter that blocks the flow.
People don't seem to understand this, how the creative mind works – at least how mine does. I cannot, like a pianist practicing a new piece, just pick up where I'd left off. Plus it's always hard to tell if there's a problem with her. Her tone is always anxious.
I know I'd feel awful if I just ignored her and there was a problem. She's a friend, after all. I always answer her calls with "Sybil, hi – what's the matter?"
Something is always the matter with Sybil but it's more likely something I can't help her with. Even when I first met her, she was in full crisis mode over something – I've forgotten what, now – as usual more in need of advice than anything I could do to help. It might be easier if she were stranded somewhere and needed a lift or something was broken that I could fix.
Invariably, I either spend my time listening like I'm her therapist (one time when I asked her how that made her feel, she didn't find it amusing) or trying to give her advice that most people would have thought was obvious.
The problem with giving advice to friends is if they don't want to hear it, they will ignore you and think less of you for it, or agree that's just what they need to do, confirmation of their own thoughts, but then you know full well they're not going to follow through with it.
In Sybil's case, most of these dilemmas in her life stem from the relationships she has or would like to have. It is never anything easy like trying to find a good plumber.
There are friends in the past with whom I could talk shop or who understood my interests. There were also friends – like Sybil – who have no idea what it is I do (if I know, myself, half the time) and with whom I had little in common.
Most of what people like to talk about is what interests them which are not, generally, at least these days outside the academic community, things I find deeply compelling.
There is something to be said for small talk – you can't always be discussing the major philosophical topics of our lives – but it's called "small" for a reason.
Talking about classical music or Russian literature won't hold the interests of those who'd rather discuss the weekend's football games or the latest movies.
When I was young, my conversation was usually idealistic, idea-based, either seeking to impress my older colleagues or learn something from them, what they thought about issues or how they handled themselves, life-lessons I could apply, things that were not taught in school nor one would imagine observing (at this point) in ones parents. I don't think Sybil had ever had this opportunity.
She'd always been moving from one job to another, a series of full-time "temporary" positions that last a year or two before she gets bored or fired and needs to move on, sometimes to a new town. The only consistency in her friends was their constant change.
Later, I found my conversations with friends had turned more practical, especially as I moved outside my circle of immediate colleagues. We talked about problems at work, dealing with abrasive personalities, feeling hampered by the system, whichever system seemed to be controlling us.
Sybil thrived in a world of conspiracies where everyone was out to do unto others before the others did unto them. She and her friends were always the victim, never the problem.
We talk about what we experienced and what has changed over the years. Now that I'm retired, there is little I experience worth talking about to a friend who is younger and still working.
Sybil, dealing with a new job where she's already found herself on the outside, talks of little else.
I sigh, already resigning myself to being unable to help her and in the process put an end to my work for the day. I must make an effort not to sound resentful but yet I want her to know that she interrupted me. There are some people who could call me and I think would never be an interruption but whenever she calls, it is always an intrusion.
If I asked a friend for advice what I should do about someone like this, they would ask me (if not "how does that make you feel?"), "why not just tell her not to call you? Set boundaries. Do you need this friendship?"
Picking up the phone, interrupting the anxiety of her incoming message, vaguely worded but emotionally voiced, I find myself saying "Hi, Sybil – what's the problem today?"
She doesn't get it.
"Oh, I'm glad you're home," she says, her anxiety immediately dissipating. It's as if my presence has immediately calmed her.
Though I've yet to succumb to a modern cell phone, at least my "land-line" is cordless and I can walk around the house while we talk. If nothing else, she is a good form of exercise.
"You wouldn't believe what that bitch was saying about me behind my back, yesterday."
("Yes," I thought, "and how are you? Did you have a good weekend? No?")
It is the end of the work-day for me, now, my creativity shot. There's no point trying to write any more, so I put the papers away and turn out the light.
Listening to her complaint, I walk into my living room and pace back and forth in front of the windows, looking at the sun reflecting against the bare branches of trees that, two weeks ago, had been brilliant with golds and reds.
A cat sleeps on the couch, looking contented, and I realize I'm envious.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
Sunday, November 03, 2013
An Ineluctable Modality: Chapter 3
An Ineluctable Modality is a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo's 2013 Challenge where the goal was to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. This year, I wrote a novel-in-blog-posts: you can read the previous chapter, here.
= = = = = = =
It had been such a mild day yesterday for this late in the season, I thought I would drive into town and walk around a bit in between running some errands, mostly for the exercise knowing that, with winter coming, it will be less likely I'll get much walking done at all. Even after six years, I feel like a tourist here, whenever I drive into Langley ("The Village," they call it, of course). Most people on the street who'd notice would probably figure me for a summer person who forgot to leave. Soon enough, I will be hibernating out here in my farmhouse in the woods. I might as well start stocking up on food – canned goods, cat food and the like – and the grocery store in the old shopping center near the center of town was as good as any that might be closer. The post office was just around the corner so I took care of some business there as well and since the library was only a couple blocks beyond that, I'd check to see if anything new would be of interest.
Normally, I would not bother with a library since I like to buy any book I'd be interested in reading, considering most of the books I would be interested in reading weren't typical of the ones you'd find in a small-town library. But I must get over this attitude of superiority that marks me as a "Big City Fella" looking down on the simpler way of life, here.
I can hardly complain about feeling like an outsider with that, can I? But I didn't move here for the camaraderie, either, whatever I care about their perception of me. The point is, I wanted to be left alone and that is an easy thing to do, here.
At the post office, people were talking about the Halloween parade that had been canceled because of the wind – up to 30mph, they said, and I suspect it had been higher than that up on my hill. It wasn't safe for the kids, though of course they were disappointed. Twenty years ago, Madeleine and I would certainly have gone out, maybe not in costume, with some friends to grab a bite to eat and take in the parade, hurrying back in time for trick-or-treaters, though invariably I would have retreated to my study and let her tend to the candy.
Walking along the street toward the library, I noticed a crowd of people standing in the old cemetery though it didn't look like a funeral. Ah, I thought, a ghost tour left-over from Halloween. Someone walking up behind me confirmed it was a group that had planned on visiting "Old Mary's" grave last night during the parade: much safer, I thought, in the day light.
Old Mary's grave, the only witch in town, someone told me when I first moved here and I asked about witchcraft trials in its past. Salem it was not – there was only one, I was told, and even then, Old Mary (who was neither old and nor possibly even named Mary) hadn't become known as a witch until years after her death and that, it turns out, was all circumstantial. When she died, her husband placed a heavy stone – wolfstone, it was called – over the length of her grave, ostensibly to keep the animals from digging at the new-turned ground. Right.
But it was the only grave in the cemetery like that and so people began to suspect it was to keep her from digging her way out of the grave and coming back to haunt him. Then people noticed large flocks of crows started to gather, sitting on her tomb on the anniversary of her death, the only grave in the whole cemetery they flocked to – and on that day, now, really – what was not to think (or rather, assume)?
The wind rattled noisily, steadily around my house Friday night, despite its being protected by the surrounding trees. The whole idea of watching a program about a history of New England vampires on television didn't help pass the night, alone in this old, creaking house. Usually, such noises had become part of my aural landscape by now, creeping out of the woodwork. They rarely phased me even when they'd come unexpectedly.
Still, I couldn't help but remember the fear I used to have trying to sleep in this very room when I was a child, visiting during those summers, convinced my grandparents lived with a whole family of ghosts. It had been hardly better, last Friday night.
Now, last night had been much quieter and this morning, I woke to gray skies, still fairly mild for Maine this time of year. I know, I didn't want to be writing an on-line journal – which is all a blog is, really, isn't it? – all about weather and the news of the day. They're rather solipsistic affairs, aren't they, these blogs? Only what I experience matters in the scheme of things: leave it to someone else to put them all together to make a whole. I had considered naming myself Sol Lipsitt after an old teacher of mine, but I like Proteus better.
At least, we have a history, Proteus and I. The other names I'm using, not so much. My wife's name was not really Madeleine Elstir. The simple mention of her name evokes a world of memories for me, meeting her when I first started teaching at Cheatham College and she was an aspiring painter just finishing a degree in art. The first time I saw her, I hardly noticed her, but we quickly became good friends and married that first summer. I would like to think we were happy, the two of us, and there were times, frankly, being with her just made me feel dizzy with delight, if that's not too prosaic a statement (vertiginous, perhaps). In the larger scheme of things, shoes fit – worn: Sol Lipsitt rises above the masses. Ita missa est.
I did not turn the clocks back last night before I went to bed. It seemed better to wait until I was awake to see what time it would have been, then reset the clocks – “Falling Back" to what was now the official time. And just like that, I could see I've received an extra hour, the return on my investment with Daylight Savings Time and Bank.
