My Cabinet of Wonders: a Report from AWP '15

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A Wunderkammer is literally a cabinet of wonders, kept, in this case—a special show at the Minnesota Art Museum--by one of the Habsburg emperors. It housed collections, starting with, but not limited to, natural objects.  The Habsburg’s included, for example, Montezuma’s crown (bastards).  The Habsburgs ruled Europe for 600 years. Wunderkammers were precursors to museums.  I too am partial to things. I collect fountain pens, black and white photographs, but mostly books.  I collect words, but in a certain order.  Welcome to my Wunderkammer.

While at AWP in Minneapolis I saw two three-legged dogs in one day.

I saw a scraggly grey-bearded man playing Don Mclean’s Vincent on his accordion on the Stone Arch Bridge.  A song that in and of itself will break your heart but particularly so if you don’t have any cash to drop in the man’s bucket, which I didn’t. 

Later that day we went to the art museum where I stood in front of Van Gogh’s The Olive Trees and, once more entranced by his universe, which so seldom seems ours without his help.  And Aisha told me that physicists discovered that Van Gogh’s swirls and eddies match the famous Kolmogorov statistical model of turbulence, generally considered the last unsolved mystery of classical physics.

Reading with Alaskans, feeling like a fraud (again).  Our friend Peggy reads our friend Eva’s poems because Eva is too sick to travel.  Somehow Peggy’s reading them drove home Eva’s absence, Eva’s illness, everyone in the room struggling to hear her words and not think about her health. Dance from dancer.

My student, now a professor, introduces me to her students thusly: “This is person who has been important in my life.”  I see two other students from my past who hold PhDs but don’t have full-time work. May God forgive me.

I chatted with Francine Prose who I haven’t seen since taking a class with her in 1987.  Thanked her for some advice she gave me.  About life, not writing.

I wasn’t going to buy any books.  Then I was only going to buy as many books as the number of my own that were sold.  Then I just started buying books, despite earlier convictions.  See Works Acquired.

I bought Mike White’s Travels in Vermeer and began reading it.  That same day I went to the museum where I was stunned to see Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  It was a one painting exhibit with the stature of a religious shrine.  Vermeer who left 35 paintings, 11 children and a bankrupted household when he died suddenly at the age of 44 in 1675.

Aisha and I were out to dinner at a very upscale French restaurant.  During dinner we received a phone call with unexpectedly wonderful news.  The kind of news that is intensely private and one can only pray for with no expectations of success.  We ordered dessert and my wife’s plate had a beet on it, which seemed odd.  The waiter would inform us that this was a pear marinated in red wine and trilled, “You thought it was a beet!?”

I won a book in a drawing at the bookfair.  The book is called Scattershot by Amy L Eggert and each of the books has been shot, literally, several times with a .22 caliber rifle. 

During the conference I walked across the Mississippi River six times.

This is sentence from Erika T. Wurth’s Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend: “He sewed into my skin with his delicate freckled hands, reminding me of a time my auntie, Jakes’ mom, had taught me to peyote stitch beads, before his family had become born again.” Woman. Can. Write.

The photography collection was amazing and included the Shomei Tomatsu photograph of a watch dial stopped at 11:02 when the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.  The dial is centered in the frame, the only image in the picture.  Imagine a quarter on an 18 inch by 18 inch off white background.

Three moments from the reception.  1) A woman arrives with the friend of Jeremy’s.  An acquaintance, Jeremy corrects me.  When the woman discovers we are mostly from Alaska she asks if we know Liz Bradfield.  You just missed her, I said.  They are poets in Provincetown who once read together.  Liz is a beautiful human, she says.  True.  2) The end of the party is always the most fun: Alysse re-enacting her star-struckedness when face-to-face with the awesomeness that is Anne Carson.  3) Then, when it was only Sherry and Aisha and me, I read aloud from Samantha Irby’s Meaty until the tears from laughing so hard blinded me and we were all convulsed in laughter and crawling on the floor. Seriously, that’s how funny Irby is.

Networking is verb I find particularly unappealing.  Couldn’t the Germans (Wunderkammer!) have a word for meeting with old friends from different periods of your life and taking great pleasure in seeing them?

