I saw a coyote on my run tonight. Here are three clear photos of the coyote and one photo of a cryptid
I am trying something new. I keep an Instagram and I love it as I love all photosharing programs but I don’t put all my photos on it because it is a social platform and I don’t think the people who follow me there are prepared emotionally or spiritually for the volume of photos I take. I am thinking of sharing photos here as well. Let’s see if I like the effect. Here are three from today: my Solstice face, everything directly to my left, and a lizard with a pleasing shape.
Something is Coming and Wants to Get By
I won’t talk about my childhood yet because if you describe something wrong or incompletely then you have done something terrible to your relationship with it—at least your word-relationship with it. And my childhood is the real center of my self, the absolute garden, from the outside bar-shaped, torso-shaped, and within a very beautiful wave of gold and green and pale purple whose shapes I will not talk about. You’ve got to wait until you’re more certain of your power to talk about things this important.
Sometimes I worry that I’ll die before I’ve ever really talked about this space which is the center of my body and my mind. It is my real identity and I want people to know it (not because I’m longing to let people see it but because I don’t like being misindentified). But stronger than my worry is my certainty that you’ve got to be a magician before you can say the magic name. I’ll wait. Maybe the shape of my work will become the shape around the garden and you will never see the interior. I guard myself closely.
I will tell you one thing now. When I was little my mother used to read to me from The Random House Book of Poetry for Children a Treasury of 572 Poems for Today’s Child selected by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Arnold Lobel. I have it on the bed by me here. The dust jacket’s spine is pretty shredded, in the soft round ruins you get when your cat puts its teeth in paper without chewing. My mother read me lots of things and this collection isn’t the only thing. It’s important, though. I am telling you now that my favorite section in The Random House Book of Poetry was the spooky section called Where Goblins Dwell.
The collection is divided into themes—nature, nonsense, city poems, etc—and I liked poems all over the book, but Where Goblins Dwell was so much my favorite that it made my nerves smart, I mean physically, to think about anyone wanting to read anything from the sections on either side of it (Alphabet Stew, poems of wordplay, and The Land of Potpourri, lighthearted miscellany). I feel this way now. I have always been pretty good at following and guessing other people’s feelings but at thirty three I still find it almost impossible to believe that other people want to hear about anything besides magic. To me it is so primary that I almost can’t conceive of a human life whose main hope and focus is something else besides the other thing.
I look now at Where Goblins Dwell and I am a little surprised at how many of my favorites when I was a child were poems I was deeply, actually frightened by. I don’t mean cozy-scared (which is how I felt about Jack Prelutzky’s “The Bogeyman”) but unsettled-by with a kind of dread.
I think if my mother knew how extreme-ly sensitive I was to this particular feeling or maybe to every feeling then she wouldn’t have read me these poems or any poems. As an adult I had to focus to feel a moment of what I felt when I was little hearing “Some One” by Walter de la Mare:
Some one came knocking At my wee, small door; Some one came knocking, I’m sure—sure—sure; I listened, I opened, I looked to left and right, But naught there was a-stirring In the still dark night; Only the busy beetle Tap-tapping in the wall, Only from the forest The screech-owl’s call, Only the cricket whistling While the dewdrops fall, So I know not who came knocking, At all, at all, at all.
It was the definitely numinous sort of dread I felt, which is a kind of longing. I felt the normal stone-dread hearing WH Auden’s “Song of the Ogres”—at least my normal stone-dread, the kind I sometimes triggered on purpose, a big and black feeling:
Little fellow, you’re amusing,
Stop before you end by losing
Your shirt;
Run along to Mother, Gus,
Those who interfere with us
Get hurt.
Honest virtue, old wives prattle,
Always wins the final battle.
Dear, Dear!
Life’s exactly what it looks,
Love may triumph in the books,
Not here.
We’re not joking, we assure you:
Those who rode this way before you
Died hard.
What? Still spoiling for a fight?
Well, you’ve asked for it all right:
On guard!
Always hopeful, aren’t you? Don’t be.
Night is falling and it won’t be
Long now:
You will never see the dawn,
You will wish you’d not been born.
And how!
For no biographical reason whatsoever and entirely by intuition I had a very clear idea of what an ogre really was, and what it meant for an ogre to say those things to you. It’s interesting now to think that both Walter de la Mare and Auden would become crucially important to me when I was a teenager—I guess they are ghosty, too, like me. You could try to argue with me that Auden is analytical and wry and midcentury, the anti-ghosty, but I’m afraid you’d be so wrong you wouldn’t be worth talking to.