Of course not, I would tell students who'd nod at anything I'd say. It's Daylight Saving Time and we're only being repaid the hour the government borrowed back in the spring: there's not even a minute of interest earned on that loan. Where's the justice in that?
Now, if I could turn the clock back years, not just an hour, how far back would I turn it? If I turned the clock back one hour at a time, would I wake up with Madeleine beside me again? How many hours, cranking backwards, would it take to reach the time my parents and I visited this house when I was a child?
Not to relive it but to stay a while, until springing forward, back to the present, no more than a vacation in the past. Would I want to spend five months there and then return, knowing what the future will be?
Every year with the return of Standard Time, I would fall back into a summer past or maybe springtime which I prefer (no great fan of cold, neither am I a fan of hot weather). What would the point of this time travel be if could only go back to some past winter? But not just any season: who would want to find themselves (again) in the path of that hurricane which flooded your town or that blizzard which dumped three feet of snow on your house and the old oak tree fell and caved in your roof?
If the government thinks it can legislate time any better than it can the greed of Wall Street – or the health insurance industry, for that matter – what guarantees would there be we would like what happened any better than where we already find ourselves? Then people would be stuck in decades they didn't really want, in seasons they didn't care for.
Where is the political outrage today against a government intent on meddling in our lives and legislating time? Shouldn't Fox News be advocating their viewers protest President Obama's Administration by refusing to turn their clocks back? But then the Right Wing would be in the future, for once, and wouldn't they feel uncomfortable with that? Better to do this in the springtime when they can refuse to turn their clocks ahead.
The implications would be significant: "Tonight's program is at 8:00 Blue Time, 7:00 Red Time." Conservatives show up to meetings an hour earlier than the liberals and push through their agenda. The nation's divisiveness would be made even more manifest, the fulfillment of the solipsis.
But imagine the potential for vacations in sunny 1972. Or going back to attend the world premiere of The Rite of Spring a hundred years ago: only 876,552 cranks. Think of all the jobs that would be created for people who would spend their days turning clocks back hour by hour to the requested destination? How many people would it take to perform 876,552 cranks around the clock?
Of course, one would have to calculate this carefully, accounting for leap years for an extended journey like that, not to mention counting each turn correctly. Perhaps going back to May a year ago would be more feasible: that's only 549 days ago or 13,176 turns of the clock's hour hand.
Digital clocks would be much faster, of course, but would they work as well as the physical turning of an analog clock, watching the hands, crank by crank, swirling backwards?
What would happen if only the traveler could crank the clock: how long would it take one person to perform that many rotations around the dial?
My coffee ready and the oatmeal done, I set them on a small tray and, bypassing the eager cats, stepped out onto my back porch to enjoy breakfast while watching the sun come up. I put birdseed in the feeders on the edge of the porch and the one in the patch of now dead flowers and bare-branched bushes.
I know they tell you not to put seed out for the birds during the summer when they can find enough food for themselves, but I like to see them when they come to visit. It's a mutual bit of welfare.
In the winter, that's different, I'm told, even though I would rather not have to get dressed warmly enough to go outside and face the cold, especially on those windy mornings, or when I must tromp through the snow.
Whether the birds appreciate my thoughtfulness or not, who knows, but I know my squirrels have become fat as a result of it and for this, I'm sure, the hawks are grateful.
But it had begun to rain, now, the temperature too cool to enjoy it as I'd hoped. I was spoiled yesterday, standing in the sunlight. Even though it was no longer summer, it felt like a fresh remembrance rather than a distant memory.
After eating my oatmeal in the warmth of my parlor, looking out over the porch, I wondered how to spend the day: start reading a new book?
Perhaps I should write a book instead? I wonder how Henry is doing with his – it's tempting to call him and ask how it's going.
He will not answer his phone, I'm sure. He would have it and the answering machine unplugged. I would.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
= = = = = = =
It had been such a mild day yesterday for this late in the season, I thought I would drive into town and walk around a bit in between running some errands, mostly for the exercise knowing that, with winter coming, it will be less likely I'll get much walking done at all. Even after six years, I feel like a tourist here, whenever I drive into Langley ("The Village," they call it, of course). Most people on the street who'd notice would probably figure me for a summer person who forgot to leave. Soon enough, I will be hibernating out here in my farmhouse in the woods. I might as well start stocking up on food – canned goods, cat food and the like – and the grocery store in the old shopping center near the center of town was as good as any that might be closer. The post office was just around the corner so I took care of some business there as well and since the library was only a couple blocks beyond that, I'd check to see if anything new would be of interest.
Normally, I would not bother with a library since I like to buy any book I'd be interested in reading, considering most of the books I would be interested in reading weren't typical of the ones you'd find in a small-town library. But I must get over this attitude of superiority that marks me as a "Big City Fella" looking down on the simpler way of life, here.
I can hardly complain about feeling like an outsider with that, can I? But I didn't move here for the camaraderie, either, whatever I care about their perception of me. The point is, I wanted to be left alone and that is an easy thing to do, here.
At the post office, people were talking about the Halloween parade that had been canceled because of the wind – up to 30mph, they said, and I suspect it had been higher than that up on my hill. It wasn't safe for the kids, though of course they were disappointed. Twenty years ago, Madeleine and I would certainly have gone out, maybe not in costume, with some friends to grab a bite to eat and take in the parade, hurrying back in time for trick-or-treaters, though invariably I would have retreated to my study and let her tend to the candy.
Walking along the street toward the library, I noticed a crowd of people standing in the old cemetery though it didn't look like a funeral. Ah, I thought, a ghost tour left-over from Halloween. Someone walking up behind me confirmed it was a group that had planned on visiting "Old Mary's" grave last night during the parade: much safer, I thought, in the day light.
Old Mary's grave, the only witch in town, someone told me when I first moved here and I asked about witchcraft trials in its past. Salem it was not – there was only one, I was told, and even then, Old Mary (who was neither old and nor possibly even named Mary) hadn't become known as a witch until years after her death and that, it turns out, was all circumstantial. When she died, her husband placed a heavy stone – wolfstone, it was called – over the length of her grave, ostensibly to keep the animals from digging at the new-turned ground. Right.
But it was the only grave in the cemetery like that and so people began to suspect it was to keep her from digging her way out of the grave and coming back to haunt him. Then people noticed large flocks of crows started to gather, sitting on her tomb on the anniversary of her death, the only grave in the whole cemetery they flocked to – and on that day, now, really – what was not to think (or rather, assume)?
The wind rattled noisily, steadily around my house Friday night, despite its being protected by the surrounding trees. The whole idea of watching a program about a history of New England vampires on television didn't help pass the night, alone in this old, creaking house. Usually, such noises had become part of my aural landscape by now, creeping out of the woodwork. They rarely phased me even when they'd come unexpectedly.
Still, I couldn't help but remember the fear I used to have trying to sleep in this very room when I was a child, visiting during those summers, convinced my grandparents lived with a whole family of ghosts. It had been hardly better, last Friday night.
Now, last night had been much quieter and this morning, I woke to gray skies, still fairly mild for Maine this time of year. I know, I didn't want to be writing an on-line journal – which is all a blog is, really, isn't it? – all about weather and the news of the day. They're rather solipsistic affairs, aren't they, these blogs? Only what I experience matters in the scheme of things: leave it to someone else to put them all together to make a whole. I had considered naming myself Sol Lipsitt after an old teacher of mine, but I like Proteus better.
At least, we have a history, Proteus and I. The other names I'm using, not so much. My wife's name was not really Madeleine Elstir. The simple mention of her name evokes a world of memories for me, meeting her when I first started teaching at Cheatham College and she was an aspiring painter just finishing a degree in art. The first time I saw her, I hardly noticed her, but we quickly became good friends and married that first summer. I would like to think we were happy, the two of us, and there were times, frankly, being with her just made me feel dizzy with delight, if that's not too prosaic a statement (vertiginous, perhaps). In the larger scheme of things, shoes fit – worn: Sol Lipsitt rises above the masses. Ita missa est.
I did not turn the clocks back last night before I went to bed. It seemed better to wait until I was awake to see what time it would have been, then reset the clocks – “Falling Back" to what was now the official time. And just like that, I could see I've received an extra hour, the return on my investment with Daylight Savings Time and Bank.
Of course not, I would tell students who'd nod at anything I'd say. It's Daylight Saving Time and we're only being repaid the hour the government borrowed back in the spring: there's not even a minute of interest earned on that loan. Where's the justice in that?
Now, if I could turn the clock back years, not just an hour, how far back would I turn it? If I turned the clock back one hour at a time, would I wake up with Madeleine beside me again? How many hours, cranking backwards, would it take to reach the time my parents and I visited this house when I was a child?