Works Acquired

Monica Berlin & Beth Marzoni, No Shape Bends the River So Long (Free Verse Editions)

Ian Bostridge, Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Knopf)

Jane L. Carman, Tangled in Motion (Lit Fest Press)

Samantha Irby, Meaty (Curbside Splendor)

Amy L Eggert, Scattershot (Lit Fest Press)

Debra Monroe, On the Outskirts of Normal (Engine Books)

Jeremy Patacky, Overwinter (University of Alaska Press)

Andrea Spofford, Everything Combustible (dancing girl press)

Michael White, Travels in Vermeer (Persea)

Michael White, Vermeer in Hell (Persea)

Erika T. Wurth, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend (Curbside Splendor)

Photograph by Cinthya Soto in the Minneapolis Museum of Art

“Reach Up:” Karl Ove Knausgaard on Writing

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About ten days after my travels a small unexpected package arrived in the mail from, of all places, Alaska Airlines.  Inside was my copy of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 1 which I had left on the plane in Salt Lake City as I hurried off to make the connecting flight to Calgary.  I realized this nearly instantly in the terminal but I didn’t have a spare minute.  Besides, I had finished the book.  My only regret was that I had marked three of Knausgaard’s passages on writing for further contemplation and I knew that in order to find them again I would have to reread the whole book. And that wasn’t going to happen.  I was still debating whether I would go on to read Book 2, of the proposed six volumes. Much less reread Book 1, as much as I liked it.

So, I was very happy to have my copy back and delighted (word chosen carefully) that Alaska Airlines had returned it unbidden: so  . . . civilized. 

Here are the passages:

You know too little and it doesn’t exist.  You know too much and it doesn’t exist.  Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.  That is what writing is about.  Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself.  There, that is writing’s location and aim.  But how to get there? (192)

Our minds are flooded with images of places we have never been, yet still know, people we have never met, yet still know and in accordance with which we, to a considerable extent, live our lives.  The feeling this gives that the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without opening to anywhere else, is almost incestuous, and although I knew this too be deeply untrue, since we actually know nothing about anything, still I could not escape it.  The longing I always felt, which some days was so great it could hardly be controlled, had its source here.  It was partly to relieve this feeling that I wrote, I wanted to open the world by writing, for myself, at the same time, this is what made me fail.  The feeling that the future does not exist, that it is only more of the same, means that all utopias are meaningless.  Literature has always been related to utopia, so when utopia loses meaning, so does literature.  What was I trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do—what on earth do I know?—was to combat fiction with fiction.  What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out, for in a way I would undoubtedly have a better life, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t something had congealed inside me, a conviction was rooted inside me, and although it was essentialist, that is, outmoded, and furthermore, romantic, I could not get past it, for the simple reason that it had not only been thought but also experienced, in these sudden states of clearsightedness that everyone must know, where for  few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before . . .  (Ellipsis: Knausgaard’s) (221-222)

. . . the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot’s description of Orpheus’s gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was in some way above the trivial and in many ways wretched lives we lived , but what I learned was that our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them.  You just had to reach up.  (330)

So, the third passage is more about reading, but the advice—Reach Up—works for writing as well.  Thanks Alaska Airlines.  And, yes, I will be reading Book 2. 

Owning Books, or Am I a Hoarder?

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It is indisputable that I own too many books, although simultaneously I believe one cannot own too many books.  But I do have more than I can put on shelves, more than my home and office can hold, and many of my books are “stored” in the garage.   A topic for another discussion is why I don’t use my Kindle.  But for now I admit: I have a problem.  I have agreed, in theory, to get rid of three books for every new one I acquire.   This pledge (which is pretty much all it is, so far) has been approved of at home.

So, I realize that I have two copies of many books.  This is understandable, right?  You have a teaching copy of this or that, both a hardcover and a paperback of a book, a gift of a book you already own, a 25 cent copy at the library sale that you couldn’t resist. Many are the reasons I can rationalize for owning two copies of single book.

Then, I realized that there are also titles of which I own three copies.  Can this be justified?  Well, I can justify it to myself, but probably not to you.  But let’s look at the titles of these thrice-owned texts and see if there is any rhyme or reason to it.  It’s not a long, nor surprising (to me), list:

The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald.  Actually there’s an edition of this I would like yet to acquire, with notes by Mathew Bruccoli.

