On a good writing day I’m lost. Not lost in the full force
of the day’s movement forward but outside of it, when suddenly a poem or a
story will cause me to drop out of that stream of time – under water or up in
the air, there is no correct analogy, but it’s out of time. You’re in that
place that has no centre except whatever coheres as you. Today a line from David
Foster Wallace story my memory paraphrases as and whatever had happened never thenceforth mattered. Or is it a
quotation? I am working on a story today that depends upon the reaction of a
boy’s father after he himself gets lost.
Often I am nostalgic for the
days when each new poem was the poem
and each new story was the story. Now
I am fine with potential failure or of never finishing, knowing more will come.
You must write the first story to write the second to write the third and on
and on. The writers I admire most know this (it seems to me, reading their
work) and their writing, while not ignoring style and form, is a never-finished
document of their engagement with the world. It’s a kind of search they love
(again, this is how it seems to me, reading their work) and the thing being
sought is impossibly elusive. Their search is recorded in a kind of secular
prayer transcribed as they leaf through the hymnbook that includes songs
calling them back to childhood, smells that recall distant homes, faces suddenly
old, and voices and text from all their numerous teachers, and everything
they’ve ever felt.
And this is while feeling
content with my girls at the playground of their school and thinking of this
essay on the day that never ends, which includes a day from another summer when
I read a review of a John Ashbery biography on the plane home from my Aunt
Iris’s memorial and deciding right then I have to read all of Ashbery’s work,
and in order. And my dog, Abby, too, who is gone and who saved me with her basic
love when my brother suddenly died. I scattered her ashes near the Spirit Mound
in South Dakota because she was from there. All of it is happening now.
As days and years accumulate I
don’t believe in them anymore. I don’t believe in increments of any kind. The
memory of Iris on that flight was made of moments of memories—the powder blue
winter coat she wore playing hockey with us on the outdoor rink; her quiet
laugh as she blew smoke out the corner of her mouth; our conversation about a
book of Anne Szumigalski poems—and they’re all present there on the plane and
in this moment here, on the playground while each daughter tests herself in
some new way or swings expertly from bar to bar.
The preceding paragraph is
impossible as well because we all know this sentence occurs some other time, at
my desk, and is presented in a way that mimics Gerald Murnane, whose work is my
most recent teacher. Somedays end emphatically and some days don’t.
Today I am working on a story
about a boy who grew up in the same era and location as I did. He’s in a shed
on a farm, and the shed is cool under the shade of poplars that grow tall up
against three of its walls. It’s dim in the shed and it smells of old oil and a
dirt floor, though it has a wood floor and doesn’t sit on the ground. The dirt
smell comes from the bare ground at its door. It’s a tool shed and the space
outside the shed is where the machines go when they need fixing.
There is a 5
gallon metal drum that he sits on, and an old card table that is his workbench.
He is resealing some old windows. The windows are 2 feet by 2 feet and each is
made of grey wood that is solid still, but its dry white paint is half flaked
off. That the frame is solid is important, because it’s his job to remove the
caulking from the perimeter of each of the nine glass panes held in a single
window and then recaulk each one.
Right now in
the story the boy has come to understand that he loves this work, but that it
has taken him too long to come up with a system that makes his task elegant and
satisfying. He has never found pleasure in work before, though sleep after a
long day of stacking bales in a pickup and then unloading them in the barn is a
pleasure. He’s discovered now that if he removes the crusted and cracked
sealant from all nine panes at once, and uses the putty knife to also remove
any slivers of wood that may impede the next step, that if he prepares each
hole, removes and cleans the panes and sets them each flat in their smooth
square socket, he can do nothing but apply the new caulking for hours.
It is not
hours, of course, but as he extrudes the grey putty along one edge of one tiny
window, then the joining edge that proceeds at a right angle from the first,
something happens to time. He takes the putty knife and smooths the putty along
the first edges so that the soft grey matter makes a 45 degree angle from the
clear plane of the glass to the grey old wood that frames it. This angle is so
perfect, so neat, that he cannot imagine he’s the one making it, but the real
pleasure comes from making, almost accidentally it’s so easy, another 45 degree
angle horizontally at the joint, as the corner of the knife that touches glass
stops at a point he intuits as the intersection of those lines. He sees this as his eyes watch his putty knife
reach the joint and part of it is stationary but part of it is not.
The surface
of the putty’s plane is not perfectly smooth. It’s like skin, maybe, and if you
look close, if you can look close, you will see it is pocked with small craters
from the air that is part of it. But we can’t see that and he can’t see that,
just as when he’s used the perfect quantity of putty he can’t see the gentle
irregular pattern of waves that makes what to him is a straight line where the
putty joins the glass parallel to the window’s wood frame. If he thought about
it, he would understand the line he’s making is not absolutely straight because
in his first attempt, at his first pane of glass, he’d used an insufficient
amount of putty and the uneven joint that he wanted to make precise and
straight was visibly not, but he didn’t think about it because he was moving
the perfect amount of caulking in a perfect line and, carefully, continuing at
the corner and both lines met in what was to the human eye a perfect right angle.
If there was
a problem it was that his father had told him the ragged line was fine, and
that he was not to take too much time, and that the purpose of the exercise was
to seal the glass, not to make it pretty. But there was no problem, because
time was not a consideration, and though he didn’t understand it then, beauty
was. Beauty and simplicity.
All of this
happened in the unlit shed and he worked alone. Between windows he would drink
from the jug of water at his feet, but other than that the physical world
disappeared, its heat and wavering light did not exist, nevermind the creatures
including people that moved about in time and space. The total effect was
soporific in a way that belied the energy it took for him to attend to the
task, which was to express the putty in as true a line as possible, and to
believe in perfection.
This is a
story I may never finish because the boy must exit the shed and the pleasure
that comes from re-entering the human world with its thump of heat and its
bright blinding absence may only happen again years later as he, as an adult,
ascends the concrete stairs to the street from a basement theater on a summer
weekday afternoon. The boy can’t see anything in the bright light for some
moments. Oh, my father.
I hope
somebody somewhere will understand, even if his father doesn’t.
Sean Johnston is a novelist (latest is Listen All You Bullets) and short story writer (latest is We Don’t Listen to Them). He lives in
Westbank, BC, with his wife and daughters and teaches at Okanagan College. He’s
just finished a manuscript of short fiction called Multiplicanda Ah Um or Negatory,
Babyloo, and is at work on a sequel to his first novel, All This Town Remembers.
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