Work is not appreciated, we realize, even when mother asks, “how was work today?” The answer would repeat itself endlessly. I wrote down the data. I applied the labels and peeled the others off. I pressed the buttons for the numbers 11, 13, 5 and then 7. I grumbled. Office people gave me a candy.
I attempt to enjoy work because I do not enjoy the aftertaste of grumbling. To grumble is to scratch well beyond the point when it still feels good. When it happens, I try to follow each grumble back the the cave where it hibernates. Why does it sleep here? What will it do if I rouse it?
I grumble mostly to myself and feel foolish for biting my own palms. And when I grumble aloud I immediately feel as though I have tagged my own face with graffiti: I RULES, U SUCKS! That sort of impression never washes clean.
Notice, I never admonish myself for my own failures so quickly as I do others. What makes me so special? Occasionally I point out a mistake (mistakenly) and then feel it necessary to admit my own mistake. I would rather not own up to imperfection. Let others inventory their particular problems. I’ll keep mine well secreted.
Grumbling is seismic. The natives will attribute it to the displeasure of gods, but we all know it is something loose in the bowels of the earth rising up through natural vents. Morality has no part in this haphazard timepiece.
]]>As the cat tumbles over and around, centrifugal forces tug the cat’s ear, tweak whiskers and stretch the cat’s tail in a pose of openness. The relative trajectory exerts an internal influence, like a string pulled through the bore of a bead. But the cat cannot even tell if it falls backward along the path it lays or forward into an unfolding emptiness. The illusion, in fact, this inverted sense of upwardness and ascent, is the most invigorating aspect of the cat’s experience of unending now.
Being in void, the cat is without time as well. The cat cannot die, never tires or sleeps. Without air, the cat does not breath, but mimics the motion of filling the lungs, endlessly inspiring. Never exhaling. The cat’s heart forever compresses, forming a single unbroken beat. The eyelids never blink, but are caught on the edge of that surge of impetuses which precede a blink.
In that existential mode of thought through which fainter impressions may swim, the cat thinks, “I am falling.” Nothing else, nothing less. “I am falling.” Each portion in turn and together, without emphasis, hums on the surface of things, where echoes break upon themselves.
But the falling cat cannot fear emptiness and decline as one might after one of those nightmares which suddenly end all dreaming. To fear is to turn away from present investigation into graver tidings, and to turn away again in ignorance for the comfort of past convictions — like a fetus drowned in a vat of dark, tepid water, no longer shocked by its momentary exposure to weight and open air.
There can be no end to this cat’s descent just as there never was a beginning. The cat cannot conceive of an end to falling, and in truth, an end would be illusory. There is only this cat in void, falling, but content to fall.
]]>Tier auf Tier, Haba’s cool stacking game, called Animal Upon Animal in English. I think of it as my executive desk toy. One wooden crocodile upon which I try to stack 28 other animals. Get your sheep out early and hold your penguins to the end.
Umeboshi, the Japanese pickled plum. So bitter and salty not even bacteria will eat them. Forced myself to eat the first one and found myself craving more the rest of the day. Like heroine, my sister-in-law asked.
Zojirushi Thermal Cooking Pot. “Set it, and forget it,” is the catch phrase I like to use describing this device. Burn your BTUs getting your food to a boil and after a few more minutes, transfer the pot to a vacuum-sealed chamber. A few hours later you’re eating. Good for us bachelors who work all day and come home hungry.
Super Hit, the incense of champions. A friend brought some over and a few minutes after he left I had ordered a year’s supply. Like all Nag Champa incense sticks, burn it good if you don’t want it to fizzle out halfway through.
My guidelines were simple.
These last two guidelines need some clarification. Almost every writer has heard the platitude, show don’t tell. What this means is, rather than tell the reader Johnny feels sad, you show the tears streaking down Johnny’s face. Great advice. Showing encourages the reader to use more brainpower while reading. If done right, images evoke emotions and acts of interpretation. A really good writer doesn’t need to spell out all the undercurrents of a story.
I can remember reading Dickens a few years back. In a scene where a woman is about to kill herself by jumping into a river, Dickens never writes, and his characters never think (on the page at least) she’s going to the river to kill herself. The woman simply draws closer to the river, with greater and greater suspense as Dickens drew out the scene over several pages. Was she trying to kill herself? If so, would she balk? If not, would the people following her notice and stop her? That is what happens when you show.
But I’ve amended that suggestion, if possible, don’t show. This is a recognition of the limitations of the miniature form, but also one of the main reasons I undertook to write these miniatures. A really good miniature would have to do more than show. Like haiku, it would need to suggest. Going back to the fictional Johnny, you wouldn’t show Johnny crying, but might mention the crumpled tissues which fall on the counter next to a bottle of vodka as he pulls the wallet from his black slacks. To the reader this might suggest Johnny has been crying, perhaps at a funeral, and that he plans to drink himself blind.
