folds of memory

It may have been in the jungle. I can't remember so well, any more, and it was such a long time ago, but at the back of it all was the study thumming drum sound, which was muffled at first by the trees and all of the growth, and I have a vivid full color memory of stepping out of the underbrush into the noise and the spray of the largest waterfall I'd ever seen. For days the sound had been getting louder and louder, until we knew it was a real live something happening somewhere; until there were no real moments of silence, because there was always this unvarying percussion.

And there were mosquitoes, the constant buzzing humming dance of mosquitoes, and nothing we could really do about it. Every inch of exposed skin became a landing site for some insect, and we tucked our trousers into our socks and our shirts into our trousers; our shirts were all long-sleeves with necks-collar raised, and a bandana covered our faces. It was all very African Queen, except we didn't have Humphrey Bogart with us and we weren't trying to navigate darkest Africa during the confusion of a world war, but we were definitely in a jungle.

That's the thing with age, there are all of these snapshots of memory shuffled together, and I know they all happened because I was there and they can't all be hallucinations, but the order gets a bit confused; the befores and afters are mixed up, and what I will swear today happened at a dinner party in Amsterdam tomorrow I might remember as the same people, the same conversation, but a brunch in Santa Fe. Perhaps both will be true. Perhaps both happened. Perhaps these details in the mosaic aren't really so very important, except as signposts to separate a life of innumerable folds into discrete chapters. Forgive me, it does all rustle together until I am as disoriented as a seeker of the secrets of the labyrinth without a spool to mark my way, but I am almost certain this was in the jungle.

This was when on-the-ground research was how information was gathered -- when we would quietly arrive, with as little fanfare as possible, and exchange stories with whoever was willing to talk. The problem was, the only ones eager to talk were the outcasts, the people with a chip on their shoulder, the ones with scores to settle and wrongs to right, and it was never worthwhile trying to separate our the grain of truth from the greater prejudice of their stories. They couldn't be ignored, and were hard indeed to discourage, which was why our travel groups kept growing ever larger, to include decoy storytellers to distract those whose tales were of universal woe from the greater tellers of truth we sought.

For a time, several years, at least, I had tried asking the children for their stories. Children, who see everything, yet are never given enough space to ask their questions, to formulate opinions about what they see. Finally, though, I gave up on the children, for their mythology clouded the truth of the stories they told. Their stories were clear, and careful, but like my memories now, they grew together, became twisted, fantastic entities, and were not worthless but impenetrable. I retracted several years worth of dubious reports, and soldiered on, looking for the key to understanding the universal truths of where we journeyed.

It must be admitted, the stories I sought to trade, the information I was eager to share, was not perhaps valued highly by those whose barter I requested. But I could only function within the tightest of parameters; flexibility was frowned on, regardless of outcome. So I drew cards, cards somewhat like Tarot cards and somewhat like flashcards for memorizing multiplication or foreign vocabulary, and these cards both illustrated my story, and incorporated the stories that I had, in turn, been told. When the time came to file my report, present my information, it was neatly transcribed into the necessary language, on the necessary forms, but these picture cards formed the backbone of everything.

There were rumors of rumors that had brought us into the jungle, and the rumors were so tangled and unbelievable that my crew was dispatched with scarcely enough time to prepare for our mission. By the time snippets and hints usually reached the dispatch office, it was a matter of guesswork and luck to have any sense of what was worthwhile and what was a wild goose chase, but this was different. We hadn't heard anything at all from the quadrant these whispers issued from, in years verging on decades verging on generations. That in itself was unusual; there was a constant simmering chatter happening from almost everywhere else, so that the black holes became filled with superstition and imbued with the power only absence can engender. That wasn't all, though; the hints and innuendo that had started to accumulate were off-the-charts unusual, were so otherworldly and surreal that none of the usual channels of information could have possibly embroidered and obscured the details so thoroughly.

I had just returned from the land of white foxes and red roofed houses and smoke smelling of peat fires and dried fish, and was immediately inoculated against whole kingdoms of micro-organisms and sent with a team and an ill-packed rucksack to determine the truth. The jungle was a child's picture book jungle, full of Rudyard Kipling animals chattering, slithering, camouflaged and caught in a moment of Riki Tiki Tavi clarity before disappearing again, becoming nothing more than the shadow of a tree. There were Tarzan's apes and chimpanzees and tiny little long-tailed monkeys who would hang upside down from branches, like children on a playground. There were all manner of flying birds and insects, the entire scale of the animal kingdom inverted, hummingbirds of bright tangerine orange no longer than a thumb, and wasps of yellow ferocity that were the size of kittens.

From the slow moving river we tried to follow, we took our drinking water, and boiled it and boiled it and still became ill, with hallucinations and stomach pains, and we avoided bathing for fear of the greater unknown evils of what lurked in the soggy riverbed. We didn't talk much among ourselves, except to attend to daily matters of survival and navigation, but we were each furiously wondering, what would we find?

The snippets of rumors had told of a land in the treetops, of birds that were as tamed and domesticated as ponies, and would allow themselves to be ridden and steered by not only humans, but also monkeys. Were the humans exceptionally little, or were the birds exceptionally large? Would this kingdom of the treetops hear our approach, and desire to have nothing to do with us, would they raise their rope ladders and send down a rain of poison-tipped arrows? Would the forest be filled with booby traps, waiting to ensnare us at unaware moments?