Not to relive it but to stay a while, until springing forward, back to the present, no more than a vacation in the past. Would I want to spend five months there and then return, knowing what the future will be?
Every year with the return of Standard Time, I would fall back into a summer past or maybe springtime which I prefer (no great fan of cold, neither am I a fan of hot weather). What would the point of this time travel be if could only go back to some past winter? But not just any season: who would want to find themselves (again) in the path of that hurricane which flooded your town or that blizzard which dumped three feet of snow on your house and the old oak tree fell and caved in your roof?
If the government thinks it can legislate time any better than it can the greed of Wall Street – or the health insurance industry, for that matter – what guarantees would there be we would like what happened any better than where we already find ourselves? Then people would be stuck in decades they didn't really want, in seasons they didn't care for.
Where is the political outrage today against a government intent on meddling in our lives and legislating time? Shouldn't Fox News be advocating their viewers protest President Obama's Administration by refusing to turn their clocks back? But then the Right Wing would be in the future, for once, and wouldn't they feel uncomfortable with that? Better to do this in the springtime when they can refuse to turn their clocks ahead.
The implications would be significant: "Tonight's program is at 8:00 Blue Time, 7:00 Red Time." Conservatives show up to meetings an hour earlier than the liberals and push through their agenda. The nation's divisiveness would be made even more manifest, the fulfillment of the solipsis.
But imagine the potential for vacations in sunny 1972. Or going back to attend the world premiere of The Rite of Spring a hundred years ago: only 876,552 cranks. Think of all the jobs that would be created for people who would spend their days turning clocks back hour by hour to the requested destination? How many people would it take to perform 876,552 cranks around the clock?
Of course, one would have to calculate this carefully, accounting for leap years for an extended journey like that, not to mention counting each turn correctly. Perhaps going back to May a year ago would be more feasible: that's only 549 days ago or 13,176 turns of the clock's hour hand.
Digital clocks would be much faster, of course, but would they work as well as the physical turning of an analog clock, watching the hands, crank by crank, swirling backwards?
What would happen if only the traveler could crank the clock: how long would it take one person to perform that many rotations around the dial?
My coffee ready and the oatmeal done, I set them on a small tray and, bypassing the eager cats, stepped out onto my back porch to enjoy breakfast while watching the sun come up. I put birdseed in the feeders on the edge of the porch and the one in the patch of now dead flowers and bare-branched bushes.
I know they tell you not to put seed out for the birds during the summer when they can find enough food for themselves, but I like to see them when they come to visit. It's a mutual bit of welfare.
In the winter, that's different, I'm told, even though I would rather not have to get dressed warmly enough to go outside and face the cold, especially on those windy mornings, or when I must tromp through the snow.
Whether the birds appreciate my thoughtfulness or not, who knows, but I know my squirrels have become fat as a result of it and for this, I'm sure, the hawks are grateful.
But it had begun to rain, now, the temperature too cool to enjoy it as I'd hoped. I was spoiled yesterday, standing in the sunlight. Even though it was no longer summer, it felt like a fresh remembrance rather than a distant memory.
After eating my oatmeal in the warmth of my parlor, looking out over the porch, I wondered how to spend the day: start reading a new book?
Perhaps I should write a book instead? I wonder how Henry is doing with his – it's tempting to call him and ask how it's going.
He will not answer his phone, I'm sure. He would have it and the answering machine unplugged. I would.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
Saturday, November 02, 2013
An Ineluctable Modality: Chapter 2
An Ineluctable Modality is a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo's 2013 Challenge where the goal was to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. This year, I wrote a novel-in-blog-posts: you can read the previous chapter, here.
= = = = = = =
Call me Proteus. In the realm of blogs, real identity stands for nothing. You don't know me, probably won't, and since no one will likely read this – for me, even my short posts would be beyond the normal person's realm of concentration – it is a way for me to express myself without actually telling anyone. It's the internet equivalent of a note-in-a-bottle – that's what my son said, jokingly, when we talked over the summer, when he suggested I keep a blog.
"But what would I write about and what would be so interesting about that that someone else would want to read it?" I wondered if he would bother reading it.
The argument came down to time and how to spend it. Before, I would have complained of the time it took to write this versus the rewards of having written it. Instant publishing, perhaps, and I can write what I want. There's always the chance some publisher or literary agent will find it, read it, like it and ask you if they could publish it. (Well, hello, there – come here often?) But not likely, he added. Jokingly?
It's a good thing I'm not writing for money: the one book I did write and publish – a study of the Seventh Symphony of Anton Bruckner – probably sold a hundred copies or so. Cost more to have it pulped after it even failed on the remainder table, from what my agent told me.
I would never have been able to retire to the Maine seacoast on those earnings. I doubt they would've put food on the table for a month. Perhaps that was when the fantasy of moving to Maine first started, with my wife and I.
It became a joke whenever someone commissioned me to compose a new piece for them (if they hadn't just asked me outright – for the exposure, you know): will it be enough we could retire to the coast of Maine? She remembered my childhood stories about visiting the grandparents – vague recollections always shrouded in the idealized world of a child (we were, for one thing, never there in winter).
"Wouldn't you like that – retiring to Maine?" But retirement was a long way off then and we had so much to do, to live for, then, even the idea of retiring was a joke.
So here I am, retired and living on the Maine seacoast – or near enough. If I stood on the roof, I might be able to see the ocean. I think she would have found that amusing, too.
And possibly appreciate the irony as well, landing here at the end of the cycle where I remember things from its opposite end. What has happened here in the fifty years between?
Three times in my life, someone referred to me as Proteus – or more correctly as being "protean". Not me, so much as the music I was writing then. The first time, I had to look it up because I wasn't sure how the critic was using it – "His music is full of protean rhythms" – so I just assumed he didn't know what it meant, either.
Unless it can mean simply "energetic" rather than "capable of sudden changes," like the ancient Greek god of something-or-other. At the time, I hadn't encountered Homer's Proteus with Menelaus hiding among the seals, wrestling him through his many instant transformations.
Apparently, another critic – this one in New York – must have read the first one (I've received so many reviews – apply sounds of sarcasm, here – it's odd, isn't it?, that two of them should use the same adjective).
How did anyone, before the internet, manage to find obscure reviews like that and plagiarize them? It's a common enough word, I guess, for someone wanting to showcase their vocabulary.
Though I had to admit, that piece (different piece – I've never had any of my works performed enough to garner two separate reviews) was full of sudden changes of mood, tempo, contrasts in general that might apply to the old Greek river god.
Perhaps they both owned the same edition of Roget? How does music manifest itself? Let me count the ways. Presto ciangio. (Ipso facto, kiddo.)
How the Old Man of the Sea applied to my music was another mystery. Then I read Joyce and realized the mere sound of a word, its euphony, was enough to suggest its use.
Now, when I walk along the beach, looking out for dead dogs or the likes of Gerty MacDowell, I think of myself as the Old Man by the Sea.
During a conversation in which I had apparently taken several sides of an argument – I forget when this was, but I was probably in my late-20s – an older colleague told me (in a negative tone) I was being "positively protean." And in that sense it stuck as a nickname for a while, one of those applied for lack of anything less nuanced. I was not especially convinced being doctrinaire about ones viewpoints was entirely a good thing, too many people seeing everything as black or white with nothing in between, so many shades and gradations deserving our consideration.
Now, like so many other aspects of my life, comparing me today to me even ten years ago, the idea of being "positively protean" is another irony, if that's the proper use of the term, that the Proteus I had been is not the Proteus I've become. Half my life ago, my moods might flare up with so little provocation – and this, a complaint from a woman I could nickname Menepausal – but now, my responses simmer or quickly dissolve.
Whatever I may have been (or felt I was) when I was teaching – and one always likes to think the seeds sown in a classroom will someday reach the harvest point – is not what I have become now, retired. Routine has expanded to fill the greater time available, compensating for its fewer events. One thing I'm positive of is the rut I find myself in: hardly protean.
How is this not also a form of change, I think, having stood on my porch, watching yesterday's briefly soaking rain dissipate to drizzle once I had changed my clothes. Like the seasons' slower rate of change, the volcano's gone dormant; it's the fire after the fuel is spent. Nonetheless a change. Unwelcome, though.
As a teacher, my day was tightly scheduled, the routine, its expectations set in oaktag or whatever those cards were made of, posted on the office doors: this class, that class, another class that no one seemed to know what it was, office hours. Time to prepare, to grade papers, even to get from one class to the next, sometimes, were all controlled and difficult to deviate from.
Today, I have no schedule, no one expecting anything of me, a transition that was not easily made after Madeleine's death and my heart attack, even before I settled into the idea of retirement which I tried not to think of as being "side-lined." (Worse: suspended animation.)