Walden, or, My Life in the Woods, by Thoreau.  My paperback Riverside edition from graduate school is the one with all my notes in it.  I consult it often.

Mt Analogue, A Novel Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventure in Mountain Climbing, by Rene Daumal.  I have the first hardcover English version translated by Roger Shattuck.  When I acquired it in the early 1970s it was the only one in print in English.  I also have a copy in French (symbolic).

Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry.  The newest one I acquired has a new intro by William Vollman which necessitated its acquisition.

Starlight and Storm: the Ascent of the Six Great North faces of the Alps, by Gaston Rebuffat.  One at home, one at school, and one recently gifted to me by the great Bernie Wood, book aficionado, collector, hoarder, and friend.

Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier.  Didn’t realize I had three until I found one by accident in the garage.  But I do love this book.  One of my copies is a first edition that I paid pennies for.

Cascade Alpine Guide: Climbing and High Routes: Volume 1--Columbia River to Stevens Pass. Volume 1, Fred Beckey.  First edition, revised edition, climbing partner trimming his library.

Yosemite Climbers Guide, George Myers.  Yeah, I have three of these, too.  I also have two of Steve Roper’s Yosemite guidebooks, both the red and green covers, and a couple Supertopos.  Plus, Tuolumne Meadows which is also in Yosemite National Park. 

When I think about it, none of the books on this list is a surprise.  The situation is precisely as it should be.

Just to check, I searched out an on-line Hoarder’s Quiz on the internet.  This was not a goofy buzzfeed quiz in which they ask what kind of chocolate you like and then tell you your life-expectancy (91 years, by the way, WOOT!).  No, this was a “real” test on some mental health website.  I took care with the answers, and gave the most honest responses I could arrive at.  The result: yeah, “High Risk for Compulsive Hoarding.”

(Photgraph: Jeffrey Vasseur's shelf in his office at Valdosta State University.)

St. Anthony, pray for us!

My aunt, now in her mid-eighties, is recovering from a fall.  A gust of wind blew her off a porch and numerous bones were broken.  Some time after this, she began asking her nieces and nephews what items in her house might we like after she was gone, or seriously down-sized, whichever might come first.

I had no real interest in participating in this exercise, not just because I couldn’t bear the thought of it (which I can’t) but because I myself have begun the process of down-sizing.  At least in theory I have so begun.

In any case, I want very little in the way of new material things unless they are related to skiing, or black shirts, neither of which one can ever have too many.

But my wife says, I have always loved that statue of the saint up in the apricot bedroom.  And I think, that thing weighs 50 pounds, how are we going to get it to Alaska?  That’s a discussion for later.  

The statue itself, by the way, features a tonsured and robed saint holding the Christ child.  I have never understood the logic of this, Christ predating said saint by a mere millennium, plus or minus a hundred years or so.   But, as I was told of many of my many theological questions as a Catholic schoolboy, “It is a divine mystery.”

So I tell my aunt, yes, we are interested in the statue.  “Oh,” she says, St “Anthony.”  We had always assumed it was St Francis of Assisi, but no, St Anthony, of Padua.  I should add here that we already have a family heirloom of this nature: a statue of the Infant of Prague, known by my son when he was young as The Infant of Prod.  Close enough.

“That came to us from Pat Delaney,” my aunt recalls.  “Mr. Delaney owned the diner a few doors north of the bakery [that my grandmother owned and above which they lived] and he was, like us, one of the few Catholics in town.  When Mr. Delaney decided to shutter the doors and move in with his sister in Chicago, he brought mother a package, wrapped in butcher paper.”  My grandmother said, “Well, I’ve seen you’ve brought me St Anthony.”  She didn’t know why she said it, as she couldn’t have known what it was in the butcher paper nor that Mr. Delaney had ever owned such a thing, but neither she, nor Pat Delaney could have been more shocked: she by what he had brought and he by what she had said.

St Anthony is the patron saint of lost objects, lost people, lost causes and “even lost spiritual goods.” I would like a clarification on this last item, but I see none forthcoming.  He is also the patron of no fewer than 29 other causes, among them, amputees, swineherds, and Tigua Indians, just to give you a sense of his range.

