I have neglected the blog over the past two months (sorry!) as I am immersed in teaching and spend many weekends out hiking. My regular destination is in the Hudson Highlands, from Bear Mountain Toll House to Anthony’s Nose, which I documented with a monthly picture from multiple spots over a year.
The above pictures look up the Hudson River toward the Bear Mountain Bridge.
The steady decline in water levels at Broccy Creek is just another sign of things gone awry.
It was an exercise in patience and focus, framing and remembering the right spot. And getting out every month. Sadly I missed the snow and peak fall colors.
His drug addled brain wouldn’t let him sleep but he remembered being trapped in an MRI machine, his arms pinned to his side, and looking back above his head at the sterile room, trying to call, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. The machine caught on fire and he woke up. He left the hotel and met Delia, a former student, sitting by the river.
She told Davis the story about when she worked at a high-end bottle service club and a patron had reached up her dress. “My mother told me I was asking for it.”
“You get along with your mother?” Davis asked.
“Mothers are overrated.” Delia eyed him. “All that self-sacrifice stuff, I get sick of that.”
He watched the clouds over the building tops and thought about going to look at the Viking ships in Roskilde in the morning. “They like to be martyrs and they hate it when they can’t sacrifice themselves.”
“I mean, my mother’s fine.” Delia looked at herself in her phone. “It’s not that I resent her for anything. She’s just my mother.”
“I forgive my mother for whatever she was supposed to have done to me.” Davis downed half of his beer. “I had this dream, more of a vision really because I think I was still awake. I was with my mother and she was in a smart button-down dress, and she looked beautiful, conservative and smart. She was younger than me and we were on the classic propeller plane going somewhere. But she was at the front of the plane with her friends.”
“That’s it?”
“I was sitting there, thinking that she would come back to me. And she didn’t.”
It was a spur of the moment thing, and she was excited to have me. She was an old friend, a successful writer, and lived on a farm north of Kingston. The conversation was animated, remembering times past.
“You were always someone I knew I could turn to.”
“Really?”
“You looked out for me.”
Dopamine was a go-to topic. “Gotta get our shot of dopamine. That’s what it’s all about.”
“Swipe left, swipe left!”
“That’s what we do.”
I drove across the bridge later that day and thought about how we only spend time with one another to be disappointed. That is what we do. That’s what she would have said too.
George Mackay Brown is one of the more well-known writers of Orkney and is perhaps best known for his novel Greenvoe which is dotted with understated phrasings. “Scots do wrong to call the devil by half humorous names such as Auld Nick, Sneckie, Prince of Darkness and Clootie.” (107)
C3PO and R2D2 on Sanday Roadside
“She was said to be a beautiful young woman, though rather lascivious. The principal light keeper was very solicitous.” (196)
Olivia de Havilland in Captain Blood (1935)
“Go to hell away from here, you faggot,” said a voice from the interior. “Horse-face, bugger off. Don’t relieve your conscience at this door, Away, you centaur.” (180)
A number of years back, an influential agent took interest in novel, My Bad Side. He had his reader review the opening 50 pages and gave me advice on changes to make, which I did. I received a follow-up on moving the back story to a later stage. I questioned this idea, explaining the benefit of where it was. That was it. I was out.
A year or so later, I pitched him my new book, Anori. “Not for me.” The one time an agent had taken an interest in my work, a one-night stand as it was, I hadn’t done as I was told and was cancelled. I’ve thought back to this moment often and wondered what might have happened if I had complied. What success would I have reaped? If only, if only…
Today, hundreds of indifferent rejection emails later, I feel something coming, some long-awaited breakthrough, not with them as much as me. I’ve made it somewhere, not a revelation as much as a state of mind, I suppose. Probably the booze but more of a clean sure hike up, getting to where I can see where I am. Which is here. Nowhere else but that.
My latest opus, The Vanishing Pill, will be ready in the spring.
Why are you here? Ask yourself that. What is the purpose? Where do you belong? I try to write like that. And then I don’t like how I feel when I go too long, my head thick, nothing working, done and lost. It seems like life isn’t worth it at that moment.
It’s not complicated to get my energy back, my brain back on its stem, even if it doesn’t feel like that. I walk and eat. And then I am new again, that clarity of purpose back inside, thinking I just came here to find the answer.
And this is it: We go fast on the roads we know and slow on the ones we don’t.
I gleaned a couple of basics from Anne Lamont’s book of writing advice,Bird for Bird. First and foremost, writing “is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work.” (7)
She also goes on to state that many readers “buy into the simplistic concepts of character and plot because it is much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality, as reality is unforgivingly complex.” (104)
These two essential ideas aside, she does miss how the nucleus of the process is in the marvel of entering another realm, knowing something there and chittering at the edge of that, loving the moment for as long as it might last.
In other words, it’s essentially about having the etching tools and a place to set up.
They came charging down from the far side of the field, all looking very excited, heads up, faces tight, eyes wide. I stopped, curious if it was really me they were coming to see. They surged up to the stone wall, the bravest and blackest at the front, their shiny noses out. “I don’t have any food.” I held my hands up for them to see. “See? Nothing.” They gazed back, their excitement intensified.
Maybe I was the first person they had seen in days. Maybe they were just lonely. “Beautiful day, isn’t it? The sun might even come out.” They were affixed on me, amazed at everything I said and did. “You must be very content here, knowing there is no abattoir on the island.” They waited, bunching up closer. “The key is to always stay here. Right?”
I approached, and the nearest wheeled back, causing a mass but brief wave of panic. I had my hands in the air again. “It’s fine. I promise. Just a nose scratch.” I tried again, and they moved back again, the nearest jumping back and forth between his fore and hind legs like a toy. I waited and they waited too, some looking off, perhaps thinking another better of me might arrive soon. I offered my hand and they bounced back again. “Well, then…”
I continued my walk alongside their wall, and they followed until they came to the corner of their field and huddled there in a great mass. I stopped and waved. “I’ll see you soon.” They stared back as I continued along, both of us a little lonelier, and then I met the pigs.
I will clean and organize. I will rearrange again. I will watch the cows intently and see if they are grazing or lying down. I will think about what it must be like to have only those choices. I will clean and organize again.
I will look at the clouds and seek out brightness on the horizon. I will plan the rest of my day and the days to come. I will think of what it is I must do except for the thing I must do.
I will write other things. I will work on bits of dialogue. I will outline a new idea. I will edit that. I will write this thing. I will do anything if it’s to keep me from the thing I know I have to do.
And then I will strike in a moment! My confidence will be true. But brief. I will look at the cows again. I will organize again. I will realize all of the things I could have done if I had only known better. I will realize I am too tired to get it into now and wait for the coming day.
I will be fresh then. I will be ready to really go at it. Of that I am certain.
Canada’s Nobel Laureate author Alice Munroe is now being judged for her complicity in her second husband sexual abuse of her then 9-year-old daughter. “There’s some things I just think it’s better not to talk about, don’t you?” (Rich as Stink)
Munroe’s short story collection The Love of a Good Woman collection offers compelling prose and narrative choices along with confounding character psyches that cannot be ignored in light of these revelations. “Her whole life was liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.” (Save the Reaper)
Society tends towards judgement, which of course is not the purpose of writing and certainly not Munroe’s fictional world. “You can’t take your attention from the tempest or it will rip open your last defenses. You try for sanity’s sake to fix on some calm detail of your surroundings, but the wind’s cries are able to inhabit a cushion or a figure in the rug or a tiny whirlpool in the window glass.” (My Mother’s Dream, 374)