My teaching schedule offered little time to compose, no more than an hour here or there as a pianist might use to practice. Such schedules are crafted by people who are not creative: that is not the way my creativity worked – others, maybe, but not mine.
Now I have all the time in the world (so the saying goes) to sit at my piano and write whatever music I wanted to.
And can't.
"Start with a title," Henry had said, without telling me what his title would be – afraid I'd steal it and discover his plot, beat him to the publisher and reap the fame and success that should've been his? Could I tell myself I will begin an orchestral work (no, let's be more realistic: a short piano piece – at least I could play it myself) which I will complete in a month, then try to write the equally unrealistic equivalent of 50,000 notes. How many minutes of music would 50,000 notes be? I'd never thought of it that way.
I had long ago developed a very structural approach to my music, thought out and carefully crafted. The idea of sitting down and just improvising something, letting it take me wherever it would, was not something I could do. Yet I remember, as a student, doing just that: not knowing what I might compose the next day, improvising at the keyboard by the hour (or what seemed like it).
For me, now, inspiration is not something that ignites a new piece; it is what comes afterward, showing me how to resolve the challenge a new piece – its structure – presented. After I found some old pieces I'd written as a beginner, I winced not because of their immaturity which was understandable, but at their complete lack of awareness.
When I was a student, every new piece was the result of something that came to me while improvising. Later, it was a form of evolution, the slow process of a classical argument with me taking every possible side available.
Madeleine – my wife, that is – joked that I was not a spontaneous man, that even my combustion was premeditated (in turn, I joked how she had mellowed me: before knowing her, I often flew into a rage with a short attack and a long decay). She would look at me, trusting, eyes half-closed, head slightly bent (I remember that look) but I had to think about it.
So it wouldn't surprise her that, when our son suggested I write a blog, I laughed, or when Henry urged me to write a novel, I laughed again (several times and continue laughing, thinking about it, today).
Could I be spontaneous enough to consider either suggestion seriously? No, not consider it, just do it. Sit down and begin, start from scratch, imagine where it might take me, what I would say, not worry who (if anyone) was reading it? Like my music, I write for myself. Point of fact: if it means nothing to me, what could it possibly mean to anyone else?
Since the internet fosters anonymity, know me, then, as Proteus. It seems a logical name to use as I continue reinventing myself. "To exist is to change," someone said (Bergson, I think), "to change is to mature and to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." (Yes, Henri Bergson, though I don't remember where he said that).
I've always liked that, whether we think of change as inevitable or maturing as an option. Which draws me back to Ulysses which I've tried reading through twice in my life, in different ways at different times (more easily, finishing it, for once, not long ago).
So before I had considered what I might – could – write about, I went on-line, found the site my son had suggested, followed the instructions and gradually it started taking shape, the transubstantiation of an idea into options, possibilities.
Start with a title – at least that, I heard someone behind me say, a voice from a past, that if nothing more, thought (through my eyes) would be made visible, an ineluctable modality.
If I should do the same for a novel – not this time, perhaps – what would I choose for its title, not knowing anything beyond this one simple fact? It would only be a working title, since I could change it at any time.
Even Henry said, "you begin at the beginning but maybe when you've written thirty pages you reach the point where the novel starts." Something else presents itself, you change course and choose a new title.
Perhaps I should call this novel "The Limits of the Diaphane"? At this point, five fingers in, it is more of a door than a gate.
But then I ask myself, "what is the point?" – as if that matters.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
= = = = = = =
Call me Proteus. In the realm of blogs, real identity stands for nothing. You don't know me, probably won't, and since no one will likely read this – for me, even my short posts would be beyond the normal person's realm of concentration – it is a way for me to express myself without actually telling anyone. It's the internet equivalent of a note-in-a-bottle – that's what my son said, jokingly, when we talked over the summer, when he suggested I keep a blog.
"But what would I write about and what would be so interesting about that that someone else would want to read it?" I wondered if he would bother reading it.
The argument came down to time and how to spend it. Before, I would have complained of the time it took to write this versus the rewards of having written it. Instant publishing, perhaps, and I can write what I want. There's always the chance some publisher or literary agent will find it, read it, like it and ask you if they could publish it. (Well, hello, there – come here often?) But not likely, he added. Jokingly?
It's a good thing I'm not writing for money: the one book I did write and publish – a study of the Seventh Symphony of Anton Bruckner – probably sold a hundred copies or so. Cost more to have it pulped after it even failed on the remainder table, from what my agent told me.
I would never have been able to retire to the Maine seacoast on those earnings. I doubt they would've put food on the table for a month. Perhaps that was when the fantasy of moving to Maine first started, with my wife and I.
It became a joke whenever someone commissioned me to compose a new piece for them (if they hadn't just asked me outright – for the exposure, you know): will it be enough we could retire to the coast of Maine? She remembered my childhood stories about visiting the grandparents – vague recollections always shrouded in the idealized world of a child (we were, for one thing, never there in winter).
"Wouldn't you like that – retiring to Maine?" But retirement was a long way off then and we had so much to do, to live for, then, even the idea of retiring was a joke.
So here I am, retired and living on the Maine seacoast – or near enough. If I stood on the roof, I might be able to see the ocean. I think she would have found that amusing, too.
And possibly appreciate the irony as well, landing here at the end of the cycle where I remember things from its opposite end. What has happened here in the fifty years between?
Three times in my life, someone referred to me as Proteus – or more correctly as being "protean". Not me, so much as the music I was writing then. The first time, I had to look it up because I wasn't sure how the critic was using it – "His music is full of protean rhythms" – so I just assumed he didn't know what it meant, either.
Unless it can mean simply "energetic" rather than "capable of sudden changes," like the ancient Greek god of something-or-other. At the time, I hadn't encountered Homer's Proteus with Menelaus hiding among the seals, wrestling him through his many instant transformations.
Apparently, another critic – this one in New York – must have read the first one (I've received so many reviews – apply sounds of sarcasm, here – it's odd, isn't it?, that two of them should use the same adjective).
How did anyone, before the internet, manage to find obscure reviews like that and plagiarize them? It's a common enough word, I guess, for someone wanting to showcase their vocabulary.
Though I had to admit, that piece (different piece – I've never had any of my works performed enough to garner two separate reviews) was full of sudden changes of mood, tempo, contrasts in general that might apply to the old Greek river god.
Perhaps they both owned the same edition of Roget? How does music manifest itself? Let me count the ways. Presto ciangio. (Ipso facto, kiddo.)
How the Old Man of the Sea applied to my music was another mystery. Then I read Joyce and realized the mere sound of a word, its euphony, was enough to suggest its use.
Now, when I walk along the beach, looking out for dead dogs or the likes of Gerty MacDowell, I think of myself as the Old Man by the Sea.
During a conversation in which I had apparently taken several sides of an argument – I forget when this was, but I was probably in my late-20s – an older colleague told me (in a negative tone) I was being "positively protean." And in that sense it stuck as a nickname for a while, one of those applied for lack of anything less nuanced. I was not especially convinced being doctrinaire about ones viewpoints was entirely a good thing, too many people seeing everything as black or white with nothing in between, so many shades and gradations deserving our consideration.
Now, like so many other aspects of my life, comparing me today to me even ten years ago, the idea of being "positively protean" is another irony, if that's the proper use of the term, that the Proteus I had been is not the Proteus I've become. Half my life ago, my moods might flare up with so little provocation – and this, a complaint from a woman I could nickname Menepausal – but now, my responses simmer or quickly dissolve.
Whatever I may have been (or felt I was) when I was teaching – and one always likes to think the seeds sown in a classroom will someday reach the harvest point – is not what I have become now, retired. Routine has expanded to fill the greater time available, compensating for its fewer events. One thing I'm positive of is the rut I find myself in: hardly protean.
How is this not also a form of change, I think, having stood on my porch, watching yesterday's briefly soaking rain dissipate to drizzle once I had changed my clothes. Like the seasons' slower rate of change, the volcano's gone dormant; it's the fire after the fuel is spent. Nonetheless a change. Unwelcome, though.
As a teacher, my day was tightly scheduled, the routine, its expectations set in oaktag or whatever those cards were made of, posted on the office doors: this class, that class, another class that no one seemed to know what it was, office hours. Time to prepare, to grade papers, even to get from one class to the next, sometimes, were all controlled and difficult to deviate from.
Today, I have no schedule, no one expecting anything of me, a transition that was not easily made after Madeleine's death and my heart attack, even before I settled into the idea of retirement which I tried not to think of as being "side-lined." (Worse: suspended animation.)
My teaching schedule offered little time to compose, no more than an hour here or there as a pianist might use to practice. Such schedules are crafted by people who are not creative: that is not the way my creativity worked – others, maybe, but not mine.
Now I have all the time in the world (so the saying goes) to sit at my piano and write whatever music I wanted to.
