On an Alleyway

　



　

　

There is nothing I like so much as walking the alleyways in the small city where I live. Houses and lawns put their best face forward toward the sidewalk and curb on their street. Everything is official and well-groomed, the orderly image that we wish to present to the public. But alleyways are another thing entirely. As I walk my dog along an alley, we pass rotting heaps of firewood, curiously shaped shanties and lean-tos and shacks, abandoned motorcycles and stranded boats, antique-looking greenhouses and garages with dim, musty interiors smelling of marijuana and spilled gasoline. Plum-sized predatory-looking spiders hang on forgotten trellises and aggressive dogs guarding their territory charge against chain-link fences barking hysterically. There are treehouses like the burial platforms of Sioux Indians suspended above little, aluminum-ribbed swimming pools, cisterns leaking water onto the damaged grass, gardens full of ripe tomatoes and fat cucumbers, vines crawling all over enigmatic little walls and storage sheds. Buckets and ladders lean against garages and odd utility boxes lurk under disheveled bushes and, sometimes, broken glass studs the asphalt. Home-made transmission towers scoop ham-radio signals out of the sky and back porches are studded with ear-shaped satellites disks. Squirrels walk the tight-rope of overhead power lines and cable connections and transformers hum in nests of wire. Everything bears the mark of assiduous, if negligent and idiosyncratic, human activity. You see backyard swingsets and overgrown sandboxes and corroding metal slides built for children who now live in Minneapolis or Chicago and have children of their own. Everything is falling down, collapsing, on the edge of oblivion.

In Austin, most alleyways bisect residential blocks. People have their garages to the rear of their backyards and access them by driving in the alley. Garbage is collected from the alleys and, in warm weather, they are pungent with the aromas of decomposing fruit and reeking paper blankets on which chicken breasts or thighs once reposed. Cats patrol the alleys and there are little caches of bones and feathers crammed into crannies in the adjacent fences and sheds. Some alleyways dead-end in enigmatic stands of trees harboring old, half-hidden garages bearing cupolas or sunken steeples. Other alleyways take sudden and sharp turns when they encounter masonry walls. A few alleys have tee-intersections with other alleys, permitting a driver to turn in the middle of a residential block and exit onto an adjacent street. These configurations are very rare and I have often wondered if a clever criminal might not memorize the anomalies in the alley system, lure police into a pursuit through those narrow alleys and, then, escape in the middle of block, by turning to the side, seeming to vanish, as it were, into thin air. I’m sure the local cops know all the roads, but do they have a clear concept for the system of alleys with its odd and unanticipated aberrations?

About three blocks from my house, I recently observed an alley marked with twin orange-tipped posts on portable stanchions. The posts signaled that the alley was being refurbished. A grader had planed away the crumbling asphalt covering the alley’s surface, cutting the soil down to the slick, black clay and slicing pebbles in two. Shortly after the alley’s surface had been skinned, it rained for a couple of days and the roadway behind the houses became very muddy. Then, there was fine, warm weather and, in the country, the corn grew so quickly you could hear it rustling as it surged upward, and the municipal highway crew was able to pour new asphalt over the black clay and amputated gravel. The new asphalt surface was wonderfully smooth and oily, as black as the darkest night you could ever imagine.

Thunderstorms swept over the town and it rained heavily for a couple of days. When I took my dog for a walk one afternoon, it was still drizzling and I held an umbrella over my shoulder. The dog is a Labrador retriever and I think she enjoys the rain. I strolled to the alleyway that had recently been resurfaced. The warning posts had been removed and the alley was open for traffic.

The oiled surface of the alley was spattered with water. The fallen rain had pooled into globular puddles, coagulating together under the repellent influence of the oil in the tar. The little pools of rainwater reflected the sky overhead which was a metallic grey. Walking along the alleyway, eyes cast downward, I experienced the most extraordinary optical illusion. The puddles of water, all connected by tiny channels and rivulets made a lacy filigree surface to the asphalt. That surface seemed to be like a leaf that time has rotted and eroded, a delicate structure of veins and holes. The lace seemed to hang over a vast black abyss – it was as if I were walking on a gossamer structure suspended over a bottomless gulf. But the most curious aspect of this illusion was that positive and negative values for the space below me wavered, oscillated, kept changing perspective. First, it appeared that the puddles below me were indented into the asphalt, holes in the surface of the road that dropped down to black depths. But, then, a moment later, the puddles reversed dimensions and were revealed to be globular, watery protrusions above the surface of the asphalt. In the course of a couple of seconds, the water ponded in lace-like patterns on freshly oiled asphalt seemed both abysmal pits below the tar surface or, alternatively, scuptural features, a bas-relief above the asphalt alley. The remarkable feature of this illusion was that it was impossible to perceive both aspects of the water pooled on the alleyway simultaneously – either I was looking into a hole or seeing a form bulging up from asphalt, always one or the other, but never the both at one time.

Halfway down the alleyway, the illusion overcame me and I felt nauseated, dizzy, a sense of spinning vertigo. I looked upward away from the asphalt. The wet sky overhead was either a limitless void extending luminously to the zenith or a heavy mat, a solid weight like the lid of a coffin pressing down upon me. The space between the houses wasn’t empty but a sculptural mass. And the houses and shacks seemed to be voids in the space filled by that mass.

I found my way to the sidewalk and paused there. My head was reeling. At the end of the summer, the squirrels are particularly flagrant, chasing one another in wild circuits around the trees, and, even, darting across the streets. Two squirrels came charging toward my dog. She bristled and, then, the squirrels were gone.

On a Dead Frog

　

In the late 16^th century, the cities and villages of Bavaria were the front lines of the battle between Catholics and Protestants. The Thirty-Years War had ravaged the country-side and many parish churches lay in ruins. Lutheran mobs burned cathedrals and rousted the relics of the saints from their repose, destroying them with fire. Luther had mocked the vials of holy blood and fragments of skeletons in their gilded reliquaries as "the bones of dogs and horses." But Catholic beliefs and customs were deeply entrenched, particularly in the rural parishes, and, with the help of Rome, the Holy Mother Church fought back, regaining territory in the south of Germany.

In this sacred war, an important weapon was the strategic deployment of so-called Katakombenheiligen – that is, "Catacomb saints." By happy coincidence, Rome’s vast underground cemeteries were accidentally rediscovered in the mid-16th century. The catacombs were crammed to overflowing with bones thought to be the remains of martyrs who had perished in the Roman persecutions of the first and second centuries Anno domino. The Council of Trent in 1545 had declared the Roman Catholic Church militant, initiating the Counter-Reformation. In 1563, the Church in another council at Trentino, declared the continued efficacy of relics as aids to salvation. In the wake of these developments, skeletons were retrieved from the catacombs, articulated, and, then, sent in squadrons of hundreds, and, even, thousands north to embattled Germany. These Katakombenheiligen were installed in churches throughout Bavaria with great pomp and circumstance. The holy bodies were crowned and studded with precious gems, dressed in armor or sacred vestments, and, then, encased in crystalline caskets. Veneration of the ancient martyrs, now raised from the dead and displayed in all their sacred radiance, was supposed to embolden the Catholics to resist the Lutheran pestilence raging at their borders.

Paul Koudounaris has written a wonderful and concise book about the "Catacomb-saints" and their deployment in Bavaria, Heavenly Bodies – Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs. Although Koudounaris’ text is informative and fascinating, the book’s real appeal is morbid – brilliant colored photographs showing the Saints and their spectacular accessories. Nuns and highly accomplished craftsmen specialized in encrusting the articulated skeletons in semi-precious gems and lacy filigrees of gold . Many of the putative martyrs have eye-sockets encircled with gilded filigree that outline huge blue-crystals inserted where eyes once would have been. Skeletons equipped with eyes of this sort have a peculiar, eerie quality – it is as if they are staring at the worshiper with vast, inhuman, insect-like eyes, glaring eyes that have an accusatory mien. Exposed bone joints are entrapped in armatures of gold dripping ruby and emerald gemstones. Mandibles and skeletal chins are whiskered with pearls inset in gold web. Most of the corpses wear huge crowns lurid with gems and brocades stiff with jewelry embedded in the heavy cloth seemingly spun with gold and silver threads. Some of the skeletons stand upright wearing armor, gilded cuirasses and greaves, heavy broadswords clasped across their ribs. The female saints recline coyly on brocaded pillows, heads turned to the spectator to display amethyst in gaping eye-sockets, limbs arranged in a delicate contrapposto posture. Fingers are studded with garish rings and gemstones. Bony toes are thrust through sandals made of gold and topaz, ankles articulated with chains of lapis lazuli. Many of the saints, particularly those who died under torture as pious virgins, have their faces partially concealed behind translucent veils – the glitter of gold and precious stones shimmers behind the sheer cloth. One modest female martyr covers her bony face with a hand shimmering with gems. The spectacle is stupefying, vulgar, terrible, and utterly fascinating.

The Catacomb-saints are one aspect of the European baroque at its most exuberant. Their meretricious glory is congruent with the rococo splendor of the churches in which they reside. The saints were supposed to represent the Church Triumphant, raised up in glory, the splendor the New Jerusalem that St. John beheld in the revelation to him on Patmos. But, I think, these skeletons entrapped in their armor of beryl, sapphires, and gold can be compared to some of Bach’s work as well – a rigorous and graceful structure, obdurate as bone, is gilded at its interstices with particularly voluptuous ornaments, all those grace notes, trills, appoggiatura, mordents and glittering Scheifer applied as surface decoration to a hard, rigid armature. Macabre and uncanny, the holy martyrs also remind me of the baroque lead and bronze caskets that I saw once in the Kaisersgruft in Vienna, huge black beetles, swollen and the size of limousines, their dark carapaces covered with reliefs of grinning skeletons waving scythes and hourglasses at the dismayed spectator.

Fashion is queen of the world and, of course, mutable. Ultimately, the Katakombenheiligen lost their cachet. Worshipers were embarrassed by the skeletons entangled in their skeins of pearls and amethyst. In many cases, discrete painted panels were built to screen the illustrious corpses from view. Some of the skeletons were denuded of their finery, equipped with wax hands and faces, and clad in relatively modest Victorian vestments. A few churches donated their saints to museums. Koudounaris books shows one spectacular recumbent saint, encased in a glass coffin, discarded in a church storeroom, a broken chair set on top of her casket, and the remnants of a hundred years past Christmas pageants heaped-up around the poor martyr.

It’s humid today and the sky is leaden and the trees seem heavy and engorged with dew. Puddles reflect a silver in the sky that is not visible when you turn your head upward to the swollen tropical clouds. By my back door, an apple tree has hurled ten-thousand small green apples, some of them delicately tinted with a red blush onto the driveway and my car has crushed many of them into pulp so that the air smells of decay and fermenting cider. On the sidewalk, I saw a diadem of emerald, a bouquet of brilliant green gemstones that immediately caught my attention and made me think of the Katacombenheiligen in their rock-crystal caskets. I bent to look at this crown of emeralds and, as I stooped, the massive, many-faceted gem dissolved into a swarm of bottle-green, iridescent flies. The flies swirled around my face and I had to grip my lips tightly shut to keep from swallowing some of them. The flies had been feasting on a crushed frog, the lichen-colored diagram of the little animal imprinted on the sidewalk, martyred, no doubt, by a passing skateboard or bicycle wheel.

There are many kinds of Saint and Kingdom of Heaven is always around us.

On Heavy Traffic

　

Shot from the muzzles of Chicago, Madison, and Milwaukee, vehicles converge on three westbound lanes on Interstate 90. The freeways from the three cities have triangulated the traffic onto a broad, sunny prairie between green, rolling hills and the trucks and cars roar across the plain as if on a race-track – although the speed limit is posted 65 no one drives slower than 75 miles per hour and there is a curious sense of urgency in the parallel processions of speeding vehicles. Although not exactly bumper-to-bumper, the traffic is dense, cars and trucks hurtling forward with only 30 or forty feet between them. Since the Interstate is straight and flat and the lanes well-marked, everything proceeds smoothly, not so much whitewater rapids of chrome and fender, but, rather, a millrace surging toward the blue ridge of the Baraboo range.