The reality was astounding, the swarms of butterflies that perched on our ears, and drank from the sweat that ran down our necks and into our collarbones; the jungle predators that left footprints in neat circles around our mosquito netted sleeping bags at night, then melted back into the shadows. We wondered at these predators, for the footprints indicated very big cats, but they never pounced upon us in our sleep, when the mosquito nets would have offered not even a token of resistance. We wondered if it was the same feline each evening, and if in its careful circlings it was not hunting, but compiling data: our individual scents, our patterns and habits, our relationships. Was it somehow our protector, keeping tabs on us and keeping others at bay?

We had no way of knowing, and did not know whether to be more fearful of an intelligence gathering cat or of a nightly hunter. Some of the younger crew members took to wrapping themselves in mosquito netting and tying themselves to the branches of trees, but I found this ridiculous; any jungle predator, any cat, can climb a tree, and sleeping like a shish kabob would only result in tormented dreams and rough mornings.

None of us were sleeping well, though; the imminent approach of the roar of the waterfall joined with all the sounds of the jungle at night, and our dreams were haunted by the anticipation of all we could not see. The day we finally broke through the undergrowth to discover the falls, we knew none of it had been in vain. The water misted over everything, obscuring anything more than ten feet away, and the mist covered everything, animal vegetable and mineral, with uncountable rainbows of every size and hue. We basked in the cool, mysterious mist, and opened our eyes to a world beyond any stories we had ever imagined.

reading
Any human heart by William Boyd

weather
the warmest winter ever, all for the new boots and coat

across the skies

Dawn came early, so very early, the sky just tinged with the expectation of sunrise, still several hours away. The ground had settled into a blanket of dew, the dampness absorbing deep into our bedrolls and around our feet, only somewhat protected by our woolen socks. The gong was struck, arise, arise, once more, arise, haste, haste, and, just like that, the dew still upon our clothes and sleep tangled with our minds, dreams not yet separated from reality, we rolled our bedrolls, laced our boots, and continued marching.

Step. Step. Step. March in line, march in formation, camp broken and carted away with our steps, the monotony of the footfalls enough to send one off to sleep again, here in the shadow of the ending night. There was no time for fires, for boiled water or porridge, for the march itself would warm us, wake us. When the sun had risen, we would pause for bread, cold water, and continue at the same pace until the sun rose high high in the sky. Noon we would boil water, cook grains, scavenge and harvest what fruits or greens could be found, refill canteens and water stores from nearby lakes or rivers, carefully boiling the water before adding it to our containers. Then a rest, a brief respite from the miles of blisters and boredom, before the deep long continuation of the march until shadows could no longer be distinguished from the night.

My shoes had grown thin, the leather under the pads of my toes threatening to wear through, seams beginning to let in water and sand as we crossed the countryside, but I did not have an additional pair to change into; I did not have a piece of leather and a needle with which to fashion repairs, much less a replacement. Some of my fellows were already reduced to bare feet, worn into blisters, callouses, and much worse by the steady unceasing pace of our migration and the harshness of the lands. We counted footfalls, carried infants on our backs who were too young to walk unaided, carried our camp and our supplies. We carried our future with us, in our stocks and in our souls, the future we could but hope we would still have the heart to create.

That day, by the noon fires, we formed council, and counted and planned, none of us the leader, but all aware of the need for order and purpose, without which we would not have survived to leave our city, the city of our childhoods and the city of our forefathers. From the crest of a hill we could see the landscape split, we were at some type of ridge and boundary between lands, and we were confronted with a valley and plain in the shadow of a mountain, which veered perpendicular to our current direction, or deep into the heart of the mountain, dead straight ahead.

All our childhoods we had heard tales of the mountains, had been told of their dangers so often we doubted the savage ferocity of the stories could be true. There were stories of bears as white as snow and as large as four men, with spikes on their claws which could impale small children. There were stories of cats who hunted in the eerie silence of the thin atmosphere, insulated by snow, cats who could leap leap through the air and snap an adult's neck in the blink of an eye. There were stories of great deer covered in shaggy winter coats with antlers covered in fur as thick as a dog's, deer who could run and dart swiftly through avalanches and over the thinnest crust of ice over the water. There were stories of men who had moved into the mountains years and years ago, men whose beards grew as thick as a bearskin and who wore patchworks of pelts, men who smelled of rotting flesh from their most recent kill, men who had forgotten they were men at all, and become wild animals, themselves, there deep in the mountains.

There were stories of snow drifts so deep entire villages were buried, and stories of nights so cold no one who went to sleep ever woke up again. Yet there were also stories of ice palaces, entire kingdoms carved and fashioned from the white granite cliffs of the mountains, with huge bonfires always lit in the center courtyard, and deep hot springs warmed by the volcanoes slumbering under the mountains. These stories told of a race of tall, thin people, whose skin was as pale as the snow itself, whose hair was the color of the bonfire, and these people were the soul of the mountains. They played trumpets and flutes, they sang from deep in their chests, long, tuneless chants that reflected the sun breaking through the clouds and protected them from the dangers of avalanches and volcanoes.

We did not know if these white beings existed, or if they were a part of our grandmother's grandmother's folktales; we did not know if they were cruel or kind. But our bare feet, our worn out shoes cautioned us against going into the mountains and snows, for we were unprepared for such an expedition, and did not care to chance the benevolence of fate.