And can't.
"Start with a title," Henry had said, without telling me what his title would be – afraid I'd steal it and discover his plot, beat him to the publisher and reap the fame and success that should've been his? Could I tell myself I will begin an orchestral work (no, let's be more realistic: a short piano piece – at least I could play it myself) which I will complete in a month, then try to write the equally unrealistic equivalent of 50,000 notes. How many minutes of music would 50,000 notes be? I'd never thought of it that way.
I had long ago developed a very structural approach to my music, thought out and carefully crafted. The idea of sitting down and just improvising something, letting it take me wherever it would, was not something I could do. Yet I remember, as a student, doing just that: not knowing what I might compose the next day, improvising at the keyboard by the hour (or what seemed like it).
For me, now, inspiration is not something that ignites a new piece; it is what comes afterward, showing me how to resolve the challenge a new piece – its structure – presented. After I found some old pieces I'd written as a beginner, I winced not because of their immaturity which was understandable, but at their complete lack of awareness.
When I was a student, every new piece was the result of something that came to me while improvising. Later, it was a form of evolution, the slow process of a classical argument with me taking every possible side available.
Madeleine – my wife, that is – joked that I was not a spontaneous man, that even my combustion was premeditated (in turn, I joked how she had mellowed me: before knowing her, I often flew into a rage with a short attack and a long decay). She would look at me, trusting, eyes half-closed, head slightly bent (I remember that look) but I had to think about it.
So it wouldn't surprise her that, when our son suggested I write a blog, I laughed, or when Henry urged me to write a novel, I laughed again (several times and continue laughing, thinking about it, today).
Could I be spontaneous enough to consider either suggestion seriously? No, not consider it, just do it. Sit down and begin, start from scratch, imagine where it might take me, what I would say, not worry who (if anyone) was reading it? Like my music, I write for myself. Point of fact: if it means nothing to me, what could it possibly mean to anyone else?
Since the internet fosters anonymity, know me, then, as Proteus. It seems a logical name to use as I continue reinventing myself. "To exist is to change," someone said (Bergson, I think), "to change is to mature and to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." (Yes, Henri Bergson, though I don't remember where he said that).
I've always liked that, whether we think of change as inevitable or maturing as an option. Which draws me back to Ulysses which I've tried reading through twice in my life, in different ways at different times (more easily, finishing it, for once, not long ago).
So before I had considered what I might – could – write about, I went on-line, found the site my son had suggested, followed the instructions and gradually it started taking shape, the transubstantiation of an idea into options, possibilities.
Start with a title – at least that, I heard someone behind me say, a voice from a past, that if nothing more, thought (through my eyes) would be made visible, an ineluctable modality.
If I should do the same for a novel – not this time, perhaps – what would I choose for its title, not knowing anything beyond this one simple fact? It would only be a working title, since I could change it at any time.
Even Henry said, "you begin at the beginning but maybe when you've written thirty pages you reach the point where the novel starts." Something else presents itself, you change course and choose a new title.
Perhaps I should call this novel "The Limits of the Diaphane"? At this point, five fingers in, it is more of a door than a gate.
But then I ask myself, "what is the point?" – as if that matters.
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
Friday, November 01, 2013
An Ineluctable Modality: Chapter 1
An Ineluctable Modality is a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo's 2013 Challenge where the goal was to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. This year, I wrote a novel-in-blog-posts.
= = = = = = =
For a long time, I used to wake up early. Usually, moments before the darkness of the night would fade with the faintest glimmer of the morning sun, I would not even realize I was waking up, it happened so suddenly. Other times, it was the long, slow process of surfacing from the bottom of the sea, gradually, reluctantly, tempting me to roll over toward the wall, away from the window where, eventually, sunlight would force me to face another day. It was good that I rarely needed an alarm clock except on cloudy days when it always seemed easier to oversleep.
On days when I had to be at school for an early class, I would quietly crawl out of bed hoping not to wake my wife sleeping beside me, though nothing ever seemed to disturb her, she slept so soundly. If she had to get up in the middle of the night, I would instantly be aware of some disturbance, whether it actually woke me or not.
But those days were gone, now, not that it took much to remind myself. Even after six years, it was still like waking up in a strange place, getting used to things all over again. The room would come into focus and I would remind myself there was no school today – there was, in fact, no school – not any more, not for me.
Since I had retired, there was no longer the need to wake up so early, no hurry to get the day started and I often found myself thinking "another hour would not be so bad, would it?" Then I would turn to the wall again, pulling at the covers.
But usually I found, once awake, getting back to sleep was never the rest I'd sought and I'd lie there conscious that it was all a pretense, trying to keep my eyes closed. "What was the point?" and so I'd sit up on the edge of the bed and look around. What day was it, I'd wonder – sometimes, it was hard to tell. Another day. Wasn't that enough?
I supposed I ought to feel thankful for that, adding with a sarcastic edge, "at my age." Another day, another week – that's right, and now another month – one thing after another, the irreclaimable March of Time – tempus continues to fugit, the ticking of my life's clock.
Not everybody would wake up this morning, fortifying themselves with coffee, go about their day, and feel the rewards of a life that has, admittedly, lasted longer than I could have imagined as a child. Tick tock, tick tock...
I keep no clock in my bedroom since I moved here, as if not knowing what time it was would keep me younger.
The beach was quiet yesterday, walking along the sea, grim and overcast as it was with a long expanse of visible grayness in all directions. Rocks, water, seafoam, sky, clouds, everything seemed gray, even the trees which, shedding their leaves, were darker gray against the near-blackness of the pines. The sound was even gray, tatters of sound carried across on the tattered wind.
The tourists had largely left which made the beach habitable again. My boots – his boots, inherited ("they came with the house," I'd say, my uncle's boots) – clattered against the rounded stones worn down by centuries of waves, I'd like to think. How water has shaped them. And time.
Visibility was intense under the clouds, vibrant even if the light was limited. It was not a damp expanse of air I stood in, then. But there was a storm coming, they said, perhaps not much of one but a change in the weather.
Imagine that – "a change in the weather!" Another summer had come and gone and winter was not far off, despite autumn's clinging to the calendar. A change, indeed.
A young man walked behind me, a child, perhaps, I couldn't tell, at first. I turned and looked. No, it wasn't – no one there. For a change, there was no one in sight. Me as a child, perhaps, visiting Grandpa?
How odd when last month this place was teaming with people who'd come to gawk at our beach and soak up our atmosphere.
No, I hadn't lived here long enough to think is was even partly mine, though, not yet. According to Henry who's lived here only six more years than I.
We're still making the transition, Henry and I, like some leg-sprouting fish not yet ready for land.
The leaf-peepers had gone, now that the foliage season reached its peak two weeks ago and though the weather had gotten colder, I was surprised to find it was so mild as I strolled along the quiet beach. When I first moved here, I was not prepared for the cold but now I realized I was not prepared for this autumnal warm-up, a last gasp before snow.
Trudging along, I'd thought of rolling up my trousers, sorry I had not brought along a peach when I stubbed my toe against a particularly large stone I should have seen. "The proof is in the rock, Algy, sorry," and thinking of Michelangelo, I went.
The first of November was something of an anniversary for me, one of those remembrances that passed for anything else worth recollecting. My birthday would be coming soon enough, but that was something less and less looked forward to – endured, perhaps.
God, it was good to turn from cliff to sea, horizon limited on my left by gray rock topped by trees and town, limitless on my right out toward the sea, topped by clouds and seabirds.
It was on this day, now seven years down, I'd been told my uncle died and his house, if I wanted it, was mine. It surprised me, like a mild November day surprised me, that he had still been alive.
Or, now that he was gone, that I was his only heir, like some distant cousin come into an unexpected inheritance. Not that he was my rich uncle. Or I his poor nephew.
His lawyer, Madeleine LeMare, reminded me, while I was here, to think about it, not that I needed to make up my mind to live in it or sell, not right away. Propitious, I thought – my wife's name, that (Madeleine, I mean).
But, yes, winter was coming and these things needed considering, didn't they? No pressure but, yes, it felt like it. I was not one to make quick decisions, not since Madeleine died (my wife, that is, that Madeleine). I looked at her and tried not to frown.
He'd been a man in his early-90s, my uncle, who, for the most part, lived in his own home until the end. It was, she said, a good life if lonely but added "the property needed work," though dismissing my fears it was run down. My aunt had died decades ago, her funeral the last time I'd visited what Dad had called The Homestead. It wasn't much, then.
His great-grandparents had built the house in 1870, an old-style farmhouse even if it wasn't really a farm. I don't remember many of the details. We last visited my grandparents when I was in my teens and the place was, to my mind, ancient then.