There was one poem in the bunch that I found actually intolerably frightening—hot and bad for you to touch—and that was e.e. cummings’ “hist whist”:
hist whist little ghostthings tip-toe twinkle-toe little twitchy witches and tingling goblins hob-a-nob hob-a-nob little hoppy happy toad in tweeds tweeds little itchy mousies with scuttling eyes rustle and run and hidehidehide whisk whisk look out for the old woman with the wart on her nose what she’ll do to yer nobody knows for she knows the devil ouch the devil ouch the devil ach the great green dancing devil devil devil
I could hear the wrong grin it’s written with, and anyway it is a very successful poem and does what it’s supposed to. I didn’t like devils or witches when I was little. I had a very clear idea of what Other-Things I liked, and I was certain that the things I liked belonged to a distinct category apart from devils and also apart from knights, although I couldn’t have named the category for you then. I could name it for you now.
You know, e.e. cummings was important to me as a teenager, too. That’s not unusual for teenage Americans. I guess most Americans who like poetry go through a cummings period, the way Auden’s generation all went through a Keats phase. “buffalo bill’s” was such a fixture in my mind when I was in high school that I had the habit of saying it to myself over and over in my head during passing periods, which were crowded and unpleasant.
I didn’t like dread exclusively—in fact dread has never been my favorite kind of ghostiness, only the most available—and William Allingham’s nearly perfect “The Fairies” was one of my favorites:
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home—
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
All night awake.
By the craggy hillside,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn-trees
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig one up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
It’s a shame about that cute second stanza—otherwise you almost can’t believe that only one person wrote it. It feels worn-down like a folk song.
I loved, very much, “Colonel Fazackerly” by Charles Causley, and my vocabulary was permanently changed by the anonymous folk-poem “Three Ghostesses”. There is one poem which I didn’t love the best on the whole, but whose final line is most important of all—“Something is There”, by children’s-poet Lilian Moore:
Something is there
there on the stair
coming down
coming down
stepping with care.
Coming down
coming down
slinkety-sly.
Something is coming and wants to get by.
This is vital information if you want to talk about the Other thing, or about poetry or art—the thing that is coming has its own purpose and is aiming for it.
One Hundred Thousand Fireflies Taught Me How to Write Short Stories
I have just learned of the death in 2021 of Susan Anway, who sang 100,000 Fireflies. I am moved almost beyond saying.
I learned to write in 2007 when I was seventeen. I had decided when I was sixteen that I would certainly be a writer and although I had been writing with most of my energy since I was twelve, having made up my mind at sixteen I began writing with all of my energy and all of my time. When you are very young you learn very fast, and it was in my first very serious year that I really started writing what I would presently call stories. I have never moved so quickly from one state to another.
I had a study hall period the year I was seventeen—big frigid room, astounding number of silent teenagers. One unpleasant adult like a buckle at a table at our head. White-white windowless light and my fingers were always purple. I made up an exercise. I think I thought I was becoming precious about editing. So my exercise was this: I would write without stopping from start to finish each study hall. I’d write a story for the length of each song on my playlist and when the song was done I would start a new story. As soon as I got home I would type everything. Spellcheck but no alterations.
I was unhappy in high school. By 2007 my classmates and old friends looked at me with pity and contempt—I was supposed already to have failed. I had contempt for them too but I didn’t want it back. I saw nothing for myself in the future. I had no sense that anyone would like or care about my work: but I was unhappy because I was thought badly of, and because I was lonely; I didn’t care whether people liked what I wrote or read it. I was like Orphée getting gods-music over the radio. I was also like a man building a table.
I had a funny idea of stories. I read To the Lighthouse in school and On the Road on my own. These comprised my idea of air-shaped storytelling. I knew I didn’t like a story with a Beginning Middle and End. Once or twice I read stories in Granta but none made any impression. Only by luck or the hand of God I escaped reading Miranda July or Tao Lin or any of the other internetcute no-shape authors of the 00s. I think they would have had too powerful an effect on me. It’s important when you are young not to like things which are popular right then. They hit you with the strength of other-people, your desire for love, your desire for friendship, all of that.
