hark fine silver drifting,
a jewelers solstice down.
round the neck and finger,
bedecked like new york town.
i grasped the flakes of fairy,
touched her whitened breast,
stars and moon were asking,
only of my rare and best.
i will not go with levelers,
for i am much more light.
i wear my strength a garland,
all powerful my sight.
on this eve my turning,
ne’er darkness i look back.
brilliant snow jewel i shall be,
a crystal christmas catch.
(c) 2002 Samuel Saint Thomas
Let’s just say you are lucky enough to get on my Santa list. You’re nice. You take your shoes off when you visit. You always and every single time refill my ice cube tray after making Manhattans. You pick the lint ever so gently from my black sweater. You don’t give a shit about much I do, not a denunciatory bone in your jaw.
And you’re naughty. Yes. When you come, you come bearing a bottle. On special occasions, two. And you bring Russian chocolates. Dark. Playful. You have a tattoo that no one knows about. To you, food is in the same lane as sex. You laugh loudly when you hold grapefruits, exclaiming, “Pamplemousse, pamplemousse!” You whisper four letter words and God in the same sentence in the dark. Naughty. Nice. You’re on my list.
I like you around. I love you. So I buy you gifts on Jesus’ birthday to make you happy. But only sort of. Because, how can I know whether a box of duck slippers will fill you with joy? Ot that a gift certificate to Panera will bring it? How about a tire rotation gift card, my muffin? I’m never sure.
And I really want to believe you when you tilt your head and say, “Wow, thank you so much honey crunch. Red? How did you know?” But I can’t even. Not since I heard on NPR that the perjury rate soars on December 25th.
So it’s okay if you lie, my cupcake, so long as it fills me with joy. Me. So when you say softly, “You really didn’t have to.” I say, “But darling, I did.” I must. I must grab my list, slip my credit card into my pocket, put on my fuzzy red hat, strap up my reindeer and head down Main to bond with the other self interested Santas. For joy.
(c) 2022 Samuel Saint Thomas
The following is an excerpt from “Frying Spam and Other Things to do Before The Rapture” a memoir in progress.
One day my brother Simmy and I were playing out back. We were sitting on the bank. In red. We were wearing brand new matching red jackets and red hats with the word BASEBALL printed on a patch that was supposed to look like a baseball. Mom got our outfits at the Farmers Market. She couldn’t resist. They were on sale and they had both sizes. Even though Mom knew nothing about baseball, she thought anything having to do with it was for boys.
Out back was in the back of the parsonage that was in the back of the church. There was a hill that we thought then was really big. There was a dogwood tree too small to climb, a pine tree too sticky to climb, and a Mulberry tree that made red spots on my pants. And there was Inky, chained up, barking, sitting in his circle of poop by the fence that Dad built with roofing tin. On the other side of the tin fence was the steep bank that Dad hated to mow, a bank of weeds overlooking Valley Road and the steel plant.
In summer, we’d sit on top of the bank, lean against the tin fence, look over at Lukens’ Steel, and watch cars whiz up the road. Once a day, Mr. Softy parked over there. Every day Mr. Softy had to take a pee, I saw it running under the truck in the middle of the guy’s feet. Carol Ann saw it too and that’s why we weren’t allowed to get a cone from Mr. Softy . “He’s got no way to wash after touching his thing,” Mom said. “Even if there was, he’s colored, how can you tell if their hands are clean?”
So there we were in red, sitting up on the bank. I picked a rock from between my legs. I bet my brother I could hit the Lukens fence across the road. I bet him a Mary Jane he couldn’t. I knew he couldn’t. He was a wuss and a faker. He cried everywhere about everything. About haircuts, toys, mud, the bathtub, shirts, and SPAM. He cried at the Downingtown Farmers Market. He cried in line for Dilly Bars at the Dairy Queen. He cried on the steps of the First National Bank of Coatesville. If it was even a bit sunny, he’d stand on Main Street on the bank steps, cover his eyes and whine, “I can’t see, I can’t see. Help me, help me, Mommy, I’m going blind.” But that was only when Mom or Carol was around.
I wound my arm up like a Phillies pitcher. “Come on,” I hollered. Most of our stones made it all the way across the road to the fence. Past the fence where Mr. Softy took a pee, was the Lukens Steel parking lot, off limits and against the law. Every eight hours, hundreds of dirty men, swinging their empty black lunch pails, walked slowly to their cars, jiggled their keys in their car doors, and glanced back at the smoke and the long gray buildings. Some men shouted things to other men. Some sat in their cars with the doors open and waited until their cigarettes got going good, then they drove slowly toward the gate. Soon the lot was filled with other cars and other men swinging full lunch boxes.
I peered down at this every day from my bedroom window in the attic. I drew the steel mills and cars and men more than once, sitting at my desk made of orange crates. Sometimes I crawled out my window to the roof for a better look until my sister found me and screamed and everyone came running. From up on the roof the men looked like ants, their cars like toys. Even then it seemed they had a terrible job, always hot and dirty and sad.
After an hour or so of throwing rocks, Simmy and I were getting pretty good at hitting the fence on the other side. Then, just as I wound up for a pitch, a shiny green dump truck screeched to a halt. The brake lights glowed a bright red. He’d seen us. I panicked. I panicked like when my tongue got stuck to an ice cube tray or when my thing down there got caught in my zipper. Panic made my feet take off without me, which is what happened. And there was Simmy, coming after me as fast as he could. If I hadn’t run, he’d have probably stood there until someone found him, hours later.
Over Dad’s tin fence we jumped, up the hill, under the mulberry trees, through Inky’s poop, past the trash cans, over the lawn mower, and up the back porch steps. In the kitchen, Mom was singing, making lunch. Fried SPAM. Again. It smelled better than usual. Fried SPAM sandwiches and strawberry Quik to wash it all down. “Eat it. Don’t think you’re gettin’ up ‘til you swallowed every bite and crumb,” Mom said, at least three times. “And no saving any for Jesus.”
I swallowed my sandwich in chunks. My stomach hurt. I was thinking about the green truck, thinking about the brake lights, that screeching sound, the awful screeching of the brakes and tires. For once, I was happy I lived in back of the church. Only people in the church knew anyone at all lived there. The truck driver would never find us, sitting in our kitchen with our SPAM sandwiches. But God told people things. God had told Mom things before. Maybe God would tell him.
“Be sure your sins will find you out,” Dad would say.
Why was Simmy crying? He was gonna tell, I knew it.
“Mom?” I said. “Simmy saw a snake up in the alley. Right, Simmy? Simmy?”
A loud knock came at the door. It was a terrible sound. Dad yelled for Mom to get it. “Missus?” the man said, “You got two little boys here wearin’ baseball hats ? Red ones? Huh?” His voice was loud. It was scary. And mean. “Charles?” Mom called. Then they were all talking. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were saying except for the words Reverend, sorry, windshield, 300 dollars, check, mail, and punish. The door slammed. Dad yelled toward the kitchen.
“Sammy?”
The following essay was first published as “Confronting the Limitations: Crafting the Unknown in Non-Fiction” by Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2008 as part of the graduate thesis earning Samuel Saint Thomas his terminal MFA degree in Creative Non-fiction.
Making sense of the vast mystery of human experience is akin to, as Alan Watts says, “…sending someone a parcel of water in the mail,” as if one is “trying to get the water of life into neat permanent packages” (13). Thomas E. Kennedy states that ”…to ignore the fact that life is one great unanswered question composed of a myriad of other mostly unanswered smaller ones” will render writing that is “…wooden, shallow, and unreal” (115). The unanswered presents a foundational challenge in the subjects and themes that a writer chooses truthfully to explore and express.
Memory is a murky tarn. Momentary perceptions are fleeting. Tomorrow is a mere belief. There is much that one does not know and much that one cannot know. In “An Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope writes, “…this due degree / Of blindness, weakness, / Heav’n bestows on thee. / Submit…” Pope submits to the mystery that “All nature is but art, unknown to thee; / All chance, direction, which thou canst not see…” (284-291). Indeed, the mysteries of love, pain, or death are too far beyond human grasp to bring more than bits and fragments into certain existential understanding and comprehension. It follows that, as writers, we must acknowledge this conclusion. If we as writers acknowledge the extent of unknown in human experience, it follows that the text will also acknowledge the unknown, whether directly or implicitly. Of all the challenges to a writer’s craft, making the unknown stuff of life in some way tangible for the reader is paramount. In dealing with the unknown, the writer must first confront this limitation, then employ creative techniques to show the unknown, even if by indirection. I intend, then, to consider the matters that the limits of human comprehension conceal from us.
To confront and conceive of this limitation requires critical thinking and examination. If, as Socrates says, “An unexamined life is not worth living,” I would posit that an unexamined event, experience, character, or thought is not worth writing about. For how, except by examination, can we know we are peering over the rim into the unknown? How do we know that we are knowing and not simply speculating or pretending to know? A writer must examine what he can know and how he can know it.
I am not pursuing this examination simply as a philosophic inquiry. I am employing the method of philosophic questioning for the sake of the craft of writing. Contemporary essayist Phillip Lopate asserts, “…whether memoir or personal essay, the heart of the matter often shines through those passages where the writer analyzes the meaning of his or her experience” (144). This way of analysis is not new. Plato, Montaigne, Descartes, Nietzsche, and many others approached their creative nonfiction thus. I suggest that the writer begin his analysis with an empirical inquiry as a pathway to craft.
Immanuel Kant states it as such: “There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. For how should our faculty of knowledge be awakened into action…?” (301) Consider this elementary anecdote. I detect a noise in the night that sounds woody, rhythmic, and exterior. My heart rate increases; I think someone is outside my house prowling about. The cause is unknown. But after examination, I find that my senses have informed my reason of a slapping shutter; reason sends me back to bed with the certain cause. Certainly, the unknown in human condition runs far deeper into the unanswered than a slapping shutter; nevertheless, empirical inquiry is the starting place for knowledge that informs the writer.
John Locke writes, “I would have anyone try to fancy any taste which had never affected his palate, or frame the idea of a scent he had never smelt: and when he can do this, I will also conclude that a blind man hath ideas of colors” (296). Indeed, the sensorium brings the writer justified knowledge that makes for powerful description in narrative. However, to give Kennedy the supple, deep, and real text he argues for, a writer may do more than describe what is known; he may confront the mystery and craft it as unknown. By inquiring through the senses of what is known and what can be known, one is lead by deduction to the unknown. This affords the writer the same certainty to name a mystery a mystery as to name an apple an apple.
As a writer probes these mysteries, ranging from the universe to human emotions, he begins to encounter types of the unknown. In confronting human forgetfulness, one first finds the unknown in the narrative past, encompassing a myriad of missing links in past experiences, behaviors, and their causes. Thus the writer crafts narration that mirrors or exhibits the limitations of memory. Second, in confronting momentary actions, he finds the unknown in the action of the narrative present that flashes across the senses that he cannot or fails to grasp. Accordingly, the writer crafts narration that shows the human limitations in perceiving the present. Finally, a third category of the unknown, the narrative future, emerges in confronting the unknown of all that is to come as the present merges with the future, or all the possible experiences that may be moving toward the present moment.
How we textualize these three categories of the unknown is crucial to narrative that resonates with the reader’s unknowns. Some writers admit to the unknown with more candor and respect for empirical knowledge than others do, employing creative strategies that make the mysteries genuine. Unlike the genuine, however, artificial mysteries of the who-done-it variety pretend to comprehend the unknown elements of event and human motive. “These authors,” Kennedy notes, “craft narrative into a neat formula of revelation that seeks to console the reader with the illusion of comprehending, distracting attention from the more elementary, irresolvable mysteries of existence.” To create this illusion, authors concentrate on the solvable puzzle of exposing the killer, eclipsing the blood, violence, and the mystery of death.
In genuine mystery, minus illusion, the narrative reflects genuine dilemma. In his essay collection, Irish Nocturnes, contemporary Irish essayist Chris Arthur weaves descriptive examinations of kingfishers, linen carvers, the pelvis of an unknown creature, a camouflaged corncrake, sheep herding dogs, a castle tunnel, all in an effort to poke and prod at the mysteries of life on the green isle. Arthur’s essays boldly embrace the unknown realistically, rather than artificially. They exhibit, as you will see, what Lopate refers to as “…quality of thinking, …depth of insight, and the willingness to wrest as much understanding as the writer is humanly capable of arriving at” (145).
Others, such as Spalding Gray, use humor to address this limited knowledge, and craft what is unknown as a frightful insecurity. Diane di Prima crafts mystery poetically as black, white, or spinning. Hunter S. Thompson chooses not to confront or reflect on the mystery at all, but to keep the narrative action moving along against an unexplained background of blankness. Still other writers narrate the unknown as an omniscient God, while still others speculate with psychological theories. Let’s see how they do it then, this business of confronting and crafting.
The Narrative Past
While it is possible for the mind to collect a considerable amount of description useful for the writer’s craft, our ability to gather, store, and remember things has limits. To fix the narrative past firmly in the mind is not possible; thus, the writer must confront the mystery surrounding his experiences, behaviors, and their causes, to make them tangible to his readers. To play therapist for a moment, I’d like to call it SCD, the Swiss-Cheese-Disorder. Missing links in the past make it seem as though experiences have dribbled out through holes in the brain. Who has not opened a box of old photos and tried in vain to recall the specifics of a snapshot? And who can clearly convey a simple dialogue, even from last week without the aid of a recorder? Memory is undependable. Even simple conversations tend to elude us as we sit at our desks over the blank page. Much of the specifically detailed events recounted in memoirs such as Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, or Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, read more like an invention than a remembrance.
In Swimming to Cambodia, Gray writes, “When I was in therapy two years ago, one day I noticed that I hadn’t had any children” (33). The narrator gives no evidence of what may have brought on this thought, simply, “…one day I noticed.” His confrontation has challenged him to make his wonder tangible: “…I like children at a distance. I wondered if I’d like them up close. I wondered why I didn’t have any. I wondered if it was a mistake, or if I’d done it on purpose, or what” (33). Nothing more is shown than the obvious fact that his memory is intrinsically faulty. Perhaps he is perplexed with his faulty consciousness. In support of what he thinks he should know, he relays an anecdote: his therapist’s genitals were shot at in the war, he knows why he has no children. The narrator has examined the knowledge that was empirically gathered and is left with what little he knows of himself. He is left with a case of wonder concerning his past.
Gray examines how fatherhood could have escaped him for such a long time. Why he had not thought of having children before is unknown and unavailable. What Gray does textually to convey the unknown of his narrative past is to express a sense of honest wonderment in specific word choice that shows the mystery. Given his tone and consistent voice of neurotic dilemma throughout the expanse of his works, we see that certain thoughts are clearly hidden from him about his narrative past. Because of his human condition, the reader (at least this reader) empathizes with Gray’s mystery and is able to participate in the experience.
Some fourteen years later, in Morning Noon and Night, Gray writes with much the same questioning voice of unknowingness. “‘How did I get here?’ Never in my wildest soothsayer-fantasy-fortune-teller-imagination-dreams did I think, at age fifty-six, that I would recreate my original family…. I didn’t know I wanted to have a child until I first held him in my arms,” he writes (4). Here he asks the classic question, “why,” and finds no evidence at hand. He admits the mystery head-on. Whatever answers he seeks are unknown in his narrative past. Although an author can pretend to know a myriad of things from his past, and even their causes, a reader who is aware of his own unknowns will not buy it.