Novelists have explored the psychological states of murderers and rapists, saints and heroes and villains. From books that we have read, we know what it is like to plot a terrorist attack or solve a mystery or commit adultery. But no one, it seems, has explored the psychology and experience of a motorist, confined in his or her car in heavy traffic on a freeway. Most people in the world are commuters of one sort or another and millions spend hours behind the wheel in their cars, but there are precious few depictions of this experience. With the exception of some perverse meditations by J. G. Ballard, I don’t know of any truthful representations of the experience of driving in fast and heavy traffic. Of course, there are plenty of accounts of car chases at high-speed, but these adventures do not penetrate to the heart of the quotidian, routine experience of driving cross-country on a congested freeway. No one seems to have devoted much energy to exploring what it is like to drive on a busy highway, to be one of the multitude traversing asphalt and concrete from here to there. I suppose this is because the experience of driving in traffic is one of mild suffering and slight irritation and representation, like thought, tends toward the extreme, toward exaggeration – we have plenty of depictions of agony, but few narratives devoted to mild or slight discomfort. Jesus is always writhing on the cross with hands and feet split by nails and his forehead gouged by thorns. No one is interested in the old man in the crowd at the foot of the cross who is thirsty after a meal of spicy food and fidgeting with a full bladder.

If we are honest, we must admit that freeway driving is an experience of selfishness and boredom, distraction and minor discomfort, a tense sort of waiting and imminence in which something is always about to occur, although the occurrence is almost always also deferred indefinitely: a bland exercise that conceals panic and rage and hysteria. The exhaustion that accompanies long-haul driving is the fatigue of restraining emotions that can’t be acknowledged: feelings of terror and homicidal anger. And the entire experience is wrapped in the mystery of a moving world that forever flees us because our looking is limited to a perpetual, nervous glance, an over-the-shoulder glimpse, a momentary diversion of eyes from road to rear-view mirror, sights seen in reflection through layers of smeared glass.

Driving is a selfish activity because we necessarily perceive our journey as having an unique importance. I am going somewhere. I have deadlines to meet. The others on the road have less right to the highway than I do. I always think that my destination is important and my errand significant and meaningful – the others on the freeway are out for a Sunday drive, going nowhere in particular, trespassing, as it were, on the precious space between the exits and the lanes. I am going somewhere and they are simply in the way, impediments to my progress. But, of course, everyone else on the highway has the same perspective: each id confined within its capsule of glass and chrome perceives himself to be uniquely purposeful and entitled – all the others are just in the way.

Driving, of course, is too simple. The equipment required to pilot the car operates intuitively and is readily at hand as well as more or less frictionless, effortless – the experience of driving is that of mental activity, not physical exertion. The ease with which we drive lends a surface veneer of boredom to the enterprise. Not much is happening; we control the mighty engine on which we are riding with tiny flicks of the wrist and finger. And so, if all goes well, we are bored and the mind wanders and can’t find any purchase in the landscape spinning by. Indeed, it is impossible to know where to focus the eyes when we drive. If you look at the edges of the road or the lane markers firing past the car like illuminated tracer bullets or the weeds in the ditch, the world is a blur of speed – you can’t see anything clearly because it is gone before the image registers. On the other hand, if you look across the fields to the hills and horizon, nothing moves at all – the green and blue and grey distances are immobile. Directing one’s attention to the immediate prospect, we see that all the cars are moving at about the same speed – they drift apart or together languidly with relative velocities slower than our speed as we might amble along a forest path. The combination of these differing perspectives is disorienting: trash and goldenrod in the ditch blast past us with dizzying speed, the hills and valleys of the greater landscape are motionless, and the procession of cars moving forward at 80 miles an hour displays only very slight motion, the vehicles slowly advancing or retreating in relation to one another. The eye can’t fix on any particular vantage since all perspectives are true and false in the same measure: if we think we are moving a great speed consider the relative motions between cars and the distant ridges with their red and white scaffolding of transmission towers; but if the motionless hills and almost motionless patterns of traffic before us are too entrancing, turn your eye for an instant to the foreground, the scuffed pavement and the debris in the ditch rocketing by with the velocity of a bullet.

As we drive, we are always dependant upon the courtesy and attentiveness of the strangers in their vehicles on both sides, ahead of us and behind. Our safety – indeed, our lives and limbs – are in the hands of others whom we don’t know. And we know that those others care nothing for our well-being and, indeed, are even indifferent to us. How do we know this? Because we care nothing for the safety and well-being of the other drivers and their passengers in transit across the highway. They must be inattentive and distracted by daydreams and private concerns, their radios and music and conversation, because, of course, we are similarly distracted and inattentive. My life depends on someone else’s attentiveness to the highway and its perils and, yet, I know that the other driver is only remotely concerned with his or surroundings, attention diverted by distractions, half-asleep or lost in thought. I know this because this is my mood – one of boredom, distraction, and faint discomfort. My posture is not exactly optimum; my muscles are too tense and my foot over brake and accelerator is uneasy with cramps or the harbingers of cramps, a tautness in my calves just between knee and ankle, and I am gripping the wheel too tightly and this translates anxiety into my shoulders which are also tense and I am half-alert to my bowels and bladder, wondering whether there will be a place to stop to relieve the pressure in those parts of my body. My mind is wandering, rushing ahead to my destination or still entrapped in the place from which I came and my eye has no purchase on the world, no fixed place to rest, and so I know that I am something of a menace on the highway, not exactly equal to the perils and risks of traveling at high-speed in flimsy armatures of plastic and aluminum alloy. Of course, I have the right to be fatigued, distracted, less than alert. But those around me, don’t have that right, because their inattentiveness might be deadly to me. I allow myself permission to be less perfectly attentive to the road and fellow travelers but I can’t authorize those around me to share in my distraction – they are dangers to me, but, of course, this is not reciprocal since I don’t perceive myself to be a danger to them. So I am always alert to the imminence of a crash – I know that I am not equal to controlling the car at these speeds with this many other fast-moving vehicles all around me. If something goes wrong, we will all be doomed. And, of course, I understand that the others on the highway are just like me, although they don’t have the right to be just like me because I own this Interstate and they are mere trespassers on my domain. I am going somewhere and they are going nowhere and this must always be considered when appraising who has the right to be here.

At any instant, the morons, the fools, the reckless idiots around me are likely to maneuver their vehicles in such a way as to slam me off the road or hurl me into oblivion. A fiery crash is waiting around every corner and attends every lane change. It would be profoundly unfair for me to be destroyed by one of these interlopers, one of my foes on the highway. This is the world of Hobbes – the war of each against each and all against all. We survive only by cooperation but, at any moment, someone can break the dozen or so contracts relating to speed and acceleration and deceleration and direction that preserve us all alive at 80 mile per hour on this stretch of unforgiving roadway. If the contract is breached, someone will die or be injured or, at the very least, suffer destruction of their property. And so, I am always self-righteously coiled to strike, to injure and wound, always trembling on the verge of murderous rage if my rights are violated, suffering panic, as well, at the danger that surrounds me on all sides. And, of course, these emotions are repressed, concealed in the bland, trivial activity of driving, but, at any moment, poised to erupt if something goes wrong. It is a terrible thing to be delivered into the skill and discretion of others, particularly when I know that those others who are going nowhere have no right to the highway and are, probably, just as indifferent, distracted, and incompetent in their operation of their vehicles as I am. None of us is fit for this road-race and we are all enemies.

All of this suppressed hatred and fear is wrapped in the great and mysterious enigma of the traffic around me – it’s obscure and hidden purposefulness. The world is a vast fantasy of curious apparitions, inexplicable desires, strange and half-illegible ciphers. Here I am on Interstate 90, surrounded by traffic all moving at high-speed in the direction of exit 119, Arlington and Lodi, Wisconsin. There is a panel truck ahead with a license-plate that reads HITMAN1. A big semi-truck labeled KOCH in scarlet letters bounces along to my right, blocking my view of the traffic ahead of it. Vehicles bearing trademarks around their license-plates of north and west suburb Chicago car dealerships run parallel to me – perhaps, people are going to the Wisconsin Dells. A limousine-long Suburban rides the lane to my left, the rear window of the vehicle marked with stick-figures identifying the members of the family: the upright father, tallest among the decals, a little like the mast of a ship, and mother with her long, disheveled hair, only rising to the height of daddy’s shoulder, then, the children-decals in descending height, one, two, three boys and girls, a series of downward steps to baby and the dog who sits at the end of the row of figures with tail curled around him. Why do people feel the need to display their family members in decals of this kind? And what happens if there is a divorce or a child dies of leukemia or the dog is hit by a car? Does someone take a razor blade to that back window and scrape the decal from the glass? Does mommy razor daddy off the pane if there is a divorce? Does the family buy another dog to replace the one killed by a car so that the decal will not have to be sheared away? Next to the Suburban displaying the stick-figure decal family, there is a tradesman’s truck bearing an Illinois license-plate. The truck has writing on its side panels: UPGRADE HOME RENOVATION. On the tail-gate of the pickup, in beautiful cursive letters, these words are written: You Should See What I Saw! What does that mean?

Once I wrote a story based on a license-plate that I saw on the freeway between Austin and Albert Lea. The license plate was on a black sports car and read B WIDOW. I named the story "Widow B" and my narrative was a lurid speculation about the meaning of the license plate. The tale is posted on this blog and you can read it here; indeed, I recommend that you take a look at it. Two or three months after I wrote the short story, I met an elderly man for a conference in my law office. The old man had been injured in a very bad car accident in Rochester, Minnesota. He had carried a little, nervous white dog into my office and the animal sat trembling on his lap as he told me his story.

After a protracted illness, the old man’s wife had died. Tragically, his daughter was also struck down by some deadly illness and he had buried her, as well, during the preceding year. The old man lived alone except for his little dog in a small town in northwest Iowa. One day, the old man’s younger brother, who lived in Rochester, came to visit him. His brother suggested that the old man drive to Rochester for a visit. They left town mid-morning in their two cars and drove across the featureless, wet prairies of southern Minnesota – it was early Spring – on Interstate 90. It was a grey day and the old man, with his dog beside him on the front seat, followed his brother’s sleek black car over the empty highway to Rochester. The next day, the old man and his brother went out for breakfast. It was their plan to eat at a Perkins Cake and Steak pancake house on Highway 52 in Rochester. On the way to the restaurant, an oncoming car made an illegal left-hand turn, disregarding the old man’s right-of-way and crashed into the driver’s side of his Pontiac. The car spun around and was flung into a watery ditch where it toppled onto its side. The old man was very badly injured. A passer-by picked up the tiny dog a hundred yards from the smashed car. The little animal was standing in the median of the roadway quivering like a leaf but, otherwise, uninjured.

I don’t recall how the subject arose, but, in the course of my conference with the old gentleman, he told me that his brother drove a sleek, black sports car. The old man’s younger brother had been nicknamed "Black Widow" when he was a little boy and the moniker had stuck. The brother’s sleek, black sports car bore a vanity plate that was lettered "B WIDOW". The coincidence was astounding. I had seen that car when the old man followed it across the desolate, flooded prairie in early Spring. Indeed, I had even written a short story about that vehicle and its imagined occupant. The old man had silvery hair and very fine manners and his little dog had wet bulbous eyes and was very well-behaved. I explained the law in Minnesota applicable to motor vehicle accidents. After listening to me, and making a few notes, the old man said that the whole enterprise seemed like too much trouble to him and he told me that he was unwilling to sue anyone at his stage in life and, so, gently lifting his dog, he left my office and hobbled to his car.

On Aunt Rose (June 7, 1925 - June 5, 2014)

　

　

1.

Minnesota is mostly flat. When I was a small boy, the highest hill that I knew was on the highway to St. Peter. My Aunt Rose lived in St. Peter with her husband, Howard "Mick" Mickelson. When we traveled to St. Peter to visit my Aunt, we descended the hill to the Minnesota River, a big, muddy flood of water hidden in eerie thickets and gnarled woods. Returning from St. Peter, we climbed the hill, the highway cutting a diagonal across the face of the steep bluff. At the top of the great hill, a little airport launched small planes into the humid skies above the great valley and there was an overlook and a drive-in movie theater.

