“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
I sit by my books in the dusty light
and think of bygone things
of a lake and a lawn
and a school and a song
and the windmills that weathered our spears
I sit beside banners of harlequin hue
and think of curious things
of heraldry sacred,
silly writ consecrated,
and an Empire named for the good
I sit in the snow by a streetlamp lit
and think of lonely things
of a fresh slap of paint
over echoes I know
and of memories gone with the dew
I sit in the shade in the garden of stones
and think of mournful things
of a poet erased
by the daze of thin hope
and a music drowned deep by decision
I sit on the floor with the dirt and the grime
and think of foul things
of a robber and shyster
who preens like a tiger
and whose grease musters all of the fleas
I sit by the crust of an asphalt patch
and think of evil things
of a dog and a tree
and two slugs in the breech
and the damnable crowing of Lies
I sit on the hill in the mist and the rain
and think of distant things
old deeds told anew
to the fruit of our vines,
and spun with the glamour of telling
I sit by the window and watch for the dawn
and think of hopeful things
every year a new autumn
to knit eyes with fire,
wind to the blood, need to the gloaming
I sit in my chair and I hold my son
and think of marvelous things
of pines over water
of grace without seeking
of our own chance encounter. Real life is meeting.
Nearly ten years ago, I assured someone close to me whose body was riddled with cancer that I would continue to pray for them after they died. The unspoken implication, in the moment, was that I’d never stop, and until I died there would always be a habit of Eternal Rests & rosaries & Masses offered For the Repose of the Soul, &c.: the usual lineup of American Midwest Catholic prayers broadcast into the hereafter.
The dying man cocked an eyebrow over his cigarette and chuckled. “No you won’t. Not after a while. But that’s okay. It is the responsibility of the dead to be forgotten.”
Which was hardly reassuring. A decade later, I don’t know what his intention was. To buck the awkward gravity of the acknowledgement of his onrushing death? To refuse the lip service paid by the living to the doomed? To rage against the dying of the light? Or to slyly ensure perpetual memory?
We carry with us only copies of the living: fictions of character descriptions, shades of shared experience. We keep our pictures of them in our mental wallets. But a picture isn’t a person, of course — though while they live, we can gently fool ourselves into thinking that we know them. In truth, we can only ever glimpse the full rich humanity and personhood in moments of encounter — as C.S. Lewis puts it in That Hideous Strength (riffing on Martin Buber): “Real life is meeting.” This is a linchpin in JPII’s theology as well: you can’t encounter another person in a picture or a memory; you merely recognize an aspect or a sliver of a fixed point in time.
The dead are beyond encounter. We the living carry forward only the picture of the deceased with us, and we who dream beyond the rational only hope to match the picture with the person again after we ourselves have experienced death. So the only remaining question is: what do we do with our memories? What do we make with this blind ability to feel the hollow impression of someone who used to be there? We can build shrines to it; we can bury its thorns in our flesh; we can drown it in deep water … or we can put it to work.
I can’t clearly remember whether that line about “the responsibility of the dead to be forgotten” came from where I think it came from. Or whether I made it up, and through the slow seepage of memory assigned its true origin to someone with the authority that comes with dying. Nothing of that person remains to me now — just shells and echoes — but if those shells and echoes remind me to keep praying, to keep investing in the economy of salvation, then it is enough to bide my time until it is possible to encounter him again.
So: pull up the photos, cue up the old music, say a prayer according to your own rites & means … and wait for the next meeting.
variant: replace basil & thyme with mustard powder and dill
variant: replace basil & thyme with chipotle chili powder, ground black pepper, and add 1 cored vine tomato
Blend all together in a food processor along with 1 cup green olives and 1 cup black olives. Then repeat the process eight more times, because the Department has more money than brains and bought far too many veggie trays for the party and forgot that no group of any size is going to eat twelve pounds of olives - and you can’t let food go to waste.
The Shining (Stephen King). After reading this for the first time, I felt that the book was far more nuanced and generally superior to Kubrick’s film. After watching the film I thought the film was better. It’s the same myth with two different tellers, and both deserve attention. The Shining is the only King novel I’ve ever read.
The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern). Interesting more in concept than in execution, though my own prejudice against specific grammatical sins certainly influences my assessment. Sentence fragments are only appropriate in very narrow applications, and deploying them as the order of the day in third-person narrative produces a lazy (or worse, affected) tone. If only the prose were as sharp, precise, and delicate as the performers in Le Cirque des Rêves. Stock sentiment and an assortment of pungent cheeses turn up at intervals, but nevertheless the underlying ideas are engaging enough to nudge a grumpy reader through the pages. For a better trip to the circus, hie thee to Bradbury.