The nonfiction writer, in crafting his memory of the past, may take the risk and liberty to dishonestly fictionalize it. Geoff Dyer asserts that the line between fiction and nonfiction is ambiguous. When asked why his book, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, was seen as nonfiction, he replied, “It’s a distinction that means absolutely nothing to me. I like to write stuff that’s only an inch from life, from what really happened, but all the art is of course in that inch” (Dyer). Perhaps Dylan and McCourt would agree.
David Sedaris crafts a bit more than an inch beyond the limits in knowing his past. In Naked, as an adult looking back decades to his disordered childhood, Sedaris writes this of the voices in his head: “Shouldn’t you be upstairs making sure there are really one hundred and fourteen peppercorns left in that small ceramic jar? And, hey, while you’re up there, you might want to check the iron and make sure it’s not setting fire to the baby’s bedroom” (12). I am supposing that he is not actually hearing voices as sound but rather is saying that he remembers his parents’ voices. To say that he can recall details to that extent seems implausible, yet Sedaris takes the liberty to push the boundaries of traditional nonfiction by pretending to know, as do the who-done-it authors, sometimes to fantastic levels.
Occasionally the past does yield truth, in slices it would seem, rarely full stories. Pieces of the elapsed make their appearances as shafts of light. What can the writer do with these? In his essay “Invasions,” Chris Arthur examines the mystery of memory and finds it a cryptic space, occasionally yielding up fragments that impose on his thoughts. “If our yesterdays drop like stones in the mind’s unfathomable waters, sinking ever deeper as they are shorn of the fleeting buoyancy of the present, these periodic invasions seem to reverse the process” (91). To wit, time has a way of effecting change on what we thought was fixed: that kiss, that concert, picnic, Van Gogh at the Met. “Occasionally these revenants are so bloated with time and distance that they are almost unrecognizable…” (91). Arthur examines and crafts patiently, waiting for “…one of the many splinters” upon which to build what becomes text. (91)
A writer is not always certain, however, that these splinters have emerged from the vaults of experience. They could be, as Arthur posits, ‘”Imagined Biographies’” or “pseudo-memories… in the imagination’s fertile echo-chambers” (94). This complicates things for the writer, especially for the memoirist. Sorting out the fictional from the factual makes for a burdensome task. In addition to close critical thinking toward accuracy, the writer may, as Sedaris or Dylan does, choose to allow the line between fact and fiction to blur. The writer may choose to inform the reader of this very dilemma in his choice of words, asking a question so as to admit ignorance of a thing unknown. By admitting ‘I’m not so sure,’ ‘I assume,’ ‘I imagine,’ ‘I’d like to think,’ and so on, he takes on the voice of a wondering narrator, one with human characteristics.
The writer may even choose to craft text in a dreamlike voice, as a theatrical voice is echoed to achieve the same effect. In an email conversation with Arthur, I asked what writing techniques he found helpful in the crafting of these unknowns. He suggested “it’s a case of looking for metaphors, images, stories, and symbols coupled with periodic reminders to myself and readers that words don’t work beyond a certain extent.” So then, it is both what is seen and unseen, decipherable and indecipherable that shapes the work. But the “certain extent” to which he refers is what the author must grapple with. Arthur notes that Joseph Brodsky, in his essay, Less than One, said, “As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms keep sliding off.”
This limited grasping of the past may be addressed in the development of a fictional character as well. The narrator chooses to show this limitation, and mirrors real minds of real people with real memory banks. In fiction, of course, the writer has license to fabricate what is known of the past. If this fabrication, however, pushes the character beyond what the human is capable of, ignoring the mystery of which Kennedy speaks, the narrative will show woodeness, unless the fiction writer creates a character that is self-deceived. For the nonfiction writer, crafting the mysteries of the past is more significant in the creation of text that shows the depths of the unknown in true characters. Whereas Gray and Arthur make this depth tangible to their readers, Sedaris loads us up with what seems to be pretended memory. Just how much he pretends we may never know.
The Narrative Present
In an empirical examination of momentary actions in a narrative’s ongoing present, we find the unknown as well. What can we know about what is going on? What is possible for us to grasp from sensory experience? As Kant says, the search begins with experience. So we ask: Can our faculties of sense and reason confirm the thought or behavior? Does the narrator’s thinking correlate with things in the real world? If the answers to these types of questions are no answer, we have ventured into the unknown. We are looking for clear knowledge of passionate experiences to convey tangibly to our readers. So we work our way empirically by deduction beyond the unknown. Inevitably we are confronted with unknowns of the present.
In Memoirs of a Beatnik, Diane di Prima narrates the flux of life at hand. This is what is so seductive about her writing. Readers enjoy the chance to reflect on and identify with her embrace of insecurity. Readers know that state of mind well. She overtly admits to the confrontation with the unknown of the present, narrating experience after experience, yet not analyzing the cause of the human condition. Not long after she arrives in New York City, she has her first sexual experience. No extended examination of what it meant to lose one’s virginity, rather, “Well, here I was. …this is only the first of many strange apartments I’ll be waking up in” (4). Here, early in the book, she sets a tone for embracing the mystery. There is no voice of sad despair, no sense of regret, rather it is one of relaying clearly what she sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches.
di Prima’s account is a romp, from her innocent arrival in the big city to the eventual fading of the Beats. She describes well, the streets, apartments, parties, poets, drugs, jazz clubs, sexual encounters. But she does not attempt to narrate or craft what is unknown. Instead, she basks in and relishes the mystery of it all with poetic device. Returning to New York City from a farm upstate, with “long twilights,” “worn out sofas,” and plenty of “passing the grass,” she ends up sleeping on park benches (110). She takes a job running a bookstore; not aware the arrangement includes a strung-out visitor named Luke. Daybreak finds her in the belly of passion, abandonment, and ecstasy. There the narrator is confronted by mystery at the edge of certainty.
di Prima is experiencing an emotional unknown that she is not able to describe without poetic voice. “…and I heard a voice that I realized must be my own filling the room with short, stabbing animal cries as I slipped into darkness” (125). What is unknown in her present narrative experience cannot be named as certainty; she borrows a physical ‘darkness’ as metaphor to show her futile attempt at mental clarity. Where Gray uses the questioning voice, di Prima employs poetics. Any words she could attach to the experience would be inadequate to capture the whole experience. It would in fact weigh the narration down. Empirically, di Prima examines what is happening to and around her. What is certain and known to the narrator is crisply described –the texture of hair, softness of the skin, the beads of sweat, the folds of clothing- while the words for the unknown are abstract.
Just as the magnificence of a canyon’s view or the perplexity of love’s demise is beyond words, so the magnificent sensorium of the skin is unknown and beyond description for di Prima. And rightly so. The skin is the exterior nervous system of the body, and when excited, sends millions of signals to the brain every second. Unlike objects in the world, defined by certain shapes, colors, and textures, neural sensations of, say, an orgasm, defy the narrator’s ability to describe. “The roar of the waves slowly recede leaving me high and dry on a white beach, in a blinding white light,” she writes (125). The black has turned to white; the wet of the waves has turned to dry sand. Whether a physiological unknown or chemically induced concealment, the narrator has certainty of her uncertainty. She intends for the reader to see her uncertainty.
di Prima shows the reader that she knows even less what Luke is feeling. She is confronted with the unknown in his eyes when she notices “the glint of consciousness slowly returned to them” (125). “‘God,’ he said hoarsely, in his indistinct undertone. ‘God, I think I love you’” (126). Luke is looking for some way to describe the feelings that have confronted him and that are out of his descriptive reach. The narrator calls for him to hush, “For to name it was to make it less than it was” (126). Love, the amorous thought or emotion, she implies, is the unknown wandering place of the mind that is better left as it is, unknown and mysterious, otherwise, the real becomes plastic and sentimental.
True to limited knowledge, the narrator cannot grasp the particulars of pain in her narrative present either. While being forced into a sexual situation with Serge, she says to herself, “I might as well” (68). She wonders how much it will hurt. “Not a whole lot,” she thinks (68). She finds no certainty when confronted with the measurement of pain, and “Anyway, it didn’t seem that I had much choice,” she says (68). There is mystery here in the word seem. She wasn’t certain if she had a choice or not. Was it her appetite or Serge’s? The details are unknown to the narrator; therefore, they are necessarily left unknown to the reader. Afterward, she writes of the unknown, “I pulled up my pants… zippered them… straightened my hair… Serge kissed me…” and “I patted his arm” (69).
After collecting herself, she reflects on the experience as “…a strange and brief orgasm. …driving all thoughts out of my head” (69). di Prima is once again confronting the unknown. I imagine they experienced many thoughts and emotions during their exchange; few of them, however, could be named as other than a mystery. The narrator identifies that her thoughts are still in her mind, “…but in some deep place, quite out of reach, like the boulder at the bottom of a lake” (69). Here the narrator employs the device of direct statement about her unknown thoughts, saying they are “out of reach,” deeply hidden beyond human ability to be retrieved. As we shall see later, even the meaning and future of the beats will remain a mystery for di Prima.
Hunter S. Thompson admits much of the same is unknown in his pursuit of what he refers to as the “American dream” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It would seem that Thompson’s objective is to explore, question, and balance himself on the edge of survival with the oft repeated, “How long can we maintain?” (5). Thompson and his attorney are speeding to Las Vegas in a rented red convertible when the two stop to pick up a young hitchhiker. “There was no sound from the back seat,” Thompson writes (5). The narrator grasps a few details. The kid was nervous, stared when talked to, and didn’t even blink. “’Can you hear me?’” Thompson yells (6). Still nothing. Thompson speculates, “…the boy’s face was a mask of pure fear and bewilderment” (6). Here Thompson chooses the word mask carefully. The only certainty of the boy’s thinking was the look on his face, what was behind the mask was only believed to be one of fear. Nothing else is known of the kid; he jumps from the car and disappears into the desert.
Thompson attempts no deeper analysis of the boy; only what was obvious. He empirically examines; he looks at the boy’s face and listens for his sound, grappling with the unknown in the ongoing action of the narrative. He shows this with: “Do you follow me?” and “Our vibrations were getting nasty–but why? I was puzzled, frustrated. Was there no communication in this car?” (08) He gives to the reader all that he knows, albeit, not more than a facial expression. Thompson’s intention here is to invite the reader to participate in the puzzle of the mystery kid. If a reader wants to play in his own imagination, so be it. The film version plays on the viewer’s imagination, suggesting that the boy’s fear (as is the viewer’s) is driven by Thompson’s insane behavior.
Much of what happens in the moment is unknown, a true to life flurry of behaviors, emotions, dialogue, and sensory experiences. If a writer does not examine, put on his empirical eyeglasses, he may -in error- name mystery as fact, belief as knowledge. Sedaris recalls in his story, “Old Faithful,” that when he was twelve, his dad said to him, “‘I want you to know that I’ve never once cheated on your mother.’” A friend stated that that indicated he had a guilty conscience. The narrator disagreed: “I knew that she was wrong. More likely my father was having some problem at work and needed to remind himself that he was not completely worthless.” But he does not know that with certainty. Unlike Thompson or Gray, Sedaris avoids the mystery, that of knowing if his father was telling the truth, possibly one of the most difficult mysteries to confront and embrace.
While it is important for the writer -and for his craft- to understand human behavior, it is also important for him to rise above mere psychoanalytic speculation, to rise above what he believes to be known to what is known. Admittedly, we do not write in a vacuum. Literature, as all art, evolves historically alongside scientific movements of thought such as Psychology. The post-therapeutic form -reflections penned following therapy- has perhaps given memoir its upsurge in recent years. But this form can render wooden scientific characters organized by their handicaps, created by writers in lab coats. If a writer chooses to ignore the mysteries of the spirited human, conjecturing with the authority of a psychologist, he may lack the evidence his narrator needs to make a case. In turn, if a writer speculates behavior or emotion, he crafts text as speculation rather than knowledge.
Other writers claim to know even more, even to know all. When the unknown is confronted, a writer can pretend to know without any empirical evidence. As John Gardner states, “They play God as they might play King Claudius, by putting on a cape” (158). It “can vary with writers and with historical periods,” Walter Cummins states, “…Victorian authors who used omniscient point of view believed they could tell readers a great deal about their characters’ thoughts and the sources of their behavior.” In nonfiction as well, writers often make it up as they go, motives, thoughts, and all. More recently, the omniscient voice has given way to a lesser knowing of the mysteries.
Kennedy writes, “…Gardner suggests that growing doubt of the existence of God or objective truth was accompanied by mistrust of the author-omniscient technique…” (132). Cummins explains that “the modernists crafted a limited point of view,” and that “…Jamesian central intelligences, the inner nature of human beings was more mysterious” (Cummins). What writer, especially the nonfiction writer, can say that he knows all, to suggest there are no human mysteries? There may be a fuzzy area where one narrator may know more than another but both still speak within the range of believability. I suggest that to be an intelligent writer, one make a deductive empirical inquiry of the unknown in the narrative present, and when confronted with the unknown, craft it as such, showing the writer’s rendezvous with mystery.
The Narrative Future
Beyond the narrative present, of course, is the narrative future that comes as the present unfolds toward fruition. A myriad of things could happen; many of them will not. While one has free will, it remains relative to unknown factors. Darkness will always begin at the end of a flood of light, whereas death is a certain unknown. The unknown in the narrative future cannot be known until it appears in the light of knowledge. What is believed may be true or false, but never true until sense and reason confirm it. The most abstract ideas attest to this: God, the devil, love, happiness, darkness, and the most unknown of all, death. This kind of unknown must be confronted and crafted in narrative as angst, fear, speculation, excitement, or wonder, but not fact.
di Prima, reading Howl for the first time, says, it “… put a certain heaviness in me…” (176). And when the Number Six, Amsterdam, pad was breaking up, “…changes started going down around us thicker and heavier than ever. …it just began to have that air about it… air that had not been stirred” (177). Her confrontation with mystery is crafted with the words thicker and heavier, and as air, the poetic language of mystery as the narrative future begins to appear. The narrator cannot know what will unfold, what will become of her, her lovers, or Ginsberg and the Beats. Whether love, a familiar living space, or the ideology of a beatnik flat, “…that particular island is no longer, … and suddenly it’s like living in a morgue…” (177). She intends for us to know her loss, the death of things that were once known and the unknown future. The author peers into the darkness of the future.
Chris Arthur crafts the mystery of memories, present moments, and what is to come, even darkness itself, with more profundity than any of the authors I surveyed. In “Linen” he contemplates the past while engaged with a photograph. “Although it is impossible to tell for sure, I like to think that the linen carver spread out on the desk on which I am writing is the same one that my great-grandmother is holding in the photograph” (4). The words ‘for sure’ and ‘I like to think’ indicate lack of certainty, crafted honestly. Using a questioning voice, he crafts the narrative future in “Meditations on the Pelvis of an Unknown Animal.” He wonders, when one dies, whether one is more than simply human remains. “Is the timbre of their individual voices still sounding somewhere in the incredible symphony of existence?” (113). The question finds no answer.
Arthur’s essay, “In the Dark” is perhaps the most sustained example of crafting the unknown in his Irish Nocturnes collection. Shane’s Castle, on the inland shore of a Northern Irish sea, is “…the perfect place to test a fear of darkness,” Arthur writes (40). While working a stint there as a warden, he “discovered just how frightening the dark can be” (40). Here, early in the essay, Arthur shows that he is faced with the unknown. He writes with frankness, admitting fright. With great description, Arthur depicts the absolutely dark tunnel leading from the castle ruins to a graveyard, the supernatural folklore, the dungeons, the wailing banshee ghost, severed head apparition, pouring rain, all in an effort to invite the reader along on his journey to confront the unknown.
