by Joy Williams
A spokesperson for the City Council said all petitions concerning the smokestack were welcome but that the animal rights group’s intention was divisive and inappropriate.
Those people are practically terrorists, the spokesperson said. We’d be a laughingstock if we gave them the time of day.
The Sinclair operation mostly processed horses.
Satan’s Leathery Wing
31
The Lord wants to give a dinner party but can never come up with twelve guests.
Whatever steward He has at the time suggests many names, but the Lord can’t get excited about any of them.
At least the menu was determined long ago. There would be a mixture of fifty pure chemicals—sugar, amino and fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, all made from rocks, air, and water without any killing at all.
Society
32
She was a student of literature. She loved the life of the mind and languages, though she was fluent in only five. The thought of the world’s peoples thinking and feeling, quarreling and praying, in so many different languages humbled and delighted her.
In 1968, she traveled to the Soviet Union to visit with the great Pavel Naumovich Berkov, the preeminent specialist of eighteenth-century Russian literature. This was shortly before his death,
She met with him several times at his dacha at Komarovo, but tea was never offered.
Once she desperately had to use the toilet but was too shy to enquire after the facilities. After she left Berkov but before she walked the short distance to the station and the train that would return her to Leningrad, she relieved herself in the birch woods.
She was so shocked at the long, glistening coil of blond excrement that was produced from her body and lay as though it could be quite alive on the leafy forest floor that she abandoned intellectual life and lived the remainder of her days more or less in seclusion in Ithaca, New York, not far from the bridge from which so many despairing students jump.
Shaken
33
A much-admired artist was giving a lecture to a large audience. His work was known for its peculiar cold beauty and its intellectual craftsmanship. He was the recipient of many awards and honors. He had received the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei’s Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize as well as the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales. He was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Education and Culture.
In his own country, he had received awards from the Academy of Achievement, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy. In one year alone, he won the triple crown of appreciation and adulation by racing off with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
At the point in his lecture where he was saying that the representative element in a work of art is always irrelevant, that for one to appreciate a work of art one must bring to it nothing from life, no knowledge of life’s affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions and desires, he was seized by the most stupefying boredom that he had to leave the stage.
Irreducible
34
She was studying the works of Robinson Jeffers. She considered him a great poet of nature and the sublime. He was an inhumanist, utterly disillusioned with human civilization. He believed that Jesus was a well-meaning teacher whose doomed mission to save mankind through a gospel of love was based on the deluded sense that he was the son of God.
Jeffers built his house and his tower of stone with the aid of his twin sons on the wild cliffs of Carmel, California, and planted two thousand trees there. His wife, Una, was described (by scholar Albert Gelpi) as “the ground, the air, the matrix and inspiration of Jeffers’ creation in stone and words, wife, mother, muse, anima.” She died in 1950, and he lived on until 1962.
She wished she could find some writer that she could be that important for—a great writer, of course. She was attracted to writers. She knew people thought of her as an old-fashioned girl.
Over the Thanksgiving holidays, she went to a party and there were several writers there, all ancient, stooped, and a little hard of hearing but very sweet. One of them told her that he had visited Robinson Jeffers at Tor House with the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
“He was short, leathern and lean, with vague, slow-moving eyes,” the old fellow said. “The place was surrounded by ranch houses, lawn sprinklers, baby strollers, and painted ducks with wings that turned in the breeze.
“As we were about to leave after a desultory conversation, Jeffers said, ‘But you must see the tower! Una will take you. I’d go myself, but the climb has become too much for my heart.’
“And just then,” her new acquaintance said with a bit of a flourish, “Una appears with a bag of groceries. She gives us a piercing and entirely hostile glance and says, ‘Follow me then.’
“Over a beheaded hawk carved in stone, a great many pigeons are flying about. We pass under a low lintel, go up spiral stairs to a room showing no sign of human habitation. There was only the booming of surf and the cooing of pigeons. Mrs. Jeffers stands by, staring at us, says not a word, and leads us back down. Shaking her head, she disappears.
“Outside,” the old fellow went on, “we were accosted by children in Indian war bonnets brandishing plastic rifles.”
“This was in 1947,” he added.
Tragedy Has Obligations
35
An artist who had just won an award and was enjoying a nice midlife bump in her career was rumored to have died. The rumor did not, as they say, spread like wildfire, for she was not well known.
