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[...] Two nights after the dream of my grandmother, I dreamt (I was in a spate of dreaming) I was hiking with my parents in a valley. It was so dark that everything looked gray, with trees as darker shapes and rocks as light shapes. Ahead of us, suddenly, we saw a pair of glowing red eyes amid the gray. We thought it might be a bear but realized it was a mountain lion, and it had seen us. The three of us ran as fast as we could up one of the sides of the valley and found a watchtower made of stone with an apartment in it. No one was in the apartment, but it was very well stocked. The mountain lion arrived soon after, prowling at the door, which was made, for some reason, of plexiglass: the bulletproof kind in jails and twenty-four-hour bodegas. I found, in the kitchen, a cleaver, which I broke off from the handle so it was like a razor on both long edges. I cracked open the door and bounced it, like a toy, and the lion, like a dog, caught the fragment and was instantly cut. Blood was produced from the back of its mouth, so much that I worried I had killed it, but mouth wounds heal quickly. The mountain lion, which had collapsed, got up, and was a changed being. I had made it submissive. In my dreams, I think I can conquer death.
I want to demonstrate it for you more clearly. We’re sitting in the restaurant, and I have an air of sad expectation. I revert to silence, which is the most basic form of agreement, of disallowing any distance to emerge between the two of us. Oliver tells me he’s thinking about quitting a group he’s a part of. I am relieved. The group has the right intentions, but something about their process has always seemed off. I support their goals—basically good political goals—but I’ve never been able to get on board with the optimism that political work requires. I say, Bernie’s too old, and my statement is both true and disappointing. I disappoint myself by saying it. Oliver doesn’t seem to need to say that sentence to himself. But now the group’s affinity for internal drama is getting to be too much; it always knocks its knees as soon as it’s getting started with real work, preferring meetings to protests. They are a group that always says, “This is what we want to do,” and the pleasure is in announcing intention.
A couple months ago, I went to one of their meetings. Beforehand I’d asked whether, at the meeting, we would talk about a big piece of policy that had passed that week. They told me that that day’s agenda was full, the scheduled presenters had been waiting for months, and they would arrange something about the policy for a future meeting. To me, this was an unforgivable mistake; it’s more important to talk about what’s at the top of everyone’s mind than to honor the hours spent making PowerPoints. Oliver is losing faith that they will spring into action; I think the group has a lot to fight for, but it’s not personal enough for any of them.
is this DSA lol
A couple’s ambivalence can be held between two people: we both feel a little of each side, but one person is yes, and the other one no. When we first started dating, we said, We’ll date for a long time, and then we started on that long time right away. Back then, we thought maybe we would get married on our fifth anniversary. That was tonight, and neither of us brought marriage up. This is part of why I was silent, but I gave myself away by crying. When we left the restaurant, I still hadn’t clearly said why.
My friend Timothy has a genius way of teaching his students to write. He assigns them three hundred words about something or other and writes alongside them, in class. One student writes a particularly lame essay. It’s written very neatly, sentence after sentence with no cross-outs. Unrevised sentences are like molecules of ice; they form a suit of armor by being recited, one after another, holding experience in. Timothy shows the student his own copy, which has a million cross-outs and carrots and a doodly diagram in one corner. “Make it look like this,” he says, waving his hand around his own piece of paper, and the student automatically becomes a better writer. The stiff bonds holding the sentences in neat order are dissolved, and the student’s writing flows like water to fill the cave of the reader’s imagination.
I keep going back and revising this story, hoping that the tensions that hold us still in our relationship will dissolve. I walk past the restaurant a couple weeks later to see the orange color of the light again. If I can understand the things in myself that make me prefer silence to talking, I think, things will change of their own accord. This piece of writing is not meant to preserve a moment for posterity, but to take a memory of a dead moment and make the timbre of that experience speak through it, like a microphone.
MY DAD TELLS A STORY about my mom. They were swimming together in Lake Michigan, after the sun had just set, so there were no lifeguards, and they could swim out to the buoys that marked the end of the sandbar. My mom swam out ahead of him, and then stopped swimming forward, treading water, far past the point where her feet could touch the bottom. She was staring at the horizon. My dad says he saw something in her eyes, some kind of suicidal resignation, and had to pull her back toward shore. This story was used to illustrate the depths of what we (he and I) don’t understand about my mother.
I can understand this better than most things about my mom. When I want to be alone, I close my eyes and imagine myself plunging into a pool. Other people have a way of inhabiting my mind. I get their voices, and lines from my conversations with them, lodged in a nook, providing voice-over for everything that happens to me. Under the surface, with the heaviness of water on all sides, it is impossible to imagine myself combined with someone else. My mind, temporarily, unmerges. The cost of the clarity found in this solitude is nihilism: a recognition of death—from the feeling of drowning—and the sense that everything is arbitrary. From this, I derive a perverse sense of power, as if all the details of my life are laid out in front of me like a deck of cards, which I have the power to reshuffle. Last night, I turned my back to Oliver and imagined myself plunging.