As for the ghost, “To hear it is to die, or go insane…” (41). The apparition is said to have a “…bloody severed head… [that] appears on the stonework like a grotesque tattoo…” (41). With such thoughts in his mind, Arthur performed his duty of tunnel watch, which he chose to do at midnight. He had not expected to experience fear, assuming “that being afraid in the dark had vanished about the same time as milk teeth” (41). He admits there was no known evidence of his fear, but rather, “…it started with a sense of there being something behind me” (42). Here he uses the word sense, as in perhaps, a sixth sense. In a profound way, Arthur identifies the possibilities, a suspicion, a hunch if you will, a speculation on the uncertain narrative future.
At first, though, Arthur was excited about the unknown, “fascinated to be surrounded by absolute darkness, …tottering on the brink of disintegration” (44). Fascination morphed into fear of the worst kind. “Each midnight run I attempted was fraught with terror” (45). I reached out for something. Was I falling? Was something falling on me? Was I being followed? “Was it laughter? Screaming? …it was unclear, indecipherable” (45). The human eye, ear, and hand have given perimeters. Beyond these perimeters, the human encounters the illegible. Arthur points out this human limitation in his narrative.
It is most important that the author chooses a syntax that admits to this mystery. Powerful and precise nouns and verbs that represent human frailty, limitation, and unreadability do well to further the synthesis of the writer’s and reader’s human condition. Arthur’s prolific admission to the unknown future is evident in phrases such as, “Sometimes it felt… I had an overwhelming sense… perhaps the whole tunnel was going to collapse… a small, ancient voice asked” (45). He employs the exposition of his thoughts as well. When referring to the folkloric legends that spooked the castle history he writes, “Sometimes stories about the place suddenly invaded my consciousness and filled me with a sense of formless evil…” but “…there was nothing there on which such fantasies could be grounded” (45). His empirical examination has yielded up personal truth and writing that speaks to that truth as well.
Even more effective is Arthur’s reflection. Looking back on his experience of these mysteries of the dark in the resolving paragraphs of “In the Dark,” Arthur writes this: “Like silence and empty space, darkness underlines our lonely vulnerability, our smallness in the face of cosmic forces over which we have no control” (46). Here, on confronting the mysteries of the dark, he points to the profound nature of our existence. He does not attempt a knowing, omniscient voice, nor does he speculate with psychological theories. He crafts his prose with truth and admission of frailty. “Such existential emphases are heavy with the kind of unanswerable questions which a wise person, mindful of contentment, will not ponder for too long” (46).
Death, indeed the most unknown of all existential inquiries, is the unanswerable question, that, if pondered too long, brings certain discontent. Of all the ideas bound in the approaching future, death is the absolute unknown. Spalding Gray reflects on this mystery in Gray’s Anatomy. While swimming, he nearly drowns. He cries, “HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLP! I’M DROWNING! HELP, I’M GETTING MARRIED! HELP, I’M GROWING OLD! HELP, I’M GOING BALD! HELP, I’M GOING BLIND! HELP I’M GOING TO DIE!…” (77). This is the cry of every person when confronted with all that is uncertain in life. The strength of his seductive dialogue brings to life the fear, faith crisis, loss, possible loss, fragility, and deterioration intrinsic to his reader’s humanness.
Ultimately, Gray fears the greatest of the unknowns. In Morning Noon and Night he asks, “So what do I tell my boys when they come to me with their questions on death?” (123) Dialogue is his best device, as if to say, “There, I said it, I am afraid, and I’m not afraid to admit it.” His son, Forrest, asked about death. Gray told him that we all know it’s going to happen but “no one really believes it” (123). The unknown knowledge of death, in that no one has come back with a report, is not an unknown easily confronted, or easily crafted. The idea of not existing forever “…just wipes [Gray] out” (122). Gray’s text is overt with perplexity of the future, void of any knowing of death other than a state of not. Like a chicken having his head severed. “…The whole bird will never know what it is to not be” (122).
As Gray shows, a writer can only name death as a mystery, as unknown, as concealed by human condition. Gray is honest with what he can know of his narrative future, truthful with his confrontation of nothingness, crafting it as such, making his perplexities tangible to the reader. Neither does Gray attempt the fantasy of a mind outside the body. “…I will never know not being here,” he says (122). But can he say he will never know? Even that is shut off from human comprehension. When a writer approaches the magnificence of the unknown, the only thing left to name is the edge. A writer can write about thinking about floating above his body, but not about floating, simply because the act of floating has not been verified. Likewise, a writer can write about thinking about the mystery of death but not about death in itself. Even if he believes to have had a near death experience, it still remains a conjecture.
The Unknown as Spur
As I have tried to make evident, a writer, upon checking with the senses, is often faced with the writing block of empirical limitation. He grapples with crafting the unknown; there are no words in sight, darkness, if you will. Beyond the sensorium as source for knowledge, the writer will be confronted with things he does not and cannot know. The murky tarn of memory will challenge the writer’s craft in narrating the past in making tangible the momentary life of the narrative present, and in the wait for what may or may not come in the narrative future. The more that artistic craft embraces human limitations and frailties, the more successful a writer will be at making the unknown tangible in text. Narrative that exposes this mystery is most believable because it mirrors real human experience. To write from the shaky stage of speculation, pretension, or belief is to risk the “wooden, shallow, and unreal.”
Authors that I have examined here confront, examine, and respond diligently to the unknown is their only source of knowledge, honestly and feebly poking at the darkness for some truth of existence. diPrima embraces the unknown without any sense of provocation. She crafts a voice that perhaps even celebrates the mysteries she encounters. Thompson’s writing engages its reader seductively. Pages later, sometimes chapters later, the reader is left wondering about this or that character, event, or behavior. Although Gray may be troubled deeply by unanswered questions, he takes the edge off his narration with humor, as if to say, “What’s there to do about it? I don’t know. I am a troubled human being. I am left with no answers.” Turning limitation on its head, he seems to enjoy mystery and wonder. Perhaps, as Chris Arthur, Gray is trying to find some wisdom in the insecurity.
I am now enjoying this dance with mystery in my own struggles as a writer. My early writings, riddled with the unknowns of human condition, are no longer problematic to me. Now, in writing of Simone biting my hand at the spaghetti party, I say, “Why the hell would you do that?” I craft the question, but no answer. Later in the essay I reflect: “And me, I’m sitting here writing essays and pondering, not too seriously, why Simone chose to bite me. Why me? If to get my attention, or attention at all, she was successful. If to gather my affection, she was not.” That is where I leave it, the cause of her behavior is unknown, only slightly speculated.
Once, I had the experience of a midnight drive with “Moon” to her family cabin. There was pouring rain. The place was deep in the woods, surrounded by howling timber wolves. Worse, I barely knew the girl. My experience was soaked in unknowns. Indeed, I would write about it. It came as no surprise that it was difficult to describe my fear, anxiety, risk, and desire. However, I kept to describing things, such as how “I’d parked the car a certain way, lights headed down the mountain, so I could take off through the woods. I had the idea that I was being smart. …I was thinking about the possibilities of things going wrong. What if some mountain guys broke in? We’d need an escape plan.” As with Arthur’s dark tunnel, going into the dark with Moon yielded its share of unknowns, both physically and mentally.
In my interview with him, I asked Arthur whether he had ever encountered a thing, a feeling, or otherwise, that he couldn’t put to text. He pointed to a passage from “Malcolm Unraveled,” one of his essays in Irish Haiku, replying, “Yes, we can say something…, but the words keep slipping off, there is a sense of the essential nature of the moment escaping…. Perversely, it is just this sense that acts like a spur, making me search for the unreachable, impossible grail of a description that might somehow capture the uncatchable.” Yes, there are mysteries and unknowns of the past, present, and future kinds that can possess a writer to pursue knowing even the smallest slice of mystery in the beyond. Knowing and writing is a writer’s means of survival. Certainly, the limitations weigh heavily on his curiosities. But that doesn’t mean the writer can’t stand at the edge and grope at the chasm and wrestle with words. In the likely event he learns little or nothing new of the mystery, no doubt the writer will become increasingly skilled at describing it.
“Man is a mystery. This mystery must be solved, and even if you pass your entire life solving it, do not say you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man.” F. Dostoevski
A Special Thanks to:
Dr. Thomas Kennedy, Thesis Mentor
Dr. Walter Cummins, Second Reader
Martin Donoff, Director
Dr. Martin Green, Chair
Fairleigh Dickinson University
WORKS CITED
Arthur, Chris. Irish Nocturnes. Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group, 1999.
Arthur, Chris. Email interview with the author. 10-15 March. 2005.
di Prima, Diane. Memoirs of a Beatnik. New York: Penguin Books, 1969.
Cummins, Walter. E-mail to the author. 05 Feb. 2004.
Dyer, Geoff. Interview with Pantheon staff. Absolute Write. 2003. 13 December 2004 <http://www.absolutewrite.com/novels/geoff_dyer.htm>.
Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
Gray, Spalding. Gray’s Anatomy. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Gray, Spalding. Morning Noon and Night. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Gray, Spalding. Swimming to Cambodia. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, 1929.
Kennedy, Thomas E. Realism & Other Illusions, La Grande, Oregon: Wordcraft, 2002.
Kennedy, Thomas E. E-mail to the author. 16 October. 2005.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London: E. Holt, 1690.
Lopate, Phillip. “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 7.1 (2005): 143- 156. Michigan State University Press.
Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Man.” Pope’s Complete Works, Ed. Henry W. Boynton. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1903.
Sedaris, David. Naked. Canada: Little, Brown & Company, 1997.
Sedaris, David. “Old Faithful.” The New Yorker 29 Nov. 2004.
Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. New York: Vintage, 1971.
Watts, Alan W. The Wisdom of Insecurity. New York: Pantheon Books, 1951.
The following story is based on actual events with actual people at “Samuel’s Late Night Tofu Spaghetti Party” thrown weekly during my senior year in Philosophy studies. Most names have been changed to protect the guilty. Until now, it has only appeared as a feature in my graduate studies creative portfolio.
I could have, I suppose, picked up enough at the market for several parties all at once. But I liked the immediacy, the excitement, of rounding the aisles at prime speed. Hungry people were coming over; and throwing a party is important business, especially when it’s for classmates. So, straight from Philosophy 457, as I’d done all semester, I threw my book bag on the back seat of my old Saab and headed over to the market. A pound of extra firm tofu, some tomato paste (3 cans for a dollar), one stick of salted butter, four cloves of garlic, a pound of generic Swiss, and two large bags of fresh spinach linguine. The organic extra virgin olive oil, double fermented soy sauce, and the secret herbs I always stocked. Then, to the wine shop for cheap Slovenian cabernet. Double bottles. Value.
Even before I’d unpacked my bags, the pan was hot, butter and garlic already volunteering their sensual scents. You see, my sauce, the only sauce worth serving, is built from the bottom up, slowly, and definitely will not be hurried. It could take hours. And what goes in it, is, and will remain, top secret. So don’t ask. All the more reason I melted, chopped, dashed, browned, and ground my herbal invention before my friends arrived. Then, as I watched it work and bubble, I got the first bottle of wine off to a proper start. Soon enough, though, the whole event began to rise right out of the pan. Crazy revelers would be knocking, and there was plenty of wine.
But no one ever actually knocked. It was more like a welcome break and entry. When Ken came through the door, Josephine was already there, standing near the sauce with a canning jar of wine.
“Canning jars, yeah,” she said, “They’re unbreakable.”
It was near zero outside, yet all Ken wore was a depreciated tee shirt under his thinning old Harley jacket. He styled himself tougher than he really was. Or maybe it was the other way around; I could never tell. Nevertheless, he was the only person on campus with sleeve and turtleneck tattoos.
“All I had was a bagel all day,” he said. He stood there in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning, hugging a glass of wine, telling candid tales of growing up in a dysfunctional family, a mad mess of things. He had, most likely, thought all day about what he wanted to say. It was as if he were waiting for someone to be listening. An occasional tear dropped to his tee shirt.
“That really sucks, man,” said Josephine, going over to hug Ken. Her brow was pulled down, curled in the center, her jaw dropped a bit. Her arms started swinging when she talked, excitedly, as if she had grown up in the exact same place as he, the same parents, house and all. Then she got into some stories of her own, the two of them okay with all the unloading. But it felt like prayer to me, or group therapy. Perhaps there is no difference. Anyway, this wasn’t what I had in mind when I started the thing up. I’d fantasized the spaghetti as foreplay to something like an orgy. Maybe it would start with the intellectual and move to the physical. These parties had turned out to be more like POW parties strewn with scars and anecdotes.
My idea to throw a weekly dinner party sprouted mostly out of a vodka late-night. Being that my friends liked both vodka and words, we played Scrabble and drank, until, Sari, a Christian freshman, climbed up on the table and stretched across the nicely arranged JURY, SECLUDE, and CLIT. I couldn’t see the board for her bare belly. That was pretty much it for the game. So, on Josephine’s dare, I drank vodka and juice from Sari’s navel. Before long, Sari was dancing on the coffee table, asking, “Do you guys think I have a nice ass?” It was unanimous. Everyone assured her it was a very fine ass. Then, down she went, her elbow going straight through the face of my guitar.
I thought we’d pick up on spaghetti night where that left off. Instead, there I was, hosting a roundtable for bonding thinkers and writers. We were the odd ones out, fixed on our poverty of friends, caught in a social gravity of sorts. My favorite essayist would have loved it, though, Phillip Lopate, author of philosophical essays of distaste for pretentious living. My friends were not softly paired in the living room over cheese and walnuts as were his in his nicely arranged “Dinner Party.” Nor was there mind-numbing chatter. No, we went face to face, sauce dripping from our lips, conversations on speed, words slurred in red wine, the air thick with cigarette smoke. It was more like, well, a train station, everybody’s thoughts going somewhere.
Just then, I thought Rachel was at the door. It was Francis and his new lover, the garishly outfitted Simone, rainbow stockings, fur hat and all. Francis was the more subdued of us all, browning jean jacket, poor guy’s running shoes, wire glasses, and the like. He’d been Josephine’s lover after me. They went on being friends, too. I asked him about it once; he just shrugged a shoulder. I met him outside of class, smoking cigarettes. He had a shy build, was a free verse poet, a self-announced official expert on the Beats, vinyl records, and all things Dylan. When I got the courage to ask him what the design on his arms was all about, we became friends. They were scars really. He had a great attitude, what I saw of it, for having had third degree burns covering his whole body. The barbecue grill exploded in the backyard. “I saved my sister from burning,” he said. “She was six, I was eight.”
Simone, however, was not a regular to spaghetti night. I wondered how Josephine and she were going to fit in the same room. I mean, both of them came on strong, but Simone had to be the center of things; if not, she’d launch into histrionics. She proposed her authority on just about everything, from diesel engines to coffee prices in jungles. Francis said he wanted to bring her as a guest; he said she’d fit right in. I told him, “It’s your call. She’s your lover, man.” That was my second mistake. The first was to introduce the two of them. Right from the first night, everybody had been possessive of the dinner idea. So, it was agreed that we’d check with the “charter members,” as Josephine put it, before someone new was invited. We weren’t able to come up with any criteria other than “philosophy major” or “writer,” though. And since Simone had never taken a philosophy class that anyone knew of and she’d never mentioned as much as one finished piece, we were all skeptical. She must have known we were on the fence about it. Every time she’d ask me if she were invited, I just said I’d let her know.