This minor incident affected her deeply and negatively, however. Her work suffered. She became obsessed with how her so-called friends reacted to this rumor of death. Did they cry? No one it seems had cried. But that was because, these so-called friends assured her, they did not believe she had died. There hadn’t been time to cry because the rumor was disproven so quickly. They’d been shocked, of course. Did they set right to summarizing her life and work with superlatives? Again, the answers provided were less than comforting. What did they really think of her anyway? If they couldn’t even tell her what they thought when they’d heard she died?
A so-called friend quoted from the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, this from a small red book he had recently discovered among what remained of his father’s things.
Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and the rememberer and the remembered: and all this in a nook of this part of the world.
The little red book had been a gift from this fellow’s mother to his father, both dead many years now, with no hope of coming back, and here she was, the artist, who had come back as it were and why wasn’t she more grateful about it or at least see the humor in it but she did not.
Just a Rumor
36
Penny had never liked the house and spent as much time as she could away from it. It fit her husband perfectly, however. He loved the open rooms, the little plunge beneath the palm trees, the shelves he had built for his many books, the long table where he and his friends played anagrams and poker. When he died, she accepted a position at a university a considerable distance away and rented out the house.
The new tenants adored it. They paid the rent promptly, planted flowers, and befriended the neighbors far more than Penny ever had. In front of the house they parked their three glorious vehicles—a Harley-Davidson, a Porsche, and a white Toyota Tundra.
They wanted to buy but offered a meager price. Penny’s price was fair, everyone said so, but the tenants mentioned the roof, the chipped clawfoot tub, the ailing mahogany tree that would have to be taken down, the foundation. There was frequent mention of the foundation. As well they spoke of the risk they would be taking—the possibility of hurricanes and dengue fever, the continuing poor economy. But they adored the house. This was where they wanted to be.
Penny found them irritating in any number of ways—they were ostentatious, full of self-reg
ard, and cheap. They also did not read. But she knew herself well enough to know that they irritated her because they had found happiness in a simple place where she had not.
A few weeks before their lease was up, they offered to meet her price, but she refused them.
After canceling the insurance, she returned to the vacated house. The rooms were immaculate. Even the glass in the windows sparkled. She went from room to room with a clump of sweet and smoldering sage. She tried to think in the language of blessing. Then, with the assistance of a few gallons of accelerant, she set all that had been the structure on fire.
Dearest
37
Even though our suspicions are usually aroused by those people who profess too much interest in saving the environment, people who harvest the water and the sun and so forth and maintain steaming mulch piles and kitchen gardens, we do on occasion visit the Lancasters, because oddly enough they give very pleasant cocktail parties. They had made quite a lush oasis around their home and were proud of the variety of wildlife that was attracted to it. They were also of the belief that birds wanted their privacy, and they strove to provide the illusion of privacy so that even with all the feeders and tree guilds provided, the birds were as invisible as God when we went over to visit the Lancasters for cocktails at dusk.
Our houseguest, who had been responsible for Victoria Secret’s water bra marketing fiasco of the decade before but still pulled down a good salary in retail, was astonished that the Lancasters would put up bird feeders where no one—neither the Lancasters nor the guests they were ostensibly entertaining— could see the birds. She said it was contrary to the very wiring of the modern brain, even the altruistic part of the brain. In her position of analyzing consumers’ habits and decisions, she took pleasure in attending seminars on the brain. She did grant, however, that there was a great deal about the brain and consumers’ buying and leisure habits—particularly consumers who owned their own homes—that she did not know. That was why hers was such a fascinating field.
The Brain
38
The child wanted to name the rabbit Actually, and could not be dissuaded from this.
It was the first time one of our pets was named after an adverb.
It made us uncomfortable. We thought it to be bad luck.
But no ill befell any of us nor did any ill befall the people who visited our home.
Everything proceeded beautifully, in fact, until Actually died.
Actually
39
The girl from the pharmacy who delivered Darvon to Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, wore a golden fish necklace.
“What does that mean?” asked Dick.
She touched it and said, “This is a sign worn by the early Christians so that they would recognize one another.”
“In that instant,” Dick writes, “I suddenly experienced anamnesis, a Greek word meaning, literally, loss of forgetfulness.”
Anamnesis is brought on by the action of the Holy Spirit. The person remembers his true identity throughout all his lives. The person recognizes the world for what it is—his own prior thought formations—and this generates the flash. He now knows where he is.
Buried in Colorado All Alone
40
She was a brilliant painter, really an exceptional, exceptional artist, and she suffered a lot of pain. She’d been in a car accident that injured her pelvis and spine, and although she initially seemed to recover from her injuries, her body was really broken beyond repair. She had numerous operations and amputations, none of which did her any good, but she continued to paint. At the end, critics point out, her work became looser, hastier, almost careless, probably because of all the painkillers she had to take. All she could paint was still lifes of fruits and vegetables. Even so, she insisted upon referring to these as naturaleza viva instead of naturaleza muerta. At the very end her attempts at painting consisted of only a few dabs.