There were, however, no stories at all that we had ever heard of the valley and the plain which ran alongside the mountains. None of us had any references to it in our memory, no stories of aborigines, no stories of horses, no stories of lands fair or foul, no stories of dangers or of promises. This emptiness, this void which should have been filled with the stories of our grandfather's grandfathers, filled us with fear, for we had learned to fear a land which keeps its secrets.

If we were to follow the contours of the valley and the plain, the water might be brackish, unfit to drink, unable to be purified. There might be beetles with crisp iridescent armor, beetles as large as a child, with grasping mandibles and a poisonous bite. There might be cannibal tribes waiting for the arrival of strangers, to mount our heads on spikes and turn our march-weary muscles into stew or jerky. We did not know if we would encounter monkeys, snakes, wasps, or giant spiders; we did not know if the vegetation would nourish us or sap our bodies of all nutrients.

And so, for the first time in many months, we paused the march and built a camp. We built tents and hammocks, gathered stores of firewood, and we brought deep into our circle every one who traveled in our company. A general pool was made, a tally of resources and materials, of skills and knowledge, and there, at the top of the hill, we prepared. We mended our shoes and our feet, our clothing and our bedrolls. We gathered and dried all of the fruit, plants, and meat we could prepare. We brought together our compasses, compared the due North of each against the other, and held trials in triangulating position from the sun and from the stars.

Two infants were born, as their time came ready, and they were placed in packs sewn for their carriage and protection. And still, still we hesitated, as ready as we ever could be for the known dangers of the mountain and the unknown dangers of the plain. Our days of preparation turned to weeks, and soon it was the peak of summer and grains which one of us had planted had begun to grow heavy for the harvest. Some of the tents had been strengthened to rustic cabins, and areas of craft were delineated on the outskirts of the settlement , where specialists met the demands of the many with whatever skill they could provide. If we were to head into the mountains, we would need to begin our march again immediately; but still we delayed.

One or two boys put together exploratory missions towards the valley, but they returned, exhausted, saying that however far or fast they traveled, the plain and valley stayed as far away, receding into the distance, and when they turned to return to our encampment on the hill, even after three weeks of hard marching away, they could always make the return trip in a single day. Still, we hesitated, uncertain, and watched the last rays of sun reflect off the snows of the mountains, unable to proceed either deeper into the story or to form a new story, in the unknown world we couldn't reach.

weather
a dram for the lads, a dram for the lassies, and a dram for the haggis : happy birthday, Rabbie Burns

reading
underground restoration efforts in Paris!

faded maps

Remember what it was like, that summer when we left, the smell of dried peony, kept preserved in amongst the maps and the letters home that we wrote but never sent. The letters, unsent, unfinished, always begun with the best intentions: but there was never a post office. There were very few strangers traveling from where we were going to where we were from, and by the time we realized, many months later, that there were never going to be any post offices, the few strangers we had encountered at our outset had dwindled, until there were no opportunities to implore someone to act as letter carrier, for there were no people on the trail.

We would awaken from a particularly restless dream, almost able to smell the heavily spiced cakes and the scents of domestic family life, the washing, the shed with all its well-oiled implements, baking bread, a roast chicken, ground nutmeg, and chocolate dark and bitter, these smells would linger at the edges of our consciousness while we slept, would awaken in our hearts the ache of homesickness, and we would find a clean sheet of stationery, sharpen a pencil with a pocket knife, and write. Our headings were nontraditional, for we had lost track of precisely when it was, after so little to differentiate so many days of traveling, so our letters would begin thusly: "the moon, waxing gibbous, a dew frozen into a thin frost on the ground, rolling hills in the distance, now grassy plains." For this was all we knew for certain, and we wanted the first flush of the letter to convey our longing and our inexpressible love to those we could not reach, somehow invoked before telling of our own journey, part tedium, part nature documentary, and unremittingly redundant to us as we continued to travel further away from certainty.

The peony we found in a bush heavy with petals, where there had once been a cottage or an outpost, softened with domestic gardening. The flowers were just about to scatter away from the plants, full and lush with spring life, and we had slept in this place where once had stood a home, had pitched our tents where the ground had been smoothed flat and level. That morning I awoke to the smell of the peonies invading my thoughts, and I gathered handfuls of them, pressed them between stationery and the pages of books, so homesick did they make me for lemonade in the garden out of a crystal pitcher on a June afternoon, the lawn green with the enthusiasm of early summer, the longest day of the year.

Those memories were already so far in the past that it seemed a different lifetime, and now two or three other lifetimes have grown, accumulated, between what was and what now is. I find the peony, petals faded, slightly grayed with the passage of time, surprised that their scent still lingers in the air about them. How long had we been traveling, then; had we just finished the soul-weary exhaustion of the first winter, the weight of homesickness compounded by the effort it required to simply not curl up into a ball and go to sleep in the snow, to die quietly of exposure rather than to bear another battle with the world? Had we known what we were about, when the nights grew long and deeply cold we would have sheltered in a lean-to, a hastily built cabin, but we could not predict what lay ahead, we were ignorant as to the building of lean-tos, we thought our travels could outpace the descent of winter.