After a couple of months doing my exercise I got worried because I wasn’t writing about people anymore and I didn’t want to. I was worried that I didn’t like people and that this would make it impossible for me to write stories. I said something about it to my mother. “They are getting pretty abstract,” she said, meaning my stories. I showed her all or most of what I wrote.
I was unhappy when I was seventeen but also I was forced by desire. I mean desire gave me a vital force. And love, and life-drive. In general in my heart and body when I was seventeen I felt a wave-tall straining forward. I did not talk to my classmates anymore outside of school. I stayed up too late every night. I can’t remember ever doing homework. I worked very hard.
I watched a lot of movies: I ordered them in the mail and I went to the Pickwick in Park Ridge and some big theater in the city where you could see mainstream foreign movies, like Mesrine in 2008, which honest to God features a prison escape where the hardcore main character takes the time amid shooting and rioting to cut a full-on man-sized mouse-hole-shape in the prison fence—so French bourgeois that he doesn’t want to snag his prison uniform on a merely sliced fence. Amazing. 2008 was a terrible year for French movies.
So I was doing my exercise in school, then working on my big projects all evening and night, and I was very sad, and I was filled with feeling, and I had read a pick-and-mix of fiction, none of which was new, and I was watching films. I liked when movies became suddenly constrained and distracted at the very end and went off without talking to you.
This is how I heard 100,000 Fireflies. I mean that this is the state I was in when I heard 100,000 Fireflies. I will tell you about this song now, and about Susan Anway’s voice.
There is a pink hazy wall of phonecharms. The harness-bells block of toy sounds that I liked about The Magnetic Fields. And Susan Anway, whose name I didn’t know then, with a voice like a paper streamer. She is singing like a doll, but not with the kind of porno naivete Serge Gainsbourg liked, which is what I normally think of when I think of frail female voices. This big pyranine-level room of playful color and Susan Anway’s voice singular in it. The lyrics open with some funniness about playing exotic instruments—goofy image you are not meant to take seriously. Then you learn that she is singing about love, and the music goes crafty-twinkly—but solemnized with a one-key-at-a-time rise and fall, a level glance. A call-and-response bing-bong bridge: then the important part. The end of the song. An up and down piano wave, an electronic drum, and Susan Anway’s life-and-death voice. She says three things, thoughts rising in a series like they do when you’re done crying or done having sex, and you are looking up and not really talking to be listened-to:
You won’t be happy with me, but give me one more chance; you won’t be happy anyway.
Why do we still live here in this repulsive town? All our friends are in New York.
Why do we keep shrieking when we mean soft things? We should be whispering all the time.
The words are sent off the wavy music and that’s the end of the song. Those final three lines, monumentally important, delivered off a fully-colored body of music on their own, holy with human singularity—this was the shape I resolved into for my stories. I had been thinking for a long time about the rhythms of movies, and I had an immediate, easy teenage response to music, and altogether I knew by sight the shape of the stories I wanted to write. I am as moved now as I was then by the image or idea of one human person moving off a vivid field of experience onto an invisible and entirely private plane. Maybe it is my primary concern as an artist—obviously I can’t know. At any rate I remember the gravity of my heart as Susan Anway’s voice rose off of everything else. I am amazed to think it belonged to a human and not to a thought in my head. God bless her. Godspeed.
Six Stories I Think About
An image or a line which is in reality a small rock or a sea-glass—which is not like a small rock to one reader but which is of its own power a smallest-unit of uniqueness—is a real artifact of art. It is a real shard off the meteor, so to speak. This is the good sound below art; this is the thing underneath Something Made Up. This is what I want my art to be. I want my lines and maybe someday even my drawings to be perfectly singular items, machine-heaving with their own uniqueness, sub-atomic. Folk songs get to be like this with almost no effort. Yeats did this over and over again. A thing so absolutely itself that it is almost anonymous. You almost can’t see it because it is so itself, like the Tao or the way it is difficult for some children to think about the sky.
This is the goal. You can only get there with immense labor, though maybe not much work, for a long time. You really have to be at it. But there is another, lesser spot, still good—and that is when a work of art becomes like a small rock: it sticks around amongst your events and in your mind so long that your experiences wear it down and it becomes rather a personal meme. Here are six stories which have become that to me. They have remained in my mind and amongst my thoughts for one reason or another and now they are icons in my head. I don’t like all of them. That’s not the point.