The hill was a tremendous thing to a child and the vista from the summit where the highway turned toward the Twin Cities was awe-inspiring. It was like that mountain in the Bible where Satan took Jesus to be tempted. You could see all of the nations of the world from that height, the cultivated land and the wilderness, the small villages spiked to the earth by their church steeples, towers turned upside-down to pin the towns with their silos and railroad sidings to the loam like a specimen butterflies: you could see to the horizon where the sun was scything through amber fields of grain and the terrain of sorrow scoured by grey-green thunderstorms like the thumbs of the sky gouging the earth. You could see into tomorrow and through to the past as well. Everything seemed visible from that height if only you had an eye to see it.

　

2.

On Saturday mornings, about once a month, we drove from the Cities to St. Peter to visit my aunt Rose. She taught 8^th-grade English and was a very witty woman, cynical and disparaging about her students and other faculty members at the Junior High where she worked. Rose’s husband, Mick, was the Dean of Men at a small Lutheran liberal arts college, Gustavus Adolphus and, when I was little, my Aunt and her family lived in a suite of rooms on the bottom floor of a dormitory housing male college students. For some reason, I recall the apartment as resembling the set of the old Dick Van Dyke show, although a bit darker, and I suppose there was an ottoman or hassock over which a visitor might stumble and take a pratfall. Rosemary’s mother, Helen Beckmann nee Zeilinger, also occupied those rooms. My grandmother was the widow of a Lutheran pastor and the furnishings of the old parsonage where my father and his four sisters had been raised crowded the apartment. I recall that there was a painting of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene, really a romantic nocturne with a yellow moon and some glistening tropical foliage adorning a midnight blue landscape. Our Savior was praying and He looked worried, like a sorrowful Labrador retriever, dark eyes and dark beard and His forehead lit wanly by a moon that seemed to be drawing clouds to it and absorbing them in its buttery light. My grandmother was a severe woman with tightly pursed lips and, like Jesus, she also always looked worried. She played organ at local churches on a substitute basis and my Aunt also played the organ, I think, at a local Episcopalian Church.

My father fancied himself an iconoclast and he viewed his sister, ten or eleven years his elder, as conventional and unimaginative. He liked to argue with her. Mick smoked a pipe and was silent. He was an orphan and had been raised in a real Dickensian orphanage and, as a young man, he had been a superb athlete. He liked to talk about sports. Sometimes, Johnny Mickelson, Rose’s oldest son, would practice his trumpet. He was lazy and heavy-set and he played his trumpet lying flat on his back on his bed in his room. I recall him playing jaunty virtuouso pieces like "Bugler’s Holiday" by Leroy Anderson. At that time, Johnny was in high school.

In those days, people had a pot roast of stringy beef for weekend lunch, potatoes and gravy, some kind of casserole, and jello with fruit embedded in it like bugs in amber. After eating, the adults sat in the living room, watching college football games on Tv, or baseball, and we were given some money and told to walk down the hill to the movies.

Rose’s other son, Jimmy, was our age and he led the way. We emerged from the gloomy apartment onto a patio beneath the ramparts of the domitory building. There we had to skitter hurriedly away from the shadow of the building since college boys were overhead, drunk and disorderly in their dorm rooms and, sometimes, they pitched beer bottles at us. The projectiles were launched from third or fourth or fifth story windows and shattered on the patio where there was grilling equipment and a picnic table. Then, we traversed a bald grassy ridge and could see all of St. Peter spread below us. The campus of Gustavus Adolphus occupied the top of the river bluffs and the city filled the valley, a grid of streets drowned in tall, stately trees, shingle roofs under the green crowns of the oaks and elms, a red-brick Main Street that was ancient and that ran parallel to the river hidden in the river-bottom thickets. Church steeples protruded through the leaves and parks with swing-sets and rump-polished slides glinted in the sunshine and, to the southeast, where the river valley deepened and narrowed, we could see terraces manicured like an English garden and the sinister turrets of the State Security Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Lunatics were always escaping and wandering around the periphery of the town, although they were usually captured in one of the taverns downtown, in the dark rooms shaped like railroad cars, drinking with old bachelor farmers who had come into St. Peter to have a few beers and watch the ballgame on the Tv above the bar.

In those days, it seemed that the hill leading down from the college was very steep, even precipitous, but, then, the land leveled and we walked ten or twelve blocks past old Victorian houses on their shady lawns, strolling under arcades of big trees with intertwining branches to reach the tumultuous movie theater on Main Street. It was a matinee and cost 50 cents admission and the place was always crammed with wild, shrieking children with no adults anywhere in sight. The kids hustled around in little mobs and fights were always breaking out and popcorn rained down from the balconies like salty snow. The show began with a serial – a strange, jittery black and white episode involving space aliens with lobster-claws wearing turtleneck sweaters battling cowboy heroes. The space aliens seem to occupy someone’s cluttered basement and they were plotting against the humans and held a young woman hostage in a metal cage. The aliens conspired in clicks and huffs and the cowboys were always hurtling across the chaparral to rescue the girl-hostage. Sometimes, an engine chugged across the desolate landscape and there were explosions cut into the action, seemingly stock footage from World War Two documentaries, and, when the train labored across a high trestle, the good guys and bad guys fought with their fists atop the moving freight cars. After the serial episode had ended imperfectly, with someone entombed alive or staring at a time-bomb with a short fuse or catapulted from a biplane toward the spiny desert floor, the main feature began. This was always an Elvis Presley musical. Elvis was a roustabout or a carny entertainer or some kind of race car driver and he wooed a beautiful young woman and had fistfights with hordes of thugs. Sometimes, he strummed on his guitar and sang to the young woman, or to his cronies, and there was usually car chase or a brawl on the beach near the end of the movie, before Elvis won the girl’s heart and married her. The kids ran up and down the aisles of the theater and popcorns spurted from the cardboard tubs that the children carried and cups of pop were spilled on the floor. Until I was 40, I had complete contempt for Elvis Presley as a result of these afternoon matinees.

After the movie, we hiked back up the hill to the dormitory where my mother and father were getting ready to load the car for our trip back home. One sunny afternoon, I recall that we encountered some older boys who were bullies on the sloping sidewalk beneath the towers of the college. The older boys challenged us and, I think, my brother and Jimmy fled. I wasn’t about to run away from bullies and so, I think, I was punched in the mouth or nose. But, maybe, I don’t recall this event accurately. It may have been that I ran away and left my brother and Jimmy to be beaten by the bullies. Since the memory is very unclear to me, I suppose, I should assume the worst and conclude that I don’t recall things clearly because I have willfully forgotten them, probably in an attempt to repress thoughts that would make me ashamed. So, I presume, that I ran away and my brother and Jimmy were cornered, made to disgorge whatever coins they had remaining after the matinee-movie and, then, slugged in the belly or testicles and left writhing on the pavement under the old oaks and the jeering cicadas. But I don’t know for sure what exactly happened.

3.

Aunt Rose was my father’s eldest sister. My father had been a chubby, handsome little boy, the darling of his four sisters. I believe that my father thought of Rose as his benefactor, perhaps, even as a wise, older guardian. When my mother, just graduated from High School, was pregnant with me, and unmarried, she and my father fled their small central Nebraska town, married at the county seat not in the county adjacent, but a couple of counties away to avoid scandal, and, then, went west, to the Nebraska panhandle where, apparently, the couple lived with Aunt Rose and her husband in Chadron, during the pregnancy until I was born. (I was baptized in the Lutheran Church in Chadron where Rose and her husband were members.) Of course, the irregularities attending my birth were never discussed and I don’t know whether this incident caused my father to become closer to his oldest sister, or, instead, perhaps, fostered some sort of rift. I am aware that my mother’s relationship with her older sister-in-law was complicated and, sometimes, mutually antagonistic.

In contrast to the mystery attending my parent’s marriage, Rosemary’s lawful and decent church wedding was on ample display at her home. Prominently displayed on an antique sideboard was a picture showing Rose as a bride. In the photograph, she stood before the cream-colored altar at her father’s church in Albion, Nebraska. Rose wore a mermaid-styled wedding dress that descended the several steps to the altar, arrayed in a floral drapery that, also, had something of the scent of the sea about it. I recall peering into that old picture and marveling at Rose’s pure, pale, and imperious beauty. She was very slender on the morning of her wedding, completely unlike the rather matronly and plump woman that I knew. Her face was severe and beautiful and her eyes and lips seemed to pronounce some kind of inscrutable judgement on the world: she looked like a Saint in glory or, even, like the Virgin Mary at the moment of Her Annunciation. Her husband, a big athletic man, stood next to her slouching, it seemed, in an ill-fitting suit – Mick’s arms looked too long for the suit and there was something vaguely simian about his posture. But, of course, the picture was not about the Groom; he was merely incidental to the image. The picture was about Rose and her beauty and the extraordinary wedding dress that cascaded from her slender lily-like torso and its draperies, the floral whorl of fabric arrayed across the three steps rising to the altar. You could lose yourself in tracing the drapery of that garment.

The wedding picture, displayed in the church narthex, across from the box where Rose’s corpse rested, seemed to have been hand-colored. It had the curious cool hues of an old photograph, colors that seemed crafted and refined and distilled into ethereal subtlety, tints just slightly faded so that they seemed to be viewed through a faint intermediary mist of vapor. The photograph was ageless – when I first saw the picture, it could not have been more than 15 years old, but the image seemed to be something from the remote and ancient past. I looked at the picture when I was a child, and, then, looked at Rose as she sat in her kitchen talking to my father and saw the great mystery of resemblance and difference – this slender apparition in the framed, glass-sealed picture was somehow the same woman before me, chubby and a bit dowdy, an eighth-grade English teacher in a small town. How could this be? The photograph showed Rose as Gothic tracery, a peaked, pointed adornment standing in front of an altar carved into peaked and pointed arches. But my Aunt Rose, as opposed to the figure in the picture, had always seemed Romanesque to me (although I would not have known that word at the time) – she had the broad, vaulted brow of her father, the Lutheran pastor, a big expanse of pale forehead that gave her a faint suggestion of baldness and the columns of her legs were set squarely on the earth and, when I was a boy, there was nothing even faintly ornamental about her: she was a practical, thickly constructed fortress – Ein’ feste Burg...



The organ growled in the sanctuary. People were assembling for the funeral. In her coffin, Aunt Rose looked like an owl, the lower part of her face was framed in heavy greyish jowls. With my mother, I stood by the wedding picture for a long time, looking at that image. The picture wasn’t exactly the way that I recalled it. The drapery of the wedding dress was, perhaps, a little less involuted than I remembered. And was there a trace of a smile, a Mona Lisa smile, on the Bride’s lips?

　

4.

Mick was studying in graduate school in Greeley, Colorado and we were on vacation. Once there had been a Lutheran church camp at Estes Park and, I think, my father had fond memories of the place from his boyhood – I suppose it had been a cool and lovely refuge after the sweltering heat of the central Nebraska’s sand-hills. We camped next to a river that came rushing down from the front range, rapids that ran clear and swift over a stream bed musical with many small and smooth and singing pebbles. Mick had come from Greeley to eat hamburgers with us. My mother was cooking those hamburgers on the Coleman stove and the next morning, I think, our plan was to drive up into the mountains, among the snowy peaks and the meadows brilliant with columbine, to Estes Park and beyond.

Mick gave my father a book. He said that the book was a late birthday present. It was Dover paperback, large and white: The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Duerer. We sat at a picnic table and flipped through the pictures where were, of course, extraordinary. The river chattered in its grove of aspens and big storm clouds clustered overhead on the heights where there were stone pillars and walls, escarpments like the ruins of hilltop fortresses. I was afraid that there would be a downpour and that the little river would rise and flood our campsite only a dozen yards or so away from the boulder-strewn course where the stream ran. Mick had brought a six-pack of Falstaff beer, brewed in St. Louis which he shared with my father. The fat knight, John Falstaff, was shown on the plump beer bottle’s label, holding a foaming mug in his big hand. I had never seen my father drink before. In a remote valley, hidden from us by the ranges of mountains, thunder sounded.