About eleven or so, things were heating up near the sauce. Ken, reaching for his Harley jacket, said that maybe he should be working on his paper. “No, dude, you have to hang out,” Josephine said, “Do it later. Stay up all night.” Josephine was fired up as always. If anyone could roll a party along, it was Josephine. She said that practically everyone she knew thought she was too much. It never bothered me that she did living room handstands, broke wineglasses, or argued about almost anything, vigorously. I loved that about her. She had activism in her tone, plenty of Virginia Woolf, poetic, strong. She was even colorful about depression, like it was a valid part of some philosophic process or as important as the meter in her poetry. And besides, she was the only female philosophy major on campus.
That’s likely why we ended up in bed. She was seductive, a comforting insecurity. I needed a release, couldn’t take all the energy. Or maybe she couldn’t take my energy or even take her own. We enjoyed everything about each other that we could, as much as we could. Nevertheless, we stopped seeing each other sexually. I was glad that we didn’t need a reason to stop. Like kids that let balloons go free, we just went on being friends. So, when I thought up the spaghetti party, she said, “I’m in, dude.”
By midnight, most everyone had wandered in. Stefan was a good-looking, lonely, boyish sort, wearing black everything, shoes, pants, turtleneck, and hat. He was mild with his voice, and known as the first person on campus to wear black framed glasses. Rad, a tall buzz-haired guy who could pass easily for a cop, rolled his own, had an old pickup, and a stern face that morphed to benevolence when he smiled. And, Tom, of course, who had developed a full set of pork-chop sideburns that gained him the title of lumberjack, was now the very happy new boyfriend of Josephine. Before the two were an item, she asked me how I thought she might be able to get his attention. “I’m sure he’d want to go for a beer,” I said. He did, they talked for five hours, and have been inseparable ever since. Then, as usual, maybe-she’d-show-maybe-not Rachel showed up. She was an unadorned queen of sorts, beautiful. I mean, you couldn’t tell at first, hair all in her face, second hand jeans dragging on the floor, an oversized nubby sweater. She said I saved her life more than once, particularly the night in Germany when she wanted to throw herself through plate glass; but that’s another story for another time.
With another round of wine and full plates of spaghetti, we settled around my old oak table, salvaged from a church basement, showing its wear as proudly as an old skiff with burns, stains, cracks, all with stories to tell. We looked at each other with faces of invocation. Chosen, beaten, mottled, connected, twenty-somethings, thirty somethings, and me, the career student, older than the youngest by a decade and a half. I felt picked, even better than the time my name was called to play second base. I felt strong about feeling beat; all of us did, as if we could beat the world, like Ginsberg meeting Kerouac, Virginia meeting Leonard. I hadn’t felt that way since I had religion.
“A toast,” I said as wineglasses met in the middle. “Here’s to… Yes. We’re all dying.” The round of still-sober laughs told me once again that food makes people happy. “There’s more cheese in the kitchen.”
“Damn, this is even better than last week,” Francis said.
“To meatless clarity of the mind,” Rad said, “Here’s to tofu.”
Glasses met again, heads nodded, noodles muffled the agreement. “Ta tofuu!” Everyone went on chewing for a bit; occasionally somebody sucked a shaking noodle in, end to end. That meant the sauce was a hit.
“Did you hear what Pruim said today?” Josephine said, not needing an answer. “Everything is just degrees of goatness.”
“You’d need faith for that.” Tom said.
“Where is Professor Pruim?” Francis said.
“He should fucking be here, dude,” Josephine said.
“But isn’t faith essential absurdity?” Ken said.
“Of course, faith is absurd; but religion puts specific limitations on absurdity,” I said.
“You know something? I’ve had all the Rationalism I can take,” Tom
pitched in, “To say that I can’t trust my senses for knowledge is rubbish.”
“Damn Dualists. I’m an Empiricist, I’m about the senses,” I said. “I taste, therefore I persist.”
“Are there limitations, though? Can I, say, smell too much?” Josephine said.
“You can’t drink too much, can you?” Stefan said, pushing on his black frames.
“Why not amass extensive knowledge of beer?” said Tom.
Back and forth and around we went, arguments and wine. From the sofa, Simone randomly offered what seemed to me a taunting squeal-of-a-laugh through her mouthful of teeth. Josephine rolled her eyes back and just went right on not falling for it. She was more intoxicated by the mayhem than anyone, not a docile bone in her, brow wrinkled, chin jutting, just short of yelling some philosophical argument still brewing from a fresh lecture. Unlike at Lopate’s party, none of my callers were hopelessly dependent on the host, being me, as the medium of conversation. Jump-starts were unnecessary. The only dependence seemed to be on the secret sauce. And, well, the wine of course. And getting away from campus.
“So, what are we all doing here?” I said.
“Smokin’ and drinkin’ like people should,” Rad said.
“I bet Samuel makes spaghetti just to get with the girls,” said Simone.
“She doesn’t get it, dude. How about, no one was cool in high school?” Josephine suggested.
Rachel lifted her glass, “Here’s to that.”
“Thirty two flavors and then some,” Josephine said, “That’s Ani.”
“I hate that song,” Simone yelled from the kitchen.
No one answered. Tom pulled at his plump sideburns, salting his thoughts with deep laughs, mouth gulping wide. “Thirty-one flavors, and still everyone is bitching,” he said. Tom was the most Socratic in the bunch, a scholar among us, perpetually examining things, keeping to his seat, engaging fully, long after several glasses of wine. He wasn’t sexually vigilant, either. Nothing was said. I mean, about Josephine. There we were, all three of us in the same room, four of us having been naked with at least one other person at the table.
I looked at the remaining lump of noodles and red sauce on my plate and lit a cigarette. I thought of Josephine naked. She was so quick at nudity, so unashamed. Like it was supposed to be. She used to sing naked to Ani. Ani DeFranco, that is. Every word. I never did get to hear much of Ani herself. I imagined the lyrics were better filtered through Josephine anyway. I looked across the table, wondering if she was thinking of me naked. Or Francis? I wondered how we could have let go so easily of those attachments.
“Humanity fucking blows,” Josephine said.
“Isn’t that our nature?” Rad said. “We want as much as we can get.”
“Altruism is dead,” Stefan said.
“It never was alive, was it?” I said. “It’s in our nature to only care for what benefits us. Who can feel another person’s pain, anyway?”
Rachel raised her glass again. “So, we all blow. What the fuck? Here’s to that.”
Digestion was kicking in and things were heating up. The arguments were driving us to madness. It was a weightless madness though. And I’m saying arguments here because it wasn’t a fight. No one really wanted to win. It was more like linguistic hugging. We begged for differences, for the creative tension in it all. We all wanted the same answers. To get at them, we busted the bullshit, ripping our beliefs to nothing. Over the weeks, I had become more energized and stimulated from it all. The early idea of the vodka and Scrabble orgies seemed empty.
“So then, back to the sense knowledge thing,” I said. “How do I know, though, that I’m not dreaming I just ate spaghetti?”
“Fork, spaghetti, fork, spaghetti. One always follows the other,” Tom said. “In a dream you can have spaghetti without even cooking it.”
“In your dreams you can come before you go,” Rad said.
“I just wanna come,” Ken said.
It’s interesting how, and I’ve seen this at other parties too, people have a mini mental orgasm or a momentary release of some sort when sexual innuendoes pop up. They always do, even in the most sophisticated groups, church socials, fundraisers for victims of abuse. It feels good to laugh at sex, about sex, during sex. So why should I be surprised? Ken did pop the topic a lot that night, though. He was madly gone, over some girl that lived with another guy. Ken got the daytime hours. “It’s only right to sleep with her after having sex,” Ken said. “It’s whacked.” With that, he got up and went for the door.
“Sit the fuck down, dude,” Francis said. Instead, Ken passed out on the floor, right there by the table.
“How can Descartes possibly say that he can live without his body?” I said. “He must not have had oral sex.”
I noticed Stefan hadn’t tried to get in on things much. He just kept filling his glass, pulling smoke from cigarettes. Josephine told me he hadn’t been laid in a while, maybe ever. “He’s a virgin, dude. Really,” she said. And Simone, she paid little attention to what was going down around the table. Nothing much at all to say. Every few minutes, it seemed, she’d call Francis over to the couch.
“Francis, Francis,” she’d say, grabbing for his belt.
“Shut up. Wait,” he’d say, “Not now,” taking turns between the conversation at the table and playing a Dylan CD, the Smiths, or somebody.
Rachel jumped up on the couch, her jeans riding low, hair flying, dancing and taking pictures, laughing between each snap.
“So here’s one,” Rad said. “Are apples red or not?”
“Of course not,” some said in unison.
“A bind man hath not the idea of blue. Locke,” Josephine said. “How about this? Byron was an opiate-head, so, should that play into a lit analysis? And if we ate opium, would we read Don Juan differently?”
And so, around we went. More questions, comments, and posits, plenty of them, rattling like bar glasses in the wind. Are there ugly people? Or are they just sick? Whose definition of beauty are we going with here? Schopenhauer? Nietzsche? Plato? And what about those Leibniz monads, those little perfect souls endowed to us, the collection of beings made by a perfect God perfectly? Or does she even exist? God, that is.
Nothing in my life seemed to be holding together except spaghetti night. The practical stuff was just fine, eating some, sleeping some, going to classes, studying. But like the rest of my friends, studying philosophy had plowed up my ideas of heaven, hell, knowledge, existence, faith, and a dozen other ingrained notions that I’d held on to. By my senior year, I had started to feel forlorn, nothing to fasten to, nothing solid. It felt like the time I was good-and-stoned on that rocky cliff above Boulder. I felt like a cooked noodle dangling off the end of a fork. The worst thing you can do is to try to control the mountain. Life is lot like being high, it’s better when you roll with it.
And that’s just it, I thought all my ideas were fixed; I’d never checked to see if they were valid. But now I was checking. I found no certainty, few answers, and I felt shaky. But the one thing I did understand was that we were asking. All of us were examining, burrowing into our ideas, personal, cultural, religious, or whatever. As I looked around the table at more of myself, I thought of Alan Watts’ wiggly world idea. He’d say we have little to hold onto, nothing but moving moments, a wiggly world. And I was starting to feel okay about it, sharing the wiggly with my wiggly spaghetti friends with their wiggly lives. Maybe we’d even be smart enough to figure something out. Thinking back, we already had.
By this time it was long past three in the morning. From out on the porch, Stefan reported five inches of snow on the ground. Rad rolled another Danish tobacco smoke with a perma-grin, “Bali Shag, man. Five cents a cigarette.”
Ken came back from the floor eventually, jumped up, cocked his hat, pointed a finger at the ceiling and danced like Travolta, yelling, “The only thing missing now is complete intimacy. I want to come like a wine stain.”
“Shit, you’re so S.N.L.,” I said. “A little jumpy. But so sexy.”
Josephine was packing another bowl, laughing the piss out of herself. And Rachel was taking more pictures. The fraternity of the profoundly confused had morphed into the fraternity of the wiggly. No one was clinging. I wasn’t clinging. I was kayaking with the current, paddle in hand, negotiating the rocks. Josephine poured the last of the wine around the table. I had my friends; we had each other, partners in the current.
I picked up the little journal that went around the table every week. We recorded things there, stuff that we wanted to say to each other, stuff that people were saying and doing, posits, jokes, drawings, comments and the like. I was writing a note to Rachel …and then there is you.. gardens flow in and out of my head.. bees lick.. birds jump in the water.. yippee, girl.. when, Simone, laughing to herself, tried to pull the journal from my hand. I held on. I held on tighter.
“I’m writing,” I said. She became more adamant, laughing hysterically. She tried again. “Simone? I’m fucking writing.” Everybody got quiet. Then, she bent over, forced my hand in her mouth, and bit me. Shit, I thought, looking for blood.
“Why the hell would you do that?” I said.
“It didn’t hurt,” she said.
Blood was pushing up to meet her teeth marks, two pink and white fleshy half moons hung from my skin. I wanted to say it hurt like hell, but I didn’t want to give her any more pleasure.
“Damn,” Tom said.
No one else said anything for what could have been five seconds or five minutes. I glanced up from the bite to see blank faces. It was as if we were all levitated. Everybody was as surprised as I was, especially when I told her to leave. Tom lit up a smoke, pulled long and hard on it, then let out the smoke with nervous exhaustion. Josephine tapped on the table. “What the fuck?” Rachel whispered to herself. Stefan, Francis, and Ken shuffled around the room a bit, then left with Simone. Ken mentioned the paper he had due. “Yeah, I have one too,” I said. And that was that.
Spaghetti night dwindled, over the weeks toward graduation, to Tom, Josephine, me, and sometimes Rad. A few weeks later, I wasn’t surprised to hear that Simone was making spaghetti, on Thursdays, at her house. After a summer of throwing fish in a market, Francis stopped seeing Simone, and wouldn’t talk about it, and moved on to corporate accounting someplace. Ken went to work moving rocks at the quarry; he sees his lover now both day and night. Rad travels around painting amusement rides (donkeys) and plays banjo in his cabin on the river. No one has heard from Rachel. When she left, she said she was going surfing, every day, in Hawaii. She said she’d never be back. Stefan got tired of loading trucks of tampons at Roadway and moved back to New York. Josephine works as a bartender, I doubt for long, and lives nicely with Tom, who is, still with sideburns, in graduate philosophy studies.
And me, I’m sitting here writing essays and pondering, not too seriously, why Simone chose to bite me. Why me? If to get my attention, or attention at all, she was successful. If to gather my affection, she was not. And I do think about a wiggly reunion now and then, inviting all the wigglies back for more wiggly spaghetti. I’ll go to the market, round up my things, start the butter and garlic an hour early, and pull a cork at the sound of the first knock. Hopefully it will snow, and no one will want to leave.
Occasionally I notice Francis’ vinyl of Jackson Brown, The Pretender, left under a chair, all the wine corks still in the basket, and the little journal up on the refrigerator. I pull it down and have a look.
Week 3, 3:30 am – I suggest we debate the ontological status of the noodle. Tom.
Week 4, 12:05 am – Ausgezeichnet! Josephine.
Week 9, 4:00 am – The promise that’s never kept, I’ll burn it for you. Samuel.
©2006 Samuel Saint Thomas
a suit that goes bathing,
a suit that’s so spare,
a triangle of sparkles,
it covers a square …
a suit that costs hundreds,
a suit nipple small,
a fraction of fabric,
it makes my skin crawl …
a suit that worships,
a suit that bows down,
a prayer to religion,
it’s sun wears the crown …
a suit that meows,
a suit with desire,
a just next to nothing,
it catches on fire …
a suit is a signal,
a suit for the eye,
a nation of naturals,
it’s begging to fly …
a suit fills my plate,
a suit menu rave,
a smorgasbord all summer,
it’s dinner time! … wave! …
©2005 Samuel Saint Thomas
An excerpt from the unpublished work in progress: Frying Spam and Other Things To Do Before the Rapture.
My dad never called me boy, man, buddy or son. He shouted my name. I knew I was chosen by the barking tone. Who else could he be talking to? I was the oldest boy, ten, and my brothers were half as tall, both of them. And my sister didn’t count, she was a girl, and she was too old.
