Late January

I needed to get the hell out of Pennsylvania. That's a whole story in itself, and I'll save that for another time. The forecast was good after two days of rain, so I found a cheap rental car, a cheap motel, and here I am in Rehoboth Beach for the weekend, where I managed to write a draft of a new story and read some student manuscripts. The plan was to stay in Rehoboth Beach, but it came clear to me that Assateague Island, home of wild ponies, wasn't all that far away, just an hour or so south, on the southern side of Ocean City. I was no sooner inside the national seashore when I saw the telltale signs of poop by the road, poop on the bike trails, poop on the parking lots, poop on the grassy banks. Such magnificent poop! It least it was clear the wild ponies were resourceful, were finding plenty of food to eat. And there was one to my right, right beside the road, his coat an unlikely color, more appealing than you'd expect of a wild creature who fed on salt marsh grass: a tannic color, like the color of cedar water, in the shallow boggy lakes of the coastal northeast. And manes the color of wheat, or the winter color of the marsh grass they eat. Magnificent creatures, especially when seen from a distance, trudging through the tidal creeks and mosquito ditches as if they weren't exactly in Maryland, but in their own Serengeti.

I couldn't leave Assateague without getting out of the car. It was windless, a winter-scrubbed sun, the air temp in the low to mid fifties, which felt relatively balmy. I parked, walked out onto the beach. The beach by the shoreline was almost as hard as pavement, no slope; it couldn't have been better for walking or running; I wish I'd brought my running shoes. On the sand itself: the detached spikes of horseshoe crabs, egg casings, the longest, fattest oyster shells I'd ever seen, chunks of driftwood the color of wet redwood, crab cases inspected by little flies. It was a bit of a shock to see so much life--well, death--at the beach this far north in late January. I stuffed my coat pockets with shells until the shells started falling out. I walked up to the dune, which for whatever reason, was enclosed with electric fencing: two barbed strands held up by posts every--ten feet apart? I lay down on the sand, in my black canvas coat, face heated by the sun. I stretched out my arms and stayed like that until I got bored, which was longer than I would have expected. Not a single person walked by. I listened to the waves. If death could be like this, then it could be something we could bear.

Song (& Video) o My Heart

Nat Baldwin - "Weights" from Willy Berliner on Vimeo.

Maybe the Mountain

A cold night in Orlando. Not as cold, obviously, as a cold night in the north, but a projected low in thirties might as well be ten in Philadelphia, especially when you've arrived without a sweater. The sprinklers are misting on the plants outside. It's been a long, sweet, occasionally intense week. After leaving New Smyrna, I drove south to stay with my brother in Miami, then one more night with my father, where I didn't do much of anything but start a few paragraphs of a story and put off working on my syllabi for the spring term. The highlight of the seven days? The huge (white?) owl in the royal palm across the street from my brother's house. We watched him for a while, then he watched us back from his perch, fifty feet up. And when he'd had enough of our looking, he flew off, with a soft bubbling sound and a wingspan as wide as a garage door. (Well, not really, but it looked somewhat like that from down on the sidewalk.) Unfortunately it was impossible to take a picture. It was night of course, and it seemed to be more important to be Present, rather than holding up some device between the experience of it and me. Who needs any more distance from felt life? Don't we have enough of that already? And must we necessarily reproduce something and pass it on in order to experience it as real? In lieu of all that, I'll pass along some pictures from the week (see below) and a new piece, "Maybe the Mountain," which went up on the Tin House blog today as part of their Flash Fridays series.

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Maybe the Mountain

It wasn’t easy to live in the woods, especially when we wanted the light on our heads. If only to know shoal and wave and dune. Maybe The Mountain thought so. Or maybe not. Maybe The Mountain was too busy pointing his chair in the direction of the house he’d lost to think any of us deserved such things.

So we did what we could to convince The Mountain. We fed his hummingbird with a dropper. We built an enclosure for his baby deer. We bandaged The Mountain’s wounds after he fell asleep one night, but when he caught us tending to him, he brushed us away. When we walked him through the hospital we’d built for the animals, he said, you’re cold and ruthless. His tone couldn’t have been further from fury which made it that much harder to take. And when we tried to lift our heads to meet his eyes, we couldn’t see past his disappointment, big enough now to blot out the country we’d built in his name.

That of course made us work all the harder. In the coming days we broke some bones, we fused them back together. We worked 24 days and nights to build a suspension bridge–the highest in the world at that time–across the water to the house he’d lost. He let us drive the pylons into the muck even though he must have known we were wasting ourselves. We needed to do something with our love, or whatever it was, which could have taken the whole town down if we hadn’t committed to giving ourselves up first.

One day it came to us that he wanted us to hurt him back. There was no other way out of it–he wanted us to destroy him. We weren’t the kind of children who were wont to hurting back. We knew such children existed but we wanted to believe in peace. So one day, with a regret greater than our names, we walked to the store and rented the biggest cannon they had on hand. It took all our might to push it out the door, to roll it up the slopes to the jungle. We lit the wick, we counted to ten and put our hands over our ears. The turmoil roiled inside our heads, so much louder than the sound of the blast, which split The Mountain into a thousand pieces. We tried our best not to catch the flying pieces, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We put him underneath our hats, we put him inside our pockets, but not before we kissed every third piece, although he tasted of aluminum.

Were we surprised when The Mountain reassembled himself in front of our eyes? Not really. Somehow the mountain got even bigger after he’d been split apart. When he calmed himself down and took in what we’d done to him, he laid us on the slab and lifted a piece of himself from his pocket. My God, he said, lifting his eyes in confusion. And just before the rock met our faces, we felt the force that he’d summoned calm us from deep within, and The Mountain went flying apart for good.