With my brother, I sat at the picnic table as the long evening darkened, paging through the book of Duerer engravings. The mixture of sadism and delicacy in those images astounded me: ten-thousand virgins were being slaughtered by men in turbans and someone was boring out a martyr’s eye with an auger in the eye-socket like a carpenter’s tool and, in the nativity scenes, the animals crowding around the manger were each characterized, with noble features and bearing as distinct as each of the disciples shown seated around Christ at His last supper. Years later, my brother and I copied pictures from the book of Duerer engravings – we accomplished this by laying typing paper over the woodcuts and, then, carefully tracing the images with pencil through that paper. This exercise made me aware of the intricate detail in the draperies of garment falling about the hips and laps of Duerer’s Madonnas. The artist seemed obsessed with depicting in the most precise way the manner in which clothing clumped and twisted around itself, the way that gravity sculpted robes, the way that even Christ’s loincloth as He hung crucified was clotted and knotted, simultaneously furled and unfurled. When copying those images, which we later tinted with colored pencils, we became aware of Duerer’s peculiar, excessive, and intense interest in drapery – indeed, there were many woodcuts that seemed to be primarily about drapery, images in which the ostensible subject matter withdrew into clouds of diaphanous fabric. What was this all about?

Memory is inaccurate. I portray Mick’s decisive gift to our family, the book of Duerer woodcuts, images that have accompanied me and guided my imagination all of my life, as something that we received in Greeley, on the banks of that cold river flowing down from the icy summits of the Rocky Mountains. But, in fact, I can’t recall any moment in my life when that book of pictures was not a part of our household furnishings, when I didn’t have the book at hand to pore over its images, using those pictures to illustrate my fantasies and later make tracings until it became tattered and its cover was torn away and some of the pages fell from the text and drifted away.

Later, it rained a little in the valley beneath the mountains. It was after midnight and the rain was very light, like a kiss on our canvas tent.

5.

The morning of Rose’s funeral dawned clear and bright, but clouds gathered and hardened into greenish mask covering the face of the sky. It was so humid that car-metal sweated and the grass in the fields looked dark with moisture.

With my son, Jack, I reached St. Peter ninety-minutes before the ceremony. I shook hands with relatives that I had not seen for many years. During the funeral, thunder spoke from time to time and people looked, apprehensively, at the church’s windows that hid the landscape outside behind panels of stained glass. Twenty years before, a tornado had swept through the town and uprooted all of the trees and hurled them like battering rams against the houses. The church stood next to city park and, I think, was demolished in the storm. The city was denuded and those arcades of tall, cool, shade trees through which my brother and I had walked with Rose’s son down to the movie theater were destroyed. From the mount where the college, Gustavus Adolphus crowned the city in its river valley, the great sea of oaks and maples and cedars had receded, withdrawn to the bore of the river below and its opposing, unsettled banks and the town lay naked, exposed to the pitiless skies. I suppose some of the people in the church recalled the tornado and they glanced at one another with worried looks and tuned their ears to the frequency of the wind and the rain that was now falling outside the sanctuary.

Jimmy, Rose’s son, greeted the mourners and thanked everyone. He is a retired sports writer. He said: "At the end, Rose lost a few steps. But, if you knew her, it didn’t matter much because she was always a dozen steps or so ahead of everyone else." Thunder boomed in proximity to the church. "You see," Jimmy said, "Rose always had the last word."

　

6.

The Pastor told a strange story to illustrate his sermon at Rose’s funeral. The Pastor said that once there was a man with unprepossessing features, indeed, perhaps, downright ugly. The man was disappointed in love and yearned to embrace beautiful women, but they rejected him because of his appearance. So the man met with a doctor and had the physician prepare a mask that could be fitted very tightly over the man’s face. The mask showed a handsome man with a smiling face. In a secret operating room, the mask was surgically affixed over the man’s unpleasant face. Almost immediately, the man was successful with beautiful women and, after courting several of them, he married the most beautiful woman of them all. For many years, the man lived happily, but he was distressed by the idea that his wife didn’t know his secret and had never known him in his true form. At last, the man arranged with the surgeon to remove the mask covering his actual face. But when the surgeon removed the mask of the handsome smiling man, he was amazed. Beneath that mask, the man’s visage was also very handsome, smiling, serene and at peace.

"So," the Pastor said in a satisfied voice, "if you wear the mask for long enough, the mask will grow to become your true face."

Thunder punctuated his words. Outside, the first rain drops fell.

7.

A light lunch was served in a fellowship hall down some steps from the sanctuary. It was the Leichenschmaus typical for Lutheran funerals: olives and pickles, ham sandwiches on little brown and fluffy buns, potato salad and a variety of cakes and brownies.

I sat with my mother with Jack and Angelica. My cousin from Kansas City, Becky, was also at our round table in the corner of the sanctuary.

"What do you suppose that story about the face transplant was about?" I asked my mother.

"I thought it was a good parable," my mother said.

"But what did it have to do with Aunt Rose?" I asked my mother.

She said: "That I don’t know."



Inset in the wall behind our table was a small rectangular of rather dour-looking stained glass. Presumably this glass was a fragment retained from the tiny former church, a relic left over from the ruin made by the tornado. Perhaps, the relic had symbolic or mystical significance – after all, the tornado had spared this fragile sheet of colored glass soldered together in little panes of brown and caramel, lettered lenses circular in their unassuming mahogany-colored frame. The stained glass was a Latin diagram of the Trinity, an odd thing to display in the Fellowship Hall even in this rather remote and dim corner. The Trinity was diagramed as three words forming the corners of a triangle – the words were Pater, Filius, Spiritus Sanctus and the lines between them were staunchly marked with the phrase "non est": that is, Pater non est Filius non est Spiritus Sanctus non est Pater and so on. Radiating inward from the names of the Persons of the Trinity were lines marked est all aimed like arrows at a central term: Deus.

This austere diagram fascinated me and I pointed it out to my mother. "What in the world does that thing mean?" she asked. I explained my interpretation of the schematic figure. "I don’t agree with that at all," my mother said. "Then, you are a heretic and must go to Hell," I told her.

My cousin Becky told a joke: "There was a bus crash and two dozen Missouri Synod Lutherans were killed and went to Heaven. In Heaven, they were ushered into one of God’s many mansions. Heaven is pretty much a party all day and all night long, lots of singing and dancing, Dixieland and Mozart’s music playing everywhere, very convivial. It’s actually pretty rowdy. So God went to the chambers adjacent to the place where the Missouri Synod Lutherans were ensconced. God told the saints in the places next door to the new arrivals to be as quiet as possible, at least for a few days, until the Missouri Synod folks got acclimated to Heaven. ‘Don’t make any noise so that they can hear you,’ God said. ‘If they hear you, that will spoil it for them. They want to think they’re the only ones up here’."

8.

During the funeral, while the Pastor spoke, my mind wandered. A white pall had been placed over the casket, something like a table cloth in an expensive restaurant, and atop the cloth there was a great fan of red roses. The white cloth bore the marks where it had been folded – I could see shadows where folds had been and, further, there were places where the cloth seemed to have been bunched or clumped in some way and, then, left in disarray for a long time. Those places showed creases and folds that were symmetrical – that is, the floral-shaped indentation at the right mirrored a similar indentation on the left. If you looked at the faint wrinkles in the white cloth long enough, you could see benign and cherubic faces in them or the symmetrically displayed wings of angels, Duerer’s messengers in garments with drapery folds like cascades of flowing water.

During the lunch, Rose’s casket was shoved against a wall in the narthex. When I left the fellowship hall to go to the toilet, I saw the casket on a steel gurney with wheels, the white pall removed from it and, presumably, refolded and stored wherever it was kept. I met my mother coming from the Ladies’ Room. "Well," I said, "I guess Rose isn’t having much fun at her party." "No," my mother said. "It’s like she’s already been forgotten," I said. "Shoved into a corner while everyone eats downstairs."

It gave me a lonely feeling, a mournful sense that human life is something compromised and bereft.

　

9.

I learned to drive a car on the highway from Eden Prairie where we lived and St. Peter, my Aunt Rose’s town. On the weekend of our monthly visits, my father would load everyone into the car, hand me the car keys, and tell me to drive us down to St. Peter. My father sat on the passenger side of the car, nervously watching me. Sometimes, he would bellow at me and shout orders and insults and none of this hectoring really much improved my driving. If anything, it make things worse because I was nervous, myself, and high-strung and a bit fearful of the speeds required by the four-lane highway from Shakopee, where we crossed the river, to St. Peter. It was easy enough to drive in our neighborhood where I knew all the streets and each bump and crack in the asphalt from riding my bicycle and, descending that great hill, from the bluffs down to the tangled river-bottoms was always a kind of a thrill, airplanes spurting into the sky from Flying Cloud, the small airport on the crest of the hill, the deep green of the water-logged woods around the river and, then, the tunnel-like passage across the valley, as if through a green grotto of trees with the place where the highway passed the high-water mark for some long-ago flood, a white standard showing water levels a dozen or more feet above the road, then, the little bird-cage bridge over the river at Shakopee, the right turn and the village with its grain elevator and railroad crossing and the taverns where farmers came to listen to polka music and, then, the four-lane highway outside of town, the long trip past many dangerous intersections with the towns a mile or so away from the freeway except at Jordan where the road intersected the village briefly, a meadow near Belle Plaine scabbed with huge glacial boulders, then, the descent into the valley of the Jolly Green Giant at LeSeuer with the colossal figure towering overhead on a billboard, a laughing green colossus entangled in vines usually with a couple arrows shot by local archers right into his groin, and, at last, after following the course of the brown and muddy river, the town of St. Peter.

At St. Peter, I had to take a right turn off the four-lane highway at a Garden Center just before we reached the speed zone where 169 turned into St. Peter’s Main Street and ran through the length of the town to exit at the other end by the St. Peter State Security Hospital and the Prison for the Criminally Insane. The first time I approached this right turn, clumsily angling into the turning lane, I was going too fast. "Slow down! Slow down!" my father shrieked. I braked hard and the car skidded a little, fishtailing. "You’re going to kill us! You’re going to kill us all!" I swung the car around the turn too fast and the wheels squealed. It was as if this cost me an enormous physical effort and I felt as if I had run some great distance against a powerful headwind. "I’m sorry," I panted. My father calmed down a little. We were on a quiet lane, slowly ascending the hill to where Aunt Rose lived.

"You have to watch your speedometer," my father said. "You have to be guided by instruments. It’s like a pilot landing a 747. He has to slow the plane enough to be able to stop within the length of the runway. You have to reduce your air-speed to the right velocity to land."

My father was the second of his siblings to die. His sister, Elizabeth, who was a brilliant musician (she taught piano at a college in St. Joseph, Missouri), was a heavy smoker and died of cancer of the jaw. Elizabeth is the mother of my cousin, Becky. After my father’s death, his sister, Rhoda died. Rhoda had been married to a very great mathematician, apparently a genius who authored an important book in mathematical theory and who died from diabetes when he was only thirty. Rhoda had other husbands and was a colorful personality – she once told me that she had been trained as a courtroom stenographer and that, for some reason, she thought in short-hand: "I’ve never told anyone but you," she said to me. "That will be our little secret." Rose was the eldest daughter. A sister in poor health, Mimi, dependant on oxygen and, therefore, unable to travel, remains alive in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

On the day that I almost killed everyone in my family by poor driving, I also piloted the car home. Everything went smoothly. It seemed that I could do this – that slowly, and with effort, I was learning how to drive. The bluffs overlooking the Minnesota River cast long shadows and I drove through them to climb the great hill and emerge at its summit: little biplanes from Flying Cloud sailed out over the great lush valley like fragile kites and images danced on the screen of the drive-in, and, far away, just faintly visible over the trees on the other side of the river, the big Ferris Wheel at ValleyFair illuminated like an emblem of eternity rotated slowly above the crowns of the oaks and maples.

　

10.

