I recently finished George Saunders’ latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In it, he takes seven short stories by famous Russian authors and talks about what works in them—what’s going on at a deeper level than a cursory read might reveal and why he can’t stop reading them himself. He intersperses this with discussions of his realizations as a human being and a writer. I loved it, but it’s taken me […]
The mind can be a buzzing midge, or a reckless bull, but it is always susceptible to ambush. You’ve been devoured, I’m sure. The midge enters the flame with a spark. Likewise, when the bull glimpses mountains beyond the rustle of the cape, the ruse is up. He rests on his belly like a puppy. There is no going back. Heart, mind and body, all together, are inexplicable. Try to list the possible states and […]
The weeds in my heart have gone to tassel. They are purple and rose edged in the soft light from Beyond. The sun here is setting, rising, calling, giving, knowing, holding, flying, burning. And I am listening, watching, walking, dreaming, dying, wishing, burning. Shadows of the unkempt reeds are dancing together on the ground. They are playing in the mud without getting wet. A world without shadows, I whisper, is a world without magic. I’ve […]
All day I am sitting. On that bench. There is some wind nearby I recognize, or maybe it is this: a dove has flown through the doorway? The sky I mean. Two timbers and a lintel in my mind, and the clouds that are playing house upon the ocean. A dove has formed from the sky and my heart trembles because it knows of such things, and also because all day I am sitting on […]
There are days when the world streams past like a horde of satiated ghosts rushing out the back door of the auditorium– the show here is over–! headed to their various ports of entry before they close. There’s the empty light socket in the train station in Dover that crackles and hisses between 2 and 4 AM, and the crook of an oak tree that’s open for the crescent moon. It never even knew, of course, the […]
I’d like to get better at letting the unknown flow through me in ways I never could have predicted, so that I can experience my own nature in ways that might cause our experience here to soften into a panorama of endless giving, but the community college near me doesn’t offer that course. So I’m taking one on the typical practices of automotive dealers. And sometimes when I look across the sea, if the wind […]
The conclusion can no longer be avoided: I’m being haunted by that weightless certainty from which no one recovers. Each day there’s at least one point in time that lingers, staring back at me, eyes level, while waving the wind through the narrow pass between us– unimpeded. The wind is whistling, and the machine won’t read my ticket. Something ten thousand feet down is yawning and long after I’m gone its baby rocks will float to […]
Sometimes I get the feeling everything so far has been a few of us stragglers wandering around this old museum just before closing, picking up little polished stones one-by-one and pewter sculptures and moon rocks and animal claws and ivory eye sockets and a fake cutlass and playing make believe and telling each other all sorts of cute fictions about ghost conjuring and sunken ships and people who eat nails or swallow flaming swords while God has […]
Embracing Forever 