- Gimpel the Fool, Isaac Bashevis Singer. A simple man is taken advantage of by his neighbors. He comes up to the point of revenge. This is a theme which is of great importance to me. I love Saul Bellow’s translation—I like the way Saul Bellow talks. So I have no means of knowing if I like the sound because of Bellow or because of Singer.
- The Shared Patio, Miranda July. The narrator watches her neighbor seizing. She lives with a strange warm barrier between her mind and her experience of other people’s bodies and feelings. I haven’t read this in years but I think about it all the time.
- A Small Good Thing, Raymond Carver. A child is killed suddenly and for no reason. The grieving parents are harassed by a baker from whom they commissioned a cake they have never picked up. I have narrated this story more than once, beat by beat, over coffee. People are always amazed.
- The Second Bakery Attack, Haruki Murakami. A couple robs a McDonald’s. I think about this story literally every week of my life.
- Poe Posthumous, Or the Lighthouse, Joyce Carol Oates. Edgar Allen Poe spends his limbo as a lighthouse keeper. At first he is pumped about it. He looks out at all the horrid underworld sub-life on the beach and thinks “I’m glad I’m not out there”. I wonder if you can guess what happens next! I fear all the time that I am Edgar Allen Poe in this story. Can’t find this one posted online.
- The Red Cocoon, Kobo Abe. The protagonist has no place to go, so with a pinch of imagination and a whole lotta postwar ennui he builds his own home. Can’t find this one online either.
I Hate Genre Painting
Every day for all my life I encounter and dismiss the pose which runs “haha modern art is bad”. Every part of it is gibberish, from the personality which undergirds it, to the crazily misapplied language, to the fact that at the very latest this is an idea got from approximately the year 1954. You’ll find it all over the political spectrum, especially amongst Americans, because rather than having to do with preference or interest or beliefs it is the expression of a smug, half-drunk pride in worse things—down-home things, like-folks, nobody’s-better-than-anybody else.
It is an attitude which is frankly and literally Nazi, and there’s not much more to be said about that—the originals in the game, breathless over Campbell’s Soup Kids and derisive of Chagall and Picasso. There are facts about art, and one fact is that the pure and subtle line, athletically controlled, restrained, is better in all ways than the squishy and decorative. Picasso is superior in skill, attitude, aesthetic and choice to a Nazi-commissioned painting of a grinning family at haying time.
This is so clear a boundary that there’s almost no need to say it: if you find yourself agreeing with Nazis, you’ve got to reevaluate your sensible faculties. Here is a position which causes me more concern, because it is better at talking about itself—the political alliance with the Renaissance. A casting-back to a time of balance, sophistication and beauty. Make no mistake: it is the same mind which makes this comparison. The person who in his heart prefers the pink-faced Northern genre painting of the child spilling his breakfast beer is the same person making soft overtures toward the harmony and sanity of Renaissance art compared to the degeneracy of the present day.
When I tell you about this, I will tell you three important facts—
1. The Renaissance as an art period is representative of decadence rather than flourishing; it is the tail-end of a movement and not the great height
2. When Renaissance art is beautiful it is asymmetric, odd and fine, not gargantuan, pleased and hot-faced
3. The people who appeal to Renaissance art for political ends do not like Renaissance art, cannot correctly interpret it, and are substandard lookers in the first place (that is, worse at looking than their betters)
Demonstrating this will be a little pokey, because I will need to show you clearly that the people who think they are talking about Renaissance art are really talking about its worst qualities, swollen over time and typified centuries later in the distillation of error called the genre painting. It is hard to argue with people who are basically confused about terms—you spend a lot of your proof laying out definitions, and risk looking confused yourself.
I hate the homely and the affectedly folkish. At one time I dismissed the people who love it; today I regard them as my enemies. They are not only subliterate visually but an active danger to art in all its forms, and for all that their position is at this point literally antique, they are continuously reinvented. I will talk more about this soon.
NB: genre painting, especially the kind I reference here, is not a Renaissance phenomenon—but the people who invoke the Renaissance for political ends are in fact more interested aesthetically in the failures of art which find their best expression in Northern genre work of the late 16th century and after, (and whose spiritual precedents are the intellectual weaknesses of the Renaissance) than they are in any actual achievement of the 15th c.
Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei
Agnus Dei, Francisco de Zurbarán, c. 1635-1640. San Diego Museum of Art (California)
In honor of Easter Weekend, following is an excerpt from my long-delayed chapbook about animal-human transformations in art. If I can arrange for even modest distribution, I will print it this summer.
Hatch of feet, 2 back through 2 front. Shadow up neck, little hedge of shadow. Neck straightened along the table, jaw nearly flat to surface, smiling mouth tucked over, the long wilted slope of the nose—the flesh of the nose beneath the flesh of its bridge; the bridge extends further than the flesh of the nose.
Looking at the light on the forefoot I recognize the painterly shorthand of strokes—before then it had seemed to me, overall I mean and in impression, like a Dutch still life, like Dutch realism. Zurbarán has more to do with slimily wet clay, fine mud from a lake’s floor than he has to do with glassine realism, cold hard hyperreality, realistic—I am referring to Dutch realism—in sense that 80s Japanese airbrush art of fruit breaching out of water is realistic.
I am looking now at a St Francis in Meditation. The weird smokey haze around his hood, like burnt pan submerged in water, shapes softened by darkness, receeding into darkness: sea glass.
Back to lamb. Its archaic smile, pulled up by the architecture of its face, like a drawing in which the brows and bridge of nose make one line, picassoid. Neck out like a dinosaur along table, and as I have said before mouth goes over edge of table. Rolling on throat so that eyelid is a canopy to the surface of the table rather than leaned back along it.
Jaw and chin and throat immediately below head are turning on the table like an unsteady object leaning back and forth as it comes to rest. Never before fully appreciated how whole, of a piece, the shape of a sheep’s head. The eye turns down in its head because the bone of the brow slides from forehead to eye socket smooth as an O’Keeffe angle of sand.
On the whole, a heap of lamb like a slouchy BoHo bag swung onto this ambient desk. I have told you about this mouth which has so often affected me. A mouth at the end of a throat-shaped whole-body. You think of how his lip feels turning his head as he does. Now his jaw and throat are on the mysterious table: the tongue is made firm and packed in the mouth. When he turns his head his lips, wide and half-exterior like a cat’s will touch the table, whatever it’s built of.
Offramp
This is a fairy tale about Southern California
Kelly walked out on a hot day. At the end of the road there was a house being rebuilt. Its driveway was turned up into corners of big gray stones. On the sidewalk out front lay two construction workers. Kelly crossed the street to give them space. One of the men lay in total sleep. He was stretched like a rabbit in a Dutch painting, with his feet long and his neck entirely extended. The other man was awake on his side, an arm triangulated for support, and he watched the screen of his phone, which was propped on its little snail-foot on the concrete. Kelly could see the blue pool through the house’s living room.
As Kelly rose slowly in the sun, past homes and their flowers, she heard a muted drumming. Down a street of houses, with horselike speed, there was a galloping animal. Its four feet curled off the road as it came. It was a coyote. Kelly paused. Its coat was Bowie-colored, burnished, clean and high. Its ears went straight up. Its mouth was open, like a human pressing its tongue to its side teeth. It swerved like a cyclist when it came near Kelly. Its head looked at her as it passed. She understood that it was afraid and that it was suffering.
The coyote moved up the hill which Kelly had meant to take. She did not want to make the coyote feel as if it was being pursued. She took the long way to the underpass.
The heat increased its pressure. Kelly stood at the light beside the offramp, waiting for the walk sign to show. The cars from the highway came down brightly. A boy’s voice called out, and when Kelly turned she saw that it was the coyote, approaching from the underpass. It looked at her like a runner with sweat in his eyes. “You were kind to me,” said the coyote. “I’m going to reward you because you were kind and didn’t chase me. If you’ll find something for me, I’ll give you a treasure.”
The coyote waited. Kelly thought, It looks exhausted. She had the sense that the coyote wanted to sound as if it were doing her a favor, but that it needed her help. It had gone up the hill, considered, and had come back for her.
“Let’s go,” said the coyote.
“You can’t cross yet,” said Kelly.
They waited for the walk sign to appear. They crossed the offramp together.
“A witch stole my face from me,” said the coyote. “I need you to get it back from her. She’s near here. Can you get it?”
“I don’t know,” said Kelly.
“You could just go in and get it. It wouldn’t be hard to find. God, it’s hot.”
“She lives nearby?” asked Kelly.