Star Wars: Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, Tales from Jabba’s Palace, and Tales of the Bounty Hunters (all collections edited by Kevin J. Anderson). I don’t think I’d even seen the Star Wars films before I first picked these short-story collections from the library shelves as a kid. I was fascinated with their cover art, and it was easy enough to pick through the shorter stories without the context of the films. I saw the originals three some years later, then watched the prequels some years later, but these books were my first introduction to all things Star Wars. They lay on the periphery of memory for many years, but with the recent cancellation by Disney of all Expanded Universe material in preparation for their upcoming gambit, they swam back into focus long enough for me to go out and buy my own copies. The stories I register as “best” really indicate the ones I remember from decades ago, but that’s as good a yardstick as any: “A Bad Feeling: The Tale of EV-9D9,” “A Barve Like That: The Tale of Boba Fett,” “Nightlily: The Lovers’ Tale,” and “Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88.” Good fun, and perhaps more on this later.
RE-READS
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (Jhonen Vasquez). I first read this at 1 AM after twenty straight hours of nervous activity, my processors working beyond capacity with the assistance of my first energy drink and slightly bemused at the skinny proto-goth girl who was sitting a little closer to me on the bus seat than was perhaps strictly necessary. There are many circumstances in which a reader can whip through JtHM, but I think my arrangement was definitely better-suited to the book than some others. As a narrative it’s hopelessly weak: it rails against the superficiality and posturing of a young and insecure humanity from its own position of fundamental insecurity and its own superficial preoccupations (both artistic and literary). However, Vasquez’ ability to dial in the electron microscope on the Angst Existential is strengthened by his expressive wordplay. Deeper Meaning in JtHM is suspect - the kind of dark epiphany that most of us grow out of (or away from) - but as a treatise on the superficial, it works. That’s probably why I like Happy Noodle Boy more than most of the whole. (Also, I realized on this reading that HNB contains simple, logical narratives. Maybe it’s obvious and I’m just coming late to the party, but once I shut down the quality control wing of my language center, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that HNB’s babble is a consistently logical if impressionistic reaction to the world around him, not random inanity. Toddlers are logical, but they are neither especially smart nor are they exactly articulate, and that pretty much sums up Happy Noodle Boy and JtHM as a whole.)
A Nasty Bit of Rough (David Feherty). This was a late re-read, after an unseasonably cool day sent the first shudder of the oncoming autumn through my veins. We’ve all got music that under cold objective examination really isn’t all that good, but we enjoy anyway and damn the torpedoes because it maintains some resonance beyond the tune itself. So it is with Feherty’s book. Its value to me is as a mnemonic token, not its writing, which is merely goofy. It was loaned to me by a friend shortly after moving into my new apartment above 5th Avenue in Pittsburgh. It’s dumb, bawdy, filled with groaner puns, and about golf, but it was exactly what I needed. The transition to a major city, the slow and deeply uneasy realization that I had virtually nothing in common with the other students in my cohort, the Atlantean dissolution of my relationship with my girlfriend, and the imminent death of my father defined that autumn. Feherty’s book, like so much music, helped lend some stability and definition to my new condition. The same is true with the other books I was studying at the time - (Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action, D.G. Meyer’s The Elephants Teach, Jonathan Franzen’s How To Be Alone, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), but for some reason Rough remains the more memory-soaked one. The smell of Oreos and rain on pavement have a similar effect.
I doubt the girl who lent me the book had (or has, or could have) any conception of how helpful it was. I lost contact with her in my second year, when I dropped into the intense solitude & focus that comes with writing a novel on a deadline. I think in the final tally that will register as one of the great losses. Every so often I ponder the feasibility of trying to hunt her up, but I suspect that would be functionally impossible despite our great and terrible Internet. And what would I say? “Hi! You don’t know it, but you’re meshed indelibly in the fabric of a Cardinal Experience. Thanks for the book - it’s not very good but I read it on the regular every couple of years for a variety of complicated reasons that have nothing at all to do with literary quality.”
Sheesh. I think that’s why people just send LinkedIn requests nowadays.
Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra (CS Lewis). Having gorged myself on pulp sci-fi, I burned through some high-brow sci-fi (or theo-pulp) in short order. This stuff is pure fanfic of the Judeo-Christian tradition (and a bit of a mild bromance with JRR Tolkien), but like all truly excellent fan fiction, there are spikes of brilliance that shoot up from a thoroughly well-crafted core. One of these is Hyoi’s conversation with Ransom about pleasure, reality, and memory. The second comes shortly afterward:
“‘No, Hmãn, it is not a few deaths roving the world around him that make a hnau miserable. It is a bent hnau that would blacken the world. And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes. I will tell you a day in my life that has shaped me; such a day as comes only once, like love, or serving Oyarsa in Meldilorn. Then I was young, not much more than a cub, when I went far, far up the handramit to the land where stars shine at midday and even water is cold. A great waterfall I climbed. I stood on the shore of Balki the pool, which is the place of most awe in all worlds. The walls of it go up for ever and ever and huge and holy images are cut in them, the work of old times. There is the fall called the Mountain of Water. Because I have stood there alone, Maleldil and I, for even Oyarsa sent me no word, my heart has been higher, my song deeper, all my days. But do you think it would have been so unless I had known that in Balki hnéraki dwelled? There I drank life because death was in the pool. That was the best of drinks save one.”
"What one?" asked Ransom.
NEW READS: LITERATURE (OSTENSIBLY)
The Source (James Michener). This was one of my Dad’s favorite books, though I never read it before he passed away, and that’s a shame. It is, admittedly, a beast of a book, coming in sniffing range of a thousand pages, and its scope is no less vast. We start in the new state of Israel in the mid-60s at an archeological dig with a Chicago Irishman, an Israeli Jew, and an Arab (and a vague sense that political correctness is very different now than it was when this was published). Within the first 100 pages, over a dozen artifacts are found, all dating from the previous decade to many thousands of years ago. The book then lurches heavily and drops us back thousands of years ago … and we slowly make our way back to the present time, watching civilization(s) rise, fall, and repeat across the millennia. For anyone fascinated with speculations on ancient human cultures, Semitic origins, Judeo-Christian history, or by the question “What is the freakin’ deal with the whole Israel v. Hamas thing?” this book is an engrossing read.
Caribbean (Michener again). I enjoyed The Source so much that I immediately grabbed the next of my Dad's old Michener novels on the shelf. This one really is a thousand pages long, or just shy by three or four. It does the same thing as The Source - starts in ancient history and moves forward - and while it’s just as good at the whole “evolution of history” thing (at least from Michener’s perspective; I’d imagine that a Caribbean native would write a vastly different book; but then again, that’s his thing, and he does it for places all over (and out of) the world).
But this novel highlighted some issues I had with The Source. First, all women that are written as positive/good people are invariably described as “slim” and are written as beautiful by modern/conventional standards, even in historical contexts where that is demonstrably ludicrous. Second, he can’t write about falling in love. He can write about unmarried/uninvolved individuals well, and he can write married couples/committed individuals just fine, but whatever happens in the middle apparently flummoxed the man. Should I make much of the fact that two of his marriages ended in divorce and his third wife easily fits the short/slim paradigm to a tee? Probably not, but it refuses to exit my head. Still, I will definitely re-read The Source in the future, and I will certainly re-read sections of Caribbean. I want to get my hands on Space next. I will read more Michener, but holy cats: his books are huge, and the bugger was prolific.
Two Years Before the Mast (Richard Henry Dana Jr.). I started this book in July and have only finished it just recently. It’s the sort of thing that is difficult to blast through at one sitting, but over time - and particularly when complemented by long travel and/or proximity to water - it becomes a compelling two-chapter-a-day narrative. Two Years is Dana’s account of his time spent voyaging from Boston to California on a merchantman in the hide (leather) trade. A case of the measles as an undergrad left him with weak eyesight, and for reasons the nuances of which are lost on most modern readers, he believed that a couple of years of sea-life would help his eyes regain their former strength. The book wasn’t written as an adventure-story; in Dana’s original intent, Two Years Before the Mast has more in common with Uncle Tom’s Cabin than Billy Budd. There’s an argument to be made that Two Years belongs to the family of sentimental lit, as Dana wanted to highlight the poor lot of common sailors, but the intimate detail with which Dana sets forth the sailor’s life provides, in the end, a far more balanced sense of sea life than may have been strictly effective. With nearly two centuries intervening, the tale survives as both an adventure-story and a historical document, and also something of an etymological treasure. Phrases like “get square” (or to “square up”) and to be “all right” - and a lot more - are common enough as to be unnoticeable now, but I had no idea that they were originally sea-slang.