But I think the peony predates the crush of nature settling into our bodies, the peony was gathered in the first flush of excitement, shortly after we set off, before our legs and hearts grew heavy and our packs grew lighter and lighter. For we departed in the fullness of spring, just as the summer plantings were beginning, the ground thawed so that it could be hoed and raked and neatly divided into rows.

We left when the moon was full and the littlest cousin had toddled her first steps from the kitchen table to the doorway, we left after spending the winter studying maps and star charts, learning how to use a compass and navigate by the heavens. We drew up plans and lists, we packed, sorted, compressed, repacked, we made our tents and sorted seeds, grains into containers to carry with us. So much I did not do, I did not learn to splint a broken bone or to use an ax on timbers larger than myself, I did not study botany or animal engravings to distinguish what was medicinal from what was poisonous, what was predator and what was prey. I did not learn to shoot a gun or how to set a trap.

My knowledge was bound in other directions, how to tie knots and identify constellations, how to watch the tide and tell the weather, how to recognize the landscape for streams and lakes just beyond hills or trees. Perhaps it would have ended differently had we taken a boat, propelled across the waters in search of new lands, but that different may not have been gold or eternal youth, it may have been scurvy, seasickness, a loss of fresh water rations, and we did not have a boat, we were not sailors, we knew no sailors. That first spring of travel, we attempted to chart our course, using footsteps to count out distances, annotating the maps we brought with us, drawing in the missing areas as we traveled through them.

As we drew further and further away, the land grew to resemble the fairy tales we had heard as very young children: the sky at dawn was the color of cotton candy, drawn out gossamer thin onto the edge of the horizon as day chased night into hiding. Evening would arrive with an explosion of color on the opposite edge, yellows and purples warring against one another as the sun sank under the rising weight of the moon. The teeter-totter see-saw play between the sun and moon was a source of fascination, how even a crescent moon was enough to force the sun into seclusion, how even the threat of the moon's anger, on the nights when it turned away from our eyes and the sky was lit by Cassiopeia, the Archer, the Seven Sisters, the morning star, even the absence of the moon could send the sun into a nightly seclusion.

The landscape, as we traveled deeper and deeper, grew less domesticated: trees were gnarled in on themselves, instead of growing high, high in competition with the buildings for the sun's affections, here they began to wrap their branches around themselves, to pull their leaves away from their trunks with a toss against the pull of the wind. When we were not looking, the trees would stretch, change shape, settle into a new position, to freeze from view when our glance turned towards them again. Grasses, always kept to a sedate green in our pasture, tumbled in wild meadows along with clover and lamb's breath and Queen Anne's Lace and grew in a riotous curly profusion of emerald and chartreuse and and lemon yellow, out of sight of settlers.

The grasses seemed to chart our movements, to know where we came from and to guide our footsteps in the direction they wished us to take. Even on the stillest days, no movement of wind, the grasses were rustling amongst themselves, talking, sharing information, the low level constant murmuring of a train station or busy market. We did not trust the grasses, felt the way they turned our footsteps away from our carefully plotted course, and felt the workings of a trap waiting for our guard to fall. For the plant kingdom lives by more than photosynthesis, the carnivorous  plants lure their prey into a final destiny of slow digestion, and we did not wish to end our days as the feed of grasses, at the whim of the mind of the plant kingdom. So we checked out compass regularly, we tied our tents stoutly to three trees each, three trees of different species so they would not conspire against us.

As we traveled further away from our homeland, as the rabbits grew to the size of small dogs, with lop ears that trailed on the ground, as the streams were aerated and carbonated from some underground effervescent source, we grew ever further from where we intended to arrive, and the days grew longer and richer and deeper, the nights shorter and sharper and leaner, and we basked in the newness of the world.

reading
The gone-away world / Nick Harkaway.

weather
cold but not too cold (or maybe that's the coat)

gods/demons

The secret was elusive, even once I got the hang of how to look for it. Years, though, years of my childhood had been spent in the maelstrom of knowing something exists, without knowing just what it is or how to find it. Perhaps the key was merely to grow up, to discover that mysteries to children become finely wrought sculptures for adults, every shadow and expression clear to view, but, no, I don't think it is that. It was more of a scavenger hunt, the growing up, picking up the miscellaneous odd bits of the adult world, and trying each new fact, each new object, to see if it was the key to understanding all that hovered just on the edge of my mind, and one day, one combination of these accumulated keys provided the answer, the entry into that shadow world, where the streets and alleys change places with labyrinths, where the monsters in attics become dreams and love letters.

My first search, so very clear in memory, preserved in the amber of nostalgia, my first search was deep, deep into the heart of the earth. It stood to reason: pirates buried treasure, lost cities were unearthed by explorers, therefore the key to the secret could well be underground, in the realm of the River Styx and Persephone's pomegranate. Choosing where to dig the first shovelful of earth: was there any sense of argument? Somehow the mind of a child knows instinctively where the points are that lead most quickly to other places. There was no need for an oracle or map, for the back garden contained only one place worthy of being a portal into the place I sought. And digging, digging the three of us without technique or intention, just digging and digging into the loamy layers of all that we could not know. Past the roots of bulbs, past grubs and earthworms, past the runners of Johnson grass, past mysterious beetles in color combinations we had never seen.