“Very close,” said the coyote. They walked along the busy street. “You’re going to get it for me, right?”
“I have no idea,” said Kelly.
“It’s my face,” said the coyote, but it was as if it was talking to itself. “I need it.”
They came to the end of the block and the coyote said they should go around the corner, behind the liquor store. On the back of the liquor store there was a big yellow banner: PSYCHIC HEALING. There was a set of stairs to a door on the second floor.
The psychic’s apartment was dim and gray and mostly empty. The psychic stood before Kelly like the blood in her body had not distributed itself yet. Her eyes were squinting. She told Kelly that she read fortunes and did energy healing and then she listed prices. There was a table and a couch and a tv on the wall. There was a galley kitchen and a blender and a microwave. There was a shut door with one sound of shifting behind it. There was a set of low shelves: a little pyramid in jelly rainbow layers, diminished by matter like dust; long smashed paper boxes of incense sticks; a Guadalupe candle; a closed drawer. The psychic saw Kelly looking at the shelves and she reached out and lifted a box of incense. “I also have things for sale,” she said.
“Do you have candles?” asked Kelly.
“Yeah,” said the psychic. She pointed at the Guadalupe candle.
“Do you have Lazarus?”
The psychic looked at the Guadalupe candle like maybe she had misread it. “Yeah,” said the psychic again, unsure.
Kelly asked if the psychic could check for a Lazarus candle. Okay, the psychic said. Also cash only, the psychic said. The psychic opened the closed door and Kelly saw a red plush blanket over the lump of a person, turning on a mattress. The psychic went into this room and closed the door and began to move things.
Kelly opened the drawer on the set of dark shelves. The handle of the drawer was soft with dust. The drawer was full. A great buttery smell of coconut. A postcard of a lucky Buddha. Kelly put her fingers into the pile of things to page through them: immediately beneath the postcard she touched hair like a horse’s neck, and although she felt horror she lifted the lucky Buddha and she saw the coyote’s face. It was small as a mask and its eyes were empty. White water line, black hard nose. It was flat.
The door opened. “What are you doing?” said the psychic.
“I’m sorry,” said Kelly. She pulled out the coyote’s face clumsily. “He needs it.”
“What?” The psychic was still holding the box of incense. She had a candle in the same hand as the doorknob. She looked confused from a great distance, like a dissatisfied person on a hill.
“I’m sorry,” said Kelly. “Sorry.”
Kelly left while the psychic said Hey. Kelly hurried down the steps, which made a lot of noise.
The coyote told Kelly where to drive. It sat on the passenger seat, so Kelly had to buckle the belt behind it to stop the safety bell. It held its face flat against the seat of the chair with its front foot. Kelly drove for a long time. The coyote explained how to get the treasure. “I’ll take you to a red cave. You’ll find a silver chain on the cave floor. Lay the chain on the table nearby and your treasure will appear.” The last town came to a gradual end.
It was late afternoon when they arrived. It was a nature preserve. There was a water bottle filling station beside the parking lot. Kelly put her head under the tap and got water on her nose as she drank.
“I can’t go the whole way with you,” said the coyote. It took its face in its mouth and walked some minutes with her into the nature preserve. The ground was wavy. There were very high stones, nubbled pillars in tall shallow alcoves. They seemed like sections of cave excerpted from the indoors and brought out for display. They arrived at a very short ridge, only the height of a step: an edge of land scalloped by water in the winter, and a wide white arroyo where the water had been.
The coyote put its face down. “Keep walking until the rocks change shape. Look for the cave in a red rock. It’s not really a cave. It doesn’t go back very far. You’ll see it. That’s where it is.”
“How long do I need to walk?” asked Kelly.
“Not long,” said the coyote. “The sun will still be out. You probably should have brought water.”
The coyote took up its face and left, a hill of animal hurrying away from Kelly. It went up a rise, into a thatch of creosote, the pebbles of its coat color rolling behind the creosote’s arms, and it swept behind a set of stones and was gone.
Kelly crossed the arroyo. The stones changed. They reached and leaned in eccentric boxes and elephant shapes. Kelly did not think she would find the cave or that it was real. High above, the pillars reappeared, grew massive, then diminished into shelves of mushroom-hatted stones. Down a slope, in a wall that was red like sauce on a chicken leg, Kelly saw the half-planet impression of a cave.