From what little I’ve read, the book is regarded as a minor but important cog in American literature. Melville knew it, and it no doubt had some effect on the shaping of Moby-Dick. An excellent book on the whole, but an interactive anatomy lesson about the different parts of a ship would be useful throughout. Two Years could be great on an e-reader, and every time Dana talks about how the crew “got up tricing-lines from the jib-boom-end to each arm of the fore yard, and thence to the main and cross-jack yardarms,” you could click on the text to see an animated video of what the hell he means.
A Friend of the Earth (T. Coraghessan Boyle). This is easily one of the most atmospheric dystopias I’ve read in a while, more visceral at times than Fahrenheit 451 and more personal than 1984. We’re introduced to the protagonist as a bent and possibly broken old man marking time in the employ of a guy rich enough to insulate himself from an earth that has gone to shit. The old man, Tierwater, was a radical environmental activist in his youth, and the novel spends enough time bouncing between past and present to reveal for us how Tierwater’s choices have produced the man he has become. It’s actually a lot like watching the last season of Breaking Bad, but in between each episode of the last season you watch an entire previous season, moving in order from the beginning. Instead of meth and murder, A Friend of the Earth has radical environmentalism, and it captures the fall of a man from activist to asshole, all the while reinforcing that no matter what, in the big picture, he was right.
Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (Hunter S. Thompson). I’ve been afraid of reading this book for a long time. Thompson is the core of my literary interests - in a sense, he is why I do what I do - but I am not so deluded as to consider anything he wrote after 1979 was really any good. The articles that populate Hey Rube were written from 2000-2003 (the collection was published in 2004, the last before his 2005 suicide), and I can count on two fingers the passages that retain any glimmer of his former brilliance. The book is notable for Thompson’s reflections in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but his powers were so diminished by the end of the century that they are more stylistic curiosities than thought-provoking essays. The rest of the book is almost impossible to read. Article after article seems to be written “in the style of Thompson,” but a style as envisioned by a middle-class high-school sophomore who has just encountered Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the first time, and equates the high-octane drug-parody of that book with Thompson’s personal zeitgeist. It’s painful to read … but I never read it, and as I am a professional, it was a thing that had to be done.
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury). Recommended (insisted upon, really) by a friend, Something Wicked does the “uncanny circus” thing far more disturbing than Le Cirque Des Rêves and more humanly poignant than the trippy Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Bradbury returned to this trope more than once, and it seems fair to say that much of his literary career was spent weaving dreamcatchers to capture the simultaneously tender and dangerous vitality of youth in autumn. Which is probably why I like him so much … and I don’t think it’s an accident that our birthdays fall at the same time of year, at the turning of summer into fall. Starry eyes aside, Bradbury’s story is written in a manner, almost a dialect, that takes some getting used to, but telling his tale in straight English would do real violence to the autumn mirabilis at the core of the story. It’s a fairy tale in a similar vein as film version of Coraline, and both Something Wicked and Coraline will become an October staple for years to come.
As with Lewis, the core story is fairly straightforward, but there are moments of precise articulation that strike deep. Zang:
"Like all boys, they never walked anywhere, but named a goal and lit for it, scissors and elbows. Nobody won. Nobody wanted to win. It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow. ….[T]heir chests broke track tapes together, their tennis shoes beat parallel pony tracks over lawns, trimmed bushes, squirreled trees, no one losing, both winning, thus saving their friendship for other times of loss."
NEW READS: SHORT STORIES
"Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines" (Ray Bradbury). What the fuck was this? It reads like an L. Ron Hubbard epilepsy dream and could easily be rediscovered in 4000 years & misinterpreted as the desert scripture of some cheerful apostate disciple of Abdul Alhazred. Clearly, fun.
"Greenleaf" and "The Enduring Chill" (from Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor). Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor is American Catholicism’s answer to the facile insipidity of European Catholic art - not intentionally, perhaps, but that hardly matters in this context. Want to prick at the limp, waxy self-absorption of sophomoric intellectualism (yes, Tumblr, you)? Hit them with the wasting disease, outflank ‘em with a pair of yin/yang Jesuits, and then refuse to allow the Noble, Tragic Death! Tired of divine grace being represented as light from the hands of a doe-eyed and smooth-skinned, clearly Caucasian Jesus? Represent divine grace as a giant bull and end your story by having someone gored to death on its horns!
None of that does real credit to her craft, of course. If you can’t see yourself on both (or on all) sides of the story at hand, you’re not reading it carefully. Flannery O’Connor is a sort of Breaking Bad to the generally flaccid religious literature in America - although it might be more accurate to say that Breaking Bad draws heavily from O’Connor, but replaces the Grace principle of her works with simple Fear.