Three Pictures (And One More)

...of the beautiful Atlantic Center for the Arts, in New Smyrna Beach, FL, where I'm giving a reading tonight at 8 PM. Please come (or please tell people you know to come). A few pictures of the ACA below.




Here's the one more, one week later....

Flying in Tight Fast Circles

At about 10:45 this morning my blog voice came back to me. That might sound strange given that this is year five of this blog, but I don't joke. The blog voice is not always the interior voice. The blog voice speaks to actual people (to you really), while the interior voice, the voice of the stories I've been writing, speak to--what? It is hard to name that what without sounding pretentious, at least in this context. So while the blog voice is still talking, I thought I'd say some words about Dana Spiotta, whose novels I've been reading over the break. I know I'm late to the game; more than a few of you know that Dana Spiotta's first novel, Lightning Field, came out in 2001, and I'm sure she published stories or excerpts long before that. What can I say about the work that won't be obvious from the passage I'm posting below? I can't think of anyone else who writes with her mixture of charisma, braininess, warmth, coolness, poetry, music, compassion. It's a bit Don DeLillo, a bit Jennifer Egan, a bit Mary Gaitskill--and completely itself. It's already ended up in my category of favorites, by which I mean work that sits alongside the people I've mentioned above, and a handful of others. I'm already rereading.

from the novel Stone Arabia
by Dana Spiotta

By now I should have been used to his--what should I call it? Need? Requirement? Accomodation, maybe? He wouldn't call it an addiction. He would call it his consolation. As far back as I can remember, Nik always used--the consoling part came later--whatever was at hand whenever he could. He just wanted and needed to get off his face, out of his head, expand, shut down, alter, spin, fly, sleep, wake up, float. When we were small kids, we would grab each other's arms and swing in circles faster and faster until out brains' equilibrium was nauseatingly off. We would wake in staggers and feel the earth come up to meet us in giant waves as we collapsed in breathless laughter. This odd feeling was a pleasure, and enjoying it is common, right? Nik also loved to wind the chains of a swing in creaking twists, pushing his leg off the support poles until the chains would twist to their very top, then he would push himself in the opposite direction, flying in tight fast circles as the chains unwound, throwing his head back to augment the spin. I read somewhere that the brain needs disorientation to properly develop. That childhood desire to feel dizzy has something to do with increasing the vestibular and cerebellar interaction in the young brain. Proprioception is the activity where the brain orients the inside world with the outside world. Spinning throws off your proprioception and the brain works and develops as it tries to get it back. The desire to spin around is healthy, I guess, because it teaches the brain how to get a stable fix on the world under any circumstances. But Nik got stuck there, somehow, and had to do these activities over and over. Getting dizzy-high was just the beginning. Swing sets were his gateway drug. Nik had an intense appetite, a special extra need, and as he grew older he grew more hungry for any and all alterations. I watched it; it was impossible to miss his difference, how he craved anything that undid his equilibrium.

He began drinking coffee in third grade. He would make it with instant coffee crystals and lots of sugar. He would mix it cold with tap water. He often stayed up all night (which is another childish and cheap way to get high--stay up all night and the fatigue alone will make you giddy). He drank OTC medicine, all kinds: decongestant to get speeded up, cough syrup to sleep. I swear he always smoked cigarettes, but of course that can't be true, he started at maybe twelve. By junior high he was taking any drugs he could get his hands on, and he could get his hands on so many.

Like the most serious druggies, he lived by the PDR, the Physician's Desk Reference, the well-thumbed paperback book that made his drug experimentations seem so rational and considered. He would root through his girlfriends' mothers' medicine cabinets. He would take a few of these, a few of those. The PDR would tell him what the drug would do, what the pill looked like, and it would tell him what it would interact with. He knew what he could mix or not mix. Nik became the guy yu asked, How many should I take? Nik was the guy who helped the kid who turned blue or the girl throwing up in the bathroom at the party. And his gleeful hunger to alter his brain never abated and was never apologized for. In his youth he extolled theories of the need and even the obligation to get high. He quoted the usual hallucinogenic pantheon of Huxley and so on. He didn't miss any rationales for his enthusiasms: Huichol Indian peyote, Freud's cocaine, Leary's LSD, Richard Harris's scotch.

As others of us (me, for instance) grew bored with taking drugs, of "experimenting," he never stopped. He wasn't experimenting. But as he lived longer and longer into his aging, creaking habits, he stopped trying to extol them to everyone, or at least to me. If it came up at all between us, it was usually because I decided I wanted him to change his habits out of simple health or plain decency, or even economy (the cigarettes I never mentioned were now five dollars a pack). He would simply tell me that this was his consolation. And what could a sister say to answer that?

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Here, a podcast. Brad Listi interviews Dana Spiotta. Be sure to keep with it. Interesting things said about studying with Gordon Lish, working at The Quarterly.

Spectator

I know this is practically sacrilege, but I couldn't bear the thought of the parade that Philadelphia is best known for, especially as its route took it a block from my building. ("Pissing in the streets!" said a stranger. "You have to go!" Then added that he hadn't been since he was ten, which was quite enough for one lifetime, thank you.) So I ended up driving an hour and a half to Asbury Park, where it turned out another sort of parade was taking place: The Polar Bear Plunge. This one struck me as sweeter, though; dozens threw themselves in the water with a variety of attitudes: some screaming as if they were hurling themselves into acid, some nonchalant, wading up to their nipple regions and standing in place with relaxed face as if it were mid July not January. It couldn't have been a better day for craziness, with a blinding winter sun and a high in the fifties. Later that afternoon, the temperatures fell, the wind picked up off the ocean, and the town cleared out. The boardwalk itself took on a shiny quality in the rain. It almost looks as if I'm standing in the water with the others, and I might have actually stripped down to my gotchies--as my favorite used to call them--if I'd had a spectator along.