We thought there might be a skeleton or two down there, but we weren't actually certain what the results of our efforts would be, a well, maybe, or simply some token left by someone from long ago, an Indian arrowhead or a penny turned vivid green with age. What we found was simply a rusty house key that didn't fit any of the locks we tried it in. We were too well behaved to go about trying it in the front doors of our neighbor's houses, and knew that they might have dogs or burglar alarms or could call the police. I kept the key, just in case, wore it on a shoelace tied around my neck, but I never found a lock that it would open. I never filled in the excavated hole in the back yard, either, and wonder now who did.

The next expedition to find out the great secret was a journey, part exploration, part running away, for in those days I kept a packed satchel in the closet, just in case. One never knew, although I find myself wondering now just what was in the satchel, what would have become of me if the great catastrophe on the edge of my imagination had come to pass, would the satchel have been my parachute into a new reality? It wasn't running away for real that day, just running away for practice, going in a new direction and home before dark.

We followed the railroad tracks, and the railroad tracks followed the creek. Mostly we stayed on the tracks like a balance beam, raised up above the weeds and the grass snakes and the dandelions turned from yellow to white with the high suns of summer. When the railroad tracks turned into bridges my bravado turned and looked the other way as I scrambled down the bank, amidst the aluminum cans, glass bottles, orphaned tennis shoes, and hopped and scrambled over the creek on irregular stones, meeting the railroad tracks on the other side and continuing along them. When it was hot, deep dog days hot, wading through the river tempting water moccasins and quicksand, chasing tadpoles out of shadowed shallows, we would allow the water to swallow our footsteps, but we preferred the railroad tracks, their sense of engineered purpose, the continuity of past and future destinations linked by daily schedules in steel.

It was easy to become diverted from the mission of finding the key to the secret, there was so much visible from the rail lines that was hidden to the world of asphalt streets and front doors. There were the backs of houses, their unkempt clutter viewed with disinterest, their stories of hard lives, lawn mowers, old cars not readily understood as a people hanging on to the edges of civilization. These were not part of the secret I sought to understand, they were only a colorful scenery to the more important work of looking for lost treasure to appropriate into my own life story. The railroad tracks never ran out, but as the afternoon wore thin, we crossed through yards and apartment complexes to beat the sun sinking in the sky. We looked towards the no trespassing signs, saw the barbed wire and the unmowed field, and as citizens of no-man's-land, as every child is, we dashed over, under, and through, delirious with excitement and fear, wondering if there really was an old man with a shotgun, and what would happen if we were caught, running rabid at dusk.

My pockets were heavy with the stones I picked up on the walk, pieces of granite glittering with quartz fragments, pieces of coal that I would try to burn, smooth pebbles shiny and black in the stream to fade to grey obscurity once no longer fresh from the water. These rocks would somehow fit into the secret world, provide some clue to understanding the mysterious incongruities of reality, where what I was told to expect and what happened were so very different, although perhaps they were just baubles from a magpie collection in the hot sun, not evidence of some deeper order in reality.

As we walked the rails and the streams, so too did we apply the search to the alleyways, having seen the sleeping backs of houses from the tracks, wondering what other undiscovered leftovers might be hidden where no one thought to look. The alleyways, for some reason, didn't parallel the streets, although they should have adhered to efficiency and been a perfect reflection of the streetscape. Instead, they meandered in directions of their own, veering away from approaching intersections and turning to weave instead in an intricate pattern of disorder, so the streets I thought I knew so very well were lost to the grid like world whose boundary I had crossed behind, to follow circuitous twistings that would end up somewhere not quite where I expected to be.

Amongst the fences and swimming pools and dogs were lives whose parameters must have closely resembled my own, although they felt distantly foreign, intensely alive and fraught with dangers and people who bore no resemblance to the cacophony of my own home. When did I realize that the world of other people's houses was a world I would never visit, even with a well-stamped passport and an eagerness for the journey? We gazed at the backs, the forlorn sides of these homes, and knew that their secrets would remain impenetrable, even after we had been inducted to the secrets and mysteries of adulthood. For all this was, and remains, foreign, the passionate desires of unfocused ambition, the bitter loneliness of divorce, the struggle of the widow left bereft at the empty house which once offered so many small daily joys.

Crimes of passion, endless telephone calls, television screens glowing blue seen through living room curtains after sunset, were as distant to me as the Inca or the Egyptians, and were not the secret I sought to understand. The pieces I picked up, the grocery lists, the old telephone books, once, a syringe which had a bent sharp needle and I knew must be dangerous, the tackle box emptied of all the lures except three gummy worms in red and yellow with green feathers, these I picked up and carried back, to study in the shadow of the brick wall by the side garden, to find the missing decoded secret to the evidence that somewhere, there was more.

As a child nothing could be as simple as we were taught to believe, it was impossible that closets did not hold something more frightening than dust in their corners, there was a quick hurried scuttling when the door drew open that made the noise of crabs walking on a boardwalk. I knew there was something in the closet, something that was part of the adults' conspiracy of knowledge, that I was being intentionally held in ignorance, while the rummaging skittering thing could steal my dreams.