The original lost object associated with St Anthony was a book.  A book, pre-Gutenburg, was valuable enough, but this book was annotated by Anthony and the comments were invaluable to him. He prayed for its return and preached about it, and indeed, the thief, for it had been stolen, returned it.  A lost book, with annotations, is a lost cause to which I can relate.  If divine intervention was necessary, I understand completely.  Yes, whatever it takes.

After Anthony’s death his tongue was preserved in a reliquary (but, of course!) where his body was buried, a tribute to his oratory talents.  When his body was exhumed thirty years after his death it was found to have turned to dust.  The tongue, however, the tongue was said to be glistening with moisture (saint spit?).

So, someday, in the future, distant I hope, we will reunite St. Anthony with the Infant of Prod.  Meanwhile I know of more than a few lost causes and I am praying to him for a little intercession.

Iowa City Days

I was transported back to the year I spent in Iowa City by the experience of reading John McNally’s hilarious satire of the writing workshop life, After the Workshop.  Among McNally’s targets are writer’s envy and block, drinking, and posing.  He gives his characters invented names, but the reader will feel he recognizes a few of them from life, and this, of course, is a guilty pleasure.  But the setting is “real,” the real Iowa City, its bookstores and bars, which I know, and its Olympian workshop, of which I know only the myth to which McNally’s portrait adds.

            One time my wife and I were at Prairie Lights, one of the great independent bookstores in the country, when we saw that one of my favorite writers was going to be reading that very night.  We had our oldest son with us, third grade at the time, and somehow bribed him into attending.  On the way up the stairs to where the reading space was I ran into an old friend from graduate school (I won’t identify him by either name or genre, but this is otherwise not intentionally fictional).  This was at least ten years since I had last seen him and we were now many miles from Utah where we had been students together.  Things were already going bad for him before we all left Utah.  He married, and divorced in a matter of weeks during grad school.  He suffered dire health problems that required a kidney transplant, but promised no guarantees.. I never knew who actually graduated and who didn’t; it was hard to tell, there were so many steps in the process.  And I didn’t ask now.

            He continued to tell me tales of woe, not in a self-pitying way but more in a this-was-what-has-happened way.  In truth, he didn’t seem like the same person at all.  I remember him cashing his student loan and hopping on his motorcycle and making a beeline to Wendover, Nevada to play blackjack with every last cent.  I remember his work appearing in prominent literary magazines. His gorgeous wife of a few weeks.   Now he was living in some small town, sleeping on a couch in his mother’s basement.  He had completely abandoned writing.  Words, he said, don’t make sense to me any more.

            I was depressed by this chance encounter and mystified at what I might do to help him, not that he was asking.

            He went to the reading, too.  For some reason, the writer was not happy to be reading.  She was almost hostile, particularly in the question and answer session after the reading.  The whole night was depressing, and, after that, I never saw, nor heard of, my friend again.  And seeing the writer in person poisoned her work for me and I haven’t returned to it.

One time I was watching my youngest kid playing on the playground that is right down town in Iowa City.  I noticed that the adult sitting next to me was a writer I admired who taught in the Workshop,.  I introduced myself, told him I admired his work.  We chatted, watching the kids.  In the end we agreed that he should come visit at the campus where I taught , a small state school across the Mississippi in Illinois, two and a half hours away.  We set it up.

            He arrived late, but happy.  We went out to eat where he ordered an enormous steak, easily the most enormous steak I had ever seen, and he insisted on leisurely eating every bite.  We were late to the reading.  Halfway through the piece he was reading he grew unaccountably bored with the story, stopped abruptly, and said something like, “Let’s just talk.” It was very strange.  And after that night I never saw him again either.

I was in a restaurant downtown, waiting to rendezvous with my wife midday while our kids were in school.  She was in graduate school and I was commuting back and forth between Macomb and Iowa City.  It was hectic time.  I don’t recall the name of the place, down on Linn St on the south end of downtown.  It had large plate windows facing the street. I noticed Frank Conroy, the director of the Writers Workshop at a window table.  He left the restaurant before the woman he had been eating with.  From the sidewalk he stopped in front of the window where his friend was still seated and kissed the glass, passionately, in front of her face.   Then he walked off, smiling, scarf trailing in the breeze.   I never saw him again either, but that was because he passed away not long after.  His writing, I am happy to report, is as lovely as was the man himself.

