Knitting together the varying coincidences of our lives gives them a glistening, netted beauty that is perhaps lost entirely when we let all the moments fall to fragmentary pieces in our minds. I don't see it as making something fictitious out of life, but rather I see it as lending a sort of lovely structure to it that only the human imagination can provide.















Photo.

Lantern Light (Work in Progress)

Through the birches in the backyard they strung white paper lanterns for the party they threw in late August, and when dusk came in and the dark began to settle, the effect was sort of thrilling in its own simple way, the white warm orbs a reflection of the netted stars above, perhaps. Steady and unblinking, they hung amongst the rustling leaves, the edges blurred and beautiful—everyone who stood on the back deck with a beer in hand looked at them and paused for a moment to stare and gaze and comment. “How nice they look,” “how positively magical." And of course there was Clara Gibson in pale yellow, the dress scooped low in the back, the waist tied fast with a bow; she walked across the deck, the paper lanterns aglow in the dark behind her as she twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck, the way she often did. Her arms were thin and too long, but that seemed almost a part of her appeal, that uncertain length and litheness of her bones. Even so, that appeal wasn’t so much charm as much as you felt if you were patient, she might begin to unfold—a petal would fall loose first here and then there, finally offering up a narrow glimpse to the center.

Peter felt glad she had come, felt a little warm from the beer and because here was Clara striding across his back deck in the muggy August air and she would, at one moment or another, perhaps stand close to the hydrangea bed with her face lit by the nearest lantern. It had been years since, as children, they pedaled plastic boats at the cottage house their families once rented together; years since he pushed her into the cold lake for telling everyone he had got them lost along some weedy shoreline one morning; since he saw her kiss his cousin behind the tool shed with quick, closed lips. They bumped into one another in hallways now, chatted outside the cafeteria with friendly faces tipped with that look of knowing one another since childhood, but little else. Still, he was glad she had come.

Photo.

I. Dreamscape

For the contemporary memoir class I took this past semester, we were told to write a ten page memoir as our final paper assignment. The opening passage from mine:


"The only recurring dream I have ever had was painted in soft hazy strokes, much like a dark-hued painting you might find on the tall walls of a museum. Throngs of people traveled together in brown cloaks and coarse fabrics, hauling baskets of food and belongings. There were always chickens pecking at scattered grain with pointed beaks, clucking along with the crowd as it traveled through an enormous metal tunnel; a great exodus of bodies and lives. I never knew the destination, or the starting point, for that matter—just the humming clang of talk and movement along the journey."

Kingdom Come

What I learned in the springtime was that monarchs are the only butterfly species that, like the birds, make the full migration from north to south, and back again. They fly south in August, great papery hoards of them flittering across a hot summer sky on a path to Mexico; a bold and patterned mass bending and diving and floating together as one. It is not for themselves, but for their children, for the progeny that will burst forth from soft-clinging eggs laid along the way. For such a voyage requires the fortitude of generations to succeed, each leg fought by the next round of freshly emerged paper-winged kings. Again and again they are born to fly ever-closer to a space (a hot and mystical grove) where offspring generations down the line will alight on the bark of giants and huddle close, safe from the bitter cold of northern winters. This great pattern of flight, I was told, is woven between the fibers of their flesh, into the very core (whatever that may be) of their being and as that third or fourth generation of wanderers lands, they rest for months as though the entirety of their ancestral struggle lies heavy upon the ringed and bonded compounds of their crushable casements. It was then that I learned, also, that up above in the leafy treetops, birds sometimes look down with small, dark eyes, hungry beaks slightly agape in the forest heat.

Collaboration

With the arrival of another summer comes more free time to adventure and, most importantly, write! Busy with papers and projects and winter hibernation, I didn't write nearly as much as I had hoped to over this past school year, though I did start in on a few things. Hopefully in the next little bit I'll polish them up and post them, but in the meantime, I've embarked on something very new. Kelsey and I, upon our summertime reunion here in Ojai, have started in on a collaborative project--a bit magical realism, a bit autobiography, and a bit graphic novel, it's a strange and fun jumble right now. Pens and watercolors are the medium of choice for the illustrations, and the story is just beginning. Kelsey and I basically trade-off writing and drawing (though Kelsey is infinitely better at the illustration part than I am--mine are pretty sketchy and have zero perspective) and our writing styles have woven together quite nicely thus-far. The above photo documents the very beginning of our collaboration, and the inspiration for the setting of our tale (courtesy of dear friend Doug)! Oh, and if you're interested, you can see Kelsey's kooky talents here.

"Art originates in:

Thought
Feeling
Earthy things like flesh

It is not:
Self-expression

It becomes:
A sudden access of self-awareness"
-Ben Ehrenreich

"Believers": Pt. One

In 1908, three things happened: Henry Ford released his Model T, the very last White-Tipped Gilfinch on the planet was killed in a tragic accident that no one seemed to notice, and Dennis Morgan’s life was forever changed, despite his not being born for another sixty-seven years. You see, it was in 1908 that a notoriously reckless Carlyle Lamoreaux, both the object of Blakeville County’s snidest gossip and most ferocious envy, purchased the first Model T in the area and took a rather fast-looking young woman whose name was most certainly not worth knowing on a ride down a sleepy country lane on the outskirts of town, to the staunch disapproval of Blakeville mothers and daughters alike.

The only documentation of the romp (and subsequent tragedy) that managed to survive the incident four years later that was dubbed by citizens as “The Great Library Fire of 1912” was found in the diary of a girl who, according to her own writings, had lived in a grand house with a bedroom window overlooking that same lane. The girl, determined by local historians to be most certainly thirteen or fourteen years in age based on the flourishes of the script and the abundance of small red hearts drawn in the margins, never penned her name in the book, but its discovery in the hollow of a tree in the early 1940’s was declared an invaluable confirmation of what scientists had speculated for decades: the very last White-Tipped Gilfinch, a magnificent little bird with white tail-feathers that flashed brilliantly in the summertime sun and a lilting song that once warmed the airs of many a North American wetland, had lived and died in swampy Blakeville County.

Though the low-flying path of the Gilfinch and the heart-rending puff of white and black feathers against the front bumper of the Model T were mere asides in a much lengthier description of the “not really all that attractive” girl in the passenger seat whose “empty and crude banter” most certainly caused the “dashing and daring Mr. Lamoreaux” to swerve out of control at a risky speed, what brief commentary there was on the bird and its physical appearance was sufficient enough to convince ornithologists that this was, indeed, the very last sighting of the White-Tipped Gilfinch ever to be documented. Being the last people who were even aware that the Gilfinch had once existed, and having finally cleared the whole uncertain mess up, the ornithologists moved neatly on, and so there wasn’t anyone left who ever thought about the poor beautiful extinct Gilfinch.

That is, until a rather nomadic man and amateur birdwatcher going by the name Larry Star arrived in Blakeville County half a century later on a bicycle and became convinced in the aisles of the public library’s catalog of local flora and fauna that the heartbreaking song he’d heard from his canoe earlier that day was, in fact, the sound of the long lost White-Tipped Gilfinch. So vehement and vocal was Larry Star in this conviction that the myth of the bird’s phantom existence spread across the country in a matter of months, sparking the imaginations of scientists and laypeople alike. Dennis Morgan happened to be among the believers.