It was cool in the shadow of the cave, but it was not dark. This place was not wide, and it was clean. There was the silver chain. It was bright as if it had been polished. The walls of the cave were pocked with wind marks or snake holes. Kelly felt as if someone dear were there. There was also a cool terrible loss.
The silver chain had the look of a bracelet, fat flat links, but overbig. A link was the size of her palm. It was very nice to touch. Unwieldy, but not too heavy to lift. There was a red promontory in a shape like an ironing board. She laid the chain there. She tried to pour it down in a smooth and doubled line but it juddered, blocked in her hand and then falling in too quick a series. It hit the stone with a big soft jangle. It was like preparing the bed for a sick child. Kelly looked at the floor when she moved back because she was afraid she would stagger on a rock. Her heels along the ground made brushing noises.
The light did not change but it was as if on the ironing board a form became apparent out of some total darkness. It was a form where everything had seemed to be one shape. Then it was a form different from its table. Kelly experienced a grief in reverse, an amazing grief at the return of someone who had been lost. Its arrival was the completion of its having been away. The form became its own before the strange light which was a light in her mind distinguished its portions. At an imprecise moment, before the shoulders were articulated, before its knees or exactly its head, Kelly saw and understood the body of a man asleep.
House of Sleeping Beauties and No-heart
This was my first time reading House of The Sleeping Beauties. I bought it sometime last year but the timing was poor, since I’d just had surgery and was reading it while insomniac and full of stitches, and eventually had to put it down halfway through. I’ve just read it through now. I think it is the most perfect book I’ve ever encountered.
There is a theme in Kawabata which I’ve never seen dealt with as accurately or as cuttingly elsewhere, of people with extremely heightened aesthetic and sensual abilities, hyper-able to appreciate and study beauty, who are also completely without morals, and who mistake their genius sensitivities for goodness. I guess you see Europeans taking about this, but since Europeans fundamentally dislike and distrust beauty you can’t take them too seriously. Kawabata loves and understands beauty and clearly detests the men who replace their morality with aestheticism.
I like Kawabata for many reasons. Principally I love his technique. I am like a Kawabata protagonist in many ways. By biological settings and by cultivation I am extremely, painfully sensitive to sight and touch and all the animal gifts by which we interact with our atmosphere. What I seek in fiction is creation and sustainment of atmosphere. It is what I admire. It is what I enjoy. For me, it is the absolute art, to which all other author’s-arts aim. Kawabata is the great master of developing and galvanizing an atmosphere. I have never seen anyone better. In this story Kawabata smacks the scene and it begins to spin, deep dark and lovely and evil, hovering above earth, and doesn’t stop spinning until the last few sentences, when it blows up and kills you.
Here’s an interesting thing, and it is the impetus for my writing this. When I’d finished the story and blown up, I wanted to read the intro. My understanding was that the intro was written by the translator, Edward G. Seidensticker, who I admire enormously and whose translation of Genji I have also read. But I was puzzled reading this intro. Very prettily written, very clear-minded, and yet, apparently, missing the mark completely. “Does not impossibility of attainment put eroticism and death forever at the same point?” it asks, and claims that reading this story one “knows with the greatest immediacy the terror of lust urged on by the approach of death”, and ultimately concludes that the story paints an unusually vivid image of life. This seems to me the opposite of Kawabata’s mind—a mind in which the main character is depraved beyond self-awareness, beyond life, beyond death, and at once supremely capable of sensual appreciation. He is not an icon of the man near death (and in fact literally isn’t near death; it is important to the story that our main character is a man of early old age participating in something designed for men of actual senility)—he is an example of a man who has died morally and lives ghoulishly on. His eroticism is half-human. Could Seidensticker have translated so beautifully and yet so direly misread the story?
Well! Come to the end of the intro and see the name signed: Yukio Mishima. Mishima! I say that so often. I say it like Jerry Seinfeld saying Newman! Mishima, my demon brother. Mishima is the man Kawabata writes about. No man has ever lived who has been more able to write about the body and its sweetnesses, and no man has ever been more morally barren. Mishima was a fantastic, phantastic presentation of a man who was able to walk and talk and write while already dead.
My copy of Beacon Quarterly #14 arrived in the mail yesterday! It features my short story “The Dweller”, which is about the Health Museum and a lamassu.
Elizabeth Atherton 