A great tempest broke over St. Peter and the cemetery. The fountains of the sky were opened and rain flooded down inundating the earth. After the funeral, I drove from the cemetery to Minneapolis in the interminable, windy storm. A rose dewy with rain atop a stem with sharp thorns lay on the console between the car’s two front seats. On the big hill rising from the valley of the Jolly Green Giant, I saw several smaller cars buffeted so severely that they had skidded from the highway and ended up in ravines or stranded in the middle of muddy fields. The great bend in the river visible from 169 a few miles north of St. Peter was wild with turbulent, muddy waters. The sides of the road were matted with fallen branches, masses of green and leafy twigs, signs smashed into inarticulate debris, the general flotsam and jetsam of this great, continental hurricane.

I told my son, Jack, that I was driving on a road that I had traveled a hundred times before to visit my Aunt and, then, to return home and that this was highway on which I had learned to drive and that every intersection and every hill and every wooded dell descending to the river was marked by a memory and meant something to me. I said that I had not driven this way for several years and that the climax of the trip would be crossing the Minnesota River at the ancient village of Shakopee and, then, passing through the bore-hole of that tunnel of trees, underneath a sign showing the height of a flood that had occurred when I was in fourth or fifth grade, the sign showing the water-level shaggy with vines growing around its pole, and, then, ascending from the river-bottoms up the flank of the huge and imposing bluff to a vantage from which all the world would be visible and from which planes launched themselves into the void.

But, unbeknownst to me, in the years intervening, the road has been rationalized. It no longer joins with the archaic Main Street in Shakopee, no longer constricts itself to pass over the railroad tracks and that bird-cage-shaped bridge, no longer crosses the dark and mournful river-bottoms with their tangled woods standing knee-deep in black water, and, of course, no longer ascends that long and dramatic hill.

"This road has to cross the river somewhere," I said. Rain fell in sheets and the ditches were flooded and overflowing with moss-green water. We came to a long and gradual causeway. On low concrete stilts, the highway was borne across the river and there was no great hill at all.

I told my son that when my father died, an enormous blizzard blew out of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico and stalked across the plain to central Nebraska. We had to haul my father’s casket, a thing of profound and unfathomable weight, up an ice-covered slope, knee-deep in snow, with the wind howling at us and filling our eyes with sleet. "When Beckmanns die," I said to my son, " there is always a disturbance in nature. My father was born in a howling blizzard and was buried in one. When I die, there will be earthquakes and comets and tornados, because, of course, I am the greatest of the Beckmanns."

　

11.

In my first year of law school, I had a girlfriend, Tarin H– . Tarin had been raised in dire poverty, working as farm laborer in mosquito-swarmed vegetable gardens where her step-father grew tomatos, cantaloupes, broccoli, and cabbage on their small family acreage. As it happened their farm was located where a large shopping mall was later built, Eden Prairie Center. Tarin’s step-father sold his acreage to developers and went from being very poor to great wealth – I believe he was probably paid millions for his land, very prime real estate at the intersection of 169 and 494, at the sign of the Flying Red Horse, a service station marking that location. Tarin’s parents bought a prestigious house, really an estate with a big post-modern mansion, occupying the highest ridge of the river bluffs overlooking the Minnesota River and Shakopee. The house had huge windows opening onto vistas of the valley and you could see for mils from that height.

One weekend, Tarin’s parents flew to Las Vegas and she stayed at their house, watching the family’s several dogs. I visited her. The house was huge and a bit intimidating and her parent’s furniture from their old farm place seemed too small and old and dowdy, out of place in the rooms that looked like something from an Antonioni movie or IKEA warehouse. The structure had great cantilevered decks extending over the steep hill that plummeted down to the river and white interior walls and several sky-lights overhead, slanting panes of glass mounted in curiously angular shafts in the roof of the house. As the sun set, rain clouds gathered in the west. It was cold outside. Although it was only early September, the night air had the chill bite of November.

Something went wrong. There was a quarrel. What was supposed to be romantic became ugly and contentious. Rain began to fall and the great picture windows were streaked with raindrops. The rain splashed down from a great altitude and didn’t seem to affect visibility. From that high place, I could look down into the valley and see cars moving on lonely country lanes, following the leash that their headlights traced on the glistening black roadways. I wasn’t happy and thought, I suppose, that it would be better to be any place but in this ugly, huge, and drafty house high atop the hill in the middle of nowhere. I imagined myself deep in the valley, riding in one of those cars, and thought of the long ascent up the hill, the road rising higher and higher until it reached the summit of the bluffs where the red and white beam of the searchlight rotating atop the air traffic control tower swept across the fields, the highway, the trees tottering on the brink of the abyss, flashing across the white blank screen of the Drive-In movie theater now closed for the season. As I watched the headlights of the cars far below and thought of each of them alone on the highway, hurrying to some destination or other, a sense of vast loneliness oppressed me. Seen from this great height, human life seemed to me to be utterly sad, bereft, and mournful.

　

12.

The mortician told us to put on our emergency blinkers and so the caravan of cars inched away from Trinity Lutheran Church. Windshield wipers slapped at the deluge of water pouring onto windshields. The trees along the road writhed and branches flew through the air like spears. The lane up the hill to the cemetery was like a waterfall.

We carried the casket over the soaked sod. Enough of us had hold of the box to keep it from being too unwieldy. A long barrage of thunder rattled across the sky.

The tent tethered over the open grave kicked and bucked in tempest. The Pastor read the necessary words hurriedly. My cousin, Jimmy, opened a bottle of champagne and we drank from slender plastic cups. "We’re celebrating Rose’s life," Jimmy said. There were several bottles of champagne and we each had two or three drinks. Jimmy poured from the bottles until they were empty. He took a shovel in his hand and said that he wanted to be alone at the graveside. The sky raged and rain pelted the top of the tent, drumming on the stretched canvas.

Jimmy gave each of us a rose from the floral arrangement that had been spread across the casket at the church. Because of the high humidity and the chill in the air made by the pouring rain, the rose seemed imperishable. It was scarcely wilted several days later when I finally made my way back home. My secretary, Susan, said that the best way to preserve the rose was to suspend it upside down and let it dry in that position. So I taped the rose to a bookshelf in my office, the blossoms hanging down like a plumb-line. The petals of the rose are completely intact as I write these words and the flower has preserved its shape. But it is now an impenetrable black, darker than the darkest night.

　

13.

In a way, I suppose, each death of someone near and dear to us is like a pedestal. It allows us to mount higher and see more. With each death, the height of this pedestal grows and allows us to peer farther and farther into the distance. In the end, I suppose the pedestal will be so lofty that we will be able to see beyond this world and into another place.

On a Wilderness of Error

　


　

1.

I never forget the location of a bookstore.

2.

Once, when I traveled to Boston on business, I bought several books at a bookstore a couple blocks from my hotel, the Parker House. I recall this bookstore as being vast and impressive, with three levels, a coffee shop, and a remarkable collection of books by Irish novelists. At this place, I bought Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

3.

Last week, on Martha’s Vineyard, at a congested intersection in West Tisdale, I heard a public radio spot about true crime books. The woman interviewed said that she thought the best of all true crime books was Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error. She said: "It is probably heresy not to recommend In Cold Blood, but I think A Wilderness of Error is a better book."

4.

I crossed the Nantucket Sound from Martha’s Vineyard on a Massachusetts Steamship Ferry crowded with trucks carrying garbage. Estates on the Vineyard cost between 7 and 13 million dollars and, I guess, it is offensive to rich people to have to share their island with garbage. And so, it seems, they ship it back to the mainland.

5.

I saw a seagull riding the wind next to the ferry that stank of rotting garbage. The seagull never once flapped its great, arched wings. Who says that animals are not capable of play? This seagull was playing with the breezes stirred up by the foul-smelling ferry.

6.

We reached Boston at 2:30 in the afternoon and returned the rental car. We checked into the Hilton at the airport, immediately across the road from terminal A. Julie said that she had finished all of the books that she had brought to read on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. I told her that I would take the subway into Boston and see if I could buy her a copy of Morris’ A Wilderness of Error.

7.

The Logan Airport Hilton is a great, lonely mausoleum of a hotel, hermetically sealed against the roar and bustle of the runways and terminals. I went to the lobby, which was empty and vast, and spoke with the concierge. He directed me outside and I rode a shuttle bus a half-mile or so to the train station

8.

At the train station, I bought a 12 dollar day pass and, then, rode the Blue Line through the tunnel under the harbor and into Boston. I had done this many times and knew that the stop closest to the Parker House Hotel was "Government Center". My plan was to get off the subway at that stop and, then, walk to the bookstore nearby to purchase Morris’ book.

9.

"Government Center" stop was closed as a result of construction. I took the Blue Line to Bowdoin, the next stop on the line. When I emerged from underground, I recognized a curving line of office buildings, a structure made from pre-stressed concrete, massive and ugly and brutal. But I knew where I was because of the concrete landmark and made my way back to the plaza atop the "Government Center" subway station.

10.

It was 92 degrees on the streets of Boston, airless and with high humidity.

11.

A great crowd of people stood in the open, sun-drenched plaza between the public buildings. The people were mostly silent, although, sometimes, they raised a great unanimous cheer or sighed at the same time. I estimated that there a thousand or more men and women, crushed together to watch several big color screens on which a soccer game was displayed underway. The United States team was playing Belgium in the World Cup Championship in Brazil.

12.

I walked across a complex intersection to the sidewalk under the facade of the Parker House Hotel. Fremont Street was busy with traffic and the glare from the chrome and bumpers made me squint.

13.

King’s Chapel Burying Ground was at my right, beyond the iron fence next to the sidewalk. The old slate graves looked like peculiar geological formations pushed up through the yellowing sod, black crystals emerging from underground. On my last trip to Boston, I recall walking past that graveyard in a hurricane, an avalanche of sleet and snow falling out of the sky and flung horizontally against the ancient graves. The dead seemed particularly forgotten and hapless in that wind-borne chaos.

14.

The bookstore that I recalled with unerring accuracy was at a small plaza between School and Washington Streets. I walked past the ornate, French-empire style City Hall and rounded the corner only to discover that the bookstore no longer existed. In its place, the three-story glass windows opened into a Walgreen’s pharmacy.

15.

I think the huge shop had once been a Borders Bookstore. Borders went out of business a couple of years ago. I was bitterly disappointed that the place no longer offered books for sale. I suppose that, if you are feeling ill or need medicine, a pharmacy is a useful business, particularly at this busy street corner, but this was little solace to me as I stood in the scorching sun wondering where I should next go.

16.

A little dazed, I strolled a block down Washington and, then, walked back to Fremont on Bromfield Street. It is a narrow lane and the shadows were cool and the air smelled of restaurants preparing for dinner.

17.

There is a subway station beyond the old Granary Burying Ground on the edge of the Boston Common. I entered the subway and tried to access the train platforms, but my Charlie Card, the magnetized pass that operated the turnstiles would not let me through the gate. So I ascended the steps again to the hot street and crossed to a larger subway entrance on the other side of Fremont, passing between crowds of street vendors and beggars and skimpily dressed girls in summer skirts and loose blouses.

18.

It was over 100 degrees on the train platforms and the air was foul with crowd-stench. The heat and fog of gaseous sweat dazed me. Trains were sitting on various sidings, panting like hot dogs, and the place was thronged, big mobs of people pushing this way and that. It took me a few minutes to figure out what train I should take toward Copley Square. More steps, slippery with sweat, had to be descended and, then, climbed again. In the steam-bath heat, people plowed into one another, dully stumbling over the slick concrete.

19.

I took the outbound Green Line train to Copley. Then, I hiked across the square to Trinity Church. I found a door leading inside and walked through heavy, dark vaults to where a young man was sitting at a desk. It was as hot as an oven in the huge brick church.

20.

The young man sat a podium displaying brightly colored coffee-table books, obscenely spread-eagled for inspection. The books showed the interior of the huge church. I asked the young man what it cost to enter the church and he told me that I could buy a ticket downstairs.

21.

"Where is a bookstore near here?" The young man blinked nervously at me. Then, he said: "I buy my books at Trident." "Where is that?" He said: "Go down Newbury – it’s one block over (he gestured). The bookstore is right at Mass." I went into the church crypt and bought a ticket to enter the place. I found a toilet, locked myself in a stall, and looked at my city map. It appeared that I would have to walk five blocks on Newbury to reach Massachusetts Avenue. But there was a Green line subway station at Massachusetts (Hynes Station) and I would be able to take the train back to the Blue Line from that place and, thence, return to the airport.