But of all those sons and daughters, sisters and uncles over the generations, I was now his closest heir? We had never been a close family, moving away and only rarely coming back to visit, the occasional summer holiday, but still, what were the odds?
It turned out my uncle had been a bit of a miser: frugal, as the lawyer put it. He could have put a little more into the house, I thought.
I came into town yesterday to have lunch with Henry, an old friend – a friend of long standing who was also now old, just to be clear. Bald, he was, and had the air of a millionaire and judging from the house he lived in, Henry Jordan was no one's poor nephew. His house was in the village, though, above those cliffs, a grand house with a grand view of the sea which at times frightened him.
Older than me by a decade, he looked younger, lacking the white hair that automatically aged a man. Stately, plump, a young buck in his day, he was still vital and easily dominated his surroundings. We would meet upon the beach and walk a bit.
This would be the last time this month he might be free, he'd warned me, though he did not need to explain – he talked of little else for the past two weeks, at least on those occasions we spoke.
He was like a child looking forward to a holiday but with no idea where his holiday would take him and this didn't frighten him.
Henry challenged me, hand extended with his ash-sword, a swashbuckler without the costume. His cane, a hand-carved walking stick that was once his father's, waved harmlessly in my general direction. "A duel," he coughed, "a duel," and pranced about the strand.
It was November and he, like millions more (or so he figured) would spend his waking hours writing a novel. The goal in thirty days was to write 50,000 words.
He would be up at the crack of dawn, earlier if he could manage, ready to leave. And the strangest bit was, he wanted me to go with him. A duel, indeed...
I laughed when he first suggested it – "Me? Write a novel?" I figured he was joking but laughed all the more when I realized he was serious.
His workroom was set, a studio looking out over the sea. I imagined pirates coming ashore, the way he talked of adventure. The desk was ready, lined with notes and index cards – for he had been outlining for days, now – his laptop disconnected from the internet (to diminish the ultimate distraction), and he would face toward the sea and await his inspiration.
"But you know what you're going to write about?" I asked.
"No," he said, "not really." And this didn't frighten him.
"But you've been outlining for days, you said," I said.
"I know the bones but how I'll flesh them out – who knows?"
He pranced a bit more, trying to rouse my interest but I only laughed more, as much at the idea of me writing 50,000 words in a month as at the sight of him, standing there, round young virgin – so far as novels went – overflowing with anticipation.
For years, he told me when he first brought this up, he had wanted to do this and finally decided – who knew how much time he'd have left – that it was now or never. He brandished his cane at a passing seagull.
"It would mean so much if you would join me: we could spar each other on."
"You mean 'spur,' don't you?"
"That, too."
I laughed, but I declined.
The morning turned even grayer as I stood on my porch with my morning's first cup of coffee. Initially, it looked like the sun would break through – then, teasingly, it did for a moment before disappearing again. The weather, typical of Maine, was constantly changing, something I still haven't gotten used to, but it was November, now, and soon we could add snow to the endless variations.
If I put the porch furniture back out – at least a chair – I knew with the wind kicking up again, it was only a matter of time before I'd have to drag it back in. Would it be long enough to enjoy my coffee?
Despite the mugginess, it could still turn out to be a one day Indian Summer if it lasted even that long. There was no point in checking the weather forecast – a thankless job in New England at best – and I knew better than to consult my neighbors.
With a wink and a smile, they'd trot out all the old sayings for the newcomer: "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute." And that was just to start.
The days grow shorter, the afternoon ending earlier each day, faster now that November is here though it will stall a bit this weekend as we pay homage to the government's attempt to regulate the sun.
At least I'll have an extra hour's sleep to enjoy on Sunday or perhaps more likely wake up an hour earlier, once I've changed my clocks. An extra hour to spend doing nothing-in-particular.
Try as I might, I have never successfully re-set my body clock. It grows old in habit and wakes me when it wants to (tick tock, tick tock).
Henry will be glad of the extra hour to write, no doubt. I wonder how it's going?
Creativity never struck me as a communal thing, something we did as a group. I'd sat in enough faculty meetings to bear that out even when I was young and still idealistic. There was nothing worse than a meeting to kill a good idea and I had no interest in wasting my time – or my ideas – in the service of an academic committee. The only faculty member under 30 in the music department when I started at Cheatham College, I let the dinosaurs run the business: they would, anyway. Once elevated to fossilhood, I saw it had now become fashionable to let the younger generation bring things forward.
The first order of business for any committee had been to give its project a name, sometimes even before it really knew why it existed. I always suggest "Fred," met at first with polite laughter then, over the years, with mounting annoyance until I was being accused of not taking things seriously.
But I'd been quite serious, just not serious about the things they wanted me to be serious about. Wasn't that the point of being creative, letting one's inhibitions go, finding the... – whatever the cliché was before someone came up with the "Inner Child"? Creativity was play, after all, but that was something only artists (I mean, creative artists) seemed to understand.
Judging from most of the academics I worked with, whose purpose in life was take what creative artists created and analyze the hell out of it so other academics could understand how in fact we'd done that, "play" had nothing to do with it.
And here was Henry Jordan, my old friend, living up to his eyeballs in the success generated by his family's business, who decided one day he would write a novel. Of course, the whole point of this challenge, as he explained it, was to commit yourself to writing enough words to qualify for a book thick enough to be called a novel.
Quality had nothing to do with it. That wasn't the point. If you made the goal – and really, 50,000 words was, what... 115 pages, perhaps? not very much of a novel – you got a prize for showing up at the finish line.
But wasn't it just another issue to undermine our already delicate self-awareness that, thirty days down the road, you might have something that was so thoroughly indigestible, it wouldn't last two days as kindling for the fire?
Then he could sit back and call himself an author while I was stewing at my desk still trying to find enough confidence to think of myself as a composer.
"All you have to do to get started is come up with a title," he'd told me over lunch yesterday, "and that should be enough to get things flowing." (What things?) We'd found a quiet diner off the cove where the servers weren't all dressed in Halloween costumes (pirates, most of them – how original). "It's not like you're committed to it, you can always change it."
For me, titles were usually generic descriptions like Symphony No. 1 or Violin Sonata, unimaginative at least to begin but better than "Work in Progress." As the piece evolved, as inspiration met the challenge of getting from one point to another, perhaps something else might suggest itself.
He wouldn't tell me his title or for that matter anything about his would-be novel's plot, something about jinxing the process making him cautious on his first time out. Would his father have stroked a rabbit's foot before starting on a business gamble? I'm sure, good Catholic that he'd been, it involved a good deal of praying: after all, rabbit's feet were only superstitions; taking a lap around the beads was faith.
Somewhere between the end of the sandwich and the second cup of coffee – which there, I was told, was very good – Henry became increasingly sullen and eventually accused me of being a wet blanket.
"I'm not trying to talk you out of it: enjoy yourself, have a blast," I said, "but certainly you don't need me to go along with you, do you?"
If he wouldn't tell me his title, how could we discuss plot details and character development, if that was to be the benefit of writing in tandem?
"And one thing I'm sure of, is the world doesn't need a novel by me."
I'd walked down to the edge of the wood to pick up some branches that had fallen in last night's wind even though the grass would need no more mowing this season, I was sure. But then the wind suddenly blew up and strafed through the trees. I would come back tomorrow to pick up the rest. And then it began to pour.
One foot in front of the other – nacheinander – and I would eventually make my way back to the house, temporarily blinded by the rain. It was the way you got through anything that had a contiguous fashion.
When Monday was an unpleasant reminder that the weekend was far away, we'd count the days, one after the other. That way, it didn't seem so long, waiting till Friday. I was convinced we'd discovered how to speed up time.
But then before long, another month was gone and the summer would soon be over and now a year had passed. Suddenly, we could not stop its galloping along (ticktóck ticktóck).
Autumn was a pensive time of year, a time to lean against the fence and watch the leaves change color and fall. We had those days a few weeks back and I savored them, standing in the corner of my porch, oblivious to the world beyond.
It was almost as magical as that first autumn I lived here, six times 'round the cycle, since, listening to its music of the spheres, its timeless cadence.
There were years the trees were like a brilliant sunset lasting a week, and others when clouds obscured the sun and failed to notice as it merely sank, leaden, beneath the horizon. Soon it will grow cold and white – despite its sunny days – the nighttime of the year.
There was a variety to change and its inevitability, even in this slow-moving kind, if one could recognize the pattern. The sudden changes of mood, fluctuations and transformations, were, like many things these days, a memory of the past. Spread out into seasons and cycles, the ups and downs of decades were marked by historical events (or not) with the effortlessness and inevitability of orbits.
But the real variety came in comparing me as I stood here this morning with me who walked around this yard six years ago, much less with me who ran through my grandmother's garden, chasing butterflies, fifty summers before that. Nebeneinander, one thing next to another.