Señor Xólotl
41
I was in jail for shoplifting. It was so stupid. Really, I must have wanted to get caught and I was. It was a ring.
But the point of my story is that there was a woman in my cell. She was there before I got there. I was afraid she’d been arrested for something heinous.
Are you acquainted with the Bible? she asked me.
If I had had something to pull over my head like a hoodie and be concealed I would have, but I didn’t.
I know the Lord’s Prayer, I said.
What about the Book of Q? she asked.
There is no Book of Q, I said.
Vanity, vanity, she said. All is vanity.
Oh yes, I said. That’s Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes just means one who assembles. Qoheleth was the assembler. So it is the Book of Q. Most modern scholars use the untranslated Hebrew name of Qoheleth, who was the writer. I bet you think vanity means pride or conceit, I would bet that.
Yes, I said. Sure.
In the original the word means “breath,” the merest breath, vapor, something utterly insubstantial and transient. Some translators even suggest the word means futility or absurdity.
Yes, yes. I don’t know, I said.
The Book of Q invites us to contemplate the fleeting duration of all that we cherish, the brevity of life and the inexorability of death.
Help, help, help, I thought. Please.
She stopped talking for a few moments. But still nobody came. Then she said, Chrysalis is the same as pupa, but the one word is so much more lovely and promising, wouldn’t you say?
Then she seemed to fall asleep and said nothing further. When someone finally did arrive, it was her they came for. They let her go first.
Jail
42
The Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg wrote a book called Heaven and Hell in which he describes the afterlife.
After dropping the physical body, souls transit into an intermediate realm where they meet dead friends and relatives.
Following a period of self-examination, they are compelled to go to a particular afterlife world—either a “heaven” or a “hell.”
Hell is unpleasant.
Heaven is more pleasant.
In heaven as well as hell, people work, play, get married, and even indulge in war and crime. Both realms also have social structures and government.
One may progress through various levels of heaven or hell, with the exception that one is never able to leave heaven or hell.
Pretty Much the Same, Then
43
They had been married for thirty-five years.
When the occasion arose, she preferred to use the word pantomnesia, he the term déjà vu.
She argued that pantomnesia has Greek roots meaning “all” or “universal”—panto—and “mind” or “memory”—mnesia—and therefore is a more technically accurate term.
He suggested that she was a snob.
She said that déjà vu simply means “already seen” and refers specifically to visual experience, when there is so much, so very much more in experiencing the unfamiliar as familiar.
He reminded her that they had had this conversation before.
Her Eyes Were Set Rather Close Together, Which Gave Her an Urgent Air
44
A doctor of veterinary medicine who adored cats and frequently treated them at the expense of his other patients, some of whom actually died for lack of immediate care while he was attending to the cats, was killed in a one-car accident while driving home at vesper time when he swerved to avoid hitting a cat and struck a tree.
The cat was inexplicably sitting in the middle of the road.
The Individualist
45
In 1994, in Beverly Hills, California, a former football star, O. J. Simpson, was accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a luckless young man who had gone to her house to return a pair of sunglasses she had left at a restaurant. The murders were particularly brutal. The woman’s throat was cut from ear to ear, resultin
g in partial decapitation. The young waiter, Ronald Goldman, also had his throat severed.
During the course of the trial, a molecular biologist and director of the nation’s largest DNA-testing firm, Dr. Robin Cotton, testified that the blood found near the victims could have come from only one person in 170 million people. That blood matched O. J. Simpson’s blood.
Further, blood found on a sock in Simpson’s bedroom was consistent with that of only one person out of 6.8 billion— more people than there were on earth at the time—and that blood matched the blood of Nicole Brown Simpson.
O. J. Simpson was, nonetheless, found not guilty and was acquitted of murder.
Courtroom analysts have concluded that most jurors find DNA analysis “boring.”
Numbers
46
Ted Kaczynski, who sent a number of letter bombs through the mail to individuals he believed were harming the environment through technology, hubris, and greed, was arrested shortly after two major newspapers in the United States, the Washington Post and the New York Times, agreed to publish his ten-thousand-word manifesto in their pages. Kaczynski, in his brief career, killed three individuals and maimed a few more with his bombs. He is now serving what is described as several life sentences at a maximum-security federal penitentiary.