22.

I went into the Church. The interior of Trinity Church is resplendent with color: Pompeii red covering plaster in the heights of the tower, majestic courses of fire-house red brick interspersed with bricks colored mustard-yellow and Rembrandt-brown, all assembled in a great, polychrome mosaic. From the outside, the church seems Romanesque, heavy, impenetrable, forests of turrets rising over formidable rampart walls. But, inside. the place soars upward with Moorish exuberance – it is like an immense fat man implausibly light and agile on his feet, like Oliver Hardy’s soft-shoe dance in Way out West, graceful and airy, murals and ornate cherry-wood carving wrapped around the interior space, bright alcoves full of gem-like stained glass hovering in the middle heights, close enough for the images to be legible, but still remote from the congregation, occupying a kind of half-accessible heaven above the dark prairie of rose-wood pews, and, then, the lofty heights above occupied by great shaggy giants, the evangelists cumbrous and immense in the high prophetic peak of the steeple. Somehow, the structure combines a sense of upward thrust and bright, even, radiant illumination with a vast weight, a gravitas equivalent to the bulk of Grover Cleveland, or a gilded era robber baron or fat, oyster-fed H. H. Richardson himself, the architect from Louisiana who designed this place. Trinity Church is one of my favorite buildings and it always takes my breath away.

23.

Above the narthex, John LaFarge’s Jesus stands in stained-glass majesty. The Savior is outside of the building, in the world, Christ represented as a column of pale white light standing in blue darkness. Jesus occupies a dark blue mandorla – perhaps, we are supposed to imagine him striding toward the Church through the icy gloom of night, a towering spectre moving through the darkness.

24.

One shudders at the glacial blue and white of LaFarge’s image of Jesus, but it was, in fact, exceedingly hot in the church, sultry, with huge fans nodding back and forth like mechanical deacons.

25.

On the street, I crossed Boylston, went north a block to Newbury, and, then, hurried along the street.

26.

The blocks were long and the walk was hot, without shade, on the crowded sidewalk. I passed girls in low-cut dresses acting as hostesses at sidewalk cafes, ice cream and gelato parlors, fashionable boutiques and hair styling places, restaurants offering Asian fusion menus or Spanish food or Italian specialties, expensive pizza places that bake their pies in wood-fired ovens, all of these enterprises occupying the ground level of elegant old brownstone apartments lining both sides of the arrow-straight and broad street.

27.

The bookstore was where it was supposed to be. I went inside, talked to a slender girl in a black tee-shirt bearing an image of a three-pronged spear, and she found Morris’ book for me in the history section.

28.

I bought a Film Comment with Morris’ book. The man at the check-out register wanted to discuss movies with me. But I didn’t exactly understand his comments.

29.

Carrying my purchases, I hurried another half-block to Massachusetts where my map showed me that there was a subway station, the next stop on the Green Line: Hynes, named after the Hynes Convention Center.

30.

I couldn’t find the train station. There were no plausible entries into the underground. I hustled up and down the street, looking in all directions for the subway but couldn’t locate it. I stooped to inspect manhole covers and peered into cavities in the bowels of buildings where coal had once been loaded to fuel furnaces and, if there was a crack in the sidewalk, I gazed into it, hoping to discover the passage downward, the way to the shadows. But my search was unavailing. There was a freeway across the road and an impromptu-looking shack on Massachusetts marked with the word "Hynes" and I went there and scrutinized the rear of that shanty looking for pits and crevasses, fissures leading downward but, again, found nothing. This was very disappointing for it meant that I had to hike back down Newbury, retracing my steps to Copley and the subway entrance by the Public Library.

31.

The blocks were long and the walk was hot, without shade, on the crowded sidewalk. At street level, businesses occupied the front of the elegant, old brownstones: expensive pizza places that cooked their pies in wood-fired ovens, Italian trattoria, Thai bistros, a Spanish restaurant and, then, some Asian fusion places, hair-styling studios reeking of chemicals, pricy-looking boutiques, gelato and ice cream parlors, girls in low-cut blouses standing at the edge of the sidewalk beckoning pedestrians into sidewalk cafes.

32.

It was obvious to me that a person of my kind did not belong on that street, that I should not be allowed to perambulate that sidewalk even for a minute, that I had traveled from Martha’s Vineyard with the garbage as a kind of penance and that I was hot and half-hallucinating as I walked as quickly as I could back to Copley square.

33.

I rush down the steps into the subway to get out of the glare of the sun, but on the first sweltering landing, there is a tattered sign and it tells me that there is no access through this arcade to the inbound trains on the Green Line and, quite evidently, it is an inbound train that I need to reach the Blue Line and, then, the airport. So, I climb back up the the sweat-slick steps, cross the street toward the great marble barge of the Public Library docked there at the plaza and, then, hurry along Copley Square scanning the vantage ahead of me for some sign of the promised entry into the subway. But I can’t seem to find the steps leading downward and so I circle the block and, at last, find the entrance only a few feet from where I commenced my circuit of the Library, an assemblage of Victorian wrought iron hiding in plain sight. This alarms me. It seems that the sun and heat have entered my brain and that I am experiencing curious lacunae in the world, places that are right before my eyes but that can’t exactly be seen, or, at least, can’t be seen for what they are.

34.

Since the Government Center station is closed and undergoing construction, and since that station is the nerve center of the whole subway system, it’s central neuron as it were or ganglion, I understand that the way back to the airport will be complex. I will have to go to Haymarket and, then, transfer onto the Orange Line and, then, ride that train for one station to access the Blue Line.

35.

It is even hotter and more sultry, more difficult to breathe and, therefore, more difficult to see clearly, on the train platforms and in the grimy tunnels than I recalled.

36.

The Green Line train is crowded this time of day, around 6:00 pm, and so I have to stand for several stops, exiting into the gloomy, furnace-like heat at Haymarket. The next subway train is nine minutes away. The people on the platform stand there withering in the heat, drizzling pools of sweat down onto the filthy concrete.

37.

The Orange Line train is even more crowded, crammed with Latino women and their children, many of them in perambulators. It is only one stop to State Station. I exit there. Signs point the way to the Blue Line – that is, through a quarter-mile long wormhole, a cement tube tiled overhead with grimy white tiles that seem to seep some sort of rancid liquid, perhaps, sweat condensed on their (relatively) cool surfaces. Everyone trots down the tunnel which goes on and on endlessly, finally snaking around a curve where there is a thunderous roar – the sound of the Blue Line train to the airport just leaving the platform.

38.

A sign overhead flashes the information that the next train will come in 12 minutes. It seems impossible to endure this airless, suffocating heat for that long. More and more people arrive at the station and I am standing on the yellow-for-caution lip of the platform, jostled ahead into a place where no one is really supposed to stand due to the dangerous proximity of fatal edge, and, now, behind me the crowd is eight deep, now ten deep, now twelve deep as more and more people throng the narrow platform between the walls and pit through which the trains move.

39.

Apparently, the Blue Line travels to an immensely populace ghetto, a slum of some sort inhabited by tens of thousands of immigrants speaking incomprehensible languages, a vast polyglot assembly of the very poor crammed elbow to elbow, buttock to groin, shoulder to shoulder on the scalding subway platform. Children are shrieking and the crowd jostles and shudders and, as the train appears – headlights rounding a black humid curve – I feel the mob moving forward and pressing against me as if to hurl my body into the void, onto the third rail, under the grinding iron wheels of the train.

40.

But, I think, at least, I am positioned to get onto the train first, ahead of the rest of this huge unruly mob, many of whom will certainly be left behind on the suffocating platform.

41.

The train stops at the station with its doors fifteen feet to my right and also exactly fifteen feet to my left – in other words, I am trapped against the side of the subway car, equidistant between the two doors that are now crowded with people cramming themselves into the compartment. I struggle along the hot metal of the subway car and, at last, scramble onto the train just as the doors are closing.

42.

The subway car is air-conditioned, almost cold, and the transition from the sauna heat of the platform into the chill refrigeration of the train is shocking. This can not be good for one’s health. People are treading upon one another’s feet and cursing, but also giggling and laughing in a good natured way and women are gossiping in Portuguese, I think, and Hmong and some of subway riders have desolate panicked eyes and look suicidal and others show bland, empty expressions like zombies and there are mad women and mad men gibbering, drug addicts wilting like rare exotic orchids, babies howling, the whole thing hurled through the black, boiling darkness.

43.

All of my sorrow, all of the residue of my grief settles into my feet. It is a slow sedimentation of misery that goes into my lower extremities and makes them throb with pain. Ever since my close friend, Terry Dilley died, I have found it difficult to walk any distance without serious, searing pain – and now my wounded mourning foot is so sore that I am afraid that it will collapse throwing me to the dirty floor of the subway compartment where I will be trodden under heel and destroyed.

44.

We roll through the silent, shrouded construction zone, the closed Government Center stop, then, to Aquarium, where the platform is mostly deserted, then, to Maverick where many people depart the train, then, to Airport where I stagger out of the subway. I call the Hilton for the shuttle bus to pick me up and the white van arrives in less than ten minutes. At the Hilton, the man driving the bus says in a cheery voice: "Welcome back, sir." "Thank you," I tell him.

45.

What do I conclude from this excursion? In big cities, the urban poor suffer greatly. The level of inconvenience and suffering experienced by people compelled to ride these subways, sweltering in summer and frigid in winter, is immense, arbitrary and capricious, taxing, unjust, unreasonable, and, it seems, by and large, borne with equanimity.

46.

That is the moral of this essay. No more, no less.

On a Dream Narrative

Although it is seductive to think that dreams can be adapted into literary form, in general, this is untrue.  Most dreams resist literary adaptation and can’t be successfully converted into narrative.  When I have used a dream as a source for a story, my writing has been unsuccessful.  Why should this be so?

We should start with a dream that presents itself as particularly – even aggressively – narrative.  Here is a dream that I experienced around dawn on May 25, 2014:

1. I am walking my dog on a customary route that takes me by a very nice house, apparently built in the nineteen-fifties surrounded by tall and stately trees;

2. Some sort of a altercation is occurring on the front lawn and so I hurry over to investigate;

3. Two older men with gentlemanly demeanor are engaged in an encounter with a small fat woman wearing a sweat-suit;

4. The small woman is vulgar-looking and she moves swiftly when the men try to detain her;

5. I am given to understand that the encounter has something to do with a large pet spider that is missing;

6. I am familiar with this pet spider and have a memory of having seen it before.  Someone in the neighborhood owns the spider and it has been prominent in an earlier dream, but one that I can’t exactly recall in these circumstances;

7. The house occupies a hill overlooking a neighborhood inhabited by immigrants and poor people who have shops there on sunny urban streets;

8. I enter a meat shop that is long and narrow;

9. I recognize the proprietor of the meat shop as someone that I encountered in the earlier dream;

10. The proprietor of the meat shop and I speak about the missing spider.  I tell the man that the last time I intervened the spider was someone’s beloved pet, but, now, no one really wants to admit owning the creature;

11. The proprietor of the meat shop tells me bitterly that the wealthy people on the hill come into his place from time to time inquiring about the spider but that they don’t think his market is worthy enough to patronize when they are buying groceries;

12. I feel that I should buy something at the shop;

13. The shop is long, with a counter and glass display cases containing cuts of meat along the right side.  There are some bagged sausages with natural casings on a shelf running along the meat counter;

14. At the far end of the shop, there is a work station where a buxom, dark-haired woman is standing over a grill.  The grill is on the left side of the shop, across from the meat counters that run along the side;

15. I approach the woman and speak to her.  She replies in a heavy accent that makes it hard for me to understand her.

16. Sizzling on the grill are little strips of dark colored meat.  They are dark black and have a disreputable appearance.  I understand her to be preparing some kind of jerky;

17. The woman accompanies me along the counter and I look at the meat with the intent of purchasing something;

18. The woman suggests that I buy ribs.  But my recipe for ribs is complicated and takes nine hours slow cooking and I don’t want to go to all that trouble.  I also don’t want to have to carry the big package of ribs back with me;

19. I decide to buy some natural-casing hot dogs although I am very embarrassed that she will perceive this purchase as merely a “token” and think that I am cheap and ungrateful;

20. Throughout this conversation and my tour of the meat shop, I am wondering why the spider was considered a beloved pet when I previously was involved with it, but now is missing and no one will admit ownership;

21. A friend appears in the store.  I am relieved.  He will give me credibility in this place.  He says:  “Now that Beckmann is here, he will bring the kink.”