Liberty Ridge, Revisited

The north side of Mt Rainier, the upper Carbon Glacier where the bodies of six climbers last week found their final resting place is one of the scariest places I’ve traveled.  I’ve been there twice, both times in winter, in the mid-1970s a few years before Liberty Ridge was anointed one of the 50 Classic Climbs in North America.  In the winter on the north side the sun barely rises over the mountain and the daylight, such as it is, holds a bluish arctic tint, shadowy, until dark.

The first time we were there we got caught in a white-out high on the Carbon.  The snow was heavy, the visibility non-existent and the tents precariously located in a heavily crevassed area.    That should have been enough to have prevented me from going back.

But I went back one more time in the winter.  On that occasion, Denny Cliff and I made it to Thumb Rock rather easily. The slope above it was diamond hard and we could barely get a crampon point to hold.  The hell with it.  The photograph I have from that trip is one of Denny winding his way through a serac field on the Carbon, the serac a good forty feet tall.  I remember the creaking and groaning of the ice and how quickly we moved through it, scared to death every minute.

I have been thinking about the party who were swept away there.  There is a kind of false security when you’re on a ridge climb: you say to yourself that the ridge is protected from avalanches, sort of forgetting that you’re rarely on the ridge proper.  We’ll never know exactly what transpired. May they rest in peace.

Michael Ybarra wrote a piece on his climb of Liberty Ridge (Alpinist 43) that was really haunting. One of his partners was so utterly depressed by the experience, its brutality, his frostbite, that he gave up on climbing forever.  Ybarra himself did not give up, but would fall to his death from the Sawtooth Ridge in the Sierra during a solo traverse.

I haven’t gone back to Liberty Ridge, but I did go back to Mt. Rainier and summited it by its most popular route, twenty-five years after I first climbed it.  It’s a glorious place, providing, of course, the weather is good and you acclimate okay.  I rather doubt I’ll climb it again, but I do entertain hopes of hiking the trail that circumnavigates the peak, The Wonderland Trail.

One more thing about Liberty Ridge.  On the way out the first time we ran into a party of guys intent on the Willis Wall.  This was January.  One of the guys in our group knew some of them and we chatted about conditions and weather.  The tone of our conversation light and carefree now that we were off the glacier and were only hours from the cars. They knew a couple other guys also climbing on that side of the mountain, Al Givler and Dusan Jagersky.  As it transpired Jack Lewis, Scott Baker, and Tom Boley went on to do a first winter ascent of some variation up there on the Willis.  And, I think Al and Dusan were successful, too.  We had missed the window of good weather by a couple days (thank God, I think now!).

The next year I had become friends with Lewis and Baker and we went in a group of five up to the St. Elias Range where we managed the second ascent of the north ridge of Mt. Kennedy, a 35 day trip accessed in and out on skis.  The trip of lifetime, I thought then, and do now, 37 years later.

We were on the ferry heading back to Seattle when we heard of a climbing accident.  When we got back we heard it had been Al Givler and Dusan Jagersky who had perished on Mt. Crillon.

This summer I am heading to the Sawtooth Ridge in the Sierra, a place I always think of as benign.  But, obviously, it isn’t.  If I hadn’t just reread Michael Ybarra’s Liberty Ridge piece I would have forgotten that was the scene of his last climb.

The  popular climber’s on-line Forum Super Topo has been down for maintenance for few days.  Its placeholder reads simply:

“Climbing is Dangerous. Climb at your own risk.”

Maybe they should just run that for a few months.

Remembering Larry Levis

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If there is only one world, it is this one.– Decrescendo, Larry Levis

A Larry Levis poem in the New Yorker, now, eighteen years after his death.  Like a star long extinguished whose light is just reaching us.  I guess that’s an easy metaphor for all the writers who continue to be read after they have left us.  The “new’ poem sure reads like the Levis I knew, but when I read it, I think of Levis the man, not so much Levis the poet, though these roles cannot be disentangled.

I remember hearing about his death:

The phone that never rings at this time, on this day, rings now.  True to its unlikely timing it’s an unlikely voice.  A friend, who is a poet, has heard from a friend, also a poet, that Levis was dead.  Poets in death as in life singing each to each.