There is a knock at your door. Nothing is there. You open your door. Nothing is there. You close your door. Now it is in the room with you. Welcome ... to Night Vale.
Real life, in the style of Welcome to Night Vale: fifteen minutes after the fact, and I'm still more than a little jumpy.
There is a knock at your door. You are alone. You are not expecting anyone. There are no lights on in the rooms between you and your door. Welcome ... to Night Vale.
Real life, five minutes ago, in the style of Welcome to Night Vale.
Another day, another night to turn out all the lights and lie naked in the dark below an open window at 2 AM. The neighbors stopped yelling a couple of hours ago, and their transit from echoing recriminations to tears to wet warm sounds has finally reached its terminus in placid collapse. I am flat on my back. Above me, on the other side of this wall, I know that the trees and steeples of my city fray the horizon edge of the yellow night-cloud that hangs over the metropolis. Further out, beyond the highway whose light-up billboards flicker insect-like in glimmering rods, the four titanic radio towers pulse in the night, as good reminders of eternity as any. Four years ago, during my second year in Pittsburgh, a teacher set my class a series of warm-up exercises intended to cultivate detailed observations, a willingness to sit and focus until the minutiae of a place opened up like shy flowers to a receptive mind. At least, that was what we figured at first, and so we all padded off to a quiet place to focus like obedient postulants. I chose to sit on the second floor of the arts building, up over the open bays that served as classrooms for painting and ceramics and sculpture work. Quiet, low traffic, and smelled of the pottery kiln. Nice. The real lesson, of course, was a lesson in the practical exercise of focus. How do you proceed? Writing about what you see is easy. All that takes is time. Hearing is also simple enough. Close your eyes and type what hits the ears. Touch is a little more risky: running your hands over various surfaces might look a little odd if an undergrad walks past. But what about smell and taste? It won't do much for your career to get surprised in the act of licking a chair, even for the noblest of reasons. That's probably why I enjoy lying like this at night with the window open. I enjoy stripping down in the dark. The breeze begins to explore my body even before I stretch my length on the mattress. In the space of moments, if the temperature is right, the familiar urgent ache: spring up from this bed, throw on the dark clothing, and flee into the night. The need to run — to fly, really, down the streets and alleyways — seizes me. My mind is all color and texture: streetlamps and dark trees and the allure promised by shadows gliding behind half-lit windows. And some nights I do give in to the inexhaustible joy of the lonely chase, this kinky urban Wild Hunt. Yes … and almost tonight. But — no — steady. Run deeper. We are after subtler quarry tonight. So slowly the mnemonic symphony rises! The air in my nostrils still burns its way into my adrenaline, but now it curls up, to the more delicate instrumentation. Tonight the air starts cool, and the temperature alone fires a recall of piney undergrowth beneath a white October moon. But there is a blended scent that makes me think of concrete. Does it clench up beneath the day's sun and release its dry ambrosia only at night? I am sitting playing chess with Mike in the yellow sodium security lamp on the art wing of the elementary school back home. The game takes two hours because we keep talking about metaphysics, and nobody wins because it turns out that Mike has reversed the setup positions of his king and his queen again. Further back with this flavor of concrete: back to the old church school. I never attended, but I know its playground and parking lot well. Where else would you go to explore rooftops, to test your mettle against fences and barricades, and to hope that she might be there that night? As I lie still I begin to sift the more delicate nuances. A puff of breeze, and I am hurtling through the midnight Bronx again, standing between the cars of the 4 line for a brief moment, smelling the steel and shriek of the wheels, bending my knees slightly to the sway. Manhattan glimmers in the distance for just a moment and I am incomparably wealthy, and then we are pulled under, and the elevated tracks plunge under the city — but those smells are too warm for this cool summer night. There we go: definite cigarette. Ash and butts trodden into crippled humpback caterpillars. I love cigarette smoke. It pulls me back to playing soccer in a closed garage, the ball making a grand smash every time it hit the garage door. I was six. I don't want to smoke, but I want to burn cigarettes like some people burn incense. Quickly: the thick, slow-moving scent of yellow pizza grease, the kind that drifts down from fatty meat and floats on the pits and valleys of the hot cheese. The sight of it might make me sick — never mind the taste — but the flash spritz of vagrant grease on the breeze makes me unaccountably happy. Greasy pizza is just as eternal as sentinel radio towers tonight. A sigh, and the pizza and cigarettes are gone, and I have come over all damp green grass underneath rolling night clouds. I'm sitting on top of a Pittsburgh hill, laid out dead center on the soccer field at the very top of my campus. There are deep blues overhead, a fantastic range of near-black blues and drift with the clouds overhead. There is a blanket nearby, I think, but I want to let the breeze creep under my clothes just a little longer. Deep peace, and something like contentment, and hope. There is something else on the air. Something floral? Olive? Or maybe it's citrus? So faint that it could be either, and I can't tell if it's memory or actual smell or some blend of both, tied up together with a faint sense of loss, like there was something I had meant to remember years ago but didn't, until tonight.