“Got a lot of work to do today,” Dad said, rising up from the table, slurping his morning Sanka. The front door slammed. That was my cue. I knew I had two minutes to get there. Outside were shovels, a pickaxe, a sledgehammer, and a ball of twine.
“What are you doin’, Dad?” I asked, chewing my cinnamon toast.
“Digging.”
“What are you doin’ with the string?”
“Drawing a line,” he said. He knelt to pound in a stake.
Dad was always erecting something: porches, additions, steps, buildings, sidewalks, and signs. He was a preacher. He said he worked for God. Spirit-filled and hell-fired. If he wasn’t sawing, he was typing sermons, two-fingers at a time. If he wasn’t hammering, he was praying for souls, loudly, pleading like blues singers do with women. It seemed I was always involved. Sometimes I pretended. “Raise up your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord,” he’d say. Dads, good dads, employ their sons in the work of the Lord.
“Drawing a line? What for, Dad?”
“So I dig the hole straight.”
Fishing around in the weeds at the back of the house, he found a thing he called a pin. “That’s where the yard ends,” he said, as if talking to himself. He drove in a stake. After digging around out front for a good long time, during which he had to call on Jesus a few times for help, and my mother for some iced tea, he found another pin. He drove in another stake. To that he strung a line to the stake in the back. Then Mr. Borus came walking down the sidewalk.
Dad called him Buxie. He rarely came down as far as our house. Dad never went up their sidewalk either. He only spoke of them when he backed the car out of the driveway. “They’re Catholics. Catholics are the whores of Babylon. Going straight to hell when Jesus comes in the rapture.”
“Am I saved?” I asked.
“You have Jesus in your heart. You’re saved.”
“Reverend?” Mr. Borus said. He stuck out his big hand.
“Praise the Lord,” said Dad.
“You need help findin’ that pin?” he offered.
“Well, whataya know, It’s right there where I thought it was,” said Dad, wiping his forehead.
Neither one said anything for a while. They stood there, combing their hair with their fingers and looking at the pin. “Saa-mmaay,” Mr. Borus said finally, walking away with his head tilted to the side. I could tell something was wrong by the way he tilted his head to the side.
Mr. Borus always said “Saa-mmaay,” and waved his lunch pail at me as I flew down the sidewalk in my wagon. He was a big shot in the steel mill. He sounded big when he talked. He was wide, and tall like the green man on the pea boxes in Mom’s freezer. After he’d go in the house I’d park the wagon and think. I could have him for my dad. I could play all the time and roll down his lawn. It was a new house, like in magazines. There was a garage in the basement, a den, a jukebox, a patio with soft chairs like at hotels, and a curved walkway lined with yellow flowers and seashells. But my dad built stuff. I never saw Mr. Borus build anything. And there were no dandelions in his yard, which Dad said was silly.
Dad stood looking at that line for a long time, thick, brand new, tight, and straight. I tapped on his round belly. I looked up at his sweaty face. I wondered what he was thinking. “Don’t pester me right now,” he said. He smiled at the line. It must have been a very good line.
Then he started to dig. “A footer,” he called it. By the next day, the hole ran the full length of the yard. Every day it grew deeper. Every day Mr. Borus came over and said, “Reverend?” Then he’d look in the hole, shake his head, and go inside. Something about his looking in the hole reminded me of a funeral. That’s what everyone did when they put Grandma down in her hole, Uncle Jim, Uncle Tom, Aunt Doty; they all looked in the hole.
“Is Mr. Borus going to heaven?” I asked. “Does he want to go up with Jesus?” Dad kept on digging. The deeper the footer got, the shorter Dad was, until all I saw was the straps of his dirty muscle shirt and his chest hair sticking out.
At dinner, something about the big hole was making Mom proud and happy. “It’s gonna be a nice wall,” she said. “Thank God we built that fence out back. Miss Hollywood can lay over there half naked all she wants now.” Dad got a big smile whenever she talked about Miss Hollywood.
“Sorry, Charlie,” she said, slapping his head.
“This is stupid,” my sister said.
“Mrs. Buckner gives me candy. She’s a nice lady,” I said.
“You’re not supposed to be over there,” my sister said.
I’m not sure if she thought the fence or the wall was stupid. Either way, I never paid much attention to her. No one did. I just hoped the wall would hide our house. It wasn’t a house anyway. Not like other kids had. It was plain and dirty white, with tall windows like the church. Mom called our house “The parsonage.” It was attached to the back of the church. We did have a lawn, “The church lawn,” as Dad called it whenever it was time to mow the grass. We lived at 75 West Fifth Avenue, Around the Back. That was our address.
The next day, the big cement truck came. The whole neighborhood stood on the sidewalk like it was a parade. The tires on the truck were taller than I was. The truck was loud like a locomotive. A giant rainspout shot out mushy gray stuff. “Mud,” Dad said. Buckets and buckets of mud poured in the hole. I didn’t do anything important. I stood there until he needed something. Most times he pointed at a tool and said, ”Give me that.” Sometimes he just said, “Pay attention!”
“Why are you smoothing it out?” I asked.
“It’s gotta be level.” I’d heard that before.
“Can I do some?”
“Later.”
“Dad? .. Dad? .. Dad.”
“What?”
“That doesn’t look like a wall.”
“It will when we’re done.”
By Sunday the “footer” got hard. It was magic. It was only mud the day before. I jumped and ran on it, from the sidewalk to the back fence. Dad said it was “cured.” That’s what he said after he prayed over someone, “She’s cured.” After the Sunday morning worship service, Dad went in his study. “The Lord rested on the Sabbath day, and so do we,” said Mom. I got my trucks out and went down in the hole.
When I got home from school the next day, tall square stacks of gray blocks lined the driveway. Near the back of the yard, Dad was down in the footer leaning over a line of blocks, scraping them with a tool. “A trowel,” he said. He dumped a bag of gray powdery stuff in a big metal box, then stood there shooting water at it with the hose like he was putting out a fire.
“Get the hoe.”
“The hoe?”
I grabbed the only thing I didn’t know the name for. “You gotta mix this mud till it’s sticky,” he said, pulling the hoe back and forth and talking to Jesus. I wanted to mix mud, mix something. I kept begging. Finally, letting out a long stream of air, waving his hand, he said, “Okay, mix the mud.” I mixed, and he lay blocks, blocks on top of blocks, spreading mud between each one, like peanut butter on Saltines. I got to do what Dad called chinking too. That’s when you scrape a piece of copper pipe –left over from the bathroom project– up and down and across the cracks. “Clean up those joints. It’s an important job,” he said.
I wanted to be important. So I cleaned up the joints. Just like he did. I knew what an important job was and going to get things was not important. Tools were important. Measuring, marking and cutting. Tools are what Dad used to “get things right,” as he would say. I wanted to get things right. I wanted to get things right so I could brag to Mom like he did, go in for dinner, adjust my shirt, stick out my chest and say, “Would you just look at that.”
Every day the wall was higher. I could tell by eyeing up the top of the wall with the statue of the Virgin Mary over at the Borus’s. Dad said, “That statue is an idol,” and something about a calf made from gold jewelry, and people that worship idols burning in hell. Mary looked pretty, except for when they put a garbage bag over her head every winter. Her white dress went all the way down to two green stone frogs in a flowerbed. She had smooth soft round breasts and a snake wrapped around her feet. Her cheeks had red spots like Denise my girlfriend in first grade did when she came back from the beach. On top of her head was a blue handkerchief and a gold halo. But the more the wall went up, the less I could see of her. The frogs disappeared first, then went the snake, her legs, her breasts, her cheeks, her blue handkerchief, and finally, no halo.
We had a wall. Dad spread mud on our side. This time it was white mud, like Mom’s icing. “Stucco,” he said. We stood there studying it, first at the back of the yard, then at the front. That’s what we always did when we finished building stuff. I looked at Dad looking at the wall. His belly hid his belt. His belly humped out when he tucked his hands in his back pockets. His muscles were brown, his shirt the color of mud. His face looked thirsty and tired. He smelled sweaty. His hair was wet and shiny and black as licorice. He smiled. He looked proud and important like guys on baseball cards. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends at school. My dad built stuff. My dad was strong. My dad was bigger than their dad.
“Dad .. Dad .. Nice wall,” I said.
“Hey Hon!” he called to Mom. Mom came out looking at Dad smiling.
“Charlie! It’s beautiful,” she exclaimed, like she hadn’t noticed all week.
“How come nobody else has a wall like us?” I asked.
“Mr. Archer has a fence,” Mom said.
“So the dog stays in, right?”
“That dog barks all night long,” Dad said.
Mr. Borus marched over and stood up on a pile of dirt down the end of the wall. Dad looked down at me. “Stay right there,” he said. Mr. Borus yelled something important at Dad. Mr. Borus was pointing at the dirt, and waving both arms back and forth at the wall. I wanted to hear. “Stay on our side,” Mom said. Whatever Dad said must have been the right thing. Maybe it was because Mrs. Borus came out and stood next to the Virgin Mary.
Grownups had things to be upset about: dogs, cats, kids, tree limbs, ladies getting tans, walls and fences. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with the wall. I thought the wall was a great thing, so did Mom and Dad. It was straight and Dad said we got it right. It was brand new. It was white. Why wasn’t Mr. Borus happy? I resolved, as much as kid can resolve, that grownups lived in a different world. Maybe I’d find out when I got as tall as them or something.
So I spent a lot of time on the porch steps with my chin in my hands. Gone was the perfect view of the Borus’s new car, the silly lawn, the flowers, the beer delivery trucks, and the Virgin Mary. I could still see up the street, the front doors, the porches, the neighbors going in and out. I wondered if they were going to heaven. I wondered if, unlike us, they had Coca Cola in the fridge, or watched “Happy Days.” They were different. They were lost and I was saved.
And I had a wall. The only one in the neighborhood. I could sit on top of it anytime I wanted. I could watch the Borus girls on their patio, flipping burgers, making mocktinis, laying out in bikinis, laughing, and having Catholic whore of Babylon parties. Sometimes on summer nights, other kids in the neighborhood would come and climb up on the wall too. One Saturday afternoon Dad came out of the garage with his tools. “We’ll have no more of that,” he barked. He spent most of the day making a pile of stones into pointy arrows. Then he cemented them to the top of the wall. “Charlie! It’s beautiful,” Mom said.
©2022 Samuel Saint Thomas
Photo: Baseball by the Wall by Dad
A Conversation with Chris Arthur ///
The following interview was first published in The Literary Review, Winter 2008, Vol. 51 No.2.
Chris Arthur, born in Belfast, is the author of a trilogy of creative nonfiction, Irish Nocturnes (1999), Irish Willow (2002), and Irish Haiku (2005). His work has appeared in The American Scholar, the Honest Ulsterman, Irish Pages, North American Review, Northwest Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Southern Review, Threepenny Review, the Best American Essays series, and many others. He’s been described as “the Irish writer who has been quietly rescuing the meditative essay for the twenty-first century.” More on this much celebrated author can be found at http://www.chrisarthur.org/author.html
Saint Thomas: In a photograph of you posted on the Internet, you look pretty dapper for an introspective fellow with a liking for nocturnes and willows.
Arthur: I’d rather focus on words than photographs, though how the two relate can be interesting. Sometimes I think books should appear under pen names and without author photos (or with photos of different/random people), so as attention is kept firmly on what’s written. I mean, does it really matter who wrote something? What’s important is the quality of the writing, whether it’s interesting/beautiful, whether it sparks insight/pleasure. Maybe this is just a reaction against some of the dafter tendencies of academic authorship, where people lay claim to every tedious footnote and seem to be very possessive of –and frequently tiresomely boastful about– every damn thing they’ve published, even if it belongs with what’s been nicely dubbed “the pornography of insignificance.”
Saint Thomas: Your essays read like maps, each with a significance of place. I happen to be a descendent of the Isle of Man, then later, Liverpool. Something about your essays caused me to consider going to those places to write for a bit. Can you speak to those places at all?
Arthur: Interesting! People tell me the Isle of Man is like a cross between Ireland and Scotland. But then people say that about Wales too and it isn’t true (well, not to me). Every place is its own place, however many echoes it has of somewhere else. Haven’t been to Isle of Man, though it has provided welcome shelter in stormy sea crossings (things get calmer in its lee) and I’ve sometimes seen its landmass– distant/indistinct– on flights/ferry trips to/from Ireland. I’d wager there are no copies of Irish Nocturnes on that Island. The nocturnes may be Irish in provenance, but I hope I manage to hit notes in them that will resonate with all sorts of readers in all sorts of places. I like the Isle of Man’s symbol of independence. The motto of those three legs “Quocunque Jeceris Stabit” – “Whichever way you throw me I stand” – has a certain air of Ulster defiance to it.
Liverpool has a quality all of its own. Sounds like you’ve been able to trace some of the maze-way of your family’s peregrinations. I’d like to hire a team of researchers to follow up some of the leads I’ve discovered about family in doing the background for an essay in Irish Haiku entitled “Obelisk.” Seems like some of my mother’s ancestors, who are buried at a place called Umgall in County Antrim (from the Irish Uimgaill, meaning “Land of the Strangers”), were refugees from Northumberland, fleeing either plague or religious persecution sometime between 664 and 674. If even some of their story could be retrieved, some of this obscure familial nerve teased out from all the forgetfulness that obscures it, that would provide raw material for a score of essays.
Saint Thomas: In “Facing the Family” you write: “To have effectively mislaid the last earthly remains of one’s progenitors.…” In thinking about where my own grandmother might be buried, this retrieving, this teasing out of obscure familial nerve from forgetfulness for raw material intrigues me. Is that not true with most things? I mean, should writers not dig deeper then?
Arthur: This is definitely true of most things. I suspect that the essayist equivalent of a Zen Master (and I can think of no one who would quite qualify) would be able to start an essay from anything. If we dig deeper, learn to see more clearly, listen more sharply, the camouflage of the mundane starts to slip off, and that’s when, at least for me, writing starts.
Saint Thomas: I’m quite interested in landscape as technique in essay form. Do you say that what you see in landscape is influenced by your interior state or does landscape affect your interior state? Say I experience a great loss of some kind or another, I may have great difficulty seeing beauty, sunshine, or what have you. Do you see what I mean?
Arthur: Landscape and mindscape/heartscape/soulscape strike me as intricately linked. If I’d been born and raised with Welsh contours running through me, or Isle of Man ones, I’m sure I’d write/think differently. But that’s probably just another way of saying that I’d be someone else. Not sure how long it takes living in a place before you take the landscape with you when you move away. I know I’ve brought loads of County Antrim memories/images/imaginings with me to Wales.
Saint Thomas: Earlier you said, “What’s important is the quality of the writing, whether it’s interesting/beautiful, whether it sparks insight/pleasure,” you seem to be saying then, that when you write, you have the reader’s pleasure and process in mind as well as your own. Some authors have said they don’t write for the reader at all. And that seems odd to me, given that language is a form of communication, whether spoken or in text.
Arthur: If someone is prepared to pay an author the compliment of giving up time (the most precious of our non-renewable resources!) to read his/her book, it strikes me that there are obligations, of courtesy if nothing else, to try to ensure that the time isn’t wasted. Georgia O’Keefe’s idea about filling space beautifully is an aesthetic hurdle that text too often fails to get over (and I’m not exempting my own). Some writing doesn’t even manage, so at least it seems to me, to get over much lower hurdles, sometimes to the extent that it comes across as a waste of time/space/energy (again, I’m not claiming innocence here). I’m very keen to avoid a particular type of academic writing of which I’ve had a bellyful. The sort of articles this results in is nicely pilloried by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim for their “niggling mindlessness”, their “funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts”, the way they throw “pseudo-light upon non-problems”.