I can’t say we were friends exactly or that I knew him very well.  A poet’s poet.  Some of those will have this impulse I’m having and dismiss it because others still will do it better.  And they will.  Good writing wishes to occupy a surface, implying a massive seven/eighths beneath its waters:  This is just the tip of the iceberg, baby.  But this writing isn’t like that.  This is the full extent of it.  Close to all there is.

When I first taught creative writing as a graduate student, new teachers were to attend a colloquium with the director of creative writing, Levis.  We met a couple three times, that many of us, in his office in the evening.  Levis slouched in his chair and spoke softly in fading daylight about poetry.  He talked about “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Williams wading in the pond holding up by the arms a child dying from diphtheria.  After that “The Red Wheelbarrow” would not look the same to me, and a thing once known cannot be unknown again.  He talked until long after dark, never turning the light on.

I was talking with a colleague about the human price of writing.  I remembered an interview with Clapton who had no memory of ten years of his life save for the songs he had written and recorded during that time.  He believed it had been a fair bargain.  Which, I don’t suppose, is the same thing as saying you’d do it over again.  I told my friend that Levis had once been in a writing workshop with Lou Reed.  She said, “Imagine that: two heroin addicts in the same workshop.”  I hadn’t known.

 In our Salt Lake days my wife and I and our friend Skip would eat breakfast together on Saturday mornings and between Skip’s apartment and the restaurant we passed Levis’ house.    One morning in winter, there was Levis standing on his front porch, in a tee-shirt, barefoot in the snow, smoking a cigarette.  The blue tarp over his motorcycle flapping in the wind, ladder leaning up against the side of the house. When we told Skip he just shook his head, “The rest of us are just kidding ourselves, aren’t we?” 

Skip and I had previously agreed that owning a ladder was a marker of manliness. A marker neither of us possessed.  Skip lived in a small apartment and his distant friends, non-literary types from places like Long Island and San Diego visited him there.  One time his guest drank too much, while Skip, under some deadline or another, toed the line of moderation and wrote late into the night.  His friend woke out of a dead drunk sleep, raised his arms above his head as if in triumph, announced, “I am Levis!” and passed out instantly.

Once Levis and I were in the same aerobics class.  We went with our wives and were the only men and least coordinated members of the class.  Levis and I in the back row.  Levis rolling around on the mats laughing at his own awkwardness, the impossibility of it all.  Aerobics with your wife might be a marriage saving gesture.  But for Levis it didn’t work.

I was reading my work in town with a poet.  A sponsored event, readers chosen by juried submission, in a grand setting–hardwood floors polished to a high gloss and carafes of white wine on the Arts Council’s tab.  I was nervous even though, truth be told, I probably knew most of the people in the room.  When Levis appeared I was shocked/flattered and almost simultaneously realized he was there to hear the poet, who was to read first and had been his student.  At the intermission he apologized for having to leave.  “I can’t stay, David, but I’ll buy your book.”  I believed him, too.  But the book took another twenty years and Levis has been gone now almost twenty and I myself am ten years older today than he was when he died.

It comforts me to imagine that he knew how much we all admired his work, even though I, for one, never told him.  Never asked him to sign one of his books for me. No, I was far too cool for that.  I think back to the last time I saw him: but I can’t begin to recall it.  How could I?  I didn’t know then, whenever it was, that it would be the last time I saw him.  I feel foolish, like the last person on earth to realize you can’t know a thing like that at the time: that that was the last time.  Right up against it, the sheer irreversibility of time is surprising, its cruel linearity.  With a little distance it all becomes ordinary and what had seemed a revelation loses its power and becomes once again, a pop-culture sentiment, a line from James Taylor: “thought I’d see you one more time again.”

 I am reminded what a silly exercise it is to read a writer’s work after his death and recast it all in that light.  Death or something like it inscribed in every line.  How could it not be so in a collection called The Afterlife?  Could anything be more obvious than that great artists understand the facts of their own mortality? 

Of course, Levis contains multitudes.  Just as many of his lines are inscribed with life.  I imagine all the words and images in his work, thousands and thousands of them spinning on a great whirling lotto wheel, slowing down and stopping with his last breath on what line, what word?  Would that it came to rest on something like the opening of “The Quilt”: “I think it is all light at the end; I think it is air.”  Would that he were right that time.

I heard they found him at his desk, at the scene of writing.  I heard he was in the bath.  I heard three days before they found him.  I heard five.