The Grindstone and the Garden

Black Book 70, October 25, 2010

I’m not sure what the hell was going on in my life in 2010 and 2011, but during those years I was apparently writing all day and long into the night, averaging 10 pages a day of microscript in the Moleskines.

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The Little Engine That Could. That was a problem, very early on. Even as a child I could never allow myself to believe that a train was capable of positive thinking.

Are there other creatures that have any sort of concept of God? How would we know? Watch them closely for signs of disappointment, I guess. Hear them when they keen.

I have noticed that I have developed the habit of stumbling into the kitchen every couple hours and turning on the garbage disposal. I would say for no purpose or reason, but that obviously isn’t true, at least on a subconscious level. What would it mean if in a Shakespeare play a character was constantly going into the kitchen to run a garbage disposal in an empty sink? I’m not suggesting, of course, that there were garbage disposals in Shakespeare’s time, but perhaps you get my drift.

The sun has just this moment entered the room for the first time in many, many days, and Wendell immediately moved from the green chair and sprawled in a puddle of sunlight on the rug. Light! Floods of light!

Connect! Only connect!

If you had asked me several minutes ago what time it was, I would have guessed somewhere between noon and one o’clock in the afternoon, but I just consulted the clock on the fireplace mantle and discovered that it is actually ten minutes to five. I have been up for more than 24 hours, and when I do not sleep times begins to accelerate. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe it just ceases to exist in any sort of normal conceptual way. It loses all utility as a structural or framing device, and no longer means anything.

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I was a happy boy, a boy with stars in his eyes. A true believer, born to move through this world with a laugh snapping from his teeth and exuberant nonsense rolling off his tongue in a ceaseless torrent. They said there was something wrong with me, but I was a boy who loved The Wind in the Willows, a boy who had no question whatsoever that he belonged in this world. Once upon a time that boy could run until the day dropped him somewhere, sprawled, and the darkness rolled back the light like a magic carpet. A temporary thing, darkness was then, something that hung around just long enough until the magic carpet made another appearance.

First person, third person, he and I were both. The world was ours, full of our people and our passions and our dreams. We had all sort of dreams. Every book we read, every movie we saw, every record we brought into our lives took us dreaming. Life could be anything at all, and no dark possibilities would be entertained. It would all be one grand adventure. Life.

What didn’t we want? We didn’t want boredom, didn’t want drudgery, didn’t want a normal life. We knew what we wanted and we knew exactly what we didn’t want.

Possibly, in retrospect, it was all a good deal vaguer than that, but at the time everything seemed crystal clear. The future was both something we were preparing to move into and something that was readying spectacular accommodations for us. We could even be bums, but exalted bums, wise and openhearted and self-sufficient and contented.

There was adventure everywhere we went, even in the nooks and crannies and the outskirts of our little town. There was me and him and them and us, and we each brought our own dreams and discoveries to the party that was every day. It was all we ever talked about: Dreams. What now? What next? A railroad trestle and the fields outside of town were our refuge, the first National Park we discovered for ourselves. Something else and something new.

When we would get together in a bedroom or basement to unveil our recent record discoveries from the cut-out bin at Osco Drug, the excitement and thrill of those moments were earthshaking. We honestly didn’t want to be anything; we wanted to be us.

In the basement graphic arts studio at school we made tee-shirts that read, “Why Should I Be Something When I Can Be Someone?”

Then, one by one, we crumbled, we surrendered or fell away. Those books—the Beats and the rest of the nonsense we read with such excitement—were like a slow-acting poison of disenchantment. We got to the parts where our heroes started to go mad, to careen out of control, to move in with their mothers, to become bitter, and to die, almost always pathetically. Things got ugly in a hurry, and the real world whose reality we had stubbornly refused to believe in asserted itself with its glum and efficient authority.

Soon there was no we, no us, and we all ended up alone, each in our own slightly different version of America, all of them terrifyingly real.

The boy with stars in his eyes was no different after all, apparently, but one beautiful day in early autumn he had found himself seated alone on a limestone ledge above the big spring in Beaver Creek Valley, reading The Wind in the Willows. All afternoon he sat there, reading that book he had so loved as a child, and when he finally finished, he gazed down at the torrent of the spring and the deep, lovely pool where he had wallowed away many a happy day with his old friends. And he thought, All of that was real. We were all exactly as alive as we believed we were. This disgust I feel is not the way the story has to end. There are still stories to be lived and told. I’m not done with my changes. And then he opened the notebook he still carried with him everywhere he went, and wrote:

Remember when you imagined stars on the roof of your mouth and stood in the river in the rain, naked and mooing, your head and palms raised significantly (or so you imagined)? You desperately wanted something momentous to wash over you; to be claimed by something outside yourself, even as you were almost utterly incapable of feeling the presence of anything outside yourself.

I’m sure you have no idea now why you wrapped your feet in aluminum foil.

Still, how could you forget all that time you spent falling, those days when you just let it all go, your whole self, surprisingly heavy, a sinker dragging all the world’s earnest bobbers right down with you? Twice, at least, you thought yourself done for and drowned, and in those moments there was just this vague glimpse of sadness mixed with regret, almost like the last fragments of an evaporating dream.

Remember the lights and the way everything smeared, blurred, and swerved away from you for a while? In the distance, sometimes, you imagined a fire tower, then a lighthouse, then a tiny chapel deep in the woods and dimly illuminated like a jack-o’-lantern, then finally a graveyard down a long gravel road somewhere in the country. The thin ones, your desperate companions reduced to nothing but haunted eyes and bones, they were so dangerous, and you were perhaps the most dangerous of all.

Can’t you even remember anymore how you were saved? Isn’t that a memory—as some would say—that you should hold onto for dear life?