That said, it’s not as if I sit down and think: “How am I going to write this essay so that readers will like it.” My primary audience is, I guess, myself, and I’d still be prompted to write even if I thought no one was ever going to read it (realistically, very few people are ever likely to read these essay collections). In part, writing is a way of getting my thinking straight, but also, as per the image at the start of Irish Nocturnes, “I write because I have no tail to wag.” I like to hear words cast in particular ways and try to write according to that (often damned elusive) voice – but in the hope that my likes/dislikes/standards/style will be something that others – though not necessarily that many others – will share.
Saint Thomas: Would you elaborate on your wish to hear words cast in particular ways?
Arthur: Perhaps. It’s when they sound right and look well together, fit flush with what you’re trying to catch with them. In fact, one of the essays in Irish Haiku is about and entitled, “getting fit” – not in the sense of weight training and running, but in terms of getting utterance/writing to fit experience/ideas. I keep going back to Basho’s advice: “Let there not be a hair’s breadth separating your mind from what you write.” Impossible of course, you can always see lots of daylight between them, but when you get the best fit it’s momentously satisfying. Why that should be I don’t know. The level of pleasure-fulfillment that writing provides, when it’s going well, is astonishing. So, I guess the depth of angst that comes when it’s not going well shouldn’t be surprising.
Saint Thomas: You speak of this “often damned elusive voice.” Is it a common thing for a writer to fear losing a voice that he has grown comfortable with, or should he just go with it to see where it leads?
Arthur: If a voice spoke to me in this kind of tone/tempo I’d sit up and listen, transcribe it, tease it out, ask it to continue – and not complain! I very definitely live in fear of losing the voice that I’m looking for, and occasionally find, in my essays. In the midst of writing, when it’s going well, it seems strong, fluent, something you can depend on just to keep on coming. Then the piece is done and, knowing that I don’t really understand where the impetus for it came from, or perhaps knowing it’s more something given than something manufactured, I’m concerned about where the next one will come from – or if it will come.
My writing is interspersed with long silences which I don’t welcome and sometimes find really depressing, but which I suspect are a kind of necessary gestation period. It would be wonderful just to be able to have that elusive voice speak to me all the time and so have the kind of writing life that can fill every day with well-wrought words. I’ve only been able to manage that kind of approach on a couple of relatively brief occasions, when I’ve taken time out from work, based myself somewhere else and got into a whole different set of routines. I dream of doing so again, but the realities of job-family-money make it difficult.
Saint Thomas: I have noticed that, in your essays, you find a way, a burrowing if you will, into the mysteries of life through the commonplace. This process is summed up in the title of your essay, “Meditations on the Pelvis of an Unknown Animal.” I remembered finding the complete bone structure of a cow at the top of the Appalachian Trail in PA. As you say, “…cleaned of their flesh, bleached white and naked, they have always struck me as objects of extraordinary beauty.” I wanted to hook them back together somehow and hang them up as art. As I was reading your essay, I imagined you coming upon that large pelvis, stooped there in a pair of shorts on the stony shore near Fifeness, eyes perhaps bugging out of your head. So, would you say that it is the process itself of examining mystery or the writing of it that intrigues you the most? Put another way, is it the adventure or the linguistic expression of that adventure?
Saint Thomas: This is an interesting point. I think certain types of experience come freighted with such a load of meaning – that they carry significance/prompt reflection by the very torque of their occurrence, the camber at which they intersect with the mind – that, in a sense, I’ve no choice but to write about them, even if I may not do so immediately (sometimes not for years). In particular, some natural objects seem to cry out to be touched, held, kept. It’s almost like they’re talismans, relics or totems which carry an enormous density of mystery-meaning. Essay writing is at once a way of seeing further into, and expressing, their mystery and meaning. The pelvis was one such object.
One of the essays in Irish Haiku (“Miracles”) takes as its point of departure a fossilized whale’s otolith (ear bone). When I came across it in Stan Woods’ famous fossil shop in Edinburgh it exerted an almost magnetic force on me. Obviously the writing depends on the experience/object – but at the same time the experience/object is deepened/developed/changed by the writing. I look at the otolith differently after going through the experience of writing an essay about it (and doing the research/reflection the essay entailed). I find natural objects are the most potent in this respect, but much the same thing can also apply to things we manufacture – the ferrule from my father’s walking stick, a book held by a terrorist (this latter from “Witness” in Irish Haiku).
Saint Thomas: I believe it was Michel de Montaigne who called himself an “accidental philosopher.” And here’s what I’m wondering; for you, do you see the results of examining as accidental? Do you simply happen onto truths? Or, as Socrates, do you have a mystery, or say, an abstract question in mind to pursue when an essay starts up in your thoughts?
Arthur: That’s difficult. It’s often a bit of both. In “Under Siege” in Irish Nocturnes, for example, the essay was in part sparked by an object I stumbled on – Walker’s Diary – a book that had been in the house for years. But in part the essay is also a meditation on what theologians call “the problem of suffering”, something that I’ve thought about on and off for years. “A Tinchel Round My Father”, in Irish Willow, was born largely as a result of a particular photograph, but it also came about because I was thinking about photography and time, and – largely through the notion of “Indra’s Net” – about how things are connected. In Irish Haiku, “Water-Glass” is another attempt to “burrow into the mystery of history through one common place” (to adapt your words).
If that common place, a street in my hometown of Lisburn, Country Antrim, hadn’t existed and meant something to me, though, I’m not sure if abstract reflection alone would have been enough to make me embark on a written exploration of what lies beneath the ordinary surfaces we walk on. Despite my professional background in philosophy and religious studies, I’m not engaged, at least not in these essays, in systematic logical analysis, following an idea through point by point. There is certainly an element of accident, but lots of deliberation too. How essays start up in my thoughts I don’t know. I just wish they did more often!
Saint Thomas: In your essays, human existence is mostly comprised of a complicated array of activities beyond the mundane. You certainly have a wonderful skill in going beyond the immediate, say, a piece of linen, or a common shy bird. But have you ever encountered a thing, a feeling, or otherwise, that you could not put to text?
Arthur: Thanks for this generous/positive assessment of my writing. Your question here immediately brought to mind a section from “Malcolm Unraveled,” one of the essays in Irish Haiku. I hope you won’t consider it poor taste/bad form to quote myself at some length, but I think this very much addresses your question. Malcolm was a neighbor awoken when my cousin and I shouted out in glee at having caught a poplar hawk moth late one night on the street outside our house. The essay tries to dissect the moment when he stood in his pajamas under a street lamp and stared at us disapprovingly.
Thinking about our experience of interrupted stories, the way we are surrounded by fragments of lives, fractions of things, the fact that we will never know “how things turned out” or what the whole looks like, makes me remember a foolish abstraction I once believed in. I’m in my twenties, butterfly and moth collecting forgotten, sitting in some university library thinking about the logical problems raised by claims that religious experience is ineffable. That is, that God, Brahman, Nirvana, the Tao, and suchlike cannot be adequately described and that they are beyond the reach of words. With the arrogance of youthful and unsubtle thinkers, I conclude that it is logically impossible for anything to be ineffable on the flimsy grounds that it is always possible to say what something is like, or at least that it is possible to indicate that it is more like one thing than another.
Taking another clumsy leap in the dark of specious logic, I further conclude that it would not even be possible to experience something that was completely unlike everything else, so that to claim to have had an ineffable experience would be incoherent. How, I reasoned, could we ever be aware of something that was completely beyond our power to describe it? I’ve long deserted such heroic naiveté no doubt replacing it with other stupidity.
Now, far from defending the position that we could never experience the ineffable, I incline more to the view that everything we experience is ineffable. For how can you really say anything about Malcolm who can stand emblematically for any moment, unless you decide not to unravel him at all and stay only at the safe surface layer of radical abbreviation that everyday discourse affords? Yes, we can say something (this essay bears testament to that), but the words keep slipping off, there is a sense of the essential nature of the moment escaping. And yet, perversely, it is just this sense that acts like a spur, making me search for the unreachable, impossible grail of a description that might somehow capture the uncatchable.
Saint Thomas: So then, in this adventure of catching the grail, what writing techniques do you find helpful in crafting and perhaps embracing the unknowns?
Arthur: Well, I guess it’s a case of looking for metaphors, images, stories, and symbols – coupled with periodic reminders to myself and readers that words don’t work beyond a certain extent. Joseph Brodsky once said (in his wonderful essay collection, Less than One) that “As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms keep sliding off.” But of course, in that image of failure, Brodsky has, in fact, succeeded in saying something about this failure. In that same collection, incidentally, Brodsky talks about trying “to make the monotone of the infinite more audible.”
Many of my essays might be seen as attempting this. I mention this comment in the Foreword to Irish Willow, suggesting that “It’s one of the most perplexing characteristics of our species that we often don’t hear the deafening hum that Brodsky identifies (astutely recognizing the need to amplify it yet further).” In one sense the ineffable/unknown/mysterious is commonplace, encountered everywhere you turn. In another sense it’s camouflaged by the mundane and very hard/rare to see. Without wishing to endorse her theistic assumptions, I think Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes the point nicely in Aurora Leigh:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
One of the review comments on Irish Willow that pleased me most said that the book “manages to catch quite a bit of the uncatchable mystery of being.” It doesn’t really, but that’s what it’s attempting. The fact that this mystery is staring us in the face the whole time, but that for the most part we operate at a mundane level and ignore it, is maybe not so strange. Would we stay sane if we stayed mindful of the realities of our situation the whole time?
Saint Thomas: Earlier you said, “We often don’t hear the deafening hum that Brodsky identifies.” Do you think it’s because we don’t have the ability to “sit”? What would you suggest a writer do to be in a place to hear? Given that writers by default are not economically placed such that they can ferry off to crashing coasts for retreat.
Arthur: Writers surely need some parallel to the ability to sit well/attentively. What works for one person, though, may not work for someone else. The kind of practical advice I give myself (and I often ignore my own advice) is to remember to engage with the elements. Very easy in the strange society we live in to insulate yourself from the dark, from stars, from dawn, from trees coming into leaf, from birdsong, from the seasons. I try to sit at first light most mornings in my garden just drinking coffee and noticing small sights-sounds-smells.
Someone I know does all kinds of obviously adventurous things, and travels widely, and then tells friends about what he’s done/where he’s been. But it just comes out like a rather tedious list and I’m left with a strong sense that nothing’s really touched him, that it’s all so much superficial distraction/activity. I contrast him with a recently deceased neighbor in Ireland (mentioned in “Takabuti’s Tears” in Willow) who, for most of the time I knew him, had an outwardly very quiet existence but was electrifyingly engaged with life. It’s that kind of engagement I envy.
Saint Thomas: I was wondering about your choice of language, the density, the thoughtful thickness so to speak. When I picked up “Irish Nocturnes” I noticed an immediate slowing of my thoughts, even the rest of me. I was invited to enjoy, meditate, think, ponder, and even posit with you at your speed. Do you set out to pace your essays as such? Or does this pace in your work reflect your person?
Arthur: The pace isn’t premeditated. It just happens. Good to know it’s an infectious tempo and makes you fall into mental step beside it. That’s wished for, certainly, but not planned. And it definitely doesn’t work for everyone. One friend’s response, having read Irish Nocturnes and Irish Willow, was, “There just aren’t enough wizards in them, Chris” – meaning he found them slow and tedious when set beside the likes of Harry Potter. Not sure if the pace reflects the person or not. Certainly it reflects part of the person. But I’m other things besides being an essayist.
Saint Thomas: In your essay, “A Paper Star for Brookfield,” you mention the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. I’ve read much of his work, and enjoy it greatly; and I sense something kindred in your work. Could it be that Merton influences you?
Arthur: I’ve not read much Merton, but the little I’ve looked at has impressed me with the authority of its wisdom/courage/insight. A short book, Raids on the Unspeakable, contains an idea that has stuck in mind over the years and sparked off various thoughts. Merton’s view that the very concept of sanity, as it’s held to in modern society, contains a fundamentally non-Christian element in its exclusion of love. Meaning, I think, if you interpret it more widely, that many religiously-spiritually based notions of identity and purpose view social-psychological norms as so fundamentally misguided as to be evil/sinful/insane.
Saint Thomas: Is there anyone whose book covers you’ve worn away?
Arthur: Not always easy to know which books/authors end up being an influence. Sometimes I guess it’s evident from what’s specifically mentioned in the essays. The forewords to all three books refer to haiku, and that mode of writing has had a very definite impact – not least because there are some very “felicitous pairings” that can be made between essays and haiku. I’m stealing that phrase from a book review of Willow that said such pairings could be made between my essays and Seamus Heaney’s poems. Don’t know if that’s true, but there are certainly lots of Heaney’s books on my shelves. I prefer his early collections – and I think some of his prose – in Preoccupations, for example- is excellent.
I’m a big fan of the Best American Essays – though I think this year’s volume is a bit disappointing. I like the way the series provides an annual harvest of what’s been appearing across a whole range of interesting publications. It was via Best American Essays that I discovered Reg Saner’s work. I’d put Saner in the same kind of category as the likes of Annie Dillard, Edward Hoagland, and Barry Lopez. This kind of lyrical celebration of nature really strikes a chord. My first encounter with writing of this kind came with the English writer J.A. Baker’s, The Peregrine, a book that deserves to be better known.
In terms of Irish practitioners of this sort of thing, Michael Viney’s A Year’s Turning is notable. Flann O’Brien made a big impression on me. In the days when people thought you’d attained adulthood at age 21 an uncle gave me £21 – back then a very generous gift. I used it to buy all of the great Flann’s work in hardback, though I’d read most of them by then already in paperback. The uncle in question – very bigoted against things Catholic and Southern Irish – was horrified when I told him what I’d spent his money on! Currently, my reading is what you’d describe as catholic – or maybe just chaotic. Of recent things that really stick in mind, Phillipe Descola’s The Spears of Twilight would probably come first out of a very mixed bunch.
Saint Thomas: When I run into the Irish here or in the homeland, they tend to launch into proud chat of their heritage. Likewise, It seems that history smartly informs the language and backbone of your essays. How important is history to your own writing adventures or for essayists in general, no matter the culture?
Arthur: I’d be very wary about making any kind of claim for “essayists in general,” given that the essay is such a varied, diverse, unfettered sort of genre (or anti-genre). So far as I’m concerned, though, yes, history is important, both in the sense of times past, but also (I think more importantly) in terms of giving texture/depth to the present. I mean, every moment trails tendrils back and forward, connects with time/space on a scale that’s stunning. Every microsecond is a kind of portal into time. I’m more interested in local history, personal history, the particular histories of objects, than in any abstract “history of Ireland.”
I guess you might say my focus is on lower case histories, rather than in any upper case, capital HISTORY (though of course the two are inter-connected). Nocturnes and Willow both, I think, suggest this interest, but I was surprised how much more pronounced it became in Irish Haiku. One long essay in Haiku, “Obelisk”, started off life with a different title, and with the sub-heading: “Some Reflections on History and Other Matters.” Its ten sections are each prefaced with a quote from some eminent historian (sorry, I guess that should be Historian) which I then proceed either to illustrate or mock. For instance, Part I is headed with M.C. Lemon’s: “The historian should not people his narratives with pseudo-human agents such an animals, angels, ghosts or gods” – and I then focus on my mother’s memory of a snake preserved in a jar of formaldehyde as a way into the particular nugget of local/family history on which this essay dwells.