Lyons and IDEO’s design-driven project aimed to solve the alleged problem of insufficient “competitiveness.” That problem, as stated — and the changes Gainesville instituted to address it, including beautiful graphic design, better web resources, and that friendly new office called the Department of Doing — had at best a tenuous relationship to the experiences of many of Gainesville’s poor and Black residents. Although the plans were intended to boost Gainesville’s economy on the whole, they did not create affordable housing, eradicate food deserts, or raise high school graduation rates. They didn’t address those for whom “competitiveness” seemed a distant problem. They seemed to leave much of Gainesville behind.
I have time now to think about what has happened to me. I am undergoing chemotherapy, with radiotherapy to follow. The doctors are optimistic and have decided I have a good chance of coming out of this alive, but of course I know that, ultimately, nobody gets out alive. A strikingly clear and simple thought has occurred to me: illness is a matter of life, not of death. What matters is how we comport ourselves as we walk away from the last home we live in.
In retrospect, the trip to the city had been a ridiculous idea. After all, the beginning of the beginning of the end had started on a trip to New York. On the train, he tried to engage Miranda with complaints about the departmental budget cuts, but all she wanted to talk about was this wonderful Wittgenstein she was learning about in her college course. ‘“Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? In use it lives. Is it there that it has living breath within it? Or is the use its breath?”’ she said, an eager sheen in her eye. ‘Well?’
‘I didn’t think I needed to respond,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem to have to do with real life at all.’
‘Maybe when you say you didn’t think you needed to respond, you didn’t need to. Maybe I needed you to respond.’
‘Is this still philosophy or do you just talk like that now?’
‘Jesus, Bill.’
‘What?’ He looked at her looking out the window. From the side, her lips were two red jelly beans. He could absolutely bite them. This was real life: lips like jelly beans! Historical facts! He was a man of events, not ideas, a historian, a knower, not a philosopher. ‘We’ll be there soon,’ he said.
‘When is soon?’
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘When you imagine soon, the word soon, what do you see in your mind? When is it?’
‘I feel like I can’t say anything without it becoming a fucking discussion anymore,’ he said.
‘Lucky we’re going to a play then,’ she said. They didn’t talk for the rest of the ride.
lmao
He’d assumed she really was sick, therefore settling on a dapper exit to cheer her. ‘Promise you’ll make sure my little girl gets home safe,’ he said smarmily to the cab driver. It was a wry little joke that had always gotten a good-natured chuckle from a stranger the first time he was married.
But this time, the driver looked at him gravely. ‘I promise you, sir: I will take care of your daughter.’ Douglas tried to explain the irony – the husband, overprotective to the point of fatherliness, though of course he wasn’t actually anyone’s father – but the cab driver just kept saying, ‘Your daughter is in safe hands, sir.’ Later, when he came home, she pretended to be asleep, and the next day he couldn’t make her admit her own pretense. Another time, they visited Ramona, and it was all a very nice afternoon until she began crying on the way back. He asked why she was crying. ‘Because you don’t know what I mean even when I mean what I say,’ she said.
looked at him gravely ... brutal
For a long time, Douglas had wished that he was the sort of man who could derive pleasure from the thought that Miranda was now with an ugly man. He could tell people that he used to be married to Miranda Shelby, the Wittgenstein scholar, and now she was with an ugly man. But the truth was, he didn’t even understand what she meant by with her. He only knew what it meant to be without. And to be without her was to see her always, as if the very symbols of his misery had married themselves to the designs of life. It was for the world never to answer his pleas.
But should he see Miranda now, he would know finally what to say. If a man becomes better too late, he’d ask, was he worse than if he never got better at all?
‘Never mind,’ she said, and sipped her glass of gin, a glass full of silvery ice and magic. The sun was dipping down toward the horizon and as it did the drinkers rose to their feet and moved out toward the dock in ones and twos. Gertrude and Purdy were almost the last ones to follow. They stood watching as the sun’s disk touched the horizon in a little notch between the trees, as it sank slowly out of this world and into the next. Gertrude thought of strangers awakening with the sunrise in another world, this world their dreamlife. Her and Purdy and all the others on the dock were characters in a dream on the other side of the world, things that needed to be expressed or worked through. The sun slipped lower and lower, a dome of orange light and then a slit and then, almost like a sigh, the sun was gone and the dense Florida night descended all at once. The drinkers on the dock all applauded and the Christmas lights lit up on the railing.
And that was it, pretty much. A few half-remembered moments: some driving, an argument, another bar. Some violent dream that a person on the other side of the world needed to have, some bad brain chemical, a residue of injury or accident. Purdy and Gertrude players on some unconscious stage.
weird but kinda pretty