This is the extent of the dream.  It is highly unusual because this dream cites an earlier dream – one that I can recall only as involving a spider that someone regarded as trusted, loyal, and beloved pet.  In transcribing this dream, I have followed several rules.  I have not “naturalized” the dream by inventing transitions or providing other narrative integument.  In recounting a dream, one tends to clarify – I have not tried attempted to impose clarity where none existed, nor have I supplied any descriptions; rather, I describe only those things that my recollection of the dream allows me to treat descriptively.  Where the dream is vague, I have been vague as well in my transcription.  For instance, I have only impressions of the woman in the sweat-suit or the men remonstrating with her.  I don’t have a visual image of those characters.  By contrast, I have an almost photographic visual memory of the meat-shop interior and, as I write these words, can recall in detail the layout of counters, the spicy bacon smell of the jerky cooking on the grill, and the peculiar sepia-toned yellow light in the charcuterie.  Finally, I have avoided interpretation.  When narrating a dream, the boundary between what was actually dreamed and interpretation of the dream is porous.  In the numbered paragraphs, I have not interpreted imagery, and, therefore, fixing or clarifying imagery on the basis of what I think it means or the waking memory to which the dream makes reference.

Coherence is the most significant problem that arises when a writer attempts to use a dream as a source for a story or a poem.  (Dreams engender “short forms;” although we may dream novels, we can’t remember them.)  The part of a dream that we can recall is coherent only on the basis that oneiric elements have been filed together by memory.  The dream’s coherence is purely formal and arbitrary.  In the case of the dream recounted, the experience as recalled may be likened to tossing several unrelated objects into a box.  This specific box contains a dog, a missing pet spider, a house of a certain description, and a meat shop where my friend appears.  These features of the dream do not cohere – they comprise a list of things that have as their unity one factor only: they all belong together in my recollection of the dream.  Narrative requires shaping facts and events into meaning.  The events that occur in a dream are haphazard; the only thing that unifies them is the frame – that is, their occurrence in the dream.  The things in the box comprise a unity in one respect only – they are all things contained within this one box.  Otherwise, these elements present no coherent unifying theme or meaning.

There is an egocentric way of making this point.  The components of a dream that I recall are unified only by the fact that the events and images all exist within my imagination.  In other words, a specious and trivial unity arises: everything in the dream is created by me, relates somehow to me, and, therefore, fits in the box that I describe as myself.  But, like everyone else, I contain multitudes of things and establishing a unity merely on the basis of the fact that several of these things occurred to me is unsatisfactory as an organizing principle.  After all, I can blurt out the words “icicle,” “top hat,” “Lithuania,” and “abstraction”.  Freudian analysis would suggest that these words all have some kind of association.  But I’m not sure that this is always true or plausible (as much as I might wish to establish meaning along these lines.)  Whether there is a deeper, pre-conscious connection between the four words mentioned is uncertain.  The only thing that I can say for sure is that these four words are unified because I wrote them down here in a sequence.  We know that’s true.  But whether any additional meaning can be ascribed to the sequence of utterances, whether they have some other narrative or thematic meaning, I think, is unclear and a subject on which we should express some degree of agnosticism.

To the dreamer, events experienced as a dream always seem to cohere.  And, in fact, I think that there is a kind of actual coherence in dreams – but a coherence that is not satisfactory as a narrative principle.  The dream recounted in this essay involves an emotion of curiosity and bemusement – why is a spider treated like a pet?  Where is the spider hiding?  This emotion carries the dreamer into a butcher’s shop.  In that place, the emotion becomes one of obligation – I must buy something.  This sense of obligation, and the pervasive feeling that I am unable to make a meaningful purchase, metamorphoses into an emotion of anxiety.  The emotion of anxiety is supplanted by a sense of relief when my friend appears and calls out my name.  In a conventional narrative, and, even, in a lyric poem, narrative events trigger emotions – things that I see and experience cause me to have certain feelings.  Wakeful consciousness is largely framed as emotional or intellectual responses to things that we encounter with our senses.  But a dream, I argue, reverses this process.  Dreams, I think, are often engendered by emotions.  An emotion exists and seeks imagery to explain or represent that emotion.  In dreaming, a mood creates a story to justify that mood.  In fiction and most poetry, something portrayed as objectively real interacts with someone’s consciousness to create a mood.

Of course, this formulation is not always accurate.  In our waking existence, mood doesn’t always arise from an objective experience of something seen or heard or expressed.  Everyone has felt “blue” or sad and, then, searched the world for evidence to support a mood that is, probably, merely a manifestation of a hormonal or metabolic imbalance.  Similarly, we sometimes feel irrationally happy, also on a physiological basis, and, then, inhabit a smiling world full of joyous people and things.  In other words, mood can certainly alter our perception of the exterior world.  Similarly, in literature, some artists have argued that mood or, as the Germans say, Stimmung should precede any artistic expression and the work of art should express that emotional state and seek words and images consistent with those feelings.  Edgar Allen Poe, among writers in English, probably expressed this notion most analytically – a poem, he thought, should be a vehicle for replicating certain vague emotions.  But Poe is generally not thought to occupy the first rank of poets.  (His prose works, which are indisputable great, don’t arise from vague and tumultuous emotional states, but are clearly examples of analytical narrative.)   In general terms, a esthetic theory that seeks to duplicate emotional states by seeking image or rhythmic correlates for those states independent of a narrative framework is unsatisfactory.  This is because the exact tenor of emotional states frequently can’t be communicated.  Every dream, in my view, contains a powerful element of the incommunicable and this feature defeats the use of a dream to structure a story or a poem.

Beyond the question of coherence lies another dream dynamic opposing intentionally artistic expression.  Narratives are stories.  Intrinsic to the notion of a narrative is the idea of “history”.  A narrative is a sequence of events in time – and these events have a past with present consequences and an implied future.  By contrast dreams don’t typically have a past or a future tense.  A dreams take place in a timeless “now,” a present-tense that, nonetheless, often has a sort of archaic, even, pre-historic inflection.  (Because of this timeless feature, the dreamer often experiences the dream as either prophetic – that is, about the future – or deriving from ancient, even, immemorial events, drowned, as it were, in a primordial past.  But I think this experience simply derives from the fact that dreams amplify the notion of “now” or the present in a way that confuses the mind when we recall the dream.  In our waking life, curiously enough, there is no real present – everything is either past, that is, a second or a minute or twenty years ago, or a future to which we look forward.  But, of course, existence is lived in the present that we know exists but, paradoxically, can’t experience.  A dream reverses these perceptions.  The dream takes place in a continuous present from which past and future are mostly excluded.)  The dream recounted in this essay has a peculiar feature.  In the dream, I seemed to recognize places and emotions and events depicted as deja vu – that is, recapitulations of things previously experienced.  But the dream’s citation of a past experience is simply one of the things in the frame of the dream.  It is not a narrative element because a dream has no past-time.  The dream can’t sponsor a “flashback” since it has no past.  The sense of something that has already happened in a dream is a false memory – that is, I am dreaming that something previously happened but can’t tell what that was.  The reason I can’t discover what previously happened is simple enough – there is no past-time in a dream and nothing previous to it.  The pet spider is a spectral object in the dream – it is imagined but never seen.  The jerky meat is a visionary object in the dream – I seem to see it.  The memories that the dreamer seems to have but can’t bring to mind – this is just another element of the dream like the jerky and spider.  The dreamer can’t recall the previous event because there is no previous event – the dreamer is dreaming that he can’t recall a previous event.  But this is a present-tense experience.

The preceding paragraph, perhaps, is not clear and maybe badly expressed.  But the difficulties abundantly evident in that paragraph are significant to the thesis of this essay – that is, that dreams make poor material for fiction or literature in general.  Any narrative description of the world and its people requires a past tense, that is, a history, and some kind of mechanism for causation – events lead to, or trigger, other events.  But a dream is devoid of this foundation.  Since there is no time in a dream, there is no narrative causalty (only the illusion of narrative) and, thus, dreams can’t be adapted into stories without radically falsifying them and, indeed, depriving the dream of its emotional force.

So, to summarize, dreams are poor fodder for adaptation as literary stories or narratives for three reasons.  First, dreams violate principles of coherence necessary for artistic expression – the question “why this thing and not another?” is meaningless.  Second, dreams characteristically reverse the relationship between mood and event.  In waking existence, our situation is ordinarily thought to induce our mood; in dreams, vague emotional states seem to precipitate narrative events seeking to justify those motions.  Finally, dreams proceed in a continuous, inexplicable present.  Since dreaming lacks a past or future tense, the experience can not be effectively adapted to media that propose to depict something that has happened with present and future consequences – that is, the essence of narrative.  (The continuous present tense in dreaming suggests that dreams are most effectively simulated by moving pictures, a media that also seems always present tense – this is a banal observation: Hollywood has always been called a ‘dream factory.”)  



2.

For the waking mind, dreams come to us cloaked in interpretations.  The waking mind inevitably processes dream material as fodder for interpretation.  Indeed, I think it probable that every dream as recounted after awakening is primarily interpretation.  What we remember of dreams are those aspects that present themselves for interpretation and that have already been interpreted to some degree.  Waking may be defined, in fact, as the process that ends the dream and commits its imagery to hermeneutic operations.

The dream expressed in numbered paragraphs above is a dawn-dream and, therefore, an anxiety-dream.  For the greater part of my life, I have risen around 6:30 am, gone to the toilet, dressed myself, and, then, departed for work with the intent of arriving between 7:30 and 8:00 am.  If something threatens to disrupt this pattern, a dream alerts me to the hazard that my customary activities are imperilled – perhaps, I will oversleep or get to work too late or be prohibited from attending to bodily necessities.  These concerns express themselves as anxiety and tint the dream accordingly.

My imagination treats rising at my accustomed time as an obligation.  Another obligation is walking my dog.  I think it inhumane to deprive my large and active dog of her customary walk.  Accordingly, my dream draws this equation “waking on time and going to work” = “walking the dog.”  Hence, the dream initiates with me walking the dog and, indeed, along a route that is familiar to me.  The house in the dream and its neatly groomed lawn is a real place that I pass on the sidewalk when I walk my dog.

My perambulation with my dog is disrupted by the men remonstrating with the small woman.  I know the source of his imagery.  A day or so before I had this dream, I happened to watch part of TV show called “Hardcore Pawn”.  That reality TV-show involves the adventures of a pawnbroker operating a sleazy establishment in the poor neighborhood in Detroit.  In the episode that I watched, a small woman with a hard, set jaw strode into the pawnshop and demanding the proprietors pay her 100 dollars for a ticket to rock concert.  The pawnshop proprietor refused to give the woman any money.  She demanded to be paid and refused to leave the pawnshop, thereby causing an altercation when, cursing and spitting, she was ejected.  The dream tells me that I should wake up and walk the dog – that is, discharge my obligations.  But sleep resists wakefulness and so the dream presents me with a spectacle to keep my asleep – the woman fighting with two men on the lawn of the nice house.

The spider element to this dream has an uncertain provenance.  My guess is that the spider refers to a German-language book that I read a year ago, Jeremias Gotthelf’s Die schwarze Spinne (“The Black Spider.”) The novella, written by Swiss author, is highly conservative.  Indeed, I suggested to someone that the book should be translated as an example of a right-wing art-work.  Shortly after I made this suggestion, the book was, in fact, published in a translation under the imprint of the NYRB (New York Review of Books).  This translation has a lurid cover that once seen is not easily forgotten – it shows the huge spider covering part of a person’s face.  The theme of Gotthelf’s novella is that pride and selfishness are monstrous vices.  These vices are embodied in the terrible spider that skitters like a pestilence through the book.  Thus, I interpret the “spider” as being punitive.  The spider represents the punishment that I will experience if I don’t rise on time, if I oversleep, if I don’t attend to excretory functions.