I knew that skeletons were not devoid or absent of life, but were merely something more than sleeping, for around the corpse of any animal recently died or at any cemetery the air was heavy with souls waiting to repossess their bodies. I knew that Leap Day was just hiding in the cusp of midnight on the years when it didn't happen, and I knew those missing days were waiting for me, making plans of their own. I knew the shadows of buildings could move, that walls were flexible and not solid, but I didn't know that I knew any of these things, until so very many years later, so many keys gathered and lost in the twilight of childhood.

reading
The other city : a novel / Michal Ajvaz

weather
walks through woods, the crunch of ice underfoot

moments of significance

{this is from the same prompt as this essay from April, 2009}

Nothing significant was supposed to happen that day. The calendar, when consulted, was a blank space bracketed by good intentions: there are so many hopes and expectations and plans that are never written down, for to do so would indicate a slippery slope to the pit of obsessive compulsive. Shower. Floss teeth, wash dishes, walk dog, fall in love. Having a to-do list of occasional chores: mopping, say, or lawn mowing, is perhaps tedious but harmless, and so this day in particular had all of the daily things to do without any particular flourishes. The alarm went off, the coffee was made, the day commenced.

Mornings are not the optimal indicators of normalcy, what with traffic and trying to remember the necessary tasks of the workday, but it is fair to say that by ten a.m., I knew my day was turning from one of routine non-significance bordering on insignificance and becoming something entirely different. The smell of the air, for instance. There was, hovering on the edges of the day, the smell of spring, the freshness of the thaw, rising sap, early blossoms. None of these were actually in evidence; the day was cold, deep midwinter cold, but the smell was of growth, movement, life, and put a bounce in everyone's step. Traffic seemed erratic, there had been no rush hour, but the roads gradually continued to fill with cars, until it seemed that everyone was in transit to somewhere else.

The birds, too, were out in numbers, not the birds of winter, nor the masses of birds mid-migration, but something both greater and essentially un-normal. Every tree was full of unexpected species of bird, but not so ostentatiously that one noticed at first; there was nothing like a parrot among the pine trees, but more a mass of starlings circling the grocery store, a line of small sparrows along a fence, a row of neatly arranged blackbirds on the electrical lines. And in their abundance, everywhere, every surface, they became significant, although their colors were muted and they did not sing.

I noticed these details, making mid-morning coffee and looking out the window, but thought nothing of it. There is chaos in the universe, and underpinning that chaos there is an ordered pattern in the universe, and I believe neither in fat nor in free will, I am neither a neuroscientist nor a Freudian. Things happen which cannot be explained to anyone's satisfaction, and then the rest of life continues without reason. So I inhaled deeply the heaviness of spring upon the winter air, I watched the birds careen across the sky, I noticed the roads grew slow and heavy with traffic, and I returned to my morning's work.

When the mailroom clerk brought around that day's deliveries, in amongst the bills and magazines was an altogether different sort of envelope. It was a shiny, shiny emerald green, and when it was tilted this way and that in the light, it turned to silver and to deep blue. My name was scrawled across it, not the crabbed scrawl of a ball point pen nor the calligraphic scrawl of a wedding invitation, but something resembling the feather-nib scrawl of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It was ink, and it was both formally scripted and somehow imperfectly written. There was no return address.

Inside the envelope was a white card, the size of a business card, and written on it in that same spidery handwriting was a very simple, very ambiguous message. "Everything will be fine." And that was all it said. I couldn't tell if it was meant to be a joke or one of those vaguely inspirational quotes that appear on hippie herbal tea bags and in women's magazines, and while it wasn't really reassuring, it wasn't threatening, either. I placed it in the center of my bulletin board, then returned to the task at hand, only to be interrupted by a fire drill.

Thus, coat in hand, I turned to obediently file out of the building to my assigned meeting location, and decided to pick the card back up, slip it into my pocket, before slowly and carefully (as instructed) making my way to the stairs. After checking in with the fire safety inspector and verifying my continued existence, rather than wait with the mass of staff hovering by the doorway, I kept walking. The air was so very ripe, and the birds, once you started looking, were everywhere.

A lone bluebird perched on the back of a bench, and as I looked at it, it looked back, intently, at me. There was a searing moment when I felt bared to the soul, all my sins of omission and intention exposed in the unforgiving brightness of the day, and then the bird hopped, two steps left, one step right, two steps left, a foxtrot on the back of the bench. I'm no Fred Astaire, but if he can tap dance with his shadow, I can foxtrot with a bluebird, and so, emboldened by the air, the birds, I stepped left cross right cross sway left left, and the bird, looking somewhat sternly in my direction, flew to the next bench, and repeated its hop, two steps left, one step right, two steps left. I felt both ridiculous and as if I was awakening from a long hibernation, and continued my rusty foxtrot across across back sway in the direction of the bluebird.

It looked at me again, straight into my eyes, but instead of that flaying of the soul, it was more of a retina scan, an identity verification, than a judgement. And with that, it flew to the next bench, left out the special hops, and waited to make sure that I was following it. There was something queer about following a bluebird on a winter day, but there wasn't any compelling reason not to, and in my pocket was the card, "Everything will be fine." So why not follow the bird, follow the approach of spring, and discover what hole has opened in the sky and let in both air and the birds, that has played such havoc with human traffic?

For, walking, there were no people, no businessmen or strollers or teenagers on bicycles, although the roads were teeming with traffic caught between destinations. We continued playing follow the leader for the better part of an hour, until we were in a neighborhood that was unfamiliar, near to the river that curved through the center of the city, leading a meandering path our beyond the suburbs and into the countryside before arriving at the sea. This part of town was empty, a few warehouses that served some mostly legitimate purpose and not much else, not yet touched by the glossy gentrification that has altered so much else of the streetscape across the city.