Saint Thomas: If you were to stand up from your writing chair and look around, what do you see? Feel? I mean, what are your empirical surroundings like in terms of place?
Arthur: Most of my writing at the moment happens first thing in the morning, before anyone else is up and before my working day begins, sitting at a plain pine kitchen table. This is often before light. The room has no view. When things are at the stage of moving from notebooks into electronic form, I work in my study. Book lined, paper-strewn, littered with some of the “found” talismans I mentioned (including the pelvis, the otolith, the willow pattern plate etc). I sit at a desk that looks out of a bay window offering a good view across some of the slate roofs of a small Welsh farming town to the green hills beyond it. It’s not my ideal place to write, it’s not my ideal place to be, it doesn’t speak to me in the way some other places do. But it’s where I am just now and it works well enough. The university here is the smallest in Europe, and the one with the oldest degree awarding powers in England and Wales after Oxford and Cambridge. It has a long tradition of strength in my disciplinary area of Theology and Religious Studies. When a lectureship came up here it seemed like a smart move to go for it.
My most intensive period of writing happened in St Andrews, when we borrowed someone’s house there for half a year. That’s where Willow was written. There’s something about the quality of the light in that part of Scotland – coastal Fife – that seems to feed my spirit a richer mix than anything I’ve encountered elsewhere. The sky there is quite different from the sky here. Writing seems to take off in Fife much more easily. I dream of being able to get back there on a permanent footing, but it’s hard to see how the practicalities of such a move could be sorted at the moment. As things are, we try to spend a couple of weeks there each year. Not enough time to write much, but I invariably come away with scribbles/fragments/ideas that sustain my writing when we get back home.
Saint Thomas: What is on your plate now?
Arthur: Well, Irish Haiku is imminent. Publication was initially scheduled for two days from now, but a glitch with the CIP data means a delay. Having not so long ago dealt with the proofs, and having recently seen the illustrations for the first time, all sorts of echoes from the book are very much to the front of my mind.
In terms of future writing, I’m in a kind of limbo just now, weighing up whether to work towards a fourth book of essays, or just concentrate on individual essays without any thought of where they may lead beyond themselves. I have a couple of new essays out seeking journal publication at the moment and a couple more nagging to get from the back to the front of the mind. Sometimes, though, with work on the Lagan Press selection completed not so long ago, I wonder if I might not be better to turn again to poetry, particularly haiku. Or perhaps do something completely different. Occasionally I speculate about marrying essay-style and academic-style.
Saint Thomas: And any plans for a voyage to this side?
Arthur: I’ve no immediate plans for a transatlantic trip. Littler journeys planned are one to Ireland in a couple of weeks, and one to Scotland in the summer. In the last few months I’ve also found images coming back from a trip made to Norway over twenty years ago. I find I’ve a hankering to go back there at some point.
©2008 The Literary Review, ©2022 Samuel Saint Thomas
Cover Art: “after”, oil on panel, 67 x90 by Angela Fraleigh ©2007
Covid & the Quest for Light in Dark Days
Live music is still on mute. I‘ve not been this artistically low for this long. Ever. As a lover of melody, I am heartbroken. As a lover of rhythm, I am motionless. I want this stinging emotional quiet to end. But despite what the suits are saying, I don’t see light in the tunnel. I’m still feeling my way in an existential darkness, experiencing a profound loss of the present and the possible.
I’ve spent many hours over the past year sawing and hammering on my kitchen. The renovation served as a noisy, yet welcome, Socratic meditation on questioning just what it was that I’d lost. Something I’d done my whole life had suddenly been deemed non-essential. I’d always thought playing music necessary—vital in managing the deepest angst. But I’ve been wondering if I’ll ever play again. If I do, I will not be returning to “normal.”
ZOOM SALON ON THIS TOPIC / May 5th / 7pm ET / REGISTER
Before the pandemic, to be out on the road with Bovine Social Club was more than fortunate. Charmed, actually. We rolled from listening room to amphitheater as if the great sound, keen engineers, unhurried sound checks, sharp hotels, lovely food, and the camaraderie of good people would go on forever. Rock stars we were not, just really, really happy to have folks listening to every word we sang.
What made it seem so luxurious, I suppose, was the high contrast between the magical moments and the grind, the battle to survive, the trying not to suffer. Long before COVID arrived, the reign of the internet had already devalued the song with its flood of free supply, which is outpacing demand by 40k new songs uploaded every single day, just to Spotify. There are so many songs now that no one fucking cares about any of them. With sales in steep decline, touring musicians have resorted to hawking souvenir water bottles and beer koozies. Beer koozies. Really?
Quietly, over the last decade, live music promoters offloaded their promotional obligations and costs to the artists, all the while running up the price of a beer in a plastic cup to $15. And with the glut of everything from Netflix to network sports to tribute bands to movies to iPhones, competition for the entertainment dollar became brutal as ticket sales lagged. So for indie musicians it was a rare gig indeed that paid anyone expenses, let alone a living wage.
Without corporate tour support, as true indies we subsidized as best we could by begging from patrons and partners, robbing retirement savings, and living on the edge without health insurance. It was all pretty exhausting long before the virus moved in. On a personal level, musician to musician, and band to band, ego and competition has long upstaged cooperation, especially here in the Northeast.
No one wins in a zero sum music scene suffering from rock star syndrome. Those with wildly lucky breaks rarely if at all offered a hand up to those of us treading water. All that aside, and perhaps most critical of all, fans and performers alike have been ducking the ethics of recording, merchandising, streaming, and touring’s truly massive carbon footprint. It’s just not talked about. The buzzkill must be avoided at all costs!
As if all those struggles were not enough, everything ground to a halt as the virus surged. Lights out. For a while though, it was novel: all sofas and sourdough. Some musicians disappeared, taking up embarrassing “real jobs.” Others went wandering, some woodshedding, a few streaming low-tech Facebook content and begging via PayPal. Still others forged on over the winter, strumming cover tunes in tented bars, frozen and maskless, in disregard and disbelief.
As things warmed up here in the Northeast, cover acts set up in bar corners as they’ve done for years, awkwardly strumming the same dusty top 40 tropes. Many musicians, encouraged by the supply of vaccines, or even laughing at the vaccines, are hopeful the old normal is around the corner, as if any day now, someone’ll hit the breakers and the party will hum again.
But after more than a year of thinking this through, it’s pretty clear how gawdawful that old normal really was. I even felt some sense of relief the week it all went down. Most of whatever we were doing and however we were doing it was no longer morally nor financially sustainable, anyway. We were headed, as Hank Snow sings, “Ninety miles an hour down a dead end street.”
Few songs we wrote and performed ever came close to reflecting the reality of a planet and its people in distress. We are teetering on the edge of frightening political unrest, a raging virus, rising oceans, massive and unchecked economic, racial, and gender inequality. The party is over and rock and roll is the new Edsel.
No matter how or when we emerge from the pandemic, we cannot blindly return to the way things were. We desperately need a new music paradigm! We need a u-turn. A change of heart. A new way forward that preserves the very thing that makes us emotionally whole. Music, chiefly the live kind, works as social glue and heals us, especially in times grossly lacking in human touch.
We’ve been given a very fortunate moment to pause, take stock and remake our house of music. I don’t know how just yet. Just that now is the time. So then, I’m on a quest. A quest for some light in these dark days. A quest to find a way for my life in music to reflect my care for the earth. A quest for my life in music to reflect a just and equitable society. I dream of making beautiful music in beautiful places with beautiful folks who reject the myth of fame in favor of walking arm in arm. I’m wide awake and dreaming of possibilities.
©2021 Samuel Saint Thomas
ZOOM EVENT ALERT! Please join a free Zoom Salon presented by Samuel Saint Thomas to unpack his challenges in indie music and his quest for sustainable solutions post Covid. May 5th @ 7pm ET. Register HERE.
Just before we headed out on our East Coast ‘19 tour of Clap Hands: The Poetry and Song of Tom Waits, Robert Price of New Jersey Herald and I had a great conversation on all things Bovine and Waits. Here’s our complete uncut and unpublished candid exchange recorded on April 11th, 2019.
What is the origin and nature of your “love affair” with Tom Waits?
I’d heard some of Waits’ hits such as “Downtown Train” and “Jersey Girl” done up by Rod Stewart and Springsteen. So being a budding songwriter I went looking to see who this Waits’s kat was. And when I heard “Chocolate Jesus” I went down a hole, partly because I’m a recovering Catholic and even more so because Waits has all the shades of a sweating Pentecostal preacher, romancing the microphone with the hazards of sin and risks of salvation.
Is this a tribute show? Do you imitate Waits? Do you cover his whole career? And who plays Rickie Lee Jones? (just kidding)
Well, Bovine Social Club is an original project going on eight years now. But even if we’d wanted to pay tribute to Waits the man, or imitate him as you say, his complexity is daunting, not to mention his gravel and glitter. So that would have been foolish. What we did set out to do was take a journey into his lyric mind to see what we could find. We want to make his songs and poetry our own, to express what they mean to us, maybe even find something out about ourselves if we’re lucky. So it’s about the works of Waits rather than the man. The songs we’ve picked out will span his career and be woven together with Waits poetic tidbits and stories and stand on it’s own as the cohesive show Clap Hands. I have a crush on Rickie Lee Jones.
Who else is in the current band, and do they have affection for Waits as well?
On the way to Daryl’s House to play a brunch last fall, I asked our fiddle player Casey McGinty if she was up for putting her years of theater experience to use to put a dramatic Waits show together. We started meeting right away and throwing out ideas. Casey put some deep study into his works! We really wanted to jump out of our comfort zone and create an adventure. Waits music was just the thing! We’d done a couple sell-out Waits shows at the Deer Head Inn jazz club so we had that in our pocket. So I started hunting around for some players that loved Waits stuff. Our long-time bassist Ron Baumann jumped on board. Some ensemble regulars and new faces too. Performing with us at Roy’s Hall will be Waits devotees, Damian Calcagne on keys, Steve Shallit on guitar, and a very special cameo with Jesse Bardwell. Other shows on accordion will be the fantastic Tyrant Taylor Galassi of This Way to the Egress.
I know you’ve worked with Tim Carbone and have ties to RRE, but, briefly, where and when did the band get its start, and how has it evolved over the years?
While taking a break from a singing and songwriting career to pursue academics, I ran into my old drummer Jeff Barg at a birthday party. We got to talking and sooner than later we drew up a plan, ran adverts, spent 2011 in development with an ensemble, raised some money, hired Tim to produce our debut record, and off we went. Yes, Carbone produced our freshman CD and he and the late Andy Goessling sat in on our Live at Mauch Chunk Opera House release. Over the years the ensemble has continued to morph. As usual, things change. Life happens. People have kids, go back to school, move away. Then new and excited folks join in. But the vision remains; to write and perform music in a style informed by our common American folk traditions.
Besides Waits, who are your musical influences and why?
My Father and his secret love for Jelly Roll Morton plays like a soundtrack in my mind; the rhythm, the melody, and my Mother singing away. There must be an authentic story for me too. People such as Johnny Cash, John Prine, Willie Nelson, Townes Van Sant, Iris Dement, even church songs, old Irish ballades come to mind. You just wouldn’t join the Bovines unless you loved that stuff.
How much has living and working in or near NW Jersey, the Poconos and the Lehigh Valley contributed to your development as a musician?
It’s been tough going at times I must admit with very few listening rooms to go around. The folk audience is quite thin here these days. Oddly enough though, the Deer Head, a jazz club, has been home for us from the start, selling out over a dozen shows there. Besides that, it was either play bars or get out of town. We had to get out of town. With that though, it has been necessary to self-fund with things like our Patreon page. That support has given us the chance for some wonderful adventures from VT to VA. We’re really quite happy to partner with the rare treasure Roy’s Hall to headline there for the first time!
Have you seen Tom Waits live? If so, what was your reaction? Ever meet him?
God would I love to see Waits, if I could be so lucky. A cup of coffee at a diner would be just as grand. A friend of mine claims to have met him. She also claims to have peed her pants.
If Tom Waits showed up at your gig, what would your reaction be?
I’d say Holy Shit! Step right up! We’ve been waiting!
In an effort to raise funds for struggling venues and to stay out of trouble during the pandemic, Samuel launched a virtual film tour of the Roys Hall concert in sixteen cities around the world!
picture fire picture blood
a palate of petition..
hanging and pleading surrounded in self,
a yearning flirting vestal pulp..
so I stepped and reached to touch.
i plucked it down, thumbed the skin
and nosed the lovely orb for scent
then, peeled it open split it wide..
a spurt. a spray, the juice hit my face
how I longed to suck and suck and savor..
i put it to my mouth, and ah
there was no sugar, only pucker, only tang.
should I, should I put her back up on the limb?
could I? hang her back up in the sun?
I just couldn’t. so I spooned sugar on her and gorged.
i’m really sorry orange, really sorry. i couldn’t wait..
©2003 Samuel Saint Thomas
I can’t believe I’m still learning how to see. I figure if I learn to do that, I can write. I’m not talking about eyesight. More correctly, I’m talking about learning to look. I see too much. I want to look, as Martin Heidegger suggests, so as to allow for a clearing, as if to licht or light up a thing or thought. That way I’ll get a chance to examine it apart from the rest of things. Allowing for a clearing saves me from the hoard of clutter in my head, the diverse stream of stuff of the world I live in. In a clearing, ideas and things get a chance to be understood and experienced.
When poking at things and ideas in a clearing is working, I feel I am writing. Just as I frame a photograph or compose a painting, placing my subject on its own is a way of framing out the clutter that might keep me from seeing a certain few colors, objects, tones or textures. That’s my idea of story anyway: allowing people, places, memories, details as needed, to stand in a clearing. Perhaps, in doing so, I may get closer to stuff, understand stuff more clearly, and if I’m lucky, my readers will too. It’s hard work though, trying to understand things in, as Alan Watts says, this wiggly world.
I think this too. What with Raymond Carver, James Joyce, John Updike, Amy Tan, William Faulkner and all the other brilliant minds in people’s laps, why should I want to go through all the work? I remember reading somewhere of Bob Dylan moaning about songwriting, “There’s enough good ones already.” One could say that about poetry, prose, and all the rest of the hybrids annexed and prefixed with the words free, acid, flash, beat, jazz.
But for some reason, that I haven’t figured out just yet, and despite the deep doubt that there’s a hole on someones’ shelf for a book written by Samuel Saint Thomas, still, I do it. I write. I like it. It juices me. And tapping away in the middle of the night makes me think I’m getting a wiggly thing or two of my life to sit still for a spell. Then something else gets wiggly. Then there’s more tapping.