The miniatures need compression. If they are to succeed as a story (if any of these do) the reader will need to unpack them like a suitcase.
This here is your god. Trifling, really. Two inches high and a bit wobbly. Poorly cut from a cool gray stone, I know not what. Your god has absolute power over all other pieces on the board. But its perfect love encompasses all, and it never shows favor or intervenes.
A glance tells everything.
There I ended my story, on the first line, and submitted it to Professor Brandeis, untilted. To write more, I explained, would destroy the integrity of the original idea. A decade now, he still hands out copies to his Freshman seminar.
Again, while walking by the river to buy coffee I revive the scenes, wishing I’d never watched the movie, that murdered girl. An actress acting, okay, but still. She could be lying in the weeds, toenails painted. Real… imagined, this path would inevitably lead to her story.
History’s long, but miles more deep. Take Uncle Shirley. He could talk you out of a winning lotto ticket, but who’ll remember Shirley Foster? Owned a business. Widower.
Another life, he’d turn back invading Visigoths with a bottle of brandy and a perfect toast. To Shirley.
Be thankful. You fit into a solid, regular space: physics, chemistry, biological processes which convert sugars into energy and the reverse. Madness may infiltrate your societies on occasion, but you continue dreaming, not knowing how.
I on the other hand, dangle from the fingertips of a frenetic fever victim.
Yoshiko folds a square of paper into her boat’s sail. “It’s blank,” she cries. “It needs words.” This she directs to me, the master of characters. “Daddy!”
Bending to her iron command, I hug my knees and blow into her ear every word I know, both terrific and terrifying.
Hair, skulls and severed limbs were discovered in gutters and drains around the murderers’ affluent neighborhood. At least seventeen missing children were identified. One mother cries in disbelief. “Police say we should breed fewer babies.” I switch off the receiver before the story continues.
The text of this book was set in Nuc Para 7. Designed by Wiloert Blightly from a true dream, it exhibits metamorphic emergence, arising from the semiotic incongruities in its line form. From one logical mutation to another, the reader is subtly introduced to an alien transliteration of human words.
That plank of melancholy on the buoyant sea unfurled blank sails. Gathering breezes in its nets, it crossed the course of natural currents. We who abandoned the cursed wood haunt deep caves far inland. Centuries hence and our captain, still lashed to the wheel, commands us. SAVE OUR SHIP.
Having never set eyes on a salamander, I can taste, from the name alone, its slick skin and the stillness of its pose even to the slits of its unblinking eyes. From one association to another, as always the salamander skirts beneath the leafage before I catch a glimpse.
Ben took one left turn too many.
Four wild dumplings in the forest foraging for fuel oil left in a doodle, afraid to deprive the depraved lathes of their fiery freighter. The fritters fled, with prognosticating lumps in their unfried hearts, knowing all the while how they were fated to meet a thin, wise owl.
Twin engines flared. Spectators fled as the fuselage fell unnaturally close overhead. The twisted metal sculpture with a ruptured fuel line (only that) flashed white.
They called it, henceforth, the Dodo’s Egg. As you see, the monumental failure still stands, here under shadows of passing jets, and still draws a crowd.
Lemuelle painted solid spheres of wood. Later, in his twenties, he began engraving. Dragons, eels and demons curled across the stone and metal surfaces. He dug deeper. Hollowed centers. In his workshop, an inverted and exploded globe sat unfinished, secrets of its making buried beneath the earth among bones.
]]>Truth being obscure, human sense strikes a flat tone against the diamond surface of reality.
So why am I surprised? Things can’t be undone. I am late, she leaves. I sit in the pretense of the absence of something lost: a woman, her love… why not a unicorn’s bones?
The past weeks I’ve struggled to claim the parking spot in front of my apartment. I occasionally have trouble since I’m located next to a gas station, and my particular curb is close to the store entrance. I can’t relax until my truck is in its place, because I know when someone parks in a place they’ll want to park there again. I don’t want to encourage parking spot interlopers.
So Friday I flipped open my window shades to keep an eye on the curb as I washed dishes, ready at any time to move my truck from behind the gas station. In the hour I waited I managed to clean the apartment quite thoroughly, and never managed to sustain any lasting anger. The grumbles would surface for a moment, but they just didn’t have any legs.
Finally, with my truck secured, I could settle in for the day. It seemed a good opportunity to listen to a dharma talk about equanimity which I had downloaded from a podcast. Ah yes, I was thinking, I was being equanimous today with the parking situation.
Then I went to update my podcasts, and the program deleted the very file I was listening to… as I was listening to it. No, Hey, I’m going to delete these files, are you sure you want me to do that? Just, whisk.
I started yelling at the computer.
The computer looked back upon me with equanimity.
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