It was entirely unclear why I had followed a bluebird to the abandoned banks of the river, but there, on the banks, was a rather battered and rusty motorboat, and sitting in the motorboat were two men, who obviously expected me, from the way they glanced at their watches and then towards the bird. I refused to feel bullied, to get on the boat powered by hooligans headed who knows where, but looking more closely I realized they were boys just reaching adolescence, no more than ten or eleven, and that I had been misled by the uniforms they wore, which were quite official and militaristic.

They saluted when they saw I was examining them, and the taller of the boys rushed forward, another of the luminescent green-silver-blue envelopes in his hand, my name upon it in the same old-fashioned writing, another small card upon which was written "Admit One." When I looked up, the bird was nowhere to be seen, and the boys had boarded the motorboat again, leaving the center bench clear, with a blanket indicating where I was to sit. It had been years since I had been on the river, distracted away from it by the demands of daily life, and here, with the air heavy with spring, I felt youth flowing into my veins, and my body becoming younger and younger with each town that we passed on our way into the countryside, towards the sea.

Darkness came early, as it does at those latitudes in winter, and I saw, as the boys lit the lanterns fore and aft on the motorboat, that while I was shedding years, my hands losing their wrinkles and the twinges of arthritis that surfaced with changes of weather, the boys captaining the boat were gaining years. In fact, they could hardly be described as boys at all, for their faces were chapped and sunburned from years of exposure to the elements, though they still wore the same uniforms, and carried themselves with the same respectful diffidence. Above, through the deepening twilight, I realized that the air was alive, filled with the swooping and flying of hundreds of birds, all different species flying at different speeds, in different formations, but in the same direction, following the river to the sea, as we sped along on the surface.

It is not possible to sleep on a motorboat in the best of circumstances, and when one is being possibly kidnapped and pursued by all the angels or demons of the sky, sleep is not any type of option at all, but as the night lengthened and I grew ever younger, I napped, and then slept, wrapped in a blanket on the center bench. When morning came, the first tendrils of light streaking across the sky, the air cold and filled with winter frost, I awoke to the smell of early summer, scents of June, of grass and dew and soil, the air still filled with birds.

My chaperones, my chauffeurs, my kidnappers had continued to age through the night, and were now crusty old sea captains, white, grizzled hair and sideburns, gnarled hands and ruddy noses, but they still wore their crisp uniforms and treated me with deference. Glancing at my hands, my body, feeling my face to tell my fortune, I gasped as the years had abandoned me back to the late days of youth, the approach of adulthood still safely some years ahead, in my future, and then gasped again, rendered speechless by the ship that awaited us at anchor.

It was part schooner, part Chinese junk, part rowboat, part Nordic longboat, with blue and silver and green striped sails. I clutched my Admit One card in my hand, and prepared to embark on a future quite different from the life I had already lived.

reading
The toaster project : or A heroic attempt to build a simple electric appliance from scratch / Thomas Thwaites. 
The night circus / Erin Morgenstern.

weather
those deep cold days of the young year

year of fog

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

fog: Easthampton, MA to Grand Teton National Park, WY

 

testing materials: onion skin options, glue options

 

printing materials: traditional paper, or transparency mylar

 

folding template

 

testing the glues wasn't so helpful; secondary attachment (sewing) still required to attach onion skin covers to transparency text

 

all wrapped up and ready for post

 

silver stamped covers (onion skin)

 

(transparency text, accordion book format)

 

images against white background; when viewed aerially they resemble old film negatives

so brief, so fleeting

(quote from Issa, Japanese poet)

The snows began early, far earlier than they had been wont to in recent years. We were caught unprepared, our summer windows and white linen suits no match for the blanket that surrounded and engulfed us. The end of summer, suddenly, desperately, upon us, barbecues canceled and baseball tournaments declared no winners at all. As the days passed, meteorologists made promises of respite, reassured us that the abrupt change in seasons would only be temporary, but we could each feel it, deep in our souls, the entrance of winter.

Rallies on the ice were declared, community figure skating and warming huts, competitive tobogganing races to make up for the soccer and football we were denied. Miles of city streets remained unplowed in the ever-thickening blanket of snow; residents banded together in the early weeks, using shovels to laboriously clear paths for cars and buses, but as the snows continued, and continued, and continued, our energy for communal manual labor faded, withered away.

Those people for whom car access was a necessity parked in the city center, near major arteries that the city focused on keeping clear, but the rest of us resigned ourselves to skiing around town, snow-shoeing to the market for meat and bread, using sledges and sleds to transport children and shopping. The city buses were filled with riders whose cars lay buried under six, ten, eighteen feet of snow, and still it was just midwinter, we wondered when the deep freeze would begin and the snowfall would diminish.

For that is what we all began to hope for: not a thaw, not the return of seasonal temperatures, but a change to the deepest of the frosts, where it was too prohibitively cold for the snows to fall. We waited, waited for this, but it was not forthcoming. What had begun as an unseasonable descent into winter remained in stasis, never deepening into the coldest freezes, and more snows continued to fall.