©2005 Samuel Saint Thomas
i awoke hungry .. writers and creativity vultures usually do! .. i
opened one eye .. i opened the other .. i poked one arm .. i poked the
other .. i slid my fuzzy legs from under the goose feathers .. slapped
my bare feet on a cold wooden floor and sat straight up thinking about
the hot coffee .. two eggs over .. hashing spuds’ .. wheat toast and
cheap jelly, $1.69 special!
i’m a loner and worldly mystic by default .. and whisking and
caking for one over burners and pans to impress and survive me is just
not my gig .. and the fridge is always empty .. so i naturally head to a
diner about this time .. cause country diners promise wonderful untold
cultural oddities .. and since i don’t have any particular attachment to
running a razor blade across my face .. i could be out the door and down
the road in a flash! ..
i picked a sunny window for gazing purposes .. a soft booth because
i was still sleeping .. the ordering was painless .. i got the same
thing as last time and the time before that and before that .. cause i
had other things to think about .. and my joe was hot …
but before i could spoon in 2 sugars and splash my cream .. the
plate hit the table with a bistro crash .. that doesn’t sound right i
thought! .. good things don’t happen that fast! .. and i was as right as
a day old weatherman .. the eggs ran like a thief .. my toast tasted
like a greasy pot scrubber .. and the fried potatoes had a bite like an old
tire .. i assumed the obvious .. they were ready for me a long time ago!
.. perhaps as far back as last week!
and just as the food was doing a fine job of rubbing my belly the
wrong way .. i overheard two old mud flaps engaging in a worthy round of
simple guy economics .. saying, “62 dollars!” .. “what the hell kinda
price is that?” .. “62 dollars!” .. “weell ai’ll teell yoou whaat! .. i
never heard of anything costin’ 62 dollars!” .. “if that guys tellin’
you 62 dollars, you can bet your ass there’s somethin’ wrong with that
there deal!” .. “cause nothin’ costs 62 dollars nowhere!” .. “not even
at wallmart” .. “65 dollars maybe .. not 62!” .. “i wouldn’t trust
that guy as far as i can spit!” ..
the advice that i had garnered was worth far more than the $1.69
and the 3 quarters i dropped to the grouch of a waitress .. so i
swallowed my complaints and shuffled to the car with a smile .. i’d
got my monies worth .. i’d say at least 62 dollars worth of breakfast!
a very valuable lesson! .. that things in life are usually exactly
what they seem to be .. for it’s only when we overthink the smell do we
perceive it as perfume!
©1999 Samuel Saint Thomas
Originally published in the weekly prose poem series “mondayMorningBluesBLASTER!
If you gotta go, go all the way. 6A. Go till you can’t take it anymore, till you can’t go any further or farther. Take it to the tip. To where the rocky land points straight at Paris, France. The tip of rocky land where the Puritans got down on their knees. Where they begged God to scrub the dirty filthy abominations from their flesh. Provincetown. Ptown for the initiated. P for those most experienced. Some don’t mention it at all, claiming they were in Boston on business.
Tourist guides say it’s “where all the homosexuals migrate.” Just how do homosexuals migrate? Perhaps in V formation, their wings thumping happily across deserts and high seas gales in search of morsels and mates. Some say Ptown is the San Francisco of Cape Cod, without the bridge, without Chinatown and The Grateful Dead. So then, it’s not San Francisco. Other people say it’s slightly gayer than Key West. What does it mean to be slightly gayer? Can one be slightly straighter?
Straight or gay, undecided or confused, people go to Ptown because it’s not San Francisco, not Key West, and nothing at all like the Jersey Shore. Ptown, all the beach without Quick Checks, black jack, Ferris Wheels, exit numbers, or children. A place where the paint falls off the houses when you’re not looking. Wide sand without a hotel in sight. Where cars are intruders and bicycles buzz like bees. Where food is art and art is food. Where straights are welcome, dogs even more so. Where nothing, absolutely nothing is taboo except taboo. When my partner introduced me to Ptown, she nursed her nerves all the way up the Connecticut Turnpike. Thought there’d be too many bulging Speedos for my comfort. Lipstick and beards on the same face. To my surprise, I liked it in the first five minutes. No one there gave a damn if I existed. That’s vacation.
I’d returned to a certain place there from my first summer at the tip. A handsome classic hotel bar alongside a canvas covered patio that claims “approachable sophistication.” Lobster Mac and Cheese and local free range roasted chicken served within eyesight of the cabaret cue to take in Starsky + Cox or Thirsty Burlington, whom Cher says does Cher better than Cher. And at the bar is jazz. A fine piano and candles. That’s what I want. That and two slow dripped absinths and two empty chairs in the middle of 40 feet of polished mahogany. She went to powder up, I took the seat next to a big guy in a big hat.
Smash. His cowboy hat hits the rim of my glasses.
“Nice glasses, Rusty’s the name.”
He sticks his hand out, thumb up, like we’re getting ready to arm wrestle. This is not good. I lift bottles of wine for exercise. And his tattoos aren’t comforting either. A whole sleeve of snakes and devils. Painful stuff.
“Your name?” he says.
Now I like a good handshake every once and a while. It restores my faith in the pretension of sincerity. I’ll shake a dead fish tail before a bone crusher though any day. And that’s just what he does. He crushed my hand like people shell lobsters. Great! Thanks. My knuckles are throbbing before I know what this guy does for a living. I’d talked with big guys before, just never one this big. I could move but that would piss him off. Drag me down under the wharf and crush my skull. That would ruin my vacation.
“Samuel? What the hell kinda name is that?” he said. “Are ya Jewish? Can I call ya Sam?”
“Sure,” I said.
“So, you Jewish then?”
“Yes. I mean I’m no, Sam is okay. Samuel’s Hebrew. But I’m not…”
“Okay? That’s it? Just okay? Don’t fuck around. It doesn’t matter to me one bit, Sam. You don’t like Sam? How about George? Or Larry? How about that? I don’t give a shit. I’ll call ya anything, anything ya want.” He lets out a deep yelp.
I straighten my chair and think it over. Sam. People name their hamsters Sam. I hate Sam. It’s small and puny. Sam I am. Good for nursery rhymes. And it rhymes with Spam. Canned meat. But I’m in Ptown. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the cowboy’s right. We could keep it just between the two of us. Me and the guy with the hat. Just then my partner comes back from powdering, pulls up a stool and strikes it up with two girls down the bar.
“She yours?’ Rusty says, pointing with his beer.
“Well, not exactly,” I say.
Smash. His cowboy hat again. Must have an eye problem. Blind in one maybe. Or poor judgment. Close talkers should not wear hats.
“Is she, you know, or what?” he says.
“We’re partners,” I say. “We’re mortgaged.”
“Mortgaged?” Got five. Five mortgages. Connecticut and New York.”
He leans in. The hat strikes. Nearly knocks off my glasses this time.
“My wife has New York,” he says. “Upper East Side, I don’t give a shit.”
“Really?” I say.
He leans back and looks me up and down.
“I don’t give a shit. She’s down there and I’m up here,” he says.
“Is this your first time in Ptown?” I say.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Twenty years. You can raise a lot of hell here,” he says.
“Nice beaches,” I say.
He pulls out a lump of a wallet and rifles through a wad of plastic cards.
“Hey Bartender,” he says. “Give this guy here whatever he wants. It’s on me. What are you drinkin?” He looks at me. “Bartender?” The buff barkeep has a tentative look about him. He’s seen this deal go down before. “And her there, whatever she wants too. Tell the guy what you’re drinkin there.”
Rusty doesn’t bother none to look at my partner. He hands a card off to the bartender and starts to line the rest of them up by his drink.
“This here. Look at this. Air Force. Air Force, Buddy. Lieutenant Colonel. Flew planes fast enough to take the hair off my nuts.” I didn’t want to imagine it, but sometimes images come at you faster than you can head the foul ones off. “Look at this one. Blackwater. Security Consultant, Buddy. Got some real nice guns too. M4’s, 10’s? Got some pictures here somewhere.”
So he goes on and on, bragging up his guns and ammo and sorting through his wallet, hitting my arm with every card he finds. He’s trying really hard at something. What about me tells him that he’s my type? He must know that I don’t care much about what he’s saying. Could be classified or something. Then I’ll be responsible and I’m on vacation. I notice my partner and the two girls down the bar have their heads together, chatting away and peeking at me. One has a husband, the other a boyfriend. They came out here to the tip for a little charge. “You just gotta go to the cabaret, you two,” they say. “Thirsty Burlington? Oh my God. So much fun. And every Monday there’s showgirls. Boas and more boas. The best pair of legs gets five hundred dollars. You gotta go.”
“Those are some nice glasses you got there,” Rusty says.
“Thanks,” I say, “I can work on my laptop and drive with the same…”
“I know what they are. I know exactly what they are. I’m an optometrist. I betcha paid too much I can tell ya that. I betcha paid five hundred big ones. You know what those fancy things cost me? Huh? Frames. Five. Lenses? Five. If you paid any more than fifty bucks…” He stopped and looked around the bar then back at me. “you got fucked up the ass.”
God. This guy’s flashing around his credit cards, pointing at me and shouting up rounds of nineteen dollar glasses of absinth and saying “fucked” and “ass” in the same sentence. Last night I sat in this very same seat at this very same bar and had an intelligent and orderly conversation with two men in linen slacks. We chatted up Asian furniture, jazz divas, private dunes, and weather. It rained horribly last week. “Torrents.” they said.
“You smoke?” Rusty says. He rubbed a cigarette back and forth between his fingers as if he’d just rolled some weed.
“I’m good. Just had one,” I say.
“When you get ready, we’re gonna go out there and smoke a damn cigarette, you and me.”
My partner leans in. “We’re wondering. Are you okay?” she says.
“Me? Sure, why?” I say. I smile as if I am doing just fine.
“Say the word and we’re out of here,” she says.
I sit up straight and drag the straw around my absinth. Just what are they thinking? I might look puny next to this guy but I’m no god damn pussy. I can deal with all kinds of shit. Spent years in bar and pub research. One Halloween I shaved twice, cross-dressed, put on makeup, and went out to a biker bar. Butch wouldn’t take no for an answer. I didn’t feel like dancing. So I escaped through a kitchen door. Negotiated boiling vats of onion rings and giant frying pans and mop buckets full of dangerous chemicals. I was a mile away before he paid for my Miller Lite.
The absinth is exactly as I remember, sweet and toxic anise flavored joy. The jazz singer finishes up another round of show tunes. Rusty taps his glass on the bar long after the last note. He leans away, turns back, gives me a shove with his elbow and belts out, “Are you queer?”
The bartender stops rattling a martini. Down the bar an ice cube clinks and settles in someone’s whiskey. I’d been waiting for this moment for a long time. To be honest. To say what I believe. To say, it really doesn’t matter does it? But Rusty wants to know.
“I’m straight,” I say quietly.
“Me too,” he belts.
Now the only thing the rest of the bar hears is, –are you queer — me too. Perhaps I am the only one left with a question. But a question is not the right move. Rusty doesn’t like questions. The bar returns to a hum again. I say something and turn to my partner and smile. A few minutes later I notice Rusty out on the front steps, sucking long and hard on a cigarette. My partner and I slip out the side door, down the crowded street of bicycles and boas and head to the Asian furniture store.
©2009 Samuel Saint Thomas
i saw a purple flower broken by the wind ..
a passerby had shored it up it seemed ..
so it could drink and mend ..
all the other hues of blooms never paid a mind ..
for from the sky it looked the same ..
and none did look behind ..
the earth and root had paid no mind as well ..
for growth of bud and seed desire ..
love and water for their smell ..
i’ll enter gardens gate when and if she calls ..
to cheer and touch for strength of stem ..
and kiss her shoulders soft and tall ..
©2003 Samuel Saint Thomas
Frying Spam and Other Things to do Before the Rapture is my comedic memoirs of a Pentecostal preacher’s kid growing up in a Pennsylvania steel town. Each chapter explores a formative humorous experience—from my kindergarten infatuation with Denise the pirate, to a pubescent French kiss lesson on a hayride with Jane, a hell-bound sinner. Narrated in the playful voice of a boy, these seventeen narratives embrace the oddities of my Christian Fundamentalist family and my curiosity for everything they said could send me to a lake of fire. Stay tuned for international publication.
So after ten years of Mom weeping and wailing, I arrived. Mom’s ten year project. A boy that she could raise up to be a preacher. A preacher of the Gospel. Just like Dad. That was the plan. “You were sent to me by God. Don’t ever forget that, boy,” she’d say. Sent was the way Mom put it. Straight from heaven to…
I’d heard Dad preach that Catholics thought there was a place in between heaven and hell. I imagined it was like getting cleaned up for a visit to Grandma’s at the rest stop on the PA Turnpike on our way to Scranton. If you got struck down by lightning or Jesus came in the rapture, you could stop by to wash your sins…
Every time Mom would catch me not going to school, she’d slap me silly and ask me the same questions all over again. “Just what are you doing up in this alley?” I hoped she’d slap me in the face again so my lips would bleed and run down on my shirt. It hurt bad, sometimes for days, but at least…
I stuffed two oranges in my shirt like breasts and drew a crayon mustache on my face. I shook the oranges up and down. The boys laughed real hard and pointed. The girls covered their eyes. Someone told. My Ms. Souder and the other Ms. Souder came rushing out the door and…
We never ever had deviled Spam. Even when it came as a love offering at the Harvest Home Revival Meetings. “Over my dead body,” Dad said. “None of the devil’s food will be served at this table. No devil’s food cake. No deviled eggs. Not in this house. Not ever. I’m laying down the law and…”
“The devil’s got a hold of this man,” Dad said, “He is possessed with the demon of homosexuality.” It was like Dad had hit a home run at Veterans Stadium. Everyone got louder and louder, saying, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” and speaking in tongues, their hands up in the air and…
Once a day, Mr. Softy parked over there by Lukens fence. He had to take a pee, I saw it run under the truck in the middle of the guy’s feet. My sister saw it too and that’s why we weren’t allowed to get a cone from Mr. Softy . “He’s got no way to wash after touching his thing,” Mom said. “Even if there was, he’s colored, how can you tell if their hands are clean?” And…
“Watch this, ya sissy,” he said. He poked the gun in my stomach, held it there and laughed. I’d only seen guns in the comic books. They weren’t that scary. This was scary. I could die. A hole blown straight through my stomach where my breakfast used to be. And there’d be blood. And I had sins to confess to Jesus first. I’d just been looking at naked pictures down in the…
The real men in those pictures drove hot rods, so I knew that men with hot rods had foxy girls. It was all there in the pictures. Girls in bikinis with their legs wrapped around stick shifts and draped on leather seats or hand-waxed hoods like sacrifices on an altar…
The Bible says that Jesus is coming like a thief in the night. Not like the way robbers rob banks and corner stores with guns and baseball bats. No. It’ll be magical stealing, snatching all the saved people up into the clouds, dogs and cats and sinners left behind to drown in blood and fry in flames…
Bleeding, screaming, dead people, sinners on top of sinners. Blood. And the frying would come. It was the end. No more baseball or chocolate Easter bunnies or new pairs of shoes or Christmas presents or going to the Dairy Queen. I’d never have sex or…
Dad stepped back, then lunged, hitting her forehead with his hand. “In the name of Jesus, come out. You demon of lipstick? Come out this minute in the name of Jesus. Barbara Rae then…
I stood there in the middle of the room wearing nothing but a jock-strap and a pair of white socks, a hundred pounds of pimples and fear. When I finally pulled the pants on, I felt my baseball career drain through the bottom of my feet. The shirt was worse. My uniform was big, very big. And now…
She was warm. Her long black hair fell across my neck. Her hand slipped under my school jacket. “Have you ever French kissed?” she asked. She must have known I hadn’t from the way I looked at her. I’d kissed Becky and Darlene, and Naomi, the preacher’s daughter from Maryland, but as far as I knew, none of them were French…
©2005 Samuel Saint Thomas