Marc's music is lousy, and that is the plain truth of it. The lyrics are cramped, the melodies are repetitive, and the recording quality is barely redeemable, even as a signature sound. His guitar was old, a second- or third-hand treasure propped up on a corner with a thready blue strap hanging down over the strings, with the bottom end draped by chance over a case of Pepsi Blue, or the Diet version, or maybe just bottled water. In this particular fragment of memory the instrument and the drink blend into the overall fabric of the dorm: thin patchy carpet, white-painted cinderblock, insubstantial board closets with a gently cracked mirror to reflect the thin sunlight filtering in through the single dirty window. An idealized picture, no questions there, because we sanctify the departed with soft liturgies such as these. But the music that remains defies canonization. It is screechy; it is loud. It is rude and ignoble. It kicks pigeons. It bursts into your bedroom and sits on your chest. It heaves back and forth like a Trabant on a gyroscope, an aural approximation of seasickness. Worst, perhaps, he was the inescapable cliché: a deregulated thinker with strange tastes in a small and conservative liberal arts college, a cannonball of gum and feathers among dowdy sweaters and sensible shoes: a bad musician with an integrated early-2000s laptop microphone and a need to sing out. He killed himself some years after he dropped out, after we had graduated, after we had begun the slow process of losing contact and getting on with life. Now, six years later, sitting here in a Barnes & Noble on the fringe of the New York megalopolis, with a fashionable silver laptop and air conditioning, across from a slim woman with a small artsy sort of face in a black dress with a gash across the middle to show a taut and tan midriff — she is fondling a tall latte from the cafe here and toying idly with her phone, glancing up at intervals — I am sitting here writing, of all the godforsaken things — I wonder at this gnawing sense of shame. I stand accused: of hagiography in the first degree, of sanctification aforethought, and of conspicuous consumption of an authentic memory amidst the shameful accoutrements of caffeine and recessed lighting. Amend the charges now to include recursive self-castigation. What am I doing here, in this place? I, who have walked among men and heard the screech and wallow of God's angels? Well … a memory is to be remembered, and if it takes on a bit of a gleam, it's still a memory, and worth the time. I have his music to keep me honest when the urge to canonize takes hold. He was a bad scholar and a bad musician, but like so many bad scholars and bad musicians before him he furnished the unique sound that courses through our memories of a specific time and place, framing those long days and the hundred strange nights according to his own sound … whether we in our latter days like the tune or not. He wasn't a soundtrack, never a minstrel to continually crank out the obligatory background noise so the Main Actors could go ahead and get on with it. His music was a shy thing in the making, a proud but deeply private necessity that only rose up occasionally. Now, however, his music is most of what we have left, and as the vat of memory pulls down the walls of linear time into a homogenous swirl of sound and space and moment, his music is released into the memory of those short years: not a soundtrack, but a continual rhythm like the background thrum of the universe, mixing into everything like an echo on the very edge of hearing. Marc's music is lousy, but as a musician … well. He was the truth: the authentic thing itself. The impression that we were like him, or he was like us, still holds on now, and reminds us that we were, and that we always can be, the kind of truth that we are called to be. He was weird, but so were we, and there's the glory of it — and, well, some of us weren't, but they respected those of us who kept odd hours, read strange text, and hummed our own hum. In any case we all lived and worked and dreamed and hated and triumphed all in the same place. We were all firing our booster rockets there: some would fire straight up and touch their target stars; some would find their own trajectories matched by another rocket in mirror flight. A few of us went sideways … and one of our number went under, drifting further and further out of range until he suddenly and finally disappeared. We are all bad musicians, in one manner or another, but we are all still here to remind each other that perhaps we are still building toward our magnum opus. His songs are petals: cracked and withered and damned ugly. We who survive — to remember, and then to hope — recall the flower.
