Prine
“I saw a hundred thousand blackbirds just flying through the sky/
And they seemed to form a teardrop/
From a black-haired angel’s eye/
And that tear fell all around me/
And it washed my sins away.”
~ from “Everything is Cool,” John Prine
The critic Jayson Green and his wife experienced the most terrible tragedy when they lost their two-year-old daughter to a random accident. Green was telling John Prine that his song “Everything is Cool” was a kind of comfort to them at that time, as if their daughter was speaking to them from beyond.
But Prine explained to him that the song wasn’t written about death or even grief. “Well, there’s only two things,” Prine said “There’s life, and there’s death. So, it’s a 50/50 shot.”
I thought this was great, that Prine had reduced all the complexities of life to their simplest terms. But the more I thought about it the more I wondered if it weren’t even simpler than that. Every breath we take while alive brings us that much closer to death. So, aren’t living and dying one thing?
Campus
During the pandemic I didn’t have access to my office to retrieve my copy of Larry Levis’ posthumously published poetry collection, The Darkening Trapeze. A few weeks ago, I bicycled to campus. I saw no signs of life there. No cars in the parking lots, an eerie emptiness. A moose walked through the library parking lot, talking its time, as they always do. It’s not unusual for moose to be on campus. But now, there was a kind of strangeness to it, as if nature had taken back the campus, as if this were a post-human world, or a toxic zone, like Chernobyl has become.
Levis
I took a class with Levis, but there were only two people in it, so Levis said we would just meet in his office. The class was the Teaching Colloquium for graduate students. We met at his office late in the afternoon and Levis would just talk and we would listen. I don’t think he even mentioned anything about teaching. He just talked about literature, poetry mostly. I think he may have believed all teaching just sort of naturally radiated out of the teacher’s love and knowledge of literature. Levis talked past sunset, never remembering, or bothering, to turn on the light in his darkening office. It was like listening to a bed-time story.
Aisha meets Sontag
Aisha, my wife, tells the story of learning about Susan Sontag. A high school student, she and a friend were visiting the friend’s brother at Portland State and he gave them a copy of Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” from The American Scholar. She remembers the shock of not being able to understand a single sentence of it, yet felt its allure, power. She didn’t know what lay on the other side of that door but knew that she was walking through it.
Cancer
I was seeing a cardiologist for my atrial fibrillation. The doctor is reading my chart for the first time. He speaks English with a strong German accent. “Ha! he blurts out, “You do not have to worry about your heart, you will die from cancer!”
I haven’t wanted to write much about twice surviving cancer, less even than I am doing at this very minute.
We have a lot of trees on our new property and Tony was recommended to us to take care of them. He came out to give us an estimate and we liked him immediately. Later that same day we saw him at the beach donning his wetsuit for an early even surf session. I mentioned this to the neighbor who had recommended him. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “Tony’s a pro surfer. You should google him.”
So, we did, and, yeah, Tony is a sponsored pro surfer. But what caught my eye was the news story about Tony being attacked by a Great White Shark, right off the beach here. Luckily, he was paddling out with his legs up in the air. The shark just grabbed the board and swam off. The newspaper wanted to take a photo of Tony and his shark-chewed surfboard. But Tony wouldn’t let them. “I don’t want to be known as the guy who was attacked by a shark. I just want to be known as a surfer.”
Which is why I don’t want to write about cancer. Don’t want to be defined by that (even if I am).
Scientists examining the surfboard estimated the shark to be 16 or 17 feet long and to have weighed about 4,000 pounds.
Richard Ford
Ford famously spit on Colson Whitehead after Whitehead said in a book review that Ford’s characters are indistinguishable from one another, among other observations. This is a particularly punk move because Whitehead is much younger, much stronger, also Black, and could have squashed Ford like bug, but couldn’t really because Ford is too old. Ford is reported to have said, “You spit on my book, you spit on me.” Later Whitehead noted, “I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho, in case of inclement Ford.”
But: You spit on my book, you spit on me. As if he and his work are one thing. This is actually the opposite of our strategy in writing workshops in which we draw a pretend line between the work and its author and claim to be critiquing only the work. Which isn’t really possible, is it?
Ford also is known for having taken a firearm and shot holes in the book of another reviewer (Alice Hoffman) who panned him. He mailed the book to her. All this behavior is childish, of course. But, I don’t know, maybe there’s something here, something understandable, his unbridled blind passion for his own work.
∞
Photo from Josef Capski's notes on In Search of Lost Time made from memory as a POW in a Nazi prison camp.