At this point, the dream trembles on the verge of waking consciousness.  The imagery becomes occluded by interpretation.  The house in Austin becomes the Hollyhock House, an elaborate structure in Los Angeles designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that I toured many years ago.  This transformation probably originates in a novel that I have been writing for the past year, a chronicle of homosexual devil-worshipers that takes place largely in Los Angeles and that, in fact, involves some scenes in a home modeled on the Hollyhock House.  The house occupies the top of a hill in an area that is, now, a neighborhood where Mexican and Central American immigrants live.  The quality of the light on the streets below the residence, the sidewalks, and the humble shops all derive from my memories of this neighborhood.  Of course, I have been concerned about the progress of this novel for some time, worry about whether I am working on that project diligently enough, and, therefore, experience a sense of anxious responsibility toward this novel.  Like walking my dog, working on this book is a duty.  Failure to work on the novel induces anxiety in me, the sense that I am shirking a responsibility, and so it seems plausible that the scene now shifts to Los Angeles and the neighborhood of the Hollyhock house to remind me that, instead of writing this essay, I should be working on the novel.

At this stage, the dream imagery is like an alarm clock.  It is telling me to wake up, go to the toilet, go to work, walk my dog, write my novel – that is, attend to responsibilities.  I am hungry upon awaking and the dream transmutes this sensation into the displays of meat in the butcher’s shop.  About the fecal-looking dark-brown jerky sizzling on the grill, the less said the better.  I have an excellent recipe for barbecue ribs (see below).  But this recipe requires that the ribs cook “slow and low” – for nine hours at 190 degrees.  To prepare these ribs for supper, you have to install them in the oven before going to work.  And so, now walking the dog, getting up and going to work, excretion, writing a novel about Gay devil-worshipers, and putting the ribs in the oven for supper after work are all entangled, all themes relating to something that is pressing, an obligation at hand, something that must be done.  The dream’s mood implies urgency and necessity.  I feel guilty about not making a purchase.  Wakefulness comes like an old friend and calls my name waking me up.  The dream dissolves into consciousness.

Twenty years ago, I would have resolved all this imagery into a complex Freudian scheme.  I am less certain about those hermeneutics today.  In all likelihood, the dream is simply an elaborate, imaginative alarm clock, a system of imagery that suggests that I should wake-up while opposing wakefulness with a vivid series of bright tableaux-like images.


3.

Here is a recipe for “Ultimate 9 Hour Barbecue Ribs”.  The recipe was given to me by Linda Mullenbach, an excellent cook whose culinary skills are renowned throughout southern Minnesota and northern Iowa.  To enjoy these ribs for dinner, you need to get up early, eschewing the comforts of bed and dream, and make the sauce in which to lave the ribs.  The ribs cook for nine hours at 190 degrees.  If you follow this recipe, the results will stun you.

You will need:

2 full racks of Hormel St. Louis-style ribs
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1/ 2 cup (one stick) butter
2 ½ cups ketchup or chili sauce (a half and half combination of these sauces)
1 cup brown sugar
3 T. Spicy brown mustard with horseradish
1/ 2 cup dark corn syrup
1 / 2 cup honey
1 / 2 cup of apple cider vinegar
1 /2 cup of pineapple juice
2 T. Worcestershire sauce
1 T. chili powder
3 t. salt
1 ½ t. cayenne pepper (or less to taste)
1 t. black pepper

Preheat oven to 190 degrees.

In a medium saucepan, melt butter and cook garlic and onion until soft.  Add all remaining sauce ingredients, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Let cool

Cut the ribs in half, layer them in a large baking pan and cover generously with sauce.  Cover baking pan with aluminum foil and bake at 190 degrees (“slow and low”) for nine hours.  Discard the drippings and serve the ribs with the extra barbecue sauce.


4.

Franz Kafka’s short story, “The Country Doctor,” is self-evidently the transcription of an early morning anxiety dream.  I can make use of interpretive methods established in the second section of this essay to offer a reading of that text.  Whether this approach to tje exegesis of this specific story contributes anything to an understanding this text is unclear to me.  But, I think, the perspective differs from most interpretations of this little story.

A summary is useful: the unnamed first-person narrator is a country doctor who makes house-calls.  In the middle of the night, he is summoned to the bedside of a sick patient.  The physician’s horse has died and so he doesn’t know how he will make the ten-mile trip in the blizzard that happens to be raging.  But, surprisingly, the doctor finds a pair of fine, powerful horses in a pig-stye.  The horses are tended by a brutal groom.  The groom assaults the doctor’s servant girl and she pleads with the narrator to stay with her.  It is obvious she will be violently raped if the doctor leaves her to the mercy of the groom.  But the duty summons the doctor and he departs in the snowstorm leaving the girl behind.  By the time, the doctor reaches the patient’s house, the snowstorm has ended.  The patient is resting in his bed surrounded by his family.  The patient seems very sick and he pleads with the doctor to let him die.  When he examines the sick youth, the doctor discovers a horrible wound in the boy’s side infested with wriggling worms with “many legs.”  The doctor feels that he is powerless.  The boy’s family members strip him and lay him in bed with the dying boy, chanting a little ditty suggesting that the physician is unable to cure himself.  The boy asks the doctor if his wound is bad.  The doctor lies and says that he has seen worse and that the youth will soon be better.  Then, the doctor departs.  As he drives the wagon home through the snow, he knows that his practice has been stolen from him, that the servant girl has been ruined by the groom, and that this house-call has destroyed him.  “Betrayed,” he cries out, “betrayed.”  

Kafka’s narrative, as long as he is transcribing a dream – probably the first three or four page of the five page text – is headlong, driven by a terrible, compulsive urgency.  In the original German, the first four pages of the text appear as one enormous present-tense paragraph that accelerates to the vision of the wound.  The wound is described as “rose-colored” and the servant girl raped by the savage groom is called Rosa.  Apparently, Kafka’s dream connects the hero’s guilt at leaving the girl to the brutal intentions of the groom with the wound.   The wound is a symbol for the doctor’s malfeasance, his abandonment of the woman.  In the symbolic economy of the dream-narrative, the wound stands for Rosa and, also, for the narrator’s anxieties with respect to her sexuality – the festering wound that will not heal is also a sexual cavity, a vaginal opening that both fascinates and horrifies the physician.  The doctor is impotent.  There is nothing he can do to help the youth.  He ends up in the youth’s death bed, a fellow victim of casualty.  The image of the doctor lying side-by-side with the wounded boy may suggest the narrator’s sexual failure with Rosa.  The story is haunting, once read never forgotten, but, also, unsatisfactory.  The narrative shifts meanings unexpectedly and the final peroration seems disconnected from  the events preceding it.  By contrast with the frenzied activity and sense of doom overwhelming the first two-thirds of the tale, the final part of the story seems “merely” literary.  The story is about failure and, of course, Kafka similarly requires that the narrative itself be defective, inadequate to the subject, a story about failure that is also a failure in literary terms.  With Kafka, the reader is never certain whether the defects in his writing are inadvertent or intended: writing about failure, the author contrives his texts to fail themselves in demonstrable ways.

A great writer, Kafka was also a hard-working Jewish lawyer.  Notions of obligation, duty, and responsibility are central to his literary production.  Kafka’s legal work involved casualty law – that is, accidental death and injury, a subject itself inflected by notion of duty, and breach of duty.  Initially, he was employed by an Italian insurance firm, Assicurazoni Generaii.  Kafka didn’t like that job, in part, because the hours were too long and required that the report to the office by 8:00 am.  After a year with the Italian insurer, Kafka began his career with the Worker’s Accident Compensation division of the Kingdom of Bohemia.  He continued working at that place until illness compelled him to retire in 1922.

My idiosyncratic analysis of “The Country Doctor” presumes that Kafka dreamed part of the narrative at dawn sometime in 1919, the year the story was written.  The anxiety that drives the first half of the story is that typical of an early morning dream.  Kafka has to get up and go to work, doesn’t want to oversleep, and, yet, the dream detains him.  The collision between muscle-memory (I have to get up) and the dream (tarry awhile as I amuse you) generates the sense of anxiety in the narrative.  This Stimmung, a mood of ever-increasing urgency and anxiety, in turns, generates the narrative events.  “I must go, but I can’t seem to move” – we must recall that dreams protect us by paralyzing the body to prevent the dreamer from acting in his sleep and possibly injuring himself and others.  Sensing this paralysis, some part of the mind is horrified.  At first, Kafka’s dream expresses this paralysis as the doctor’s missing horse.  He literally can’t go because his horse has died.  (I suspect an excremental element to the physician’s search for the horses in a pig-stye – that is, a surrogate for a toilet.)  Horses present themselves – “I must go.”  But, then, the dream-paralysis expresses itself more subtly as an insoluble (and paralyzing) moral conundrum: “If I go, my servant will be raped; but, if I stay, I will not do my duty.”  At this point, Kafka’s anxiety and paralysis assume symbolic and thematic elements.  The writer’s famously conflicted romantic life affords the dream with a theme entangling Kafka’s ambivalence toward women, his dutifulness, and his sense that if he does his duty, he will inevitably lose the object of his affections – Kafka seems to have thought that love and marriage were inimical to his writing.  All of this is expressed in the genital wound, the nuptial bed shared with the dying youth, the narrator’s sense that by doing his duty he has sacrificed Rosa, his servant girl.

Dream-paralysis is momentary.  We always wake up and go about our business.  The last part of the story seems to me be a literary construct.  Kafka, the writer, tries to make sense of what he has transcribed as Kafka, the dreamer.  For this reason, the last part of the story seems somehow inauthentic, a caption applied to the vivid nightmare that climaxes in the vision of the genital wound infested with wriggling worms.  In fact, I will go so far as to maintain that the vision of the wound was so terrible to the Kafka that it knocked him out of the dream, convulsed him with terror, and ended his paralysis – shaken, he could go to work.  After the doctor sees the wound, the energy leaks out of the story.  What follows is interpretation not dream.  One clue to this is the literary business involving the Pelz, the fur coat that the doctor wears during his trip to the sick-bed.  As he leaves the farm, someone tosses the coat into the back of the doctor’s wagon where it gets stuck on a hook.  The doctor can’t reach the coat dragging behind the wagon, nor will the country folk raise a hand to put the Pelz back in the cart.  And, so, the doctor returns across the snowy wasteland with the fur coat, like his tail, ignominiously dragging behind him.  This is a vivid detail, but it is carefully set up across twenty lines of prose and self-consciously literary – it’s the kind of detail that Dickens or Balzac might engineer.  (Deleuze argues that Kafka’s writing is always about a “becoming-animal,” a kind of abjection in which the narrator or the characters become beasts, bestial, less-than-human; the literary detail involving the Pelz dragged as a kind of tail seems an example of this theme.)  

As the conscious mind reasserts itself, interpretation predominates over imagery.  The dream fades into its exegesis.  This process is very clear in the last lines of Kafka’s story.  “Betrayed,” the narrator cries out.  This word, repeated three times as a kind of mantra, is a label.  It is the word that Kafka applies to label his dream.  The word is interpretive and protective – it banishes the bad dream.   The word “betrayed” attempts to characterize what we have experienced in the story.  And, as is always the case, the label is completely inadequate to the tale.   The unnamed narrator cries out that he has been “betrayed”.  But the “betrayal” is deeper and more pervasive.  The narrator has “betrayed” his servant girl by leaving her to be raped by the brutal groom.  The physician has betrayed his patient by failing to treat him and by deceiving the dying man.  The dutiful workers compensation lawyer has betrayed his employer, the King of Bohemia, by not getting out of bed and going to work on time.  The dutiful Jewish son has betrayed his father by scribbling stories instead making a legal or mercantile success out of himself.  Kafka has betrayed himself by writing a tale that is unsatisfactory and that must fail as a narrative.  “Betrogen, betrogen, betrogen!”