While we had been unable to continue our citizen shoveling brigade, other communal projects besides the sports teams were undertaken and adopted with gusto. Entire playgrounds were sculpted out of snow, with twisting slides, tunnels, playhouses built in vast stretches of parks and parking lots. Without our cars, we joined efforts in transporting firewood, Christmas trees, any other bulky or heavy acquisitions for neighbors, operating as a human team of mules.

The schools had had emergency meetings, desperately trying to work out a school schedule when the entire academic term would have been forfeit to snow days. Administrators, teachers, parents all had different solutions; the children had strong opinions of their own, filled entire schoolyards with snowmen built in protest, had vast armories filled with snowballs to defend their descent into a winter of anarchy. Shorter school days were proposed, as the teachers and students were utterly reliant upon overcrowded city buses and skis; the school buses, still sleeping unused in the summer vacation parking lot, had never been unearthed from the snow.

Finally, a four hour school day was reached as a compromise, and school districts shuffled and changed classes and curricula to make up for the teachers who lived too far away to be able to commute to the schools. The children, who would have preferred the complete cancellation of classes until the weather stabilized, were despondent, but did eventually put away their objections and returned to multiplication tables, Euclidean geometry, international geography in classrooms whose windows were entirely covered in snow.

As the Christmas holidays drew near and passed into January, and the snows continued to accumulate, the joy and sense of wonder at the changed landscape began to turn into a quiet desperation. Alcoholism increased, couples argued more bitterly, brothers and sisters were unable to find common ground even against shared enemies. Preachers and therapists counseled patience, recommended meditation or joining Bridge groups, churches began hosting ever more regular pot roast dinners and bingo events. Community centers held film festivals on almost every evening, and enterprising citizens began creating community theater and choir groups, filled with the desperation of performers exhausted by the snows, presenting revues of South Pacific, The King and I, The Little Mermaid, anything, as long as it was an escape.

Our houses were insulated on all sides, a constant struggle to keep doorways clear enough for use, our front doors leading either into tunnels or to carefully built staircases of snow to the top of the accumulation in our yards. Some residents took to using upstairs windows, or those with balconies and porches on upper floors reoriented away from buried front doors entirely. For the infirm and elderly, dependent upon the efforts of others just to not become house bound, a charitable barter system was agreed to, wherein high school students could receive school class credit for freeing the doorways, for either delivering groceries by skis or for pulling sleds with those not well enough to ski to the market or the closest bus stop.

We persevered, but the exhaustion continued to beset us, as the days began to lengthen into spring but still the snows continued. We were not a people of the tundra, we were neither Inuits nor Russians; we wanted maple syrup and the early blooms of crocus bright against the snow; yet the trees were encased up into their canopies, the crocuses under so much snow that a thaw would take years before allowing their blooms to shine forth. Kindergarten classes made hundreds of origami flowers, entire grade schools cut and folded construction paper into brights beacons of spring, and the fields and yards around the city were soon littered with these paper offerings to Demeter, or these colored flashes of hope, winking where we desired to see blooms before being blown away or buried in the next storm.

And there was a next storm, and a next, and then we began noticing something odd. There were strangers among us: they looked somewhat as we appeared, but their skin glowed with the same white sheen as the gloss of fresh snow. Their hair was white, or the palest blonde, or a shining silver, it was hard to pinpoint which. They moved through the snow more gracefully, as if their feet were gliding upon skates, balancing where we would trip on rough patches or sudden cracks in the surface. They did not seem to congregate together in groups or to seek each other out, at least not in public, so it was some weeks before we noticed how many of the new arrivals there really were. When two would pass on the street they gave no sign of recognition, but we wondered, amongst ourselves, who they were, what was their intention.

They did not have children in the schools, they did not attend our churches or our amateur theatricals, they rarely shopped at the market and almost never rode the bus, moving along at their eery unearthly glide over the snow. Oh, yes, we thought they were aliens, come through some vortex from Neptune or some even more frozen distant galaxy. We thought they were ghosts, images only now able to be seen because the amount of snow shifted the visible spectrum and caused invisibles to materialize. We thought they were foreign invaders, come to take over a city which they had immobilized not with bullets but with weather. We thought they would colonize, enslave, or kill us, for they did not seek to become our friends, and we were afraid.

The religious thought that they might be angels, that the end times might be arriving in ice and not in fire, and yet still, these whitest of beings did not respond to either the offerings in their honor nor to the aggressions enacted against them; they would gaze, detached and serene, at whomever they encountered, and continue on. Whenever someone would attempt to follow one, to a home, a nest, a hive, a foreign ship, they were never successful, always became disoriented, separated from their quarry after a block or two, lost among other people or the trees.

And still the snows continued, until one morning when we suddenly awoke to clear skies, the first we had seen upon leaving our houses, as the snows covered the windows all around. Clear skies, cold, cold air, so cold our breath turned into icicles, but a wavering yellow sun over it all. And in the square in the center of the city, erected overnight: a carnival tent, as large as the high school gymnasium, constructed of shell-pink silk that we couldn't quite see through. Bustling about the carnival tent were all of the white, white visitors, meeting our eyes, smiling, inviting us inside. We were uncertain if it was safe, if it was wise, but the clear skies and wan sun inspired us with hope and confidence, and we entered into the mystery at the heart of our town.

weather
will flights be delayed: that is the question

reading
an astounding assortment of the avant-garde:
Reader's block / by David Markson
The curfew / Jesse Ball