I'd made it to the porch, soaked, and looked back toward the valley I knew existed beyond the trees, the way I knew that finally it was Friday and the weekend was upon us. Then I went inside to change into some dry clothes.
Behind me, I could hear someone say, perhaps in the tone I recalled from my grandmother, "you'll catch your death of cold."
And someone else, more recent, would respond, "old wives' tale..."
* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *
...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
= = = = = = =
For a long time, I used to wake up early. Usually, moments before the darkness of the night would fade with the faintest glimmer of the morning sun, I would not even realize I was waking up, it happened so suddenly. Other times, it was the long, slow process of surfacing from the bottom of the sea, gradually, reluctantly, tempting me to roll over toward the wall, away from the window where, eventually, sunlight would force me to face another day. It was good that I rarely needed an alarm clock except on cloudy days when it always seemed easier to oversleep.
On days when I had to be at school for an early class, I would quietly crawl out of bed hoping not to wake my wife sleeping beside me, though nothing ever seemed to disturb her, she slept so soundly. If she had to get up in the middle of the night, I would instantly be aware of some disturbance, whether it actually woke me or not.
But those days were gone, now, not that it took much to remind myself. Even after six years, it was still like waking up in a strange place, getting used to things all over again. The room would come into focus and I would remind myself there was no school today – there was, in fact, no school – not any more, not for me.
Since I had retired, there was no longer the need to wake up so early, no hurry to get the day started and I often found myself thinking "another hour would not be so bad, would it?" Then I would turn to the wall again, pulling at the covers.
But usually I found, once awake, getting back to sleep was never the rest I'd sought and I'd lie there conscious that it was all a pretense, trying to keep my eyes closed. "What was the point?" and so I'd sit up on the edge of the bed and look around. What day was it, I'd wonder – sometimes, it was hard to tell. Another day. Wasn't that enough?
I supposed I ought to feel thankful for that, adding with a sarcastic edge, "at my age." Another day, another week – that's right, and now another month – one thing after another, the irreclaimable March of Time – tempus continues to fugit, the ticking of my life's clock.
Not everybody would wake up this morning, fortifying themselves with coffee, go about their day, and feel the rewards of a life that has, admittedly, lasted longer than I could have imagined as a child. Tick tock, tick tock...
I keep no clock in my bedroom since I moved here, as if not knowing what time it was would keep me younger.
The beach was quiet yesterday, walking along the sea, grim and overcast as it was with a long expanse of visible grayness in all directions. Rocks, water, seafoam, sky, clouds, everything seemed gray, even the trees which, shedding their leaves, were darker gray against the near-blackness of the pines. The sound was even gray, tatters of sound carried across on the tattered wind.
The tourists had largely left which made the beach habitable again. My boots – his boots, inherited ("they came with the house," I'd say, my uncle's boots) – clattered against the rounded stones worn down by centuries of waves, I'd like to think. How water has shaped them. And time.
Visibility was intense under the clouds, vibrant even if the light was limited. It was not a damp expanse of air I stood in, then. But there was a storm coming, they said, perhaps not much of one but a change in the weather.
Imagine that – "a change in the weather!" Another summer had come and gone and winter was not far off, despite autumn's clinging to the calendar. A change, indeed.
A young man walked behind me, a child, perhaps, I couldn't tell, at first. I turned and looked. No, it wasn't – no one there. For a change, there was no one in sight. Me as a child, perhaps, visiting Grandpa?
How odd when last month this place was teaming with people who'd come to gawk at our beach and soak up our atmosphere.
No, I hadn't lived here long enough to think is was even partly mine, though, not yet. According to Henry who's lived here only six more years than I.
We're still making the transition, Henry and I, like some leg-sprouting fish not yet ready for land.
The leaf-peepers had gone, now that the foliage season reached its peak two weeks ago and though the weather had gotten colder, I was surprised to find it was so mild as I strolled along the quiet beach. When I first moved here, I was not prepared for the cold but now I realized I was not prepared for this autumnal warm-up, a last gasp before snow.
Trudging along, I'd thought of rolling up my trousers, sorry I had not brought along a peach when I stubbed my toe against a particularly large stone I should have seen. "The proof is in the rock, Algy, sorry," and thinking of Michelangelo, I went.
The first of November was something of an anniversary for me, one of those remembrances that passed for anything else worth recollecting. My birthday would be coming soon enough, but that was something less and less looked forward to – endured, perhaps.
God, it was good to turn from cliff to sea, horizon limited on my left by gray rock topped by trees and town, limitless on my right out toward the sea, topped by clouds and seabirds.
It was on this day, now seven years down, I'd been told my uncle died and his house, if I wanted it, was mine. It surprised me, like a mild November day surprised me, that he had still been alive.
Or, now that he was gone, that I was his only heir, like some distant cousin come into an unexpected inheritance. Not that he was my rich uncle. Or I his poor nephew.
His lawyer, Madeleine LeMare, reminded me, while I was here, to think about it, not that I needed to make up my mind to live in it or sell, not right away. Propitious, I thought – my wife's name, that (Madeleine, I mean).
But, yes, winter was coming and these things needed considering, didn't they? No pressure but, yes, it felt like it. I was not one to make quick decisions, not since Madeleine died (my wife, that is, that Madeleine). I looked at her and tried not to frown.
He'd been a man in his early-90s, my uncle, who, for the most part, lived in his own home until the end. It was, she said, a good life if lonely but added "the property needed work," though dismissing my fears it was run down. My aunt had died decades ago, her funeral the last time I'd visited what Dad had called The Homestead. It wasn't much, then.
His great-grandparents had built the house in 1870, an old-style farmhouse even if it wasn't really a farm. I don't remember many of the details. We last visited my grandparents when I was in my teens and the place was, to my mind, ancient then.
But of all those sons and daughters, sisters and uncles over the generations, I was now his closest heir? We had never been a close family, moving away and only rarely coming back to visit, the occasional summer holiday, but still, what were the odds?
It turned out my uncle had been a bit of a miser: frugal, as the lawyer put it. He could have put a little more into the house, I thought.
I came into town yesterday to have lunch with Henry, an old friend – a friend of long standing who was also now old, just to be clear. Bald, he was, and had the air of a millionaire and judging from the house he lived in, Henry Jordan was no one's poor nephew. His house was in the village, though, above those cliffs, a grand house with a grand view of the sea which at times frightened him.
Older than me by a decade, he looked younger, lacking the white hair that automatically aged a man. Stately, plump, a young buck in his day, he was still vital and easily dominated his surroundings. We would meet upon the beach and walk a bit.
This would be the last time this month he might be free, he'd warned me, though he did not need to explain – he talked of little else for the past two weeks, at least on those occasions we spoke.
He was like a child looking forward to a holiday but with no idea where his holiday would take him and this didn't frighten him.
Henry challenged me, hand extended with his ash-sword, a swashbuckler without the costume. His cane, a hand-carved walking stick that was once his father's, waved harmlessly in my general direction. "A duel," he coughed, "a duel," and pranced about the strand.
It was November and he, like millions more (or so he figured) would spend his waking hours writing a novel. The goal in thirty days was to write 50,000 words.
He would be up at the crack of dawn, earlier if he could manage, ready to leave. And the strangest bit was, he wanted me to go with him. A duel, indeed...
I laughed when he first suggested it – "Me? Write a novel?" I figured he was joking but laughed all the more when I realized he was serious.
His workroom was set, a studio looking out over the sea. I imagined pirates coming ashore, the way he talked of adventure. The desk was ready, lined with notes and index cards – for he had been outlining for days, now – his laptop disconnected from the internet (to diminish the ultimate distraction), and he would face toward the sea and await his inspiration.
"But you know what you're going to write about?" I asked.
"No," he said, "not really." And this didn't frighten him.
"But you've been outlining for days, you said," I said.
"I know the bones but how I'll flesh them out – who knows?"
He pranced a bit more, trying to rouse my interest but I only laughed more, as much at the idea of me writing 50,000 words in a month as at the sight of him, standing there, round young virgin – so far as novels went – overflowing with anticipation.
For years, he told me when he first brought this up, he had wanted to do this and finally decided – who knew how much time he'd have left – that it was now or never. He brandished his cane at a passing seagull.
"It would mean so much if you would join me: we could spar each other on."
"You mean 'spur,' don't you?"
"That, too."
I laughed, but I declined.
The morning turned even grayer as I stood on my porch with my morning's first cup of coffee. Initially, it looked like the sun would break through – then, teasingly, it did for a moment before disappearing again. The weather, typical of Maine, was constantly changing, something I still haven't gotten used to, but it was November, now, and soon we could add snow to the endless variations.
If I put the porch furniture back out – at least a chair – I knew with the wind kicking up again, it was only a matter of time before I'd have to drag it back in. Would it be long enough to enjoy my coffee?
Despite the mugginess, it could still turn out to be a one day Indian Summer if it lasted even that long. There was no point in checking the weather forecast – a thankless job in New England at best – and I knew better than to consult my neighbors.
With a wink and a smile, they'd trot out all the old sayings for the newcomer: "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute." And that was just to start.
The days grow shorter, the afternoon ending earlier each day, faster now that November is here though it will stall a bit this weekend as we pay homage to the government's attempt to regulate the sun.
At least I'll have an extra hour's sleep to enjoy on Sunday or perhaps more likely wake up an hour earlier, once I've changed my clocks. An extra hour to spend doing nothing-in-particular.
Try as I might, I have never successfully re-set my body clock. It grows old in habit and wakes me when it wants to (tick tock, tick tock).
Henry will be glad of the extra hour to write, no doubt. I wonder how it's going?
Creativity never struck me as a communal thing, something we did as a group. I'd sat in enough faculty meetings to bear that out even when I was young and still idealistic. There was nothing worse than a meeting to kill a good idea and I had no interest in wasting my time – or my ideas – in the service of an academic committee. The only faculty member under 30 in the music department when I started at Cheatham College, I let the dinosaurs run the business: they would, anyway. Once elevated to fossilhood, I saw it had now become fashionable to let the younger generation bring things forward.
The first order of business for any committee had been to give its project a name, sometimes even before it really knew why it existed. I always suggest "Fred," met at first with polite laughter then, over the years, with mounting annoyance until I was being accused of not taking things seriously.
But I'd been quite serious, just not serious about the things they wanted me to be serious about. Wasn't that the point of being creative, letting one's inhibitions go, finding the... – whatever the cliché was before someone came up with the "Inner Child"? Creativity was play, after all, but that was something only artists (I mean, creative artists) seemed to understand.
Judging from most of the academics I worked with, whose purpose in life was take what creative artists created and analyze the hell out of it so other academics could understand how in fact we'd done that, "play" had nothing to do with it.
And here was Henry Jordan, my old friend, living up to his eyeballs in the success generated by his family's business, who decided one day he would write a novel. Of course, the whole point of this challenge, as he explained it, was to commit yourself to writing enough words to qualify for a book thick enough to be called a novel.
Quality had nothing to do with it. That wasn't the point. If you made the goal – and really, 50,000 words was, what... 115 pages, perhaps? not very much of a novel – you got a prize for showing up at the finish line.
But wasn't it just another issue to undermine our already delicate self-awareness that, thirty days down the road, you might have something that was so thoroughly indigestible, it wouldn't last two days as kindling for the fire?
Then he could sit back and call himself an author while I was stewing at my desk still trying to find enough confidence to think of myself as a composer.
"All you have to do to get started is come up with a title," he'd told me over lunch yesterday, "and that should be enough to get things flowing." (What things?) We'd found a quiet diner off the cove where the servers weren't all dressed in Halloween costumes (pirates, most of them – how original). "It's not like you're committed to it, you can always change it."
For me, titles were usually generic descriptions like Symphony No. 1 or Violin Sonata, unimaginative at least to begin but better than "Work in Progress." As the piece evolved, as inspiration met the challenge of getting from one point to another, perhaps something else might suggest itself.
He wouldn't tell me his title or for that matter anything about his would-be novel's plot, something about jinxing the process making him cautious on his first time out. Would his father have stroked a rabbit's foot before starting on a business gamble? I'm sure, good Catholic that he'd been, it involved a good deal of praying: after all, rabbit's feet were only superstitions; taking a lap around the beads was faith.
Somewhere between the end of the sandwich and the second cup of coffee – which there, I was told, was very good – Henry became increasingly sullen and eventually accused me of being a wet blanket.
"I'm not trying to talk you out of it: enjoy yourself, have a blast," I said, "but certainly you don't need me to go along with you, do you?"
If he wouldn't tell me his title, how could we discuss plot details and character development, if that was to be the benefit of writing in tandem?
"And one thing I'm sure of, is the world doesn't need a novel by me."
I'd walked down to the edge of the wood to pick up some branches that had fallen in last night's wind even though the grass would need no more mowing this season, I was sure. But then the wind suddenly blew up and strafed through the trees. I would come back tomorrow to pick up the rest. And then it began to pour.
One foot in front of the other – nacheinander – and I would eventually make my way back to the house, temporarily blinded by the rain. It was the way you got through anything that had a contiguous fashion.
When Monday was an unpleasant reminder that the weekend was far away, we'd count the days, one after the other. That way, it didn't seem so long, waiting till Friday. I was convinced we'd discovered how to speed up time.
But then before long, another month was gone and the summer would soon be over and now a year had passed. Suddenly, we could not stop its galloping along (ticktóck ticktóck).
Autumn was a pensive time of year, a time to lean against the fence and watch the leaves change color and fall. We had those days a few weeks back and I savored them, standing in the corner of my porch, oblivious to the world beyond.
It was almost as magical as that first autumn I lived here, six times 'round the cycle, since, listening to its music of the spheres, its timeless cadence.
There were years the trees were like a brilliant sunset lasting a week, and others when clouds obscured the sun and failed to notice as it merely sank, leaden, beneath the horizon. Soon it will grow cold and white – despite its sunny days – the nighttime of the year.
There was a variety to change and its inevitability, even in this slow-moving kind, if one could recognize the pattern. The sudden changes of mood, fluctuations and transformations, were, like many things these days, a memory of the past. Spread out into seasons and cycles, the ups and downs of decades were marked by historical events (or not) with the effortlessness and inevitability of orbits.
But the real variety came in comparing me as I stood here this morning with me who walked around this yard six years ago, much less with me who ran through my grandmother's garden, chasing butterflies, fifty summers before that. Nebeneinander, one thing next to another.
I'd made it to the porch, soaked, and looked back toward the valley I knew existed beyond the trees, the way I knew that finally it was Friday and the weekend was upon us. Then I went inside to change into some dry clothes.
Behind me, I could hear someone say, perhaps in the tone I recalled from my grandmother, "you'll catch your death of cold."
And someone else, more recent, would respond, "old wives' tale..."
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...to be continued...
Dick Strawser
©2013
November is National Novel Writing Month
I wrote my first one in 2008 though I'd wanted to do it for a while, but time was always a concern. After having been laid off, though, I had no excuse: what was time?
True, 50,000 words may not be that long, compared to some novels you've read - I would estimate it to be perhaps 115 pages or so - and, really, over a span of 30 days, that breaks down to an average of 1,667 words a day. My blog posts are longer than that but, true, I'm not blogging every day.
This first post is about 3,255 words long (which might be 7 pages of a printed book). Most of them will be shorter, as I have it planned.
An Ineluctable Modality will be my 6th NaNoWriMo novel.
It is designed to be in 30 chapters, one for each day of the month. So, for some reason, I thought why not raise the stakes a little by posting each chapter at the end of the day? This precludes a certain amount of editing in the final process, once the whole novel is done, but I'm hoping that I've outlined my ideas sufficiently before beginning it to keep any major surprises to a minimum. As one of my characters, a would-be author himself, says, "I know the bones but how I'll flesh them out - who knows?"
The title may sound familiar, from the opening line of the third chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses.
- - - - -
'Ineluctable modality of the visible, at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read... Limits of the diaphane. ...If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see... You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. ...Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes.'
- - - - -
But there are other references, semi-quotes and puns just as Joyce himself did: my opening line references the famous opening line of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past as it was known in English when I first read it).Both Proust's Swann's Way (the first of the seven novels making up In Search of Lost Time) and Ulysses were published in 1913, so I'll consider this my Centennial Tribute.
Mostly I write "classical music appreciation thrillers" like The Schoenberg Code, The Doomsday Symphony , The Lost Chord and now The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben (you can read an excerpt here). But I've always wanted to do a more lyrical novel, something that is not so plot driven or, for that matter, so tightly organized, something that exhibits an entirely different sense of style.
So join me in this month-long adventure. I make no promises (especially since I doubt anyone will be reading these posts, anyway).
The first chapter begins here. Please be aware this is only a first draft and may change over time.
Thanks for getting this far,
Dick Strawser
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And now, from the "Well, That Didn't Last Long" Division of the Best Laid Plans Department:
I rather quickly, given other commitments and a pesky thing called reality, fell behind schedule. And while I'm only a day behind in writing the chapter-posts to my novel (yet still staying ahead-of-schedule in the total-number-of-words-written-toward-the-goal department), I find I need more time to edit and polish the text before committing it to the world, even as a first draft, and that is time I'd rather spend writing. So, eventually I'll get back to posting - and when I do, they will be posted on the day they should have been posted because that's the way the novel was planned...